Month: March 2015

The End of the Genre Wars — Please!

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Moving Forward by Moving Back

Bridge over Outlet Bass Lake

Bridge over the Outlet, Bass Lake

From December 31, 2012: The Ox

Okay–so it’s arbitrary. A change on the calendar that means nothing but what we want it to. But I like these marker times… not the holiday stuff, which makes me feel profoundly alienated, but days where I can check where I’ve come to on the ascending (or descending) spiral… where I… we… all of us, have come to occupy the same space again, a place–which is not the same at all.
Years ago… pretty sure is was Martin Buber (I was in thrall of him in my 20’s), said something to the effect that ones life is never over so long as one has the capacity to begin again. This year I made one of those life change moves… from a little too expensive efficiency at 13th & Morris in South Philly, to an old, unheated warehouse on N. 2nd St… sharing space and life with some 20 others… all many decades younger.

This was like… and has proved in one other profoundly significant way, a move back by moving forward… or the other way around. I lived in a commune from 1966 to 1970. Here I was again.

At that time, I was painting… in oils. Had many hours and courses in art behind me–from children’s classes at the Art Institute in Chicago… where (like the Nelson-Atkins Gallery in Kansas City years later, I was able to wander the halls and bond with the art as a child… with almost adult privileges. Sunday at La Grande Jatte … was like something in my second living room (all the museums in Chicago were like that, thanks to an unmarried Great Aunt who lived nearby).

I gave it up… for 8 years or so, to make pottery. And then… some dumb ass wish to be respectable (?)… merged with a genuine passion for intellectual pursuits… I gave it up.

After moving into the Ox… even before–the first view from the roof, I knew… that with space to work, and tools. I moved quantum leaps forward by moving back.. this time, without the pretensions, the inhibitions of what it meant to make ‘art.’

In June, I walked to New York from Philly with Occupy Guitarmy.. and everything I saw made me want to go back and start putting things together. THINGS. Objects. Street junk. It was an act of pure pleasure. With no sense at all of where this would take me. But I kept doing it. And found that I was .. surprised, startled… by what was happening. What I was making. It began to sink in… that yeah (still hard to use the word)… I was making ‘art’ … and it was, like .. ok. I mean… maybe better than ok

It’s become an obsession. On a day when I make progress on a piece, or finish one, or begin another… I’m happy! I mean… as happy as I’ve ever ever been in my life! And on days when I don’t… ?

So here I am. End of this arbitrary number (2012)… having begun again. Half way through my 72’nd year. Thinking… this time, it’s to the end. It’s all the way. Maybe… before 2013 has passed… I’ll be able to think of myself as an ‘artist’ without irony, without self-consciousness. Not just all those museum images.. it’s family. Really talented family… never felt quite up to snuff. Mostly, cause I was trying to do what I thought OTHERS judged worthy. Now… I’ve found my own way. I’m so glad I lived long enough.

Crystals of Eternity

larvalsubjects's avatarLarval Subjects .

Perhaps it’s like this.  The eternal and universal are not something that is already there, but rather are something that is produced.  Here, of course, I’m dancing with Badiou.  If it is true that the eternal and universal are something produced, then they are also wagers.  No one can know in advance whether something will be eternal or universal.  Only time will tell.  This entails that both universality and eternity will perpetually face challenges.  At any moment these crystals of time could fracture and shatter to pieces.  I am here, above all, thinking about works of art.  The eternal and universal work of art– song, painting, sculpture, prose, poem, architecture, etc. –is slippery.  From the beginning, it doesn’t fit with its time.  It’s irreducible and can’t be dated, even if we know its date and its origin.  Often it will create strife or controversy; which is to say, discussion. …

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Drawing is the Mother of All Visual Arts

 

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I sit in the El. I look at the man in the seat across the aisle. I see lines, mass… shadows. He leaves at the next station. A young women takes his seat. I watch, but from the reflection in the window. I don’t want her to think I’m leering at her.

It’s what I do when I’m drawing—working intensely at learning, doing studies from photos, coming back from figure drawing classes at Fleishers.

It becomes a mode of seeing. Seeing. Not representation. Seeing, and process. Like Chinese brush work.

Though most of my finished work is abstract, I think of drawing as the mother of all visual art. Nothing else schools you, trains you—molds your very brain to a way of SEEING… to an attention to vision, like drawing. Nothing.

I’m getting better. I’ve said this before. It’s an obsession with me. How 40 years ago or more, I gave up on being a visual artist. Because, I thought… I couldn’t draw. Not well enough. Not with the apparent ease of my mother, my uncle. I thought it was.. just ‘talent.’… and I didn’t have it.

I didn’t understand.. it was about work. Practice. Drawing bones. Learning anatomy. and just drawing… everything.

Looking back—I had the “talent” thing. But talent.. whatever the fuck that is, might be the difference between commercial skill, and “art”… whatever the fuck that is… but there’s no way to avoid the work. A musician… you have to train your fingers, your voice, learn scales—even if you don’t know the words for music theory.

I do constructions. From found objects. Nothing to do with drawing that you might imagine… but it does. It’s not different, but as one medium differs from another, as charcoal differs from pencil from pastel from pen and ink.. from paint.

Drawing is the mother of all the visual arts—because nothing, nothing so intensely trains the eye to attention, to see…. to see… to see

Every work of art, every poem… is an investment

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from October, 2010

I walked down Passyunk to 5th, and then to South and the Eyes Gallery. 42 years ago, Eyes had been open… maybe a year. A proposal to build an exit from I95 to South, fought and delayed for years, had driven away old businesses and made rents cheap: perfect for Artist Urban Pioneers like the Zagers.

1968, I walked into the Eyes with my wife, then five months pregnant with my oldest son. We left with a birth announcement, a wonderfully visceral silkscreen of a newborn, Oct. 29. Ezekiel Zager. A few months ago I came across this print and thought of how many photographs, mementos, drawings that I’d done, had been lost over the years. Not surprising if Julia and Isaiah had lost the last of these. Today, being the 29th of October, I walked the mile or so to the Eyes Gallery. I saw Julia, who now manages the business there. Said, I may have something you’d be interested in… and took out the print, gave it to her.

She thanked me… and remarked on my Spirit Stick, and seemed pleased. It was like returning something that I had held in safe keeping–but was never mine. I can visualize the image without it.

This is what life is meant for… to return what we’ve been loaned, without ceremony. No one ‘owns’ anything. We don’t always know to whom or where to return what we hold in trust. It’s a great moment, when we are able to to make good on the loan.

For me, every work of art, every poem… is just that. Returning what we’ve be given… for temporary safe keeping. The interest… how I’d understand the parable of the talents in the Christian bible… about interest on the talent, not as profit… but creative investment. We give back… with what we have created out of ourselves from the seed of the gift.