I sat outside A-Space for almost 4 hours. Maybe three people stopped to more than glance at my art. I thought about that post on the time one needs to see, to actually see, a work of art.
More specifically, I was thinking about Joyce’s “ineluctable modality of the visible.”
Who cares, right? but there I was, sitting in the sun, what else did I have to waste my time on?
The visible became words for Joyce. What I was thinking about, was the visible in art that remains in the ‘modality of the visible.”
This is what I do, what I seek out, what I work for in my art–the power of the visible to grasp the attention of the eye, to guide and to reward exploration that has no need to become symbol, message, exhortation or story. Useless.
There I was, useless. Old man trembling in my own private thoughts and anxieties. With my useless art, refusing to allow any meaning beyond the visible to be pried lose from the visible. A vision quest, of no use to the world.
Jacob Russell's Magic Names 