Category: Goby’s Journal

Valentine’s Day

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Valentines day. The day I knew…viscerally knew, my life was expendable. The day my son was born.. .and held my breath till he took his first. And knew. That in the order of things, he must outlive me. Acceptance of death.
I’ve been in love. More than once. The romantic confusion that turns Being-in-Lust, into something transcendent. But there is no transcendence. We grow old. We grow out of lust. And our lust itself–you might think, more trustworthy, coming out of the body, is itself confounded by that romantic movie we hoped to inhabit… so we miss even what it is our bodies hunger for, and cannot account for our multiple failures,
Cupid… you are the ultimate trickster. I can’t hate you for that… but only hope that I might become more like you.

So may we all.

Poetry & Art on the Brink of Extinction

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from December, 2009… waiting for the end. When OWS came along two years later… I was ready.

I had this feeling once before, on the third or fourth day of the Cuban missile crisis, standing outside the door of a nearly empty auditorium on the Campus of Wichita State University, listening to a member of the faculty playing a Bach partita for unaccompanied violin. This time, it doesn’t go away. It comes over me every time I look up at the sky.
Below is a comment I tried to leave to a post on pas au-delà, but there seemed to be a problem with the system. As it’s something I think about every time I hear someone complain about Obama’s failure, I’ll post it here. But pay a visit to Matt’s blog–and buy someone you love one of his beautifully crafted cutting boards for Xmas.

We need a revolution… but of what kind?

The problem with blaming Obama is it suggests that, whatever it is that’s wrong, the right individual in the right place, is going to be able to make it different. Even if there were truth to the cliché that the American president is the ‘most powerful man in the world,’ his power is still limited to stirring the soup; he can’t cook up a new reality. His power is borrowed–it belongs to the whole vastly complicated network that created the mess in the first place.

No president is going to start a revolution, and nothing short of revolutionary change is going to get us out of this. I say ‘revolution,’ because I can’t think of a better word–I sure don’t have in mind any historical example I can think of. Not going to help to turn the pie upside down, put the one’s on the bottom on top, but same old pie. And it’s not going to come from the top down. Before power corrupts, it blinds. Even the prospect of destroying all life on the planet isn’t enough to penetrate the belief of those used to having their way, the belief that they are in control, that whatever comes, they–if no one else, will be able to tough it out, to survive and prosper.

I don’t have a picture of how that ‘change we need’ is going to happen, but I’m damn sure it’s gotta be big… bigger than the industrial revolution, bigger than the emergence of nation states… something equal to the neolithic agricultural revolution, the beginning of settled urban life and our invention of the gods. In a way, our imaginations are still dominated by that vision–whether or not we hold to any of the great mythical systems that grew out of it. What we need is nothing short of starting over, of building anew from the ruins… (is this, perhaps, the ultimate challenge to artistic vision…?) trouble is, I don’t think we’re going to have a second chance. We have turned ourselves into collective infants–a two year old–who out of terror and anger at the failure of the gods we invented to define and lead us, are about to destroy everything in a final uncontrollable tantrum.

Art and Capitalism: There has to be a better way

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The first time I visited the Ox, late Spring of 2012, to see police films of our arrest at Wells Fargo, I knew, standing on the roof and looking across the vacant lot, the warehouse and brickscape, the Frankford El like a toy train in the distance, that this was the place where I would begin to make art again.

An unfinished, unheated warehouse, home to a collective of not quite 20 activists, queers, musicians, artists… and a soon to be grad student in particle physics who slept on top of what had been an elevator shaft that opened to the roof—here, I thought, there would be space and freedom to work, a return to where I left off some 40 years before.

The streets around the Ox were a rich source of materials, broken glass, rusted metal, torn sheets of roofing, weathered composition board, scraps of wood, cardboard. I had long been fascinated by found things—patterns, colors, forms of abandoned objects, invisible to those who passed them by without seeing. I began to drag in trash from the street, spread pieces out on an old dining room table, arranging them, observing how they came together to form new objects that freed them from their past identities as objects of use, from their place in the capitalist Empire of Money and Death.
I had no pigments, no brushes, only rusted nails and screws from the street, wire and string to tie things together, planks of wood or Masonite I would find to mount them on. I went to Utrecht and asked the art student clerk: what would could I use to bind such a diversity of materials—that would dry transparent, remain flexible to hold objects that would expand and contract at different rates in reaction to heat and cold? That’s was how I discovered Modpodge!

Here was a way of making art without grants or institutional support. Art from the streets—literally. Those great pieces of public art, I thought—cast bronze, welded steel beams, no matter how pleasing—what were they, but bound slaves, there to decorate and embellish the institutions of power, useful propaganda. You see! they proclaimed, this is civilization! Without the generosity of the predator class, where we would be? How would it be possible to have art like this? What public art has always done, these monuments of beauty and culture!—the equestrian statues of generals, heroes of conquest, genocide and patriarchal tyranny—no matter that they had been replaced by elegant abstractions, perfect representations of faceless corporate power. Art in chains. Artists as servants of the corporate police state.

I bought brushes. An easel. Pigments. Added color to my assemblages, worked on recovering my drawing skills. Began to make paintings. I had a show at a little gallery in Port Richmond—and put prices on my work.

It felt dirty. Wrong.

Where was this taking me? What was the logical path for this? O.U.R. Gallery, was not dependent on sales, but if I wanted to sell, if I had been a young artist hoping someday to live from their art, that was the route I’d have to take—assemble a fine expensive portfolio of photographs, find galleries that would take my pieces, give me shows–galleries that did depend on sales, and on buyers whose interest in art was for investment, or the prestige of owning—owning work that might someday be coveted by collectors, that would decorate the walls of the wealthy, that might one day hang in museums—the mausoleums that house the remains of dead creators–the artist’s dream-equivalent to winning the lottery. Or the field slave whose highest hope is to work in the house of the master. For those who make it, become part of a system of oppression that forces all but the very few to live by commercializing their skills, or find other means to support themselves and their work, a system of exclusion that has little or nothing to do with aesthetic merit. The artist: submissive servant of the Empire.

There has to be a better way. Capitalism, like abusive relationships, traps by maintaining the illusion that nothing else does, or can exist. Take your lumps, it’s all there is. And maybe—maybe you’ll be one in a million… or billion, who is selected for the dubious honor of rubbing elbows with the predators, thieves and killers who manage the levers of power.

Think about it.

Of related interest, Picasso’s granddaughter scaring the shit out of Big Dealers by threatening to sell his stored up work.

STOP SELLING OUR ART!

CapitalismIsDemocracy

Really, this article says it all:

Selling my art isn’t capitalism, as I own the means of production. I understand that. I’ve read Capital.
What I want to opt out of is the gallery to investor pipe line. Galleries, even when run with the highest ideals, are dependent for survival on buyers (duh)… and that pool of buyers is heavily influenced by those who buy for investment, as well as aesthetics–even though though it may often be too deeply entangled to tell one from the other. What is inescapable, though, is that this functions as a systemic market gatekeeper on what art, and which artists, reach a public larger enough to come close to supporting them, so over all, you have the art that works it’s way up, and the very very few artists who are able to be fully supported by their work, without going openly commercial, and this is market driven–and more important–market excluding, so truly good work, often the best of what’s being made, has no place, and will never find a place until it’s no longer contemporary (and so, non-threatening). So what we’re left with are artists who think they can play the system, competing for a very few seats at the top, with aesthetic value playing an incidental role at best. It becomes a game where those who control what is seen, are the capitalist predators, with full power to censor and exclude what can’t be usurped and used to for profit or propaganda… or later, with sufficient bribes, or outright theft… as commercials.

I want to use how I distribute my art to support a message about the idea of ownership as understood in a capitalist system. As for the right to support myself–the only way that can happen, as things stand now, is by entering into the gallery to investor game. No. No way. What I want to do is create an alternative–and that means,  directly challenging it, not imitating it by other other means. It’s also not something I can do alone. I need other artists, to work together, to work out how to do this, collectively, through horizontal, creative decision making.

There’s going to be, I hope, a discussion around this at A-Space here in Philly some time in the near future. Maybe if your around, you can come.
If you didn’t read the article linked at the head of this post–do it now.

Reading at the Bride: a tribute and thanks to CA Conrad

I went to a reading at the Painted Bride on Thursday. A time for remembering. For reflection. I shared a reading at the Bride in — 1966? –with the late Henry Braun. That was when the Bride was on South Street–Gerry Givnish had recently opened a gallery in what had been bridal store–hence, the name.

I was 25–a very young 25. I don’t know how I got that reading spot–it was in this bare store front space, fold up chairs. Paintings on the wall. Don’t remember if it was before or after–but I brought some of my paintings–an open invitation for artists they thought might fit their vision. I didn’t. My paintings didn’t (large oils of faces–filled the canvas–somewhat expressionist mode). I think I looked way too straight and middle class to fit in, and my paintings too over the top for their more “cool” ironic aesthetic…Philly Warhol school.

Before the reading Thursday, I took in the paintings in the gallery. Remembered. How nice, I thought–that this had come from that. A poetry reading in a gallery, surrounded by art.

Such a beautiful reading –with CA Conrad and Frank Sherlock. Not only are they both great poets, but they have exemplified with their generosity and support of poets in Philly and beyond, something as important as the poetry itself. An idea of poetry that has rejected competition, exclusion, the musical chairs of who will survive, who rise to the top–that whole fucking capitalist Darwinian struggle, refereed by literary gatekeepers. They stand for another world, another way of living and loving, the world that we dream might be. This is the poetry of the extraordinary family that I’ve come to be a part of, and I feel so fucking lucky to have lived long enough to experience and share.
I felt this deep sense of affirmation as they read–that we are committed– together– in our poems and our lives, to making a better world, to supporting one another, to a creative struggle of imagination and compassion against indifference, cruelty and submission to the lordship of money and power.

I wanted to voice my appreciation here, and my amazement, at finding myself at such a time and place, in being able to be part of this unfolding creative family.

Thank you CA Conrad, Frank Sherlock… and all the wonderful Philly poets who have informed, and transformed my life.  I love you… all of you.

For Those of us Who Keep Journals

 Bridge over Outlet Bass Lake
photo by Will Hardin. Bass Lake Outlet
Journal entry
Vol. 44:
Friday
1/11/08
After 5576 pages (since 1987… earlier volumes destroyed), nothing could be clearer. My journals don’t aspires to “literature.” To be sure, there are moments–caught up in passing enthusiasms–whole volumes when plain insanity wears the mask of “art” –but day after day, page after page, what I’ve compiled is nothing more (or less) than a verbal equivalent of the middlebrow albums of the snapshots my family used to keep.

Moving pictures.

Like the reels and reels of 16 mm family movies–long since lost. Moments, images, brief visual narratives I hope to return to–and save from the ever changing sequences of organic memory. Something external, I tell myself. Like a photograph. Like those lost silent movies. No less subjectively framed, so no closer to “truth”, but at least–external. Free of alteration.

Vane hope. Every reader, and every reading… rewrites what is read. But at least, I tell myself, the words remain. There. In their original sequential order.

So many pages, so many words–an embarrassment of false memory, a presence that begins to weigh on my life (is that why I’ve burned ten-year segments–twice?… since my earliest entries… 50 years ago?)

Memory serves us to our advantage–only to the degree that we retain the power to transform it.
Anything less, is …?

If this is so for us as individuals… how much more is humanity burdened by the false memory of history?

If it’s our lot–condemned to misremembering, erasing the violence we have done, to ourselves, to our fellow creatures on this earth, let us begin to remember forward, to creatively body forth from imagination, a world where there will be no need to forget the horrors we seem unable to face in our past.

Not Quite There…lost… and not yet

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This sense of being at the end, and how, as an artist, I feel we have been wrenched loose from the idea of posterity that for so long was both a prison, and a liberating force in Euro-centered art.

Here’s a post from January, 2008.

In Hermann Broch’s novel, The Death of Virgil, the dying poet and the Emperor Augustus enter a prolonged dialog, an argument on statecraft and poetry, on duty, and–what is ultimately at stake here, the survival of the Aeneid. Their discussion turns on Virgil’s claim to the right to his own work, the right even to destroy if it does not fulfill what he believes to be his more profound duty to it, to the duty of art.

There is a mild earthquake in progress…

Without comment:

Caesar paced back and forth over the swaying floor; with every dip of the wave he turned round so that he was always walking up-hill; but now he must have reached the top for he stopped–yet maybe he did feel the Poseidonian movement–and held on to the candelabrum: “Again you speak of things that cannot be proved.”

“In art we are everywhere imitating the Greek forms, in the conduct of the state you are forging a new path. You are fulfilling the task of your time, not I.”

“That proves nothing; the newness of my path may be argued, but eternal form remains eternal forms.”

“Aye, Augustus, you simply do not want to see, you do not want it to be true, that the poetical task no longer exists.”

“No longer exists? No longer? You sound as though we were standing at the end of something…”

“Perhaps it would be better to say, not yet! for we may assume that a time for artistic tasks will dawn again.”

“No longer and not yet,” –Caesar, much dismayed, was weighing these words–“and between them yawns an empty space.”

Yes, no longer and not yet; that is how it sounded, how it had to sound, lost in nothingness, the lost, passed-away inter-realm of dream…

… isn’t this where we always find ourselves ?

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.

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.