HILLBILLY ART---GETTIN ER DONE

cy twombly

 

 

Jr Maxwell has been with me in spirit today. This morning I picked up some motorcycle wheels from the motorcycle skeleton yard, a frame with a motor, 5 old rusted flywheels from I can't imagine what, a short crankshaft covered in rust. That's my treasure. I want to do something special with it, thinking of displaying it upright like Brancusi's Bird In Space. Might play with putting chemicals on it to make different colors of rust. Everything is possible when I have no box. I've decided to jump out of whatever boxes I've been functioning in where art is concerned. The box gives structure and foundation. I can find them outside the box, as well. I can't lean on the wall of a box. All the more fun. I want to make abstractions, though I also want to make crazy things like flamingos and giant insects, whatever happens. Anything goes. I spent the day in Jr's tractor repair shop that is now Ross's. The shop was built by Jr, has his name on the sign. It will always be Maxwell Equipment. The place smells like it smelled in Jr's time there, the old grease smell covering the cement floor over about thirty years. A mechanic's hands are always black with grease, a thin coat of black remains on everything he touches. Over time the black thickens until the handles of tools are black from much use. The shop was also Jr's man cave.

 

tony smith

 

 

I spent a few hours sitting out of the way by the wood stove not in use taking apart the gears and axles of the two back wheels. It was quite an adventure in bolt removal. I'm looking as much forward to disassembling these motorcycle skeletons as much as reassembling them in original new ways. Saving all bolts and nuts, sleeves, rings of every sort in a particular box. I want to use the bolts and screws from the bikes themselves putting them back together. Getting acquainted with my palette.  Tomorrow morning I'll tear into the frame with the motor and back wheel. Disassemble the whole thing down to the pistons and the rods, valves, sparkplugs, crankshafts. Every part of the entire mechanism I want to have available for use. Break them down to their nuts and bolts and tiniest parts. This is the time of deconstructing the dead bikes to their parts. Axles with bearings could be great for something that turns in the wind. I know I'm not the first to do something like this. Far from it. It doesn't matter. I don't want to look and see what other people have done. I want my own vision to emerge from the parts themselves and my experience putting them together into something new, something worth making. I'll let Ross decide about prices. I don't want that in my head. All this will be worked out conversationally over time. I can see I'll be spending a lot of time in the shop. It's not like we're starting a business. My only agenda will be never to get serious about it.

 

ai weiwei

 

 

It will be fun to make yard ornaments, even wall sculptures that hang on an outside wall or an inside wall. Things for indoors and outdoors. I see houses everywhere now with a black star hanging on an outside wall. I've heard they indicate a retired sheriff. I don't know. Whatever it is, I find it a very unfortunate image to put on one's house. A black star. That's kind of like an upside down cross. Not that it is anything at all, but the emotional symbolism is there. The black stars strike me sinister. They make me pause with a frown, like that aint right. Of course, it is right for the people who put them up and I remind myself it's their right like having a bird feeder in my yard is my right. It's just that they're creepy in my way of seeing. I don't want to make creepy things. I want them to express delight in one way or another. In this period of bike deconstruction, I'm discovering parts, shapes, designs, patterns. I like the rust. I will want to paint very little. Though some things will need painting. That can be decided per piece. No gotta-oughta-should-better-needta-benefit-from. I'll let Ross handle the money totally. I don't want to get mixed up with money. I'm doing it for the fun there is in it and that is all. If occasional gas money comes from it, hooray. Beyond that, I don't care. Even that, I don't care.

 

donald judd

 

 

This project will be done in a spirit of in memory of Jr Maxwell. Inside the shop is a sense that he is living. Jr was important to Ross and Jr was important to me. Ross and I did a kind of male bonding struggle around Jr. Men who don't like each other and have a fight come out of the fight best friends. The fight somehow, maybe even subliminally, becomes a bonding. Hierarchy is important to men. Knowing who can kick whose ass is important among men. I attribute it to 6,000 years of armies at war. Boys grow up to be soldiers and take orders. Boys expected to grow up and be killers for awhile, then raise a family. Warrior society. It's got our working class men, the ones that shoot guns and get killed, believing blind obedience is patriotic, masculine. Yes Sir! Easily manipulated by propaganda. Ross believed I was setting Jr up to rip him off. When I went home the day Jr's spirit left the body, expecting or asking for nothing. What I was there for was done. I never attempted to convince Ross that my intent was what he would want it to be, to allow Jr to leave the body in his own bed. That was important to him, and I was the only one who could make it possible for him.

 

dan flavin

 

 

I understand Ross's suspicion, because everybody around here knows somebody or of somebody who moved in on somebody feeble and alone to get everything signed over to them in the will. It happens. People you'd never suspect. I knew my purpose, but knew I could never be convincing; words are not convincing to anybody of these mountains and I understand. When it became apparent I had not imposed myself on Jr for property or anything in any way, the day he died, then I became ok to all who had been watching: Whitehead. All of Whitehead. I had no idea until the day he left the body that all of Whitehead had been watching. That day I became a naturalized citizen of Whitehead community. One of the great honors of my life, if not IT. In some way I don't understand at all when Ross and I are around each other, Jr is with us. I see Jr in him and he sees Jr in me. In short, we've become friends in memory of Jr. I like that. It keeps Jr alive for both of us. Like Jr said, "Patience is everything." The shop has become a gang of misfits, doing whatever needs doing. Today this old boy from town was there repairing the bottom of a fiberglass canoe and he'd never worked with fiberglass before. The sound of power tools, the satellite radio playing bluegrass sometimes and hard metal other times. The smell of grease and WD-40. Laughs happening frequently.

 

 

ai weiwei

 

 

We're ready to make hillbilly art, put up a sign misspelled like somebody who didn't pay much attention in school painted it, who got passed along year after year until he graduated illiterate. Or quit first chance it was legal, whichever came first, sixteenth birthday or finish eighth grade. That's how it was with my generation. I don't know what it is now. Probably not much different. Hillbilly. I think of it as exploiting expectation. What Ross and I are wanting to do is #1, get rid of his old motorcycle skeletons and parts that go with them, and  #2, have some fun. Humor. Funny. I'm already thinking of what I can do with maybe twenty valves from motorcycle engines, gas tanks, fenders, wheels, frames, handlebars, pistons, chains. I'm excited anticipating taking the motor and wheel off the frame to see what the frame itself looks like. I'm looking forward to having several different frames to see what can be done with them. Spoke wheels, rusted chrome, some with tires, some without. I want to leave the tires. I enjoy taking the bikes apart. It's like a potter kneading the clay before creating the form with it. I am thinking that instead of putting my name on them, finding a way to sign them Maxwell Equipment. That name acknowledges the group effort it is. I may be the one with the designing eye, but maybe not the only one. And everyone involved in the shop will be helping in varieties of ways, if no more than telling me how to use a particular tool, like a welder. Everybody will be involved. I don't want the credit to be all mine. That would be taking it seriously.

I want my part light hearted.  

 

 

frank stella

 

 

 

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ART: SERIOUS NOT SERIOUS

eva hesse

What about Dada? What about Surrealism? What about Abstract Expressionism? What about Pop, Minimalism, Op, Conceptualism, Post Modern? Talking with a guy I've known several years, his whole family, about an art project I'm venturing into involving welding, something I'll be learning as I go. I've wanted to know how to weld all my adult life and never got it done. Now, here it is offering itself to me. Hooray. I'm looking at sculptures made of varieties of steel scraps, wheel rims, motorcycle skeletons. With welder friend Ross, we will make things and put them out by the road for sale. He has all this junk metal that is too light weight to get any money for as scrap metal. Let's have a good time and make some crazy things. Sell them. Friend today said he took a lot of art and philosophy of art---he can't take art that lightly. He has to be serious about art. So he doesn't make any art. I mentioned making some abstractions with the parts. His response was that abstraction was what was happening in the Fifties and has no more relevance since then. I thought: Huh? What? I didn't want to go there, because I believe he has his reasons for his own way of seeing. I've spent my life looking for making art without making art.

cy twombly

The list of questions above were the unspoken questions that flashed through my mind when he said he was too serious about art to be so frivolous with it. I wondered. Twentieth Century art has a serious / not serious divide. The ideal to be serious and not serious to where they cancel each other. Eva Hesse. I talked about inability to do something spontaneous without regard for Art, the kind that is funded by corporations for skyscraper office decorations. I don't want what I do on corporate walls. I used to know somebody who bought for corporate offices in Charlotte and I thought that the best job a man could have. He'd fund a European vacation going around to different cities and galleries and artists studios buying for the Bank. On the other hand, the hand I live my life by, I find it repulsive the major corporations cannot pay workers a living wage, but pay for art in office spaces with millions in their budget, where everybody who works there would prefer Remington prints in ornate frames. I was in a show in Greensboro some years ago and saw a corporate buyer going around looking at things with somebody associated with the show and thought: great job. I didn't want to meet him or suck up to him or anything. Didn't even want him looking at my things. It was at this show I learned that is not the world I want to do my art for. I'd rather sell it at a roadside stall. I'm not breaking new avant-garde territory. Nothing close to it. Just a Joe having fun playing art.

ellsworth kelly

Getting momentum started in the morning toward making some stand up sculptures like John Chamberlain and Tony Smith, though not like either one. We want to make things like swans and other animals and bugs with parts. I want to explore abstraction in what I'll call a Wipe Out series. The whole idea behind it is redneck art, something to put in your yard in front of the trailer. I think of making everything I do Dada. Approach it like nobody has ever done anything like vertical sculpture of any kind. Giacometti had his Surrealist period interrupted by ww2 and he moved to Geneva, just across the border into Switzerland. The artists of Paris had to leave the country. Giacometti in Geneva was alone in his art mind. He decided to start over as if no sculpture had ever been made. He was making first ever. He started carving tiny, one-inch long standing figures, out of soap with his pocket knife. He kept them in small pocket match boxes. He returned to Paris at the end of the war and began making clay figures like he made with soap, carved them with his pocket knife. It was the only tool he used. His brother, Diego, cast them in bronze. I can see I'll be using my art eye, which I can do and nobody will notice. I believe our key word will be humor. All in fun.

giacometti

I found that I have come so far beyond Serious art that I don't even think about art as serious any more. It seems to me like internationally the whole world of art all over the globe is exploring Dada, making it new. My sensing is the next 500 years will run the course of 20th century art again, but all over the world; dada, surrealism, abstraction, pop, minimalism, conceptual. I'm seeing Post Modern the beginning of that cycle again on a bigger scale. First cycle happened in half a year in Zurich, 1915. Next cycle was 20th Century art post-Duchamp for half a century. This is why I suspect the next cycle to be half a millennium. After ww1 Dada transcended into Surrealism through similar excursions all over Europe into the inner realms in art. Abstraction started "officially" with Kandinsky and became a movement in New York after ww2, the same time bluegrass and rock n roll took off. Then the momentum happened in a hurry through the 1960s through minimalism and Pop, Op, et al, until about 1969-70, in my way of seeing the flow. By this time in the world of art, anything goes. This is why I have Found Art images with the blog, photographing things I see out and around, like water hydrants wrapped in black plastic and fixed with black tape. Christo came to Sparta.

christo

I've reeled inwardly since hearing it's possible to be so serious about art you can't do anything. That's too serious. It tells me art is not serious. Maybe I'll be making art for the first time in my life.  I'm seeing this as my own chance to discard what seriousness I have in myself about art. I know I have plenty. To weld something together that looks like a gigantic penguin for the lawn. From what I've seen of the junk parts we'll be using, I am peaking in my designing mind. I already know what I want to do with some of it. I'm ready. In Little Richard's words," I'm ready, I'm ready, ready, ready, I'm ready-y, ready, ready, ready, I'm ready, ready, ready, ready, I'm ready, I'm ready, ready, ready to rock n roll." It's like answer to a prayer I never thought to ask. It's another reminder to myself that I don't have to suck up to anybody about my art expression. Don't have to suck up to a gallery owner. Don't have to suck up to rich patrons at gallery events. I can't do that shit. I cannot look at any art expression having to do with money. To me, they're antithetical. That's not very practical thinking. I feel like the art world is the way it is because it's the nature of the world we live in. I don't care to "make it" or pretend to. It's rather freeing. No two ways about it, I still have much of my own seriousness about art drifting about in my head like space junk. Time to set it free before this lifetime is out. I'll give it the rebel yell of today: Hail Yeah!

tony smith

 

 

 

 

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