Author: wjacobr

Visual artist, poet, novelist, activist & Street Medic, living in North. Penn Name: Jacob Russell My blog is a confluence of art, writing, politics. my Art portfolio: Art-by-Willard.com

Random thoughts on Art… and blogging, from 2008

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In searching The Dog for posts I thought might be worth dragging back into the light, I came across this, from September, 2008, the year of the great financial meltdown, and the last fall term I would teach at St. Joe’s. A rambling, introspective reflection on what it meant for me to be an artist–four years before I’d begin to make visual art again. What caught my attention was the mention of neolithic cave art–having just read Stephen Mitchelmore’s wonderful review of Georges Bataille’s book, La Peinture Préhistorique: Lascaux ou la naissance de l’art, on his post, Book of Forgotten Dreams at This Space.. Do take the time to read this–a beautiful piece on our need to return to the place where human art began.

I had asked, why am I compelled to enclose the word “art” in quotes?

I grew up–was raised to a state of awareness by artists, living and dead–from mothers, uncles, siblings–receding all the way back to those strange stick figures who dabbed in charcoal and ocher by lamplight with marvelous precision, a catalog of animals their contemporaries were, at that very instant in time, engaged in exterminating. To claim a place in the pursuit of the arts is not a claim to a special class: no. What bothers me is the class of “art” itself.

As impossible to define as “religion.”

As impossible to define as what it means to be “human.”

I’ve become aware of something… of more than a few somethings… since beginning this blog a year ago, July. …that this is writing of another kind. I make no pretense to making art… One of the things I’ve become aware of: that what I do in the realm of art… ( a category I don’t trust even exists… ) I do in private. Turning my efforts over and over.

A short story, Godzilla’s Eye, of some 5,00 words… I have more than 500 pages of drafts that went into that throw-away effort. Nice that the Laurel Review thought to publish it… but who reads these little reviews? A few dozen people, if that.

I spent almost a year on that story. Not all my writing is so labored–but the point here is the element of privacy: privacy of composition. And my thought is… that the “art” is not in, maybe never in, the end “product.” The story that found a place on the pages of the Laurel Review.

Art, I though, does not exist–not as the “product'” I use the quotes here as defense against the common associations with the word… .”product.”
Is this what I mistrust? Is this why I place quotes around the word, “art?”

If what you see, hear, feel think…. respond to, in a work of art, is about nothing but the finished “product”… you have missed. Not a part. But everything.

The finished work is not the art–it’s the best possible suggestion the artist could come up with for what really matters. Suggestion. Not an end point, but an invitation back into the process. An invitation to an endless conversation carrying us forward.

So I re-write my posts. Edit on line. What matters… is process. And in process…we are all participants.

And yet I recoil… I post and delete…

To act with others, before others, unleashes unpredictable reactions.

To do that… to be able to do that… is the very definition of Trust–in ones self. The thing no artist can be without.

Compose in public.

Performance.

I’ve been doing this with my posts for months…then waking in a panic and deleting them.

So what… if what matters is PROCESS.

We need a new form of critique.

Nothing new here. A return to engagement. Real encounter… where what matters is the process, the journey…

Encounter… not to own, but to be infused in the aura of impossible distance. Discovering ourselves in what we have made– more truly and more strange.

From December, 2013 #65 #68 #74 by Willard

#65 Dec 30 12

#65 61x61cm Arcrylic on wood, with paint can lids, wood strips, paper street dirt.
I scrape curbside dirt with its bits of glass, fine gravel and shreds of this and that for texture and modulation on wet paint. Framed with wood from an abandoned building.

#68

$68 November Alleghenies. 28x98cm Rusted metal cabinet door, dirt, twigs acrylic

#74

$74 76x13x32 cm. Auto bumper from car accident with acrylic shadows.

Georges Bataille, The Impossibility of Literature

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(from the Barking Dog, November, 2008) The essays in the beginning of Georges Bataille’s THE ABSENCE OF MYTH, Writings on Surrealism. are primarily of interest for the light they shed on Bataille’s early conflicts and later reconciliation with André Breton and on the history of surrealism: its flowering between the wars and transformation and reemergence after the liberation. The later essays deserve consideration in their own right, quite apart from their place in the history of a literary movement.

I would single out “War and the Philosophy of the Sacred, “Poetry and the Temptation of the End of the World,” and “Surrealism and God,” but those on Jacques Prévert, (From the Stone Age to Jacques Prévert), René Char (René Char and the Force of Poetry), Camus’ (The Rebel (The Age of Revolt), and his critique of Blanchot on Sade (Happiness, Eroticism and Literature) represent aesthetic critical thinking above and beyond.

Begin with the impossible. And never back off.

If you want to think about, to write about “literature” (I am more and more estranged from this word… let’s go back in time and call it all poetry… and what doesn’t come up to poetry (or merely aspires to it without overwriting all earlier attempts to define it, is merely “literature.” What we called the glossy hand-outs at the auto show when I was a kid in the 50’s).

“…poetry is…literature which is no longer literary, which escapes from the rut in which literature is generally entrapped. For us, ‘poetic’ cannot have a set value in the same way as an Anjou wine or a piece of fine fabric–if you want to think about poetry, there’s no where else to begin.

… but with the impossible.

You have volunteered to be shackled to two draft horses. They are pulling, one to the north, one to the south. Your job, if you choose to accept it, is to never give way to one side or the other, even as they tear you, body and soul, asunder.

Making Art Outside the Machines of Power

Given that art has human value (without– or suspending definition of what that is), it follows that the labor of the artist merits support. This entails meeting basic human needs for the artist, seeing that tools, supplies and space for making art are available. How that support is offered, where and by what means it’s obtained is not a matter of indifference for art or artist, but will have the power to affect and control both art and artist.

There is an unavoidable entanglement of the production of art and artist with the economic, social, political, and cultural, machines (thank you Levi Paul Bryant ), through which support is procured. The gallery-investment-collector-museum-gentrification-reward-machines will select that which maintains and enhances their operations, and reject what threatens them. The flow of money is the mother’s milk that fuels these machines, and those who control the flow of money will not abide anything that challenges their territorial power. If you are an artist, and court what passes for ‘success’ in this system, you will, no matter how firmly you believe in your aesthetic purity, or how hard you work to compartmentalize your creative work to shield it from the machinery you have made yourself dependent on, you will be making art that serves that system. You will be a useful servant of the Empire of Money and Death.

There was no need to define the value of art and the artists labor, because it will be defined by the machines that distribute the reward and how they make use of it. Artistic freedom will be the reward of the parasites, the rebels, thieves and refusers. When you see one of those great, expensive, powerful works of public art, those magnificent museum worthy pieces, made possible by grants and awards, by the flow of money–tell yourself, that is not what artists who value their freedom do. That is not what a free creative soul aspires to do–it’s a temptation, a seduction to join the stable of the pimps who run the machines… the machines that build the prisons and make the drones and turn everything human into a means of profit. Why am I not hearing this conversation from artists everywhere? How do we survive without supporting the machinery of slavery and death? What kind of art can we make–how does that change what we are given to do, how does that shape our creative vision? Why am I not hearing this conversation from artists everywhere?
April, 2014

Ari Figue’s Cat

Ari Figue’s Cat

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Reposting this pre-review of my novel from Goodreads.

We cannot know both the reality of the Snow Angel and the trajectory of our desire. The one will erase the other, opposite poles of attraction we cannot hold together. But somewhere, (who cannot believe it will be so!) we may hear a Voice that will lead us to some greater freedom, from the prisons of memory, to visions of the Peaceable Kingdom, lead us on a Winter’s Night, t, even to the Left Side of the World, and grant us the gift of a new name.
So it was for Jacob, who first saw the angel on the Frankford El, and where she fell in the snow–a photograph, a note, an address to the house of Nacht. What could he do, but follow the signs? Ah, but there will be fire to pass through if you are to meet the messenger, with riddles, like koans that have no end. Follow the cat. Run your finger over the alphabet–feel where his teeth have left their marks, close your eyes, draw pictures in the dark, let your fingers tell the story, like reading brail, that it may unfold, not in words, but out of the unfathomable silence of the body.

Paperback, 233 pages
Expected publication: May 25th 2015 by Deep Sett Press

Jacob Russell’s Ari Figue’s Cat does what few novels do: grabs you and won’t let go, without resorting to the cheap gimmicks New York agents rave about (explosions, long lost siblings, incest, and other soap opera tactics).

The Cat is the multiplicity of consciousness, a la Schrödinger, but Russell never lets the scale of his art’s inquiry overshadow the simple humanity of his characters; each is painted delicately and humanely– appropriate, as the author is also a painter.

This book provides no easy answers; if it had, I would not have read it. It is the kind of art we have always needed: questioning, beautiful, full of soul.
Robin Dunn

On Being a Late Bloomer

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In April, 1988, standing in our kitchen in NE Philadelphia, it came to me that for the rest of my life I would follow whatever course best served my desire to write. And by that, I meant–to make art, to be an artist, though I wasn’t yet ready to accept that name for myself

I was 47, two months short of my 48th birthday. It wasn’t that I hadn’t done these things before, I had taken courses in art from childhood, at the Chicago Art Institute, Nelson-Aitkins Gallery of Art and Kansas City Art Institute. Later, majored for for time at Wichita State University. I had written stories and poetry from the time I could write, but this was new. This was something else. Like a conversion experience. A sense of accepting a calling, making a commitment. If I could live to work another 20 or 30 years, I told myself, I would have as much time as many who had begun in their youth–to leave a body of work.

Maybe it was the feeling that time was running out. Or was it that to my mind, being an artist was something too grand, that I wasn’t worthy? I thought of what Cezanne had written: ” Why so late and with such difficulty? Is art a priesthood that demands the pure in heart who must belong to it entirely?”

Yes. I thought. It does.

Though not so sure about the “pure in heart” stuff. A bit too 19th Century.

But with humor, yes. And this new sense of freedom from any judgment not my own–this was what I was going to do.

It will be 27 years come April. Some of them–pretty rough going. But I can call myself an artist now–a novelist, a poet–and not cower in shame lest I be found out as a fake. And I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life.

I kinda like this, being a Late Bloomer–of just warming up when most people are winding down, of not having to hang it up, rest on the laurels of what I accomplished in my youth. Life is just beginning. Every day. Every day, a new beginning!

The Imposibility of Art

imagesA blog post is as ethereal as the trace of dancing particles though a cloud chamber, and yet in the universe of the web, seemingly always there, as though cyrogenically frozen beyond time, perhaps sprung to life at the mistyping of a search word, or preserved on old UBS drives at the bottom of a landfill, like mineralized imprints of the first self-replicating cells that drifted in Precambrian seas.

I don’t trust the impulse to preserve. nursing as it does, a delusional wish for immortality, and yet, like: Shakespeare’s 64th Sonnet, the wish to have that which we fear to lose, nudges aside good sense, and I go back into the old blog, searching for scraps–what, had I not written them, would have been likely nothing more than trains of thought, passing time on the el waiting for my stop, forgotten as soon as my foot touched the station platform.  Here, then… from my birthday, June 22, 2008.

Ulrich went on: “Every great book breaths this spirit of love for the fate of individuals at odds with the forms the community tries to impose on them. It leads to decisions that cannot be decided; there is nothing to be done but to give a true account of their lives. Extract the meaning out of all literature, and what you will get is a denial, however incomplete, but nonetheless an endless series of individual examples all based on experience, which refute all the accepted rules, principles, and prescriptions underpinning the very society that loves these works of art! In the end, a poem, with its mystery, thousands of words in constant use, severs all these strings, and turns it into a balloon floating off into space. If this is what we call beauty, as we usually do, then beauty is an indescribably more ruthless and cruel upheaval than any political revolution ever was.”
From chapter 84 of The Man Without Qualities.

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