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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A WORLD OF BOXES

kazimir malevich

Talking with different friends yesterday, three, I brought up the subject of the box for some thoughts on the matter. Everyone I talked with said something to the effect of, Who needs a box? These were people who don't have an art expression, though take an interest. It continues in the front of my head that since 1970 we've been in the Post-Modern time, a time in which anything goes. I personally see the Post-Modern period a composite of what was learned through the Modern Period, a kind of universal Dada period. In 1915 a small group of draft-dodging artists from around Europe met in Zurich, Switzerland. They set out to discover art as if none had ever been made before. They acted as something of a cleaver on a chopping block, severed everything that went before and started fresh without reference to the past. They experimented with chance, with nonsense, with the new machine age.  Everything they did was then outside the box. Happening then was Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism. The dozen or so Dadaists in Zurich created a new -ism, totally outside the box, Dadaism. In a period of about 6 months they deconstructed art down to conceptualism. By the end of WW1, they had practiced their art vision outside the boxes, and introduced a new box to Europe and the rest of the world, the box that is not a box, the anti-box. From the end of WW1 to 1969 the world of front-runner artists all over the earth repeated the Dada process of deconstructing art, peeling away superficial layers a step at a time by way of a series of -isms. Surrealism started up in Paris post-Dada, explored interior territory until WW2, after which abstract expressionism in New York came forward. Then minimalism, and Pop, which became an -ism too, and a quick run of new -isms every year unto conceptualism, which revealed the core of what we call art, conception.

 

kazimir malevich

 

One of the better known conceptualist moments was a postcard a "conceptualist" sent around to art dealers in NY and patrons announcing a show at a particular address, a particular time. When the people arrived, it was a locked empty space with nothing going on. The postcard, itself, was the art. I've seen what the Dadaists did in Zurich in half a year repeated universally in half a century, the Modern period. This Post-Modern time started its first cycle in a Dadaist manner where anything goes; realism, abstraction, projection, video, exploring everything. The Post-Modern is a new time of thinking outside the box, but this time with reference to the past, the Modern period. Everybody was too busy watching television and fighting wars to notice that the Modern period, Dada to conceptualism, was the greatest renascence the world has ever seen. Preceding it were the renascence of the classical period of Greece and Rome, and the Renaissance, renascence with an Italian name. The next renascence the Modern period. It was the beginning of a new expansion of mind for collective humanity. Renascences past brought us into Reason. The renascence that was the modern period is bringing us into Intuition. It shows in the evolution of art. It's a long slow process. We still have a world of people who have not caught up with the cosmology of evolution, and even what would be a surprising number, if known, of people who have not yet caught up with the cosmology of round earth. We humans come in all levels of development. I've never argued with someone who believes flat earth. I figure that's their place and their vision. I don't know how to convince someone who does not understand planets and orbits that the earth is indeed round, and I don't believe it matters in everyday life whether someone believes the earth is flat or round. It matters for launching satellites. I believe round earth initially because I was told as a little kid in school it's a fact, like it's fact that George Washington was first president. Get it right for the test. My neighbor Tom would say of the moon-landing propaganda that no man can walk on the moon. The Bible sez the moon is just a light. No man can stand on a light.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Remembering the time he told me his teacher in school said the world was round like a baseball. Little man Tom said, "I aint never seen no mountains on narry baseball." This house used to be the Air Bellows School, it happened in the space I live in, in the space where this is being written. These walls were there. Tom believed he understood baseball, played it when he was a kid. I had to respect his integrity as himself and not let it show that I was tickled. Immediately I saw a baseball magnified to the size of the earth. The mountains would be a hundred miles high. Even the smooth part would be a plain of great high mountains and deep, deep valleys. A ball bearing the size of a baseball magnified to the size of the earth would have huge mountains and vast valleys. His mind really was from another cosmology. He did not need to be converted and I didn't need to be telling him he was wrong, when he was going by experience and I was going by believing what I was taught. He would be disappointed that I was so ignorant to take what somebody else told me without questioning it by way of my own experience. The sun goes across the sky, caint y'see? College boy thinks he knows all about it and didn't even know what a chainsaw was, except for a movie that warped my mind so bad it probably changed my DNA. Jesus brought a new cosmology, love is all there is, summary of the gospels by John Lennon. This cosmology was a little slow taking hold. Finally, all these millennia later, a pope is reintroducing the old cosmology that never went anywhere, as if it were new in a world that never heard of it. This cosmology goes back before gravity. A couple thousand years later, it's outside the box. I continue to wonder what the box is. It comes to me over and over that Western Civ is the box. It is the box that civilization is transcending now. In Asia, Africa and the Middle East, they are transcending their own boxes. My new piece, BIG SUR, is only outside the box pre-Dada. From 1915 on, it's very much inside the box.

 

kazimir malevich

 

Again, I see the box so vast as not to be a box. In conversation with Tom's preacher brother, Millard, who was hard-shell unto stasis, after years of knowing him, I said one day, "If everything is a sin, then I'm free, it doesn't matter what I do when I can only sin." "No, it's not like that." It was quite a time knowing those men from two cosmologies back. I had a difficult time where talking was concerned, because I'm from round earth and understand evolution is the ongoing process of creation. Never use the E-word, it's as bad as the C-word, Communism, the A-word, Atheism, and the F-word. These language restrictions were pre-political correctness. I might make a case for the old restrictions due to limited education, but political correctness is adhered to with the same vehemence in the "educated" middle class. Who needs censorship when we have a population so eager to self-edit? Concerning my own interior boxes, television has so minimal a place in my world as to have no place at all. To go outside my box I could start watching television. That's not even worth an experiment for laughs. I like to tap in periodically for a review of what the people around me are believing this moment and to see what it is they're smiling about all the time. This could be outside my box too, smiling all the time. I could sit in front of a tv with a Bud, a bag of barbeque flavored potato chips and a big smile on my face. Good time for a selfie. Click. Self as Ken doll in environment. Call it art. Instead of doing it, I write it and that is my art expression outside the box. But it's not really. Just sparkles flickering in the universe of the image-ination. Lenny Kaye on the guitar. Keith Jarrett on the keyboard. Go Rimbaud and go Johnny go and do the Watusi. How was that sentence for outside the box? You didn't see it coming. What did it have to do with anything? An outside the box joke, a game I learned from the donkeys, I get a kick outta you.  

 

kazimir malevich himself

 

 

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APOLLINAIRE AND THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD

       francis picabia

Yesterday in the morning, a question came to me about Guillaume Apollinaire, French poet from the first two decades of the 20th Century. Apollinaire kicked off the Modern with his poem ZONE. It brings to my mind Allen Ginsberg's HOWL that kicked off the second half of the 20th Century. Apollinaire looks to the modern world with fascination from the first decade of the 20th Century. His book of poems, ALCOOLS, was published one hundred years ago, 1913. That was the same year Duchamp painted Nude Descending A Staircase that kicked off the Modern in the world of visual art. ZONE welcomes the new century, airplanes, the Eiffel Tower, Pope Pius X (the most modern European).

     You read the handbills catalogues posters that sing out loud and
          clear
     That's the morning's poetry and for prose there are the
          newspapers
     There are tabloids lurid with police reports
     Portraits of the great and a thousand assorted stories


It would be another 10 years for Surrealism to take shape after WW1. Apollinaire expresses the hope that came with the New before WW1. He survived the war, but only by a couple years after a head wound. If you think of Symbolism in poetry parallel Impressionism in painting, then Apollinaire's book of poems, Alcools (poems 1898-1913), is there with Post-impressionism (vanGogh and Gauguin), Fauvism (Bonnard and Matisse), Expressionism (Kirchner and Kandinsky), Cubism (Picasso and Braque), just before Dadaism (further breakdown of form and color during WW1, the chopping block of before and after), then Surrealism after "The Great War." Apollinaire's place was between Symbolism and Surrealism, that tremendously gestative time. He wrote in a March, 1913, essay, Through The Salon des Independants, For the past twenty-five years, it is the Salon of Independants that has brought to light the newest personalities and tendencies of French painting, which is the only painting that counts today and which is pursuing in the face of the universe the logic of the great traditions. This year the Independants is more alive than ever.

The poem I went looking for that set off this morning's spell of reading Apollinaire's poems was THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD, very much a Symbolist poem creeping toward Surrealism. The poem is like a dream in the way the story unfolds. It concerns walking by a row of shops called an arcade, shops with big glass windows and mannequins. He calls the mannequins the dead.

     A diamond angel shattered all the windows
     And the dead accosted me
     With looks from another world.

The dead stepped out from their glass mausoleums and joined the living people walking by. Some fell in love, some rowed boats in a park's lake, some walked holding hands. A dead woman sitting on a bench / Next to a barberry bush / Allowed a student / Kneeling at her feet / To speak of betrothal.

     "I'll wait for you if I have to
      Ten or twenty years
      Your will shall be mine."

     "I'll wait for you
      All your life,"
      Replied the dead woman.

At a given time the dead return to their windows and lie down,

     Waiting for burial behind their windowpanes

     They did not suspect
     What had taken place
     But the living remembered it as
     An unhoped-for happiness
     And so real
     They had no fear of losing it


Several years ago I discovered that Apollinaire wrote The House Of The Dead to the music of Pachelbel's Cannon in D, which he evidently had in his head very well. They didn't have recording devices then like we have now. I don't recall how I discovered that. Possibly I heard its slow progression in his short story in verse of the living and the dead having a night out together. I had Pachelbel's Cannon on LP to listen to then, but don't have it on CD to listen to it now. It works to read the poem slowly at the rate of the music's flow. High places match, low places match, the feeling carries all the way through and it ends at the right time.
\
I've been going nuts trying to remember the title and author of a novel written maybe in the 1930s or 40s that is the story of Apollinaire's poem told in Symbolist prose. It is a little-known classic. I have searched until I've convinced myself I gave it to somebody many years ago. I don't even know how to search for it on google or amazon. I'd remember the writer's name and the title if I saw them. Not able to call them up from the ocean floor of my mind. Maybe like a rising bubble it will surface in a few days. When it does, I'll note it here. I've been so distracted today so many times attempting to write this that I've lost the sense of it. The translator I've used here is William Meredith from his 1964 translation of Alcools.


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