SUCCESS WITHIN

All day today I have felt like a success. Certainly not money or attention success. I have blown my own mind, and that blows my mind. I have touched art for the first time in my life. This black box with the string hanging down, or standing up, whichever, I cannot stop looking at. I prefer to think of the string suspended. Now I'm thinking of other things to do with string, simple, like this one, simple down to just the string. I see one I want to do right now, but have to vision it first and I have only the conception. This is what I mean by success. I'm making things that are my own, that come from my own imagination, like composition did in the time of painting portraits of mountain musicians, but a step beyond. What I'm doing now grew out of boredom with what I called painting inside the lines. One day I said, no more coloring book art. From here on, somebody likes it, ok, somebody doesn't like it, ok. Indifferent to praise or blame, I set out find my own aesthetic besides reproducing faces and hands. I thought of gluing some cardboard to plywood and painting them different colors. Made two and they did not trip my trigger, but felt like it was leaning in a direction I liked. The next one, same arrangement of cardboard on plywood, all one color, yellow. I loved it. Made another yellow one, then a fire orange one, a black one with a faint purple haze in it, different compositions of the cardboard. Each one I liked better than the one before. It has been this way all along in this series, the black box being at least the thirtieth in the series, sometimes sculpture, sometimes to hang on a wall. I can't afford to make big outdoor sculptures, so I make small models of things I'd like to see big in a public space. This part ceases to matter, the model being the thing itself. 

A few friends have seen some of the new things, though I have no interest in anybody seeing them. I'm exploring my own aesthetic for myself and seeing where it goes. Actually, I don't want the distraction of attention. I like showing them to friends at the Daily Creative Practice group on facebook, and like seeing the new things by the different people there. I find it an inspiring bunch of people I've come into contact with. I'm the only one doing what I can only call minimalism. It is natural that I would want to go minimal. I remember seeing minimalism come in after abstract expressionism, seeming so radical, extreme after a period of expressionist splashings of color, though some, like Robert Ryman and Barnett Newman were like the seed of minimalism in abstract expressionism. I took to minimalism with a passion similar to how I took to punk rock after a period of what was then called "underground," and now called "classic," "Sixties" rock. Punk was refreshing and new, as was minimalism. At first, I was a bit ill at ease with the simplicity of it, in both cases. I saw a show at the Whitney (I think), in 1968 or 9, of a blend of Pop and minimalism. I was there to see the Pop, not much interested in minimalism, until I saw a green board about eight feet long leaning against a wall. Upon seeing that board, I felt like I got it. All other minimalist works I saw after that fell into place, I saw what they were doing. Since then, I've found a couple of good picture books of minimalism and a few by artists, Robert Mangold and Richard Serra. I'm drawn to the simplicity of minimalism, both visually and philosophically. In the time of abstract expressionism was a belief that went with it that abstraction was the apex of pure art, the ultimate in art. It was an arrogance. Then came minimalism and pop. There was something next. 

Abstractionists went nuts when pop came along, some calling it propaganda art, and minimalism wasn't even worth noting. Who cares about a plywood box? I never dreamed I'd be entering the minimalist arena. All the years of learning, enjoying, appreciating 20th Century art, I preferred to do figurative realism, because I live in the country and wanted to paint in relation to the culture I live in. I wanted to paint mountain people. I wanted to validate mountain people, say these people are worthy of note, worth remembering. The greatest gift from God in my life has been landing my parachute in the Blue Ridge, no more knowing where I was going than a dandelion seed in the wind. I'd only seen Doris Ullman photographs of Appalachian poverty. In the first months, I was afraid to walk anywhere, afraid I'd come up on a still and get shot. Pure fantasy. The Ullman portraits were the tail end of another time. I feel like I've made my contribution to my community by now, seven years with the radio show of regional music, four years a store that sold regional cds, five years a column in the local paper, involvement in this and that. A time came after the heart acted up that I felt like I've been given a stay of execution, not borrowed time, but a gift of time. I thought, this is my time. This is I dive in to find out who I am time. Time to explore my attitude toward life. Since Jr died, I felt like I've fulfilled my service to humanity give-back and may have been given extra time twice to advance my search. It is time I don't want to waste on distractions. And if I'm going to find my own art, which I felt I'd been creeping toward all the way along, reaching toward art like grabbing the air. 

Finally, I feel like in the black box with the string I have touched art. I'm not putting this up for debate, just reporting that within self I feel like I have, indeed, touched art. It's a quiet, humble feeling. It is something I feel like matters to no one but me, aint nobody's business but my own. It's mine to work with. Next, the step beyond this. Everything I've done in this series, I love it upon completion. It tells me I am in touch with my own personal aesthetic, informed by everything I've learned since birth. Every aesthetic consideration comes from my own visual sense. Feeling visually. No consideration of selling eliminates the money distraction. I am the only one it is necessary to please. At this moment, each one I do I love more than the one before. In October I'll show them in the Sparta library for a month. It will be a fun month. Few people will see them. Nearly everyone who sees them will see nothing. This guy's trying to pull my leg calling this shit art. And that's ok. What somebody else sees is neither here nor there for me. Like a Rorschach ink blot, it is what the individual sees. Now that I've reached an ideal, it's kind of like coming into a place I cannot transcend, but I can, and will. The significance of the black box for my own development is what comes next. It put me in a new zone. I even feel like this is worthy of Francis Picabia, an ideal for me. Dada post-dada. The Dadaists of 1915 and a few years after were the punk rockers of the art world. They did something that was new in their time. I am not. What I am doing has gone before, others did it first, a century ago. It is new to me, coming into dadaist way by way of minimalism is a perfectly natural progression for me as these are the periods of 20th Century art that appeal to me most. A long way of saying I feel successful within.  

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CATCHING THE FLOW OUTSIDE THE BOX

all photos by tj worthington

Yesterday some horoscope analysts and a friend who is an astrologer told me that Tuesday the 28th would be a day to do something outside the box. In the evening I went to a softball game in Wilkesboro, sat and watched two games. It was already scheduled. I didn't go to the game for the specific purpose of doing something outside the box, but felt like it fit the call of the day. Two of my friends were on one of the teams. Our team lost both games. It seemed to me like our pitcher threw a lot of good hits. It looked like he was throwing the ball so the batter could hit it easily. It was like he was throwing for practice batting. The other team's pitcher was not an easy one to hit and he didn't allow a great many really good hits. Afterward, the team felt like they didn't play a good enough game. It looked to me like the teams were equals and the pitching had a great influence on the game. I don't mean to imply it was great pitching by any means. The ball arches so when it crosses home plate it is descending to hit the plate or not far behind it, close to straight down. I sat with my friend Sheena and her boy Seth on a small aluminum bleacher with a half dozen others. Driving home after midnight I saw the rising half moon in bold orange.

The influence of this planet arrangement went over into today. I got a call from Justin in the morning wanting to know if I wanted to go fishing on the Willis Lake, the next farm up the road from my house. Fishing is not something I do. I don't care to prepare them to eat and I have no interest in catching them to throw them back. I thought: outside the box.  I took my camera to get pictures from the lake. I was thinking of landscape pictures taken from the water. On the water, the landscape became boring for photographing. I spent possibly the first half hour in the boat watching Justin catch fish, impressed by how he can throw the line so it goes to the exact spot he wants it. He likes to catch and throw them back. He gets a charge from catching fish. It's the same as hunting. Hunters know the addictive thrill of hunting. I experienced the hunting thrill once, felt like I got it why so many people like to hunt. But I don't like killing. That doesn't mean I have issues with people who do kill. That's their business if they want to hunt the same as it's my business that I don't want to. That one experience gave me an understanding of the thrill. I understand my friends who are hunters, understand what they like about it, a little bit of what they like. There is much more to hunting than just squeezing a trigger or pulling back a bow string. The hunters I know keep meat in freezers to get them through the year with meat they don't have to buy, meat that doesn't have growth hormones etc in it.

 

 

The water was perfectly clear today. I surveyed the sky, the land, the water, the boat for some idea of a theme to photograph. The landscape bored me. I thought: I have landscape pictures. Everybody takes landscape pictures. It's beautiful when all the leaves are fresh in their yellow-green of early spring. Big white clouds in the flow-lines of the gaps around. I saw a row of clouds over the gap where Hwy 18 to Wilkesboro enters the mountains. Parallel to that row of clouds was another beyond it passing over Twin Oaks gap at Hwy 21. Those clouds were flowing west to east. Flowing south to north over Roaring Gap a row of clouds moved around Bullhead over Glade Valley to join the other two flows eastward toward Mt Airy. I looked at all the land I knew intimately from walking on it over a number of years. I've worked the farm in the past and know the owners and the people living there. It's "next door," about a third of a mile from my house. I felt at home. I felt my love for the mountains and Air Bellows Mountain where my love enters the mountains. The wind was blowing just enough to make active ripples on the water. The boat was in slow motion with a trolling motor and the wind. Sometimes the boat went slowly in a circle. I watched sunlight sparkle on the waves, began seeing the range of colors on the surface. I've tended to think of the lake water as brown from the mud on the bottom, though the water is clear, and blue and white surface from the reflection of sky.

 



I started seeing the continuously changing patterns of colors on the water's surface. Tree reflections were refracted among the images of clouds and sky, their colors making patterns in constant change, fast change, no two ever repeating all over the lake's surface. I began to look more into the patterns and found the camera makes a rectangle of abstraction in it's manner of stopping the motion. I could never get an image as I saw it when I pushed the button; by the time the camera clicked, a split-second later, the patterns in the water were changed altogether. The slow turning of the boat showed me the colors in the reflections were different all the way around according the angle the sunlight struck the water in relation to my location. I pointed the camera to the water maybe three to four feet from the boat. The image in the rectangle of the camera's monitor was extraordinary every moment. I clicked over a hundred pictures, fascination increasing as I found in our movements around on the lake that light was different and reflections different all over the lake. Finally a short video of five minutes or less came to mind. I held the camera still looking at the water just a few feet from the boat and let the motion of the boat be a part of it. I felt like the sequence of photographs are among my very finest photographs. I don't mean I'm something special with a camera, but I get a picture the best I can, learning by experience.

The video holds my visual attention almost dramatically. Sometimes it goes slow, sometimes fast when the boat is turned by the wind. Colors changed, patterns changed; the patterns changed extremely fast. On the laptop monitor the colors and shapes are flying. It's a constantly changing abstraction, like something Clifford Still might paint that never stops changing and never does the same thing twice. Every pattern I caught is unique in the life of the lake. It never happened before and will never happen again. Something like an action painting by the abstract expressionists of the 1940s and 1950s. None of the pictures was composed. I just pointed the camera where the visual activity was at the place between looks like water, and at the same time does not look like water. I was getting my kicks walking that edge. It was simply a point and shoot experience, composition merely that zone between is and is not water. It was the flow I was attempting to photograph in a still image, and then a moving rectangle of constant change. I fell into a zone where the surface of the lake became for me a sparkling wonder of moving colors and shapes flowing in and out of each other. I spent a few hours in silence lost in awe by the changes of colors in a spontaneous dance of speed. I like to make photographs of nascar races from the flat-screen tv, looking for a still image that catches a sensation of speed. The images on the water moved and changed so fast, they became another challenge to fix speed in a still image. Outside the box I found what I can't help but think is the first art moment of my life.

 

 

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HENRY GELDZAHLER AND POP ART

roy lichtenstein

Today's video was a fairly collage-like documentary of art and artists in NY. 1950-1970. I liked about the film that it caught the spirit of the time and place, post-WW2 New York, the abstract expressionist period, emphasis in the film on the flow into Pop then minimalism unto conceptualism, the last years of the Modern period that began with Impressionism. The film looked at the art of this period through the point of view of Henry Geldzahler, a museum curator who involved himself in the art of the time visiting new artists, getting to know them, finding out what they were doing, discovering a new spirit among younger artists in the time Abstract Expressionism was finally being recognized as valid art, then the oncoming of Pop that Geldzahler recognized as the next new thing. I remember his name from the art press of the time, books on Pop I read to find out about the new are that had the abstract expressionist painters calling it propaganda and anything else they could think of. Abstraction was soft-edged and Pop was hard-edged, a major difference in the time, a difference the abstractionists pointed to as invalid in painting.

Pop was possibly the first art period of the Modern era that caught the public eye. There were long lines of people waiting to get into a show of the new Pop artists. I went to New York in the time and saw a huge show of Pop with hundreds of people milling about, talking about particular sculptures and paintings with an excited awe. I felt it too. It was fun. It was nutty. It was off the wall. A show of Abstract Expressionists was serious. It was an intellectual art form. It embraced existentialism. It was pure art, expression as it happened. Pop popped the bubble of intellectual art that you had to read Nietzsche to really get it, Unamuno too. The spirit of pop broke the line between high art and low art. Pop made high art by incorporating low art, like rock n roll in the way it incorporates other musics. Anything that gets close to it, rock incorporates. Pop was open to finding art everywhere you look, like the grocery store, the beach, the sidewalk, store fronts, graffiti, beer cans. Geldzahler created exhibitions, bought for museums, connected artists with collectors and created his own collection.

Henry Geldzahler's name was as well known in that time as one of the artists. He was most widely known as somebody who appreciated Andy Warhol's work when few got it. Geldzahler created the Modern collection in the Metropolitan. The day I went to the Met, I was awed by what I saw when I stepped into the space.

I have to stop. The blogger site has an interface that seldom works. Tonight it is not working AGAIN.