Power = Sadness
When
Desire is
In flow
Joy is
So
Fragile
"Put down that pen
And hurry along"
November 02, 2005
October 31, 2005
October 25, 2005
October 24, 2005
July 31, 2005
Twin thoughts on knowledge
THE MORE ROOMS, SPACES, PLACES, YOU BUILD IN YOUR HEAD/THOUGHTS/MIND THE MORE TERRITORY YOU HAVE TO WANDER,STORE, AND LIVE IN.
NO GREATER LENS IS THERE THAN THE MIND'S INFINITE BECOMING.
chriseddy
NO GREATER LENS IS THERE THAN THE MIND'S INFINITE BECOMING.
chriseddy
July 03, 2005
neOteXt 20
Desire lies
I wish I heard voices in my head
Whispers shouts screams and rants
I wish the schizophrenic me
Would rise and tell me
What I refuse to know
Desire lies
A two fold story
But I just hear the one
You are reading
The all of mes
Endless thoughts
Craving more
Stirring pots
For new recipes
So this drone must continue
At least until I die
Inside I am always thinking
Desire lies
Paths of flight feel good
For all the multiplicities
The text continues that is I
A binding force
An illusion of oneness
Nevertheless
more....
I wish I heard voices in my head
Whispers shouts screams and rants
I wish the schizophrenic me
Would rise and tell me
What I refuse to know
Desire lies
A two fold story
But I just hear the one
You are reading
The all of mes
Endless thoughts
Craving more
Stirring pots
For new recipes
So this drone must continue
At least until I die
Inside I am always thinking
Desire lies
Paths of flight feel good
For all the multiplicities
The text continues that is I
A binding force
An illusion of oneness
Nevertheless
more....
July 01, 2005
June 05, 2005
neoTEXT 19
Mother Earth We
Mother Earth
Molten Iron core
Deep beneath
A skin
Of rock
My skin
Cuts
Bleeds
With iron oxide
Red
The compass spins
To the earths rotation
The geese migrating
Along
Magnetic vibration
The weak force
Emulation from Terra’s heart
Voices from the fiery center
Speak
Through my
Vein’s
Pulse
Mother earth
And I
One
More.....
Mother Earth
Molten Iron core
Deep beneath
A skin
Of rock
My skin
Cuts
Bleeds
With iron oxide
Red
The compass spins
To the earths rotation
The geese migrating
Along
Magnetic vibration
The weak force
Emulation from Terra’s heart
Voices from the fiery center
Speak
Through my
Vein’s
Pulse
Mother earth
And I
One
More.....
May 31, 2005
On Different Velocities
Perpetuation is the domain of the art museum.
Change is the habitat of the artist.
chriseddy
April 26, 2005
April 25, 2005
neoteXT 17
Between Black and White and Colour
He looked at me like I was a TV not working
Stuck on one channel
Mine
The look on his face said "I don't have the remote/st."
I kept on talking in the hopes that
He would tune in
Find my wave lengths
But his eyes still reflected static
His hands like a 1950's antennae
Twitching on the roofs tops of turquoise bungalows
In the hopes of getting a better picture
A better picture like the ones on the first colour TVs after being suckled on B&W
Those almost real tones
If he could remember it is like that
It is always like that
So that is what I tell him
"It's like TV, you know, from black and white to colour."
"TV sucks" he says
"That’s part of it" I say
Our words crossing vectors of meaning
He can see my horizontal and vertical hold now
See on his buttons with the labels
Unfortunately I can't stop from rolling horizontally
Flipping vertically shifting diagonally
Wanting to see his picture
With network difficulties
Snow, Lines, static sounds
I give him static
To see his movement
His eyes glaze over he starts to ramble off topic
Drunk not caring if I am the I that is there
Only then I could hear his tune separate
From the hissing
See the picture arise out of the swarm of dots
But he was not a broken TV
With substitute parts and coat hanger reception
Crossed wires and uninterrupted wavelengths
His Vertical hold gone his eyes flickering
His mouth still transmitting waves
As his horizontal hold went
His head began falling toward the wooden table
Becoming wooden TV cabinet
Slumping body
Unplugged
And tomorrow I will again
Broadcast unbroken frequencies
Some even containing an evening in memories
In new arrangements, bisecting, traversing
Avoiding horizontal planes and vertical holds
It is hard to tell them it is not like TV
Fixed lines and dots and cycles
It is some where between black and white
And colour.
more......
He looked at me like I was a TV not working
Stuck on one channel
Mine
The look on his face said "I don't have the remote/st."
I kept on talking in the hopes that
He would tune in
Find my wave lengths
But his eyes still reflected static
His hands like a 1950's antennae
Twitching on the roofs tops of turquoise bungalows
In the hopes of getting a better picture
A better picture like the ones on the first colour TVs after being suckled on B&W
Those almost real tones
If he could remember it is like that
It is always like that
So that is what I tell him
"It's like TV, you know, from black and white to colour."
"TV sucks" he says
"That’s part of it" I say
Our words crossing vectors of meaning
He can see my horizontal and vertical hold now
See on his buttons with the labels
Unfortunately I can't stop from rolling horizontally
Flipping vertically shifting diagonally
Wanting to see his picture
With network difficulties
Snow, Lines, static sounds
I give him static
To see his movement
His eyes glaze over he starts to ramble off topic
Drunk not caring if I am the I that is there
Only then I could hear his tune separate
From the hissing
See the picture arise out of the swarm of dots
But he was not a broken TV
With substitute parts and coat hanger reception
Crossed wires and uninterrupted wavelengths
His Vertical hold gone his eyes flickering
His mouth still transmitting waves
As his horizontal hold went
His head began falling toward the wooden table
Becoming wooden TV cabinet
Slumping body
Unplugged
And tomorrow I will again
Broadcast unbroken frequencies
Some even containing an evening in memories
In new arrangements, bisecting, traversing
Avoiding horizontal planes and vertical holds
It is hard to tell them it is not like TV
Fixed lines and dots and cycles
It is some where between black and white
And colour.
more......
April 22, 2005
Trillium War Machine
Trillium warrior
This rhizomatic Trillium Grandiflorum roamed free in abundance throughout the forests of Ontario. Bringing to the spring forest floor a beauty to match that of the autumn canopy. Then in 1937 it was annexed by the state and given the structure of Ontario's provincial flower. Which resulted in it being raped and pillaged by the citizens of the land and the city. In retaliation the white trillium which lives and multiplies underground withdrew from view. And refused to bloom for seven years commencing on it being so violently ripped from it roots. The state in an effort to save the nomadic flowers and roots started a campaign to warn people about picking them. This has evolved into a myth in Ontario society that it is in fact illegal to pick them. Today the trillium blooms profusely once again in the few remaining forests. Perhaps they should go one further and free this woodland wanderer from its state duty as the three petals painted on anything relating to the Ontario government. Then future generations can greet the Trillium anew. Freed from the head cluttering structure imprinted on the blossom. Free to greet the trillium and be becomings trillium(s) . To be so close and not hear its messages of being one and all, alone and a pack, in the middle and everywhere, is sad.
NeOtExt 16
An Orbital
On the bricks,
A painted yellow star peeling,
Inside a man and guitar playing,
Outside the weather is freezing.
Past the musical constellation,
The people are walking,
Heads in the wind,
Searching the leeward doors.
The music bouncing off,
Their contracted pores,
To cold to toss coins.
Still the star keeps on playing,
To the wind that is blowing,
The notes pass the bodies,
Escape out into space.
This alone seems to please him,
Freed from rhythms measure,
Knowing that harmonies roam,
And for his nomadic pleasure,
Sitting on the sidewalk,
Alone.
MORE.......
On the bricks,
A painted yellow star peeling,
Inside a man and guitar playing,
Outside the weather is freezing.
Past the musical constellation,
The people are walking,
Heads in the wind,
Searching the leeward doors.
The music bouncing off,
Their contracted pores,
To cold to toss coins.
Still the star keeps on playing,
To the wind that is blowing,
The notes pass the bodies,
Escape out into space.
This alone seems to please him,
Freed from rhythms measure,
Knowing that harmonies roam,
And for his nomadic pleasure,
Sitting on the sidewalk,
Alone.
MORE.......
April 03, 2005
Lesser New York
I have linked this article because it points to curatorial problems further afield than New York.
village voice > art > Lesser New York by Jerry Saltz
village voice > art > Lesser New York by Jerry Saltz
March 31, 2005
Picasso found
Guernica by Picasso found in a gargabe can in Hamilton, On. Can.
Picasso, Walks and Synchronicity.
There are interesting things that happen on aimless ambles. And our eyes and minds search out what we know out of all the unfamiliar. As you scan the immediate universe on a walk looking for meaning one can come to see and understand the world in a whole new way.
You are constantly bombarded with new situations. You run across things that relate to your own life. Things that place you and your consciousness on the bigger map of the territory you live in. And place the bigger map on your interior territory.
I always seem to find objects on these walks for some reason. And these objects relate mostly to my art making process. I have been doing this for a long time as you can see in my blog entry A REFLECTION. Synchronicity plays the part where my randomness meets my discoveries. There have been amazing coincidences a long my pedestrian journeys. One St. Patrick day I was on a walk in a neighborhood that was once very Irish around one hundred years ago. I happened to look down in the mud at the edge of a church lawn and saw a bit of white pottery. I picked it out of the mud and found it was an Irish clay pipe of the type you see associated with Leprechaun images. I had found a relic appropriate to the day.
The picture above, Guernica by Picasso came to me on one of my wanderings. I was strolling in the Portuguese neighborhood when I saw Guernica jutting out of a garbage can. I was affected by it immediately. This heroic masterpiece by Picasso that is not only massive in significance but also in size made this little dog eared copy seem even more relevant. And that it was soiled and from a home also added to its signification. Since that day about six years ago it has occupied a space on the wall above my oven.
The book in the picture below about Picasso's Guernica was found about a month later at an old book section in a local thrift store. A book not only found in Hamilton but with a forward from a local University. It seems that this arresting creation of Picasso's has now become an event webbing around the globe and into the very fabric of everyday life. A painting that has a life of its own.
To see some of my found object art link to Canadian Porcelain Company or Owen Sound.
March 30, 2005
neOteXt 14 & 15
Look up it
There are no meanings of words
In the dictionary
No fixed designations
For Aardvark or jelly
Sorry, if you’re close
You are probably wrong
Because text in not
Found in etymologicals but in song
The meanings are wind,
And skin and across.
Sky and eye,
Together tumble toss.
The mouth and the water,
Bend down to the lake.
The body and the gravity,
Now text for situations sake.
Microdissidence
Only a certain part of me
At certain times
Will I let from the cage
That I built
To keep me safe
From the me
That I am
And to protect
Those that see
My multiplicity as one
Creating
My
Cage, my safe, the structure
So inside safe
My nomad can wander.
more......
There are no meanings of words
In the dictionary
No fixed designations
For Aardvark or jelly
Sorry, if you’re close
You are probably wrong
Because text in not
Found in etymologicals but in song
The meanings are wind,
And skin and across.
Sky and eye,
Together tumble toss.
The mouth and the water,
Bend down to the lake.
The body and the gravity,
Now text for situations sake.
Microdissidence
Only a certain part of me
At certain times
Will I let from the cage
That I built
To keep me safe
From the me
That I am
And to protect
Those that see
My multiplicity as one
Creating
My
Cage, my safe, the structure
So inside safe
My nomad can wander.
more......
March 26, 2005
Nomadic Easter Thoughts
The problem with every revolution
is that its success marks its own end.
As the revolution succeeds it dies and
is resurrected as the newest state structure.
"This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine."
Anonymous Negro spiritual.
Enlightenment means as much to carry the light as it does to generate and maintain the light. The becoming enlightened person acts as a relay beacon. Similar to the beacons in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, that sent a signal from from rocky crag to mountain peek and beyond relaying the "message". But this time the message is vast and ever changing with infinite speed through out history/memory. A landscape populated by people not in a line but in a great web, geographically and time wise. Sending and receiving each light in ever shifting ebbs of understandings. This rhizome like picture of human history's part in its own enlightenment illustrates the miracle that all knowledge truly is. It is not the library structure, or book structure, or even sentence structure that has kept enlightenment alive and burning. It has been the active hearts and heads of people keeping the fires alive for future generations. As it has been kept through out time, added to and taken away from. Like the running torch lighter at the Olympic games only this time everyone is a beautiful kouros speeding in space and time, all lighting the way for each other with signification. Knowledge seems to exist as much between us as with in us. The more a person scans the horizon and perceives the torches, the signals built by others, the broader the territory of our combined knowledge becomes.
Chriseddy
There is no communication with only one.
One becomes two as soon as you leave a mark.
Nomadic Art
Attention Artists
If you are intellectually driven. And interested in an exploration of nomadic art then please come and join us at Nomadic_Art. A site for artists to theorize, share, and enlighten each other in our singular quests into the creative process. What does all this mean? That's what we are working on and need your help.
If you are intellectually driven. And interested in an exploration of nomadic art then please come and join us at Nomadic_Art. A site for artists to theorize, share, and enlighten each other in our singular quests into the creative process. What does all this mean? That's what we are working on and need your help.
March 21, 2005
Rock, Paper, Scissors
Paper covers rock
chriseddy
Rock
Nomadic cultures all required weaving as a basic technology for living long before architecture’s textual permanence. Weaving cultures are lost to today’s scientists, archeologists, and anthropologists. Like its procreators weaving is nomadic and non-fixed; decaying back into the organic dance that it was borrowed from. Weaving presents the mind with structural organizations and possibilities. Could the scratches in stone, the petroglyphs be born out of these lines? The lines that taught us to map the stars and the deserts. And the lines and folds that may have taught us the necessary structures for spoken language. Showing us the way to understand the lines and folds needed to develop architecture in stone.
Paper
The interlocking fibers of paper act like rhizomes. Each fiber being the center of their own intertwining. Until all the fibers become one great tapestry of chaos with each being a centre of locking. The result of this being the ordered plane of a piece of paper.
Scissors
Folding and cutting paper mirrors or inverts the nomadic activity of weaving. They both are technologies that set out a predetermined structure for the building of a more complex language. In the case of weaving it is the strings of lines (warp) that creates the basis of forming the pattern or language. And with the paper we see it is the folds that function as the structure. The cuts being the human interventions that unfold into a new language.
March 16, 2005
Shamrock
I bought this shamrock three years ago on
St. Patricks Day. It has grown very large and
has been blooming continuously since I
brought it home. It has survived being knocked
to the floor by Bill the cat and being frozen almost
to death when I left the window open one winter.
Truly an Irish botanical.
Happy St. Patricks Day
March 17, 2005
On St. Patrick's Day I like to celebrate by
re-reading passages from "Finnigan's Wake"
by James Joyce.
March 15, 2005
neOTExt 12
A Daze
Turning changing direction
Lost on a pivot
Becoming a new view
Pottery in motion
Infinite forms on a brink
Lip in slip
Formed changes the direction
Shooting outward
Projecting journeying
Speeding the line
Avoiding the stop
And every stop
A spin
Memory lost
New
Formations
Before
Becoming
A
Line
Speeding
Infinite
Safe from chaos
Iffor
Only a moment
In
Flow.
more......
Turning changing direction
Lost on a pivot
Becoming a new view
Pottery in motion
Infinite forms on a brink
Lip in slip
Formed changes the direction
Shooting outward
Projecting journeying
Speeding the line
Avoiding the stop
And every stop
A spin
Memory lost
New
Formations
Before
Becoming
A
Line
Speeding
Infinite
Safe from chaos
Iffor
Only a moment
In
Flow.
more......
March 13, 2005
March 08, 2005
NeOTexT 11
Beyond Known
Words best left unspoken
Spells woven
Uncertainty blanket
Wrapped in invisibility
The Gardner’s spade
Deep cuts
In the couch grass
Outlets cut off
Eyes and ears in a hand crafted basket
Fingers locked in a dance with the piano lid
Flow ceases and life becomes finite
Counting the nouns kept in a glass jar
Flight taken different directions
A worm cut in half
Love of the car for the gas pump
The gas pump is the tanker becoming
Equilibristic reterritorializations
The fish and chips were wrapped in a newspaper
The end
The fish and the chips and the wrapped
And the newspaper and the aroma
A beginning
Liberated by “AND” freed from the old briars
Of subject, object, or context.
More.........
Words best left unspoken
Spells woven
Uncertainty blanket
Wrapped in invisibility
The Gardner’s spade
Deep cuts
In the couch grass
Outlets cut off
Eyes and ears in a hand crafted basket
Fingers locked in a dance with the piano lid
Flow ceases and life becomes finite
Counting the nouns kept in a glass jar
Flight taken different directions
A worm cut in half
Love of the car for the gas pump
The gas pump is the tanker becoming
Equilibristic reterritorializations
The fish and chips were wrapped in a newspaper
The end
The fish and the chips and the wrapped
And the newspaper and the aroma
A beginning
Liberated by “AND” freed from the old briars
Of subject, object, or context.
More.........
March 06, 2005
Photography Gallery
J W Bush Gallery
Now boasts a NEW BLOGSITE for your pleasure
Click on this link to see more of this
exciting photo gallery, the artworks,
and information on up and coming exhibits
March 02, 2005
Woven Architecture
Woven Architecture___________chriseddy
An Ancient weaving
Caught a pattern
In their head
Everything since
Has had to be said.
NeOteXt 10
Weaving Thought
Cutting paper
A soothing effect
Snip snip
A loom of folds
Instead of the warp, paper
Re-placing weft woof, cuts
Structure lying
Over fold
Revealing
A
Woven
Snowflake
Thought creating pattern creating thought
more.........
Cutting paper
A soothing effect
Snip snip
A loom of folds
Instead of the warp, paper
Re-placing weft woof, cuts
Structure lying
Over fold
Revealing
A
Woven
Snowflake
Thought creating pattern creating thought
more.........
February 27, 2005
Nomad Museums
Nomads, Gods, and Life’s Instructions
The ancient Greek myths tell us that if you get a sign from the gods you have to act on it even if you don’t like it. So with this in mind I must move on. I have just been given one of those signs. The kind no one likes. The kind that railroads your plans. The kind that helps you see that ego can only get in the way.
This morning while checking my blog hits I found one from a Nomadic Museum search. Curious since I have been working with this idea for some time now I searched it. I have been researching my nomadic heritage, the philosophy on nomadic thought, nomads, and working on nomadic museums. Concepts both possible and less possible to see realized. So I was wondering what else might be out there?
No, I could not believe it, there it was, a nomadic museum. It was vastly different visually from my art works of one. But close enough conceptually that the world would now have a good idea of containers as nomadic temporary structures for the exhibiting of art. It is big and it is famous.
The nomadic museum by Shigeru Ban is located on Pier 54 in New York City. It will rest there for the next three months. The Venice biennale being its last home. One of the weightiest show cases in the world for contemporary art. And I am not surprised. The work of this brilliant architect trails behind him like a path of stars.
But the signs seem to be there when you need them. At this point in my work I have been waffling with the physical structure of my nomadic traveling art. My work on nomadic museums was leading me back to earlier ideas about sculpture. And as I was designing the container museum I was having underlying ideas about cutting into it, transforming it.
I had been working for some time on cutting into steel objects, tanks, drums, bins, etc. I would change these objects into sculptures and still maintain the language of their original identity. And these feelings were surfacing again in my work with nomadic museums. I was having doubts about the nomadic museum as a structure housing art. And I was becoming more excited about making the nomadic museum into art.
This morning the gods have shown me that the nomadic museum is done. My work here is finished. But they have also gifted me with a beacon lighting another path. My nomadic path is just beginning. Shigeru Ban, master architect has freed the museum allowed it to travel and be independent in ways a museum can’t. And I am now free as an artist to work toward sculpture that can roam the world. The monumental liberated from land ownership and museum designations.
monumental sculpture
The ancient Greek myths tell us that if you get a sign from the gods you have to act on it even if you don’t like it. So with this in mind I must move on. I have just been given one of those signs. The kind no one likes. The kind that railroads your plans. The kind that helps you see that ego can only get in the way.
This morning while checking my blog hits I found one from a Nomadic Museum search. Curious since I have been working with this idea for some time now I searched it. I have been researching my nomadic heritage, the philosophy on nomadic thought, nomads, and working on nomadic museums. Concepts both possible and less possible to see realized. So I was wondering what else might be out there?
No, I could not believe it, there it was, a nomadic museum. It was vastly different visually from my art works of one. But close enough conceptually that the world would now have a good idea of containers as nomadic temporary structures for the exhibiting of art. It is big and it is famous.
The nomadic museum by Shigeru Ban is located on Pier 54 in New York City. It will rest there for the next three months. The Venice biennale being its last home. One of the weightiest show cases in the world for contemporary art. And I am not surprised. The work of this brilliant architect trails behind him like a path of stars.
But the signs seem to be there when you need them. At this point in my work I have been waffling with the physical structure of my nomadic traveling art. My work on nomadic museums was leading me back to earlier ideas about sculpture. And as I was designing the container museum I was having underlying ideas about cutting into it, transforming it.
I had been working for some time on cutting into steel objects, tanks, drums, bins, etc. I would change these objects into sculptures and still maintain the language of their original identity. And these feelings were surfacing again in my work with nomadic museums. I was having doubts about the nomadic museum as a structure housing art. And I was becoming more excited about making the nomadic museum into art.
This morning the gods have shown me that the nomadic museum is done. My work here is finished. But they have also gifted me with a beacon lighting another path. My nomadic path is just beginning. Shigeru Ban, master architect has freed the museum allowed it to travel and be independent in ways a museum can’t. And I am now free as an artist to work toward sculpture that can roam the world. The monumental liberated from land ownership and museum designations.
monumental sculpture
February 22, 2005
GONZO'S GONE
HUNTER S THOMPSON
1938 - Febuary 2005
Thompson, 67, was associated with the "New Journalism" movement of the 1960s. He took an experimental approach to journalism. Layering personal text with journalism and producing novels. I will miss the laughs, the insights, and the workings of the great capitalist machine, found in his work. Bye, I must go to the drug store now......................
February 21, 2005
Funny or Sad?
The other day a woman I know came over to my studio. I was sitting around my work table with a few friends. One of them was also an artist.
We were talking about this woman's ideas of opening a restaurant. She has specific health needs and believes others may have the same need to dine out and have it their way so to speak. A grand idea, I thought it sounded very interesting.
But then she adds, I am going to get the "artists" to hang art and perhaps rent to show there. Alarm bells when off in my head. I enquired if she had asked any artist about her idea. She flatly said no as if this was of no consequence to her plan. I am aware that this person knows other artists so I am having a problem figuring out why she can't understand she is being usury and adding to the problem. Even after I attempt to explain this.
Let’s look at this deal, the artist who is already one of the most extremely marginalize workers in the humanities vs. the restaurant owner.
The restaurant owner gets free ever changing art on the wall. They also get the prestige that goes along with showing original works which in turn helps to build the business. They are free from the burden of having to find a decorator or art and pay for it for the restaurant. And even make extra income from the rental of the wall space.
The artist gets to take time to hang work; self promote the work, and are even lucky enough to pay for the chance to show the work. There is no clientele set up to purchase the work in a new establishment. And in 20 years of experience in all kinds of exhibiting, I know the exposure in a restaurant is mostly useless and sales are negligible if existing at all. The work often comming back damaged in some way. The patron tends to think of it as décor. And it certainly isn't an exhibit to pad your resume either.
This looks like a great deal for the entrepreneur, but the shits for any artist trying to pay the rent and feed their family. What a lack of regard for an already beleaguered group of workers.
Funny or sad, you decide?
Advice to entrepreneurs:
1. Put your money where your art loving heart is and buy original works for your establishment it will be an amazing help in legitimizing your business to the public, as well as assist artists in their sustainability in the community.
Advice to artists:
1. Stay away from good Samaritans or you will carry them on your back for your whole journey.
2. Bite the hand that promises to feed you but doesn’t.
We were talking about this woman's ideas of opening a restaurant. She has specific health needs and believes others may have the same need to dine out and have it their way so to speak. A grand idea, I thought it sounded very interesting.
But then she adds, I am going to get the "artists" to hang art and perhaps rent to show there. Alarm bells when off in my head. I enquired if she had asked any artist about her idea. She flatly said no as if this was of no consequence to her plan. I am aware that this person knows other artists so I am having a problem figuring out why she can't understand she is being usury and adding to the problem. Even after I attempt to explain this.
Let’s look at this deal, the artist who is already one of the most extremely marginalize workers in the humanities vs. the restaurant owner.
The restaurant owner gets free ever changing art on the wall. They also get the prestige that goes along with showing original works which in turn helps to build the business. They are free from the burden of having to find a decorator or art and pay for it for the restaurant. And even make extra income from the rental of the wall space.
The artist gets to take time to hang work; self promote the work, and are even lucky enough to pay for the chance to show the work. There is no clientele set up to purchase the work in a new establishment. And in 20 years of experience in all kinds of exhibiting, I know the exposure in a restaurant is mostly useless and sales are negligible if existing at all. The work often comming back damaged in some way. The patron tends to think of it as décor. And it certainly isn't an exhibit to pad your resume either.
This looks like a great deal for the entrepreneur, but the shits for any artist trying to pay the rent and feed their family. What a lack of regard for an already beleaguered group of workers.
Funny or sad, you decide?
Advice to entrepreneurs:
1. Put your money where your art loving heart is and buy original works for your establishment it will be an amazing help in legitimizing your business to the public, as well as assist artists in their sustainability in the community.
Advice to artists:
1. Stay away from good Samaritans or you will carry them on your back for your whole journey.
2. Bite the hand that promises to feed you but doesn’t.
February 18, 2005
The Gates
Congratulations Christo and Jeanne-Claude!
New York the world's greatest art Mecca can finally boast a Christo. After wrapping half the world from his birth place in Bulgaria to the far off shores of Japan, Christo finally conquers New York.
I can remember back in 1982 talking to Christo at one of his art openings. It was at the local public gallery. He was very intense and full of purpose. Of course his mission was to raise money for future plans. The walls being covered with these plans and amongst them were the working drawings for a wrapped sidewalk in Central Park New York. There were also photos of past works like The Running Fence for sale. Art for sale in a public gallery was very unusual. Not surprising however for Christo and his mega projects.
There were several works pertaining to the wrapping of the sidewalk in Central Park, N.Y. with a saffron coloured fabric. Sidewalk, yes he had not developed his ideas of the Gates at this point. And the working drawings showing central park were wonderful black and whites with the saffron wrapping collaged on to the image of the park. The bright wrapping looked as if it were tied down using collaged on strings. At this time it was becoming evident that Christo was transforming his earlier idea of wrapping. Although he still had a lot of wrapped work to see realized.
I find it interesting that the N.Y. city project changed from its inception. We must keep in mind that it takes Christo up to twenty years to see some of his working drawings realized. This would allow him a lot of time to re-think and re-work his ideas. Also his life would be changing causing a need to alter past works.
I see quite a moral change in the work and its relationship to the audience. The earlier wrapped sidewalk would have stopped passage through the park or invited people to walk on it, an awkward task. Anyway you look at it; it is not a friendly relationship. The resulting work is far different in its relationship to the viewer. It is over head, something to go through, and seen in repetition for miles.
Christo's work has always been more than the resulting piece of art. The years of fundraising, getting political sanction and community support are also part of this work. It is like a great machine after years of running comes to rest only for a brief moment, reflecting on where it has been and where it will be going.
To see this work as merely an esthetic experience is to rob ones self of the real passage through the gate. Even if you can't fly to New York, you are free to pass through Christo's Gates. To enter a garden that took years to grow. To mull around these ideas of art, community, and social construct.
Christo pics....
February 13, 2005
FOR YOUR CONVENIENCE
Now for easy access to all NEotext poetry on this site just link to NEotExt Archives. A Blog created for easy access to the neotexts posted throughout this site. Link here for a journey across the territory of textual becomings..............
NeOTeXt Archives
.........................................................
extra-reterritorialization
A stake in your heart
Define love St. Valentine
Define it for the Roman Emperor
So that he can meet Tristan and Isolde
And learn the vows of chastity
And be as blind as us
To anyunderstandings of Love
That are not tied to property
NeOtExt 9
Tides
My thoughts are being pulled forward
Philosophy is a wee donkey
My thoughts are being pulled aback
Past codification
A herd of Arabian horses.
Some times afloat
Unaware of the ripple underneath
The Tsunami heading for my shores
Past imprints, unwanted codes
Unawares the hidden demons
Imprinted on your soul
Enlightenment
A carrot on a stick
For a donkey stuck
In a gate.
More....
My thoughts are being pulled forward
Philosophy is a wee donkey
My thoughts are being pulled aback
Past codification
A herd of Arabian horses.
Some times afloat
Unaware of the ripple underneath
The Tsunami heading for my shores
Past imprints, unwanted codes
Unawares the hidden demons
Imprinted on your soul
Enlightenment
A carrot on a stick
For a donkey stuck
In a gate.
More....
February 04, 2005
February 02, 2005
A Reflection
A Life Time of Exploring Art
This year marks 20 years since I received my degree in art, donned my Basque beret and declared my self an artist. How strange it seems now to think about those first few years after graduating. The confusion of what it meant to be an artist. The constant worry over the work now seems somewhat endearing in its naïve way.
To have that degree in art, a piece of paper with little artistic merit, what did it mean? A license to practice insider art was certainly a new way to define my plane of composition. But my real education in art started way before that. I was born an artist.
Part 1 show and tell
At the tender age of six I arrived at my grade one class well prepared for show and tell and very excited. Under my arm was my older brother’s Roy Roger’s red suitcase, which was now my art portfolio case. And I was all revved up to share my work. This show and tell I though was going to be different from the dad bought stuff, which was the usual fare.
Finally it was my turn and the teacher called me to the front of the class. I stood there looking at my class. I could tell they were all eager to see what I had in my red suitcase. And with a child’s sense of intrigue I began to slowly introduce the contents of the suitcase carefully opening it and raising the first painting to view.
I had no idea that these classmates, the kids that I played with frequently on the playground and in the neighborhood were from Canadian families with mostly worker dads and stay at home moms.
As I pulled out the first painting the class began to titter and by the second image they were in a full roar. They were laughing as if my intentions were to disrupt the natural order of Central Park Elementary school. I have long forgotten my grade one teacher’s name but I still remember her reaction, “All right that’s enough of that, go back to your seat and sit down.” I really didn’t care that the other children could not understand the seriousness of my work. I remember feeling sorry for them. It was sad they didn’t know things. However I was hurt and very surprised that the teacher didn’t respect or defend my work. After all she was a grown up and a teacher. She should have knowledge of art that her six year old student had. But she didn’t know who Jackson Pollock was so she didn’t know why I painted like I did. I have no idea of the source of my art experiments but it was 1962 and abstract expressionism was mainstream art in the media, so mainstream that Disney was spoofing abstract expressionism in comics. Of course my teacher didn’t read comics, but did she not watch the boob tube?
Unfortunately for her she didn’t have a mother schooled in a private school in London England. She didn’t have an aunt that was a jewelry designer and most of all, this ignoramus educator didn’t have a great tome of all of Europe’s deemed masterpieces.
On rainy days from as young as I can remember I would lie on the carpet and go through the great book of paintings. This giant blue book with over a 1000 pages containing colour, tipped on prints from the renaissance up to the end of the nineteenth century. A book to fill me up with the knowledge of European art, and also a book to leave me unsatisfied and searching for art of my time and place. Having a perceived foreign mother and an indigenous dead father left me always craving for something mine, something North American. And I am guessing that’s why abstract expressionism and particularly Jackson Pollock had such a huge influence on my earliest work. After all the abstract expressionist movement had been a huge campaign to create an art that was uniquely American.
Part 2 garbage art
But the thirst to see the world of matter as text was greater in me than my desire to transcend. Sculpture was in my blood and the found object became my medium. By age seven I had begun to go out early in the morning on garbage days. I would pick the neighbors garbage for objects I could use in my “inventions” as I called them. I’m sure Jean Tinguely would have loved these inventions, I sure did. But my Mother was aghast, if it wasn’t bad enough being a single mom in the late fifties and early sixties and living in a new survey of nuclear families, she had a son that picked garbage.
Our neighbors were average people living in a new fifties survey, folks with little worldly education and decent jobs. We were the only single parent family in our survey and as a result we were also the only poor family. Keep in mind that this was also a time in Canada when the government could put a neighbor in an asylum if people complained they were not normal. Later on when I was an adult my Mother who worked at the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, admitted to me that she would order my older brother to get these things out of the house while I slept. And I was told to cease and desist from doing this for all kinds of reasons that didn’t make sense to a wee artist. Why wouldn’t my mother want a broken hair dryer or an old birdcage?
Lucky for me on the other side of the hogs back that our house backed on to was an old foundry. Tucked in under the far side of the hill was a plethora of found objects all cast in steel. Giant drills, old and vandalized cranes, rusty shapes and things from old factories. Not knowing or caring about the objects original intent it was a fantasy land for me and my friends. I could spend hours there collecting up the strange objects and rearranging them to create meanings different than they were intended for. Or more accurately to my child age desire I was making great machines and new inventions. Giving these rusty old objects a new life and new chance to communicate. Art for me was still a word used for drawing, painting, and dripping. I continue to collect garbage to this day only now I call them found objects.
Part 3 from garbage to garbage can.
By the time I was a young teen I had discovered Henry Moore. His surfaced round shapes mirrored my own desires. I was a young man in the throws of discovering, surfaces/skin, round and protruding forms. Forms that fold into themselves, interlock and reveal, were certainly the forms to inspire my adolescent becoming, as an artist and as a man. And to complement these powerful new discoveries I finally had an art teacher. I had a real art teacher, born in South Africa, a survivor of polio, with a husband that owned a gallery. Mrs. Lebow had entred my life not a moment to soon. She saw who I was and feed into it. As much as I could take and I could take a lot. I had already been working on my art for over ten years.
Such fun free thoughts the young mind has. Under the tutelage of Mrs. Lebow I decided at the age of 15 that I was going to marry the work of Henry Moore with that of Brancusi.
I wanted to create the roundest and most pierced “Kiss” you ever saw. I wanted to free the “kiss” from Brancusi’s blocked in Kiss, that modernist but some what less sensuous reaction to Rodin’s Kiss. And I was going to use Henry Moore’s freeing of the sculptural form to do this.
I commandeered a large steel garbage can and without any hesitation, I mixed up bag after bag of plaster of Paris to fill the garbage can to the brim. After a few hours I had completed my task, the full size galvanized school property garbage can was full and hardening. I waited a few days to slip the can off my gigantic lump of unborn sculpture.
And when I did I was a little miffed upon discovering the can did not want to release its valuable contents into my care. And it wasn’t until after a trip to the school shop class to borrow some tin snips that I was able to solve my problem. Of course this created several other problems I hadn’t thought of. Like how to let the school know they were short one of their precious pieces of property. Not because of some normal thing like the football team on a vandalizing rampage but for some weird art thing. As I had learned in grade one being a Canadian artist wasn’t something anyone understood or therefore liked.
I was quite relieved when nothing much came of my actions, protected as I was by my art teacher. And I was allowed to chip away for the next two months free of the mundane and infantile required art projects for Canadian art students lacking in having a parent to introduce them to a greater heritage than their home town and country flag.
Part 4 Museum sanctioned art
Mrs. Lebow was a gift from god. Like Mary Poppins she showed up magically at a time when most needed. The year after the Henry More incident and with the research I was doing on perspective I came to her one day with a sketch for a painting I had worked out. I was just handing in my home work and was surprised when she felt I should go all the way and make it into a full scale painting. I was coming from a well informed sculpture back ground and thought the real thing should have a chance at being monumental. I suggested that the finished size should be almost four feet square. She said this would be no problem. We had acrylic paint at the school but no canvas. So she cut down one of the blinds from the cafeteria. In those days they were old canvas roll down blinds but Westdale Secondary School was huge and so were the blinds. Next she obtained the help of the shop teacher to make the stretchers I needed.
It took a few months to finish that painting and I even framed it with cedar strapping from the wood shop. There was a city wide competition at the time for student art, which has been a regular show at the Hamilton Art Gallery until just recently. I was so surprised when I found out my painting was accepted. My first exhibited work and in the third largest gallery in the province (seventh in the country). I remember not being as excited for getting the honor of being in the show, as I was enthralled about being in a major gallery recognized as a peer of all the great artists I had looked up to.
Part 5 anti-art
My work and understanding of art had drifted away from my early “inventions” explorations in found objects and machines. I had been taught, whether self taught or through schooling what the academic western idea of art was. Concepts like aesthetics, form, space, composition, and feeling dominated my understanding. The definitions of the post Napoleonic museum were taking hold of my plane of composition. Until some thing happened to reaffirm my experiments in visual language beyond and above what I was being taught. The school took us on a bus trip to the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo N.Y.
The curator at the time was a Canadian by the name of Douglas MacAgy. He was an instrumental player in the history of abstract expressionism in America and a firm believer in artistic evolution beyond academic parameters.
The exhibit we were going to see was the memorial retrospective of Eva Hesse. An artist that was new to me and one that had just passed from this world at an early age. This became know to me later. At the show I was taken, amazed, ripped apart, devastated, tickled and excited. I was a teen, it was the early seventies, and I had never found anyone that came even close to ripping apart and recreating understandings of art like this, other than me in grade one with my abstract expressionist paintings. Her work was unlike anything I had seen so far or anything I had done and yet familiar to what I had felt.
It was close; it felt like home, it was like the thick vines that hung down through the broken widows of mammoth machines behind an old foundry of my youth. It felt like rusted steel and grease and plastic tubing. I remember one piece in particular , Accession 2, that was a box roughly three feet square with an open top. The box was steel mesh woven with plastic tubing so that the interior felt like a womb, not mother’s but a machines. I remember like it was yesterday. It was a womb I felt I belonged in, it was art and yet anti art. My mind was spinning on the bus ride home the other students laughing and jostling around me. Something I had come quite use to in my younger years as an artist. I loved what I had seen and the new experiences it afforded me. But there was a rift. This work related more to my early experiments as an inventor. And seemed to contradict the understanding I had come to take as western art.
In hindsight
It wasn’t until I was in my twenties when I entred the Ontario College of Art and was able to resolve the rift in my work. The two paths of art, one defined by the western tradition, the other defined by my own explorations with materials finally crossed. It was the last incubation before returning to an art that was purely self driven, an art that I had know from an earlier time, something raw and basic, now informed by a gala of artists and theorists through out history and the world. No wonder twenty years ago when I graduated I found myself in such an unsure state. It was now my time to take on the world and supply a new definition of art. Or so I truly believed.
This year marks 20 years since I received my degree in art, donned my Basque beret and declared my self an artist. How strange it seems now to think about those first few years after graduating. The confusion of what it meant to be an artist. The constant worry over the work now seems somewhat endearing in its naïve way.
To have that degree in art, a piece of paper with little artistic merit, what did it mean? A license to practice insider art was certainly a new way to define my plane of composition. But my real education in art started way before that. I was born an artist.
Part 1 show and tell
At the tender age of six I arrived at my grade one class well prepared for show and tell and very excited. Under my arm was my older brother’s Roy Roger’s red suitcase, which was now my art portfolio case. And I was all revved up to share my work. This show and tell I though was going to be different from the dad bought stuff, which was the usual fare.
Finally it was my turn and the teacher called me to the front of the class. I stood there looking at my class. I could tell they were all eager to see what I had in my red suitcase. And with a child’s sense of intrigue I began to slowly introduce the contents of the suitcase carefully opening it and raising the first painting to view.
I had no idea that these classmates, the kids that I played with frequently on the playground and in the neighborhood were from Canadian families with mostly worker dads and stay at home moms.
As I pulled out the first painting the class began to titter and by the second image they were in a full roar. They were laughing as if my intentions were to disrupt the natural order of Central Park Elementary school. I have long forgotten my grade one teacher’s name but I still remember her reaction, “All right that’s enough of that, go back to your seat and sit down.” I really didn’t care that the other children could not understand the seriousness of my work. I remember feeling sorry for them. It was sad they didn’t know things. However I was hurt and very surprised that the teacher didn’t respect or defend my work. After all she was a grown up and a teacher. She should have knowledge of art that her six year old student had. But she didn’t know who Jackson Pollock was so she didn’t know why I painted like I did. I have no idea of the source of my art experiments but it was 1962 and abstract expressionism was mainstream art in the media, so mainstream that Disney was spoofing abstract expressionism in comics. Of course my teacher didn’t read comics, but did she not watch the boob tube?
Unfortunately for her she didn’t have a mother schooled in a private school in London England. She didn’t have an aunt that was a jewelry designer and most of all, this ignoramus educator didn’t have a great tome of all of Europe’s deemed masterpieces.
On rainy days from as young as I can remember I would lie on the carpet and go through the great book of paintings. This giant blue book with over a 1000 pages containing colour, tipped on prints from the renaissance up to the end of the nineteenth century. A book to fill me up with the knowledge of European art, and also a book to leave me unsatisfied and searching for art of my time and place. Having a perceived foreign mother and an indigenous dead father left me always craving for something mine, something North American. And I am guessing that’s why abstract expressionism and particularly Jackson Pollock had such a huge influence on my earliest work. After all the abstract expressionist movement had been a huge campaign to create an art that was uniquely American.
Part 2 garbage art
But the thirst to see the world of matter as text was greater in me than my desire to transcend. Sculpture was in my blood and the found object became my medium. By age seven I had begun to go out early in the morning on garbage days. I would pick the neighbors garbage for objects I could use in my “inventions” as I called them. I’m sure Jean Tinguely would have loved these inventions, I sure did. But my Mother was aghast, if it wasn’t bad enough being a single mom in the late fifties and early sixties and living in a new survey of nuclear families, she had a son that picked garbage.
Our neighbors were average people living in a new fifties survey, folks with little worldly education and decent jobs. We were the only single parent family in our survey and as a result we were also the only poor family. Keep in mind that this was also a time in Canada when the government could put a neighbor in an asylum if people complained they were not normal. Later on when I was an adult my Mother who worked at the Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital, admitted to me that she would order my older brother to get these things out of the house while I slept. And I was told to cease and desist from doing this for all kinds of reasons that didn’t make sense to a wee artist. Why wouldn’t my mother want a broken hair dryer or an old birdcage?
Lucky for me on the other side of the hogs back that our house backed on to was an old foundry. Tucked in under the far side of the hill was a plethora of found objects all cast in steel. Giant drills, old and vandalized cranes, rusty shapes and things from old factories. Not knowing or caring about the objects original intent it was a fantasy land for me and my friends. I could spend hours there collecting up the strange objects and rearranging them to create meanings different than they were intended for. Or more accurately to my child age desire I was making great machines and new inventions. Giving these rusty old objects a new life and new chance to communicate. Art for me was still a word used for drawing, painting, and dripping. I continue to collect garbage to this day only now I call them found objects.
Part 3 from garbage to garbage can.
By the time I was a young teen I had discovered Henry Moore. His surfaced round shapes mirrored my own desires. I was a young man in the throws of discovering, surfaces/skin, round and protruding forms. Forms that fold into themselves, interlock and reveal, were certainly the forms to inspire my adolescent becoming, as an artist and as a man. And to complement these powerful new discoveries I finally had an art teacher. I had a real art teacher, born in South Africa, a survivor of polio, with a husband that owned a gallery. Mrs. Lebow had entred my life not a moment to soon. She saw who I was and feed into it. As much as I could take and I could take a lot. I had already been working on my art for over ten years.
Such fun free thoughts the young mind has. Under the tutelage of Mrs. Lebow I decided at the age of 15 that I was going to marry the work of Henry Moore with that of Brancusi.
I wanted to create the roundest and most pierced “Kiss” you ever saw. I wanted to free the “kiss” from Brancusi’s blocked in Kiss, that modernist but some what less sensuous reaction to Rodin’s Kiss. And I was going to use Henry Moore’s freeing of the sculptural form to do this.
I commandeered a large steel garbage can and without any hesitation, I mixed up bag after bag of plaster of Paris to fill the garbage can to the brim. After a few hours I had completed my task, the full size galvanized school property garbage can was full and hardening. I waited a few days to slip the can off my gigantic lump of unborn sculpture.
And when I did I was a little miffed upon discovering the can did not want to release its valuable contents into my care. And it wasn’t until after a trip to the school shop class to borrow some tin snips that I was able to solve my problem. Of course this created several other problems I hadn’t thought of. Like how to let the school know they were short one of their precious pieces of property. Not because of some normal thing like the football team on a vandalizing rampage but for some weird art thing. As I had learned in grade one being a Canadian artist wasn’t something anyone understood or therefore liked.
I was quite relieved when nothing much came of my actions, protected as I was by my art teacher. And I was allowed to chip away for the next two months free of the mundane and infantile required art projects for Canadian art students lacking in having a parent to introduce them to a greater heritage than their home town and country flag.
Part 4 Museum sanctioned art
Mrs. Lebow was a gift from god. Like Mary Poppins she showed up magically at a time when most needed. The year after the Henry More incident and with the research I was doing on perspective I came to her one day with a sketch for a painting I had worked out. I was just handing in my home work and was surprised when she felt I should go all the way and make it into a full scale painting. I was coming from a well informed sculpture back ground and thought the real thing should have a chance at being monumental. I suggested that the finished size should be almost four feet square. She said this would be no problem. We had acrylic paint at the school but no canvas. So she cut down one of the blinds from the cafeteria. In those days they were old canvas roll down blinds but Westdale Secondary School was huge and so were the blinds. Next she obtained the help of the shop teacher to make the stretchers I needed.
It took a few months to finish that painting and I even framed it with cedar strapping from the wood shop. There was a city wide competition at the time for student art, which has been a regular show at the Hamilton Art Gallery until just recently. I was so surprised when I found out my painting was accepted. My first exhibited work and in the third largest gallery in the province (seventh in the country). I remember not being as excited for getting the honor of being in the show, as I was enthralled about being in a major gallery recognized as a peer of all the great artists I had looked up to.
Part 5 anti-art
My work and understanding of art had drifted away from my early “inventions” explorations in found objects and machines. I had been taught, whether self taught or through schooling what the academic western idea of art was. Concepts like aesthetics, form, space, composition, and feeling dominated my understanding. The definitions of the post Napoleonic museum were taking hold of my plane of composition. Until some thing happened to reaffirm my experiments in visual language beyond and above what I was being taught. The school took us on a bus trip to the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo N.Y.
The curator at the time was a Canadian by the name of Douglas MacAgy. He was an instrumental player in the history of abstract expressionism in America and a firm believer in artistic evolution beyond academic parameters.
The exhibit we were going to see was the memorial retrospective of Eva Hesse. An artist that was new to me and one that had just passed from this world at an early age. This became know to me later. At the show I was taken, amazed, ripped apart, devastated, tickled and excited. I was a teen, it was the early seventies, and I had never found anyone that came even close to ripping apart and recreating understandings of art like this, other than me in grade one with my abstract expressionist paintings. Her work was unlike anything I had seen so far or anything I had done and yet familiar to what I had felt.
It was close; it felt like home, it was like the thick vines that hung down through the broken widows of mammoth machines behind an old foundry of my youth. It felt like rusted steel and grease and plastic tubing. I remember one piece in particular , Accession 2, that was a box roughly three feet square with an open top. The box was steel mesh woven with plastic tubing so that the interior felt like a womb, not mother’s but a machines. I remember like it was yesterday. It was a womb I felt I belonged in, it was art and yet anti art. My mind was spinning on the bus ride home the other students laughing and jostling around me. Something I had come quite use to in my younger years as an artist. I loved what I had seen and the new experiences it afforded me. But there was a rift. This work related more to my early experiments as an inventor. And seemed to contradict the understanding I had come to take as western art.
In hindsight
It wasn’t until I was in my twenties when I entred the Ontario College of Art and was able to resolve the rift in my work. The two paths of art, one defined by the western tradition, the other defined by my own explorations with materials finally crossed. It was the last incubation before returning to an art that was purely self driven, an art that I had know from an earlier time, something raw and basic, now informed by a gala of artists and theorists through out history and the world. No wonder twenty years ago when I graduated I found myself in such an unsure state. It was now my time to take on the world and supply a new definition of art. Or so I truly believed.
January 24, 2005
Nomadic Museum 1
working model for the European Nomadic Museum (egg museum)
link to musee imaginaire reference
click on image to enlarge, enlarges twice
January 23, 2005
Nomad Museums
working drawing for possible nomad museums and galleries click on image to enlarge, will enlarge twice.
January 22, 2005
Nomadic Hearts
Bayanihan by Joselito E Barcelona 1993
Bayanihan is an old tradition in the Philippines wherein neighbors of a relocating family would help the family move by gathering under their house and carrying it to its new location.Although bayanihan practiced in this form has become rare in today’s modern times, the word bayanihan itself has come to mean any manifestation of the powerful spirit of communal unity that can make seemingly impossible feats possible through the cooperation of many people working towards a common goal.
more on Bayanihan
January 21, 2005
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January 20, 2005
hobby artists
THE TESTED AND TRUE METHODS OF HAMILTON'S HOBBY ARTISTS
Warning; if you have a problem with your reading comprehension or sense of humor do not read this!
If an artist is defined by their full time commitment to their work then it becomes evident who the hobbyists are.
A Guide to be a successful hobby artist in Hamilton
1. Get a partner to pay your way, live off their money then you will have the free time you need to create.
2. Get health benefits from the government. A certificate from your doctor saying you can’t work, will give you an income while you struggle away at your art.
3 (the biggest group of hobbyists) Get a full time job!
I have heard this is the way in Hamilton. You can work full time spend money on your hobby art and show in galleries.
4. (The most dangerous) get a job in arts administration. Where you can define your own hobby approach as the status quo. And help other hobbyists like your self.
5. Own your own gallery; you get immediate recognition from the community of hobbyists that are up your ass trying to get a show.
6. Wait till you retire, have money in the bank and a pension and you will be free to create whatever you want.
7. Use more than one of the above methods and you could be quite a wealthy home owning so called artist.
I have watched as these hobby artists pass the ball between themselves in our community for years. And I have seen many marginalized real full time artists being driven out of the city because of this. I have seen an art community fraught with fraud and chicanery.
In our town the artist is as marginalize as they were in the courts of the renaissance. And the marginalized artist is too busy surviving and making art and in no way can compete with these privileged hobbyists. Unfortunately the tension felt by real artists in this kind of society does not exist in the work of hobbyists. They are comfortable people who want comfort first. So don't expect anything, new, earthshaking, or intellectually riveting from them.
It is your loss Hamilton. Maybe you should inquire of your curators why they prefer the hobbyists that chase them down as apposed to going into the community to find the marginalized full time artists that have given a real commitment to their town. And when you do go to a gallery, note if the artist is a hobbyist or not. I’m sure you will find a difference in the works ability to go beyond the decorative and didactic. I haven’t found this to be the case in other major centres that I frequent. Nope, in Hamilton it is just more of the blight that keeps our city down. Ooops don’t forget some of these curators are the hobbyists that you should watch out for.
What do hobby artists do to a community? They rob it of any sense of professionalism.
This in turn erodes the community’s confidence in the commitment of the work they are looking at. And also reduces all serious artists to the lowest common denominator. What ever you do don’t become a full time artist in Hamilton, you will be ignored. Just ask the other full time artists, who ever they are.
Warning; if you have a problem with your reading comprehension or sense of humor do not read this!
If an artist is defined by their full time commitment to their work then it becomes evident who the hobbyists are.
A Guide to be a successful hobby artist in Hamilton
1. Get a partner to pay your way, live off their money then you will have the free time you need to create.
2. Get health benefits from the government. A certificate from your doctor saying you can’t work, will give you an income while you struggle away at your art.
3 (the biggest group of hobbyists) Get a full time job!
I have heard this is the way in Hamilton. You can work full time spend money on your hobby art and show in galleries.
4. (The most dangerous) get a job in arts administration. Where you can define your own hobby approach as the status quo. And help other hobbyists like your self.
5. Own your own gallery; you get immediate recognition from the community of hobbyists that are up your ass trying to get a show.
6. Wait till you retire, have money in the bank and a pension and you will be free to create whatever you want.
7. Use more than one of the above methods and you could be quite a wealthy home owning so called artist.
I have watched as these hobby artists pass the ball between themselves in our community for years. And I have seen many marginalized real full time artists being driven out of the city because of this. I have seen an art community fraught with fraud and chicanery.
In our town the artist is as marginalize as they were in the courts of the renaissance. And the marginalized artist is too busy surviving and making art and in no way can compete with these privileged hobbyists. Unfortunately the tension felt by real artists in this kind of society does not exist in the work of hobbyists. They are comfortable people who want comfort first. So don't expect anything, new, earthshaking, or intellectually riveting from them.
It is your loss Hamilton. Maybe you should inquire of your curators why they prefer the hobbyists that chase them down as apposed to going into the community to find the marginalized full time artists that have given a real commitment to their town. And when you do go to a gallery, note if the artist is a hobbyist or not. I’m sure you will find a difference in the works ability to go beyond the decorative and didactic. I haven’t found this to be the case in other major centres that I frequent. Nope, in Hamilton it is just more of the blight that keeps our city down. Ooops don’t forget some of these curators are the hobbyists that you should watch out for.
What do hobby artists do to a community? They rob it of any sense of professionalism.
This in turn erodes the community’s confidence in the commitment of the work they are looking at. And also reduces all serious artists to the lowest common denominator. What ever you do don’t become a full time artist in Hamilton, you will be ignored. Just ask the other full time artists, who ever they are.
January 19, 2005
abbreviations
WORDS ABBREVIATE OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THINGS
The word snowflake puts a cap on that concept. As in, "oh those are snowflakes." But in reality they are complex ice crystals that come in varying forms and infinite shapes. A point sadly missed if one is regarding a snowflake. This is perhaps why it has taken us thousands of years to build a language barely adequate to communicate our understanding of the world around us. And also why language requires us to string together complex lines of these abbreviated meanings to get back to the initial understandings of the concepts behind them. From the Hopi to today we seem to have evolved toward making things that start out simple more complicated to understand, moving backward as it were. This being a direct result of written languages need to be economized thus abbreviating or cutting off the natural webbing of meaning. Only in works of poetry do we find words that fold in on themselves adequately enough to produce vast meanings and feelings in a terse vehicle.
Abbreviation =complexity
Editing= simplicity
chriseddy
The word snowflake puts a cap on that concept. As in, "oh those are snowflakes." But in reality they are complex ice crystals that come in varying forms and infinite shapes. A point sadly missed if one is regarding a snowflake. This is perhaps why it has taken us thousands of years to build a language barely adequate to communicate our understanding of the world around us. And also why language requires us to string together complex lines of these abbreviated meanings to get back to the initial understandings of the concepts behind them. From the Hopi to today we seem to have evolved toward making things that start out simple more complicated to understand, moving backward as it were. This being a direct result of written languages need to be economized thus abbreviating or cutting off the natural webbing of meaning. Only in works of poetry do we find words that fold in on themselves adequately enough to produce vast meanings and feelings in a terse vehicle.
Abbreviation =complexity
Editing= simplicity
chriseddy
January 18, 2005
ARTIST AS NOMAD
Artist as nomad
In my research of my first nations heritage I was surprised to find a model of a nomadic life style that I had not encountered before and one that offers an insightful metaphor into the artist as nomad.
The first nations people that I am descended from call themselves the Mi’kmaq. They are one of the first people here to have first contact with Europeans. But it is their recorded nomadic life style that I would like to discuss here. The Mi’kmaq made their homes out of tree poles, spruce roots and grass mats or birch bark. These wigwams were easily moved around. The Mi’kmaq migrated following the appropriate seasons. In the winter they live in small family clans alone in the forest. In the spring they would move to a planting area. And then in the summer months they would relocate at predetermined places along the coast. They would settle into the same area and form a tribal community. The leader or chief was chosen out of the heads of the larger family units, and was a temporary figure for the summer. In the fall they would break up and trek to their own harvest grounds and then retreat in smaller family units into the forest for a winter of hunting.
It is not hard to see how this social model not only speaks of our liberation from property ownership, but also of a need to be both social and individual, a need to form our own territories and to find ways to share these meanings with others. As Delueze and Guattari point out, in a capitalistic society our desires vacillate between the two poles, schizophrenic and paranoiac.
We see in the Mi’kmaq way of life that the two disparate poles of desire take the lead at different times of the year. Paranoiac desires requiring social codifications are fulfilled in the summer months. Objectives like the coupling of young people would be accomplished. The winter months seeing the schizophrenic need to be alone and revolutionary/anti-social being fulfilled. This is the time for self expression through art and writing. Yes the Mi’kmaq were known to have a form of writing that they kept secreted in birch bark boxes.
How does all this relate to artists? If we look at some of the problems with artist groups and collectives this soon becomes apparent. There have been many attempts to organize artists. We have seen groups that tend to work more from the paranoiac pole (group or mob mentality) which has resulted in artists being forced into boxes of someone else’s choosing. Someone else’s idea of what art is or should entail, or what should be shown in order to get the most points for grants or institutional notoriety. They are asked to jump through stylistic hoops or be judged from within their peers. The structure of group codifications dictates a subversion of individual freedoms to allow the group to function.
As Andre Malraux makes clear in The Voices of Silence, artworks are to be understood in the context of the artist’s body of work not a larger grouping. Making what we have come to know as the “isms” ineffectual to adequately describe a work of art. Asking an artist to conform to group mentality runs the danger of adding a condition to their own plane of composition. It would be like adding a prerequisite to their creativity. A creativity that already finds value in the context of the induvidual artist.
We need to see artists as natives, nomads, free to create new percepts and affects. Artists, that are aware of, but unfettered by outside codifications, artists as the winter hunter alone to define a new spring becoming.
But in reality artists like the Mi’kmaq people can not survive alone in the forest forever. Artists depend on accesses to the outside codified capitalist world for their survival. A survival that is well recorded through out history to have left the artist crippled and marginalized, artist’s groups or co-ops being a recent attempt to empower the artist. This resulted only in empowering organizations and their membership’s definitions of art.
I think that if we look at the Mi’Kmaq model for inspiration we can come to an understanding of how to group artists without compromising their individuality.
If artists use the codes of their society to organize themselves they will inevitably be victims of these codes. Codes that are set up for socialization and not artistic individual goals. Think tanks, chat sites, sweat lodges, or roundtables can be open groups where everyone is equal in their intellectual input. Perhaps it is time the artists formed nomadic partnerships and met in sweat lodges instead of galleries and boardrooms. Modernism pointed out the individuality of the artist but failed to insure it. Postmodernism pointed out the equality amongst artists/text but failed to create a bridge between the individual understandings and society.
The nomad is free, part of the land not owner of it. The nomad seeks and doesn’t build. The nomad is constantly moving and not growing roots. The nomad is not alone but part of everything. The nomad eats, drinks, thinks, and makes love. To embrace the nomadic in thought and action is to start to truly create what is yours/ours.
by chriseddy
In my research of my first nations heritage I was surprised to find a model of a nomadic life style that I had not encountered before and one that offers an insightful metaphor into the artist as nomad.
The first nations people that I am descended from call themselves the Mi’kmaq. They are one of the first people here to have first contact with Europeans. But it is their recorded nomadic life style that I would like to discuss here. The Mi’kmaq made their homes out of tree poles, spruce roots and grass mats or birch bark. These wigwams were easily moved around. The Mi’kmaq migrated following the appropriate seasons. In the winter they live in small family clans alone in the forest. In the spring they would move to a planting area. And then in the summer months they would relocate at predetermined places along the coast. They would settle into the same area and form a tribal community. The leader or chief was chosen out of the heads of the larger family units, and was a temporary figure for the summer. In the fall they would break up and trek to their own harvest grounds and then retreat in smaller family units into the forest for a winter of hunting.
It is not hard to see how this social model not only speaks of our liberation from property ownership, but also of a need to be both social and individual, a need to form our own territories and to find ways to share these meanings with others. As Delueze and Guattari point out, in a capitalistic society our desires vacillate between the two poles, schizophrenic and paranoiac.
We see in the Mi’kmaq way of life that the two disparate poles of desire take the lead at different times of the year. Paranoiac desires requiring social codifications are fulfilled in the summer months. Objectives like the coupling of young people would be accomplished. The winter months seeing the schizophrenic need to be alone and revolutionary/anti-social being fulfilled. This is the time for self expression through art and writing. Yes the Mi’kmaq were known to have a form of writing that they kept secreted in birch bark boxes.
How does all this relate to artists? If we look at some of the problems with artist groups and collectives this soon becomes apparent. There have been many attempts to organize artists. We have seen groups that tend to work more from the paranoiac pole (group or mob mentality) which has resulted in artists being forced into boxes of someone else’s choosing. Someone else’s idea of what art is or should entail, or what should be shown in order to get the most points for grants or institutional notoriety. They are asked to jump through stylistic hoops or be judged from within their peers. The structure of group codifications dictates a subversion of individual freedoms to allow the group to function.
As Andre Malraux makes clear in The Voices of Silence, artworks are to be understood in the context of the artist’s body of work not a larger grouping. Making what we have come to know as the “isms” ineffectual to adequately describe a work of art. Asking an artist to conform to group mentality runs the danger of adding a condition to their own plane of composition. It would be like adding a prerequisite to their creativity. A creativity that already finds value in the context of the induvidual artist.
We need to see artists as natives, nomads, free to create new percepts and affects. Artists, that are aware of, but unfettered by outside codifications, artists as the winter hunter alone to define a new spring becoming.
But in reality artists like the Mi’kmaq people can not survive alone in the forest forever. Artists depend on accesses to the outside codified capitalist world for their survival. A survival that is well recorded through out history to have left the artist crippled and marginalized, artist’s groups or co-ops being a recent attempt to empower the artist. This resulted only in empowering organizations and their membership’s definitions of art.
I think that if we look at the Mi’Kmaq model for inspiration we can come to an understanding of how to group artists without compromising their individuality.
If artists use the codes of their society to organize themselves they will inevitably be victims of these codes. Codes that are set up for socialization and not artistic individual goals. Think tanks, chat sites, sweat lodges, or roundtables can be open groups where everyone is equal in their intellectual input. Perhaps it is time the artists formed nomadic partnerships and met in sweat lodges instead of galleries and boardrooms. Modernism pointed out the individuality of the artist but failed to insure it. Postmodernism pointed out the equality amongst artists/text but failed to create a bridge between the individual understandings and society.
The nomad is free, part of the land not owner of it. The nomad seeks and doesn’t build. The nomad is constantly moving and not growing roots. The nomad is not alone but part of everything. The nomad eats, drinks, thinks, and makes love. To embrace the nomadic in thought and action is to start to truly create what is yours/ours.
by chriseddy
January 11, 2005
nEotEXT 8
In search of a muse
There is no vitrine
Or glassed in diorama
Containing the muse
In the namesake castle
But traces can be found
Between the object's decorum
Through the vast halls
In every museum
Out in the park
A fountain says "spewing"
There are statues, sculptures
Just for viewing
And even though this is absolutely amusing
There is only a hint
Of the muse coming through it
With the radio on
Inside of your head
It’s the music's world playing out
The text that is read
Here in the sounds it is also know too
That the footprints of the muse
Are left there as clues
The sacred place
Deep inside of you
Is where you will find the leavers of clues
The ones that we search for
And have faith they will come
The muses, the mused,
Our creativity begun.
More.....
There is no vitrine
Or glassed in diorama
Containing the muse
In the namesake castle
But traces can be found
Between the object's decorum
Through the vast halls
In every museum
Out in the park
A fountain says "spewing"
There are statues, sculptures
Just for viewing
And even though this is absolutely amusing
There is only a hint
Of the muse coming through it
With the radio on
Inside of your head
It’s the music's world playing out
The text that is read
Here in the sounds it is also know too
That the footprints of the muse
Are left there as clues
The sacred place
Deep inside of you
Is where you will find the leavers of clues
The ones that we search for
And have faith they will come
The muses, the mused,
Our creativity begun.
More.....
January 09, 2005
January 02, 2005
-neOteXT 7
Rear Axel
Jazz Radio
Rain window background
Car tires rush water
Between sax solo
And drums
New beat vibration
Moving water falls
daggers of water
stabbing the piano
Mind is where?
Bare bulb energy saver
Glares inside
Rains envelopment
Water prison bars
Focuses freedoms
Life’s and umbrella’s
Cinematic rain standing
Naked
Ends of lines, water
Pounding the flesh
Pounding the heart
Freedom or fuckyou
Or just pure desire?
Jazz instruments sing
Indoor songs
To the rain
That beats the rhythms
Of natures chaotic response
Rhizomes in the middle
Slide off in infinite directions
Becoming in flow
Pure joy
More.....
Jazz Radio
Rain window background
Car tires rush water
Between sax solo
And drums
New beat vibration
Moving water falls
daggers of water
stabbing the piano
Mind is where?
Bare bulb energy saver
Glares inside
Rains envelopment
Water prison bars
Focuses freedoms
Life’s and umbrella’s
Cinematic rain standing
Naked
Ends of lines, water
Pounding the flesh
Pounding the heart
Freedom or fuckyou
Or just pure desire?
Jazz instruments sing
Indoor songs
To the rain
That beats the rhythms
Of natures chaotic response
Rhizomes in the middle
Slide off in infinite directions
Becoming in flow
Pure joy
More.....
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