#565

Mostly Yellow. 16″ x 20″ Acrylic, ink on canvas board

#564

24″ x 30″ Acrylic on canvas

Trickster makes this World

I love this book: Lewis Hyde’s TRICKSTER makes this WORLD.
“Wandering aimlessly, trickster regularly bumps into things he did not expect. He therefore seems to have developed an intelligence about contingency, the wit to work with happenstance.”
This says everything about how I make art. And when I veer from this… when I try to plan (oh, thank you Dorothea Lasky, for your Poetry is Not a Project)… people, especially people with Big Brains, don’t understand how profound, what a great essay this is!) … when I try to map out where I think I should go, it all goes wrong, horribly wrong. I don’t know what I’m doing or where I’m going. And for me, that’s the only way.. which is no ‘way’ at all.
I make a mark… or respond to one I see. We have a dialog.
That’s it. That’s the entirety of my aesthetics.
Coyote should be the animal spirit of any would be revolutionary in our capitalist system. They know how to survive without a pack, rob traps set for them, turn whatever environment they find themselves in to their own advantage, and eat genrtrification poodles for dinner.
And of course, I’m reading Lewis Hyde’s wonderful, Trickster Makes this World: Mischief, Myth, and Art.
Wasn’t so sure, first 90 pages. It was ok, but wordy, I thought… then he turned the trick and revealed some powerful, moving personal stories that made everything before come to life. This is a great book

Found Things: making art at the Ox

This was a journal entry from 4 years ago–popped up on Facebook.

Found Things… The significance of a fond object is that it has none. Decathected, by being lost—though I don’t mean lost, so much as discarded. The objects I find on the street, in empty lots. Not things still useful—things sticky with the snare of desire. The desire that adheres to and generates the delusion of ownership.

I like these objects because they are free. I don’t want to own them. I don’t want to return them to a state of servitude, to become their slave.

When collected, placed in some degree of proximity, they suggest their own form of desire… placed beside, under, inside another object, I sense affinity—or indifference. If the former—it is as though they have become a new object, each retaining its own identity, but now also, a part—of something else.

These are the assemblages that I build… or better– build themselves when I lend them my attention.

The prime rule… is that there must be no rules. Else I would be the Master, the enforcer, the tyrant god … and so, eviscerate my own existence… for there are no gods. No Masters. Were I to aspire to that… I would not be.

#563

6″ x 3″ Black gesso, white gel pen, ink on mat board

View GALLERY HERE.

Art and the Machines of Power: Connections

It’s difficult, when those in power, those with power over the lives of others, expose themselves as hateful assholes–difficult to not slip into the belief that it’s the fault of these assholes that we are, collectively, in such terrible trouble. If we could only be rid of the assholes–give power to ‘good’ people, everything would begin to improve!
But when I can manage to set aside my anger, my entirely justified anger, at these figures, I see that they do what they do, not because of character flaws, but because they follow the rules of the system, of the roles they have been assigned. Whether they have taken on those roles for selfish, or class serving motives, or because they sincerely believe that this is what works, that this is ‘reality,’ and if you are a ‘realist,’ you act accordingly. If Dick Cheney exemplifies the former, Obama might exemplify the latter–but what they do, the killing, the destruction of our supportive environment, the endless war, their support of the vindictive surveillance state, where whistle blowers are punished–when you measure them by what they do, there is little to tell them apart.

The machines of consumer capitalism, the war machine, are in a real sense, not metaphorical–self generative, independent actants. It’s those complex social/political/economic machines that determine the actions and ideas; it’s those machines that manufacture the assholes they need to keep them running.

Those of us of more progressive or radical views, have no problem recognizing how, in poor and marginalized classes, material and social conditions make criminals, create anti-social behavior, and yet we too easily fail to see how the capitalist myth of the individual, and personal responsibility, shape how we react to the assholes of the oligarchy–even when we understand ‘class,’ even when in our mouths and heads, we know it’s “The System,” and that it’s the system we have to change–that we waste our energy and thinking when we rail against individuals in power, instead of demonstrating how the system works to create the assholes, and dictates to them what they can and cannot do within it.

In my art, I think of this in terms of representing, not objects or ideas, but connections. Even when objects are represented–I am drawn to emphasizing the connections, and leaving the objects partially erased, covered over, and secondary to what is more real than the “thing” … the connections between that create, destroy, and create them again as something new.