CATFISH HEALED AND HOME

henri rousseau

The appointment to see auto mechanic was 1:30. I went out to the car at 12:30 to pour two quarts of fluid down the narrow tube with the only funnel I have, which turned out to be exactly the right size, like a wrench. I don't even know if the tube with the dipstick was the place to add fluid. Read the owner's manual on how to add fluid without destroying the transmission. No mention at all of where to pour the fluid. For that one, I was on my own. I did the only thing I could see to do. It worked. Drove to the shop, transmission working like usual, soft rain, wipers about half speed, water puddles in the road. I ran through nearly every one of them, washing the mud off the underside of the car. Didn't have a chance to wash it off for three dollars with a pressure-washer in town. Chuck put it up on the lift and the underside was cleaner than if I'd washed it. The problem was a hose, a small hose about a foot long had sprung a leak where it rubbed against a corner it bent around until it rubbed a hole. The parts store in town delivers right away. Easy to fix. The part and labor cost about a tenth of what I went there prepared in my mind to pay. I was also having two new horns installed. The horns on the car were not stock, came from I don't know what, Appalachian-American (redneck) rigged, as we call it around here. I had trouble-shot the electrical leak to the horns and removed the fuse to the line the horns work on. Goodbye radio antenna, clock, door locking and unlocking device, interior lights. I had not noticed how much I rely on the clock. Only driving by way of schedule, I like to know the time. And I like to listen to Charlotte NPR talk shows during the day in fifteen and twenty minute clips. Sometimes Fresh Air, Robin Young, Diane Rehm, The World, have some interesting subjects to talk about. They give trips to town and back some left brain activity to accompany the right brain of driving.  

henri rousseau

I felt refreshed learning the transmission was taken care of, the problem not on the inside. Chuck played the new horns for me. They are loud, like big truck loud. I sometimes tap a horn to alert deer at night grazing beside the road. They don't know what the two lights are. In deer culture, the ones that find out what the lights are don't live to tell it. This horn duet will get their attention. I tap the horn, too, when I pass Ross's shop and where my friend of many years, Tina, works. While Chuck was working on the car, I went to Crystal's sign-making shop, next to her dad's shop, to see her and visit. A young Alleghany woman came in about some custom tshirts she wanted made. She wore a jacket with a third-world array of rhinestones on the back in a big pattern, covered the whole back. She had tight jeans with rhinestone designs on the back pockets. I was thinking, There's a woman I'm told, thinks what's glitters is gold, and she's buying a stairway to heaven. Jimmy Page outer-space guitar solo. And what a hillbilly accent. I was curious for Crystal to tell me how she handled an issue with day-care personnel, one in particular, where Vada was concerned. She had legitimate cause, would handle it a thousand times better than I could. She did handle it well. It worked out so well for her she did not have to call the powerful woman within for backup. She spoke with the administrator, who understood what she was saying when the option of taking Vada out of the facility came up, a hefty amount a month. Crystal is good at making herself understood. She does it gently and mindfully. She was working on some tshirt orders. She's learning the process, teaching herself well. I had her make one for a friend's birthday coming up next week. 

henri rousseau

In Chuck's shop today, I heard a cut-loose fiddle tune and a tear-jerker gospel tune sung so beautifully in the hillbilly way it pulled both Chuck and me out of our conversation for a moment. A major part of hillbilly singing the people from outside the mountains don't hear is how from the heart the singing is. It doesn't sound like it. You feel it. All mountain music is about feeling. I could see in my mind's eye the people in an old-time mountain church singing the song, not a dry eye in the house. In the old way, the church was called the meeting house, the house for brevity. I love it when I hear a beautiful song someplace by surprise. At Ross's tractor repair and welding shop, he has satellite radio set on outlaw country metal. It's some straight-ahead Americana rock n roll. I hear good grooves in there too, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan, Southern rock, the Stones. It felt today like I was riding a wave where everything flowed so smoothly no effort was involved in anything I did. It all flowed in a continuum of good feeling. First stop when I left Chuck's shop, Billings Tire & Auto, was the new auto parts store in town, O'Reilly's, to see about a battery charger. I've borrowed Allen's battery charger more times than he's used it. It was time to buy one. Found a good one listed at $120 on sale for $65. They had others for forty and fifty dollars, but only with slow-speed charge and extra-slow-speed. This one had an option for high-speed charging as well. The difference of a few hours or all day and all night. Found what I went in there for, got a good deal too. Stopped at the grocery store for catfood, drug store for pills and hardware store to have a spare set of keys made. Every step along the way felt good, accomplishing something that genuinely needed doing. And friendly associations at every stop. Even got a hug from Lynn Worth in Farmer's Hardware.  

henri rousseau

Stopped by the coffee shop for a pound of Ethiopian coffee and a cup of the coffee of the day. Saw Bob Bamberg and we talked. He was alarmed by the repeated news of cops killing unarmed black men, women and children, retarded people of any race, homeless, poor people without recourse. I felt jaded hearing his bewilderment. He's bored in his retired years, talking about finding a job, something to do. I was taken a little aback. I'm loving my retirement so much there aren't enough hours in the day. I'm busy all the time with something, allowing self days when I don't feel like doing anything at all but sleep and watch movies. Those are my battery charging days. Naps are about recharging. At home after a successful drive of no engine problems, I took shoes and socks off, stretched out on the bed, pulled on the cover and couldn't sleep. I relaxed and waited til feeling like getting up. I find to lie there and rest is as good as sleep for a quick recharge. Needed to go to Carpenter's house and have a shower, it being a warm day. I noticed on the deck that the phoebe is back, building a nest high on a rafter. Tiny mud splashes sprinkled the deck in front of one of two doors. Judy does not like this. I agree with her, the worst place for a bird nest, except for the bird it's great. Being in a place of exploring gentleness instead of force, I can't knock the bird nest down, but can persuade the bird to suspect the security of this location. I have a toy snake a couple feet long made of a hundred or more slices of wood that allow it to wiggle like a snake. Freaky likeness in the wiggle. Bought it for a dollar. I found some black spray paint and painted the wooden snake a glossy blacksnake. In the morning, I will put the blacksnake on the deck table, a light tan octagon. I believe the bird will see it. I'll go up daily and move it to a new place. If it doesn't work after a few days, I'll find a long branch on the ground in the woods and put the blacksnake on the rafter beside the nest. That'll do it.     

selfie by henri rousseau

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THE BACKSIDE OF WATERFALL ROAD

trees beside waterfall road

Drove to town today to pay a few bills due tomorrow. I set out on a leisurely drive. Didn't need anything from any store, my coffee shop friends don't go there anymore, no reason to stop there. I told self to spend no money in town. Don't need gas. Drive up to each of three drive-thrus, envelope in drawer, "Thank you, have a good day," never turn off the engine, drive on through town and make a circuit. Drove into town by way of Pine Swamp Road and returned by highway 18. Felt relaxed the whole time. No radio in the car, no problem. I'd actually rather listen to the tires sing on the pavement. New tires on the road have their own sound. I listen to the motor. It is a near perfect engine, the 93 Buick Century 3300 v-6, a classic motor like the Chevy Nova slant-6 that is used all over the Third World running pumps long after the bodies have rusted away. My motor is such a fine motor, doesn't burn but half a quart of oil per 3,000 miles. A healthy motor. All problems with the car are external to the engine. I love the engine as much as I love the car. It starts right now, in zero degree air as in seventy degree air. The car runs so reliably, just driving it makes me happy. I went on the one-gallon of gas round-trip to Sparta, out seeing the landscape, the slant of the light, the shadows on the ground, the trees, the houses, the sky, the mountains. Out for a drive on a sunny day. Took camera along, saw one scene of an old-time loading pen, a dozen black cows grazing nearby and a tree, stark winter shadows. I'd already passed the only place I could pull off the road and park. I'd need to turn around, go back, etc. Too much. 

 chance installation

Drove through Sparta feeling good, brief verbal exchange at each drive-thru window, pull up to the red-light in the middle of town on hwy 18, turns green and I'm on the way home. At Whitehead, I decided to drive up the back road, the beautiful road that goes through the woods and hasn't been messed with ever, but to throw gravel on it from time to time and let it wash down the roadbed in the side ditches every big rain. Big rocks beside the road that takes a ridge up the mountain, a more direct shot than taking Air Bellows Gap Road up the mountain, though rough, so rough I go slow and straddle ruts the best I can. It's an easy road to drive, just have to drive it like walking. It's a hurry slowly road. I passed some icicles hanging from a rock formation. Pulled up a ways to a place I could get off the road. Nobody uses the road, but sure as I park in it, somebody will come along. It's a natural law. I walked back to the icicles, got some pics of it, some rock and some trees the other side of the road. The road goes up the spine of the mountain. It is the old wagon road to Air Bellows. At the top of the mountain, the sides of the road are like any other. The pavement ends at the top and the further down the road you go, the sides of the road rise gradually as walls. By the bottom, the walls are as high as the car. A few centuries of erosion down wagon tracks in mud, the roadbed becomes a river during a torrential rain washing the mud away. Such a rain happens at least once a year. 

merlin the shop cat

In Whitehead, before driving up the mountain, I stopped at Maxwell Equipment to see whoever was there. Ross was on the phone. It was cold. The building is made of wood framing and tin-roofing walls and roof. It's merely a windbreak. The temperature outside and inside are the same. Ross had the stove going. It made a pleasant zone in a radius of about five feet. Chairs around the stove. Merlin the shop cat was in there staying inside the stove's aura. He sleeps in a stack of insulation in a high corner of the building. Merlin is a good old neutered Tom cat with a white hairs sprinkled randomly through his black pelt. He likes the shop for the mice. Must have left wherever he lived before. Ross and I sat by the stove talking and somebody came in for some minor work, and the three of us talked awhile. Harry came in and the four of us stayed near the fire and talked. Harry lives up the hill behind the shop. Merlin took up with him a few years ago. Harry and Ross needed to drive to Wilkesboro for some steel or a part. I came on home, driving slowly along Air Bellows Gap Road looking at landscape in afternoon winter light. This is where I decided to go up the mountain on the back part of Waterfall Road. The part of the road houses can be built on are at the upper end of Waterfall Road. From the point where the pavement ends, on down to the bottom, the banks are almost straight up on both sides of it. There are so many trees, it's not a concern leaving the road. I have walked the road with dog and photographed it many times. It was one of my favorite walks. In late winter when the two roads coming up the mountain are so rutted that getting stuck is an in-yer-face issue, I take this back road. People with new cars don't know they really can drive over it easily, so none of the new people ever use it. 

icicle and rock

In winter with snow and ice, when the other two roads are nearly impassable, I use the old wagon road. It's like a bobsled run going down it on ice, a slow, very slow bobsled. I drove Ted Stern, whose farm I once caretook, down the the wagon road in his new Cadillac. He was mortified, but I never scraped bottom one time. I'd walked the road so many times, I knew it intimately. One winter, I drove preacher Millard Pruitt down the bobsled run in good packed snow in my 78 Toyota pickup, blue with the driver's side door red. He grew up on the mountain and this was the road he grew up on. I wanted to show him the old road of his childhood. I knew I could easily make it. It was just snow and ice. His eyes were bugged out all the way to the bottom. Never lost traction one time. It was the smoothest the road ever is. A few people like to four-wheel on it in winter. They pack the snow down good to make an easy road to drive. One of my favorite memories happened one day in winter, several inches of snow, walking along the road with my dog Sadie. A crow flew up over the ridge from one side to the other, passing just a couple feet above my head. I heard the wings, thought of the hymn, Come Angel Band, "I hear the sound of wings." In a world of white, one crow, appeared, flew over my head and disappeared down the other side. I felt like that was one of the most blessed moments of my life. The waterfalls are down the very steep bank beside the road. I decided to go to the waterfalls by that way one day years ago. Took a fifty foot rope to tie on a tree at the top. The first thirty or so feet was sheer rock covered with leaves, slicker than ice to try to walk on. It was a fun journey. At the bottom, close to the waterfall I came upon a huge area of jack in the pulpits. Big ones, maybe two feet tall, covered the bank above the water. It's an ideal a Japanese garden designer reaches toward, natural, the way God flung it.  

rock and growth

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EARTH DAY WITH PEOPLE OF THE EARTH

wrench

Yesterday I searched for my own definition of nature, came to see the natural world as whatever is not created by the human mind, natural meaning left alone by human mind. This does not mean to dismiss the human mind, which, itself is natural as a tree, a rock, a squirrel. The human mind, a microcosm of the Creator is a creator itself. Mind created civilizations all around the globe down through time. Mind created an historical legacy of art from beginning to present. In Athens, Greece, 1972, I went to the museum of Greek art. I saw some of the very first carvings in soft stone of the first human depictions in that part of the world of self representation. They were static, arms straight down for centuries. The Greek renascence, the Classical Age, depicted the human form in motion, in time. Art is one activity of the human mind, philosophy too, that a good case can be made for to include them as the same as the natural world. Plato continues to be as relevant to the human condition as Michelangelo and Matisse. Much of our own human behavior is natural as donkey behavior, or chimpanzee behavior, cat behavior. I believe it is that part of self, the natural world part, that I have aspired to find in adult life. To do it, I've had to separate myself from the games of the human mind like social climbing, making money as an end in itself, identifying with the most expensive house, car and clothes affordable, and the right people. That's the zone I consider unnatural; therefore, the world. The mind likes to attach itself to things as expressions of self. Of course mind is attached to things because things are creations of the mind. A rubber ducky, somebody's mind created it. God creates life, the whole cycle from birth to death, whereas creations of the human mind begin their process of entropy upon creation. I hesitate to use the word God, because its meaning varies from individual to individual, but it's the same with a lot of words.

ross

My way of living the natural world in human society is to have my right people be the people I naturally resonate with in varying degrees. Several years ago I decided to trim my associations down to the people I care about who care about me. I have enough people in my life I care about who care about me that I don't have room for gamers. When somebody starts gaming me, it's a very short time before it's a game of one, bouncing a ball off a wall. I quit playing bridge not long after catching on and finding it a fascinating game I believed I could learn well enough in a few years to become a player. But the temperaments of bridge players was something I couldn't handle. When I got cussed by my partner for playing the wrong card, I stood up, announced I will never play another game of bridge the rest of my life and left the table. How are we going to finish the game? I don't know, that's yours to figure out. My hillbilly blood shining through, back when I didn't know I had hillbilly blood, and sure as hell wouldn't have told anybody if I knew it. Blood is natural. I believe it is natural when somebody gets in my face cussing me to do something about it right now, whatever it takes, least violent recourse first, unless it calls for putting the individual on the ground. You don't have to be a fighter to be able to do that real easy. Just turn on the mode Justin calls survival mode when he's in a fight, when you do whatever it takes. Our feelings are natural as our bones. I'm recalling my friend Jr Maxwell in his 80s telling me, You have to go with your feelings. Another time he said, Patience is everything. He was a welder, a tractor mechanic, a sawmiller, heavy-equipment operator, farmer, bluegrass banjo picker and singer, husband in grief without his wife, a man of the real thing wisdom, who looking back over his life assessed himself a fool. I called him, in my mind, the wise fool. He used mind for a tool, for figuring out how to fix things. Money was what you needed to meet expenses, the rest of it was living your life, enjoying talking with friends around the wood stove in the tractor shop, enjoying playing bluegrass on weekends wherever the band played.

 

zak

 

Had to make a town run today for cat litter and gas for the car. Stopped at the Exxon station for four gallons, 80 miles. Walking from the pump to the station to pay, I saw Doris putting gas in a car for a woman I didn't know. I spoke to Doris, the woman started to drive off. Doris started drumming the trunklid with the palm of her hand and hollering for the woman to stop. She stopped. She was up in years. Inside, paying Doris, I said, That's me in a year or two. She said, I'm afraid I'm gonna be there too. It was an amusing moment, but it was not funny--if we live long enough, we will each have such lapses. It was a moment of empathy both Doris and I were feeling. I'm glad we spoke of it. I was thinking this is what I love about country people. Doris knew the woman and knew she could not put gas in her car, went out to work the pump herself. I just now heard the yipping of a pack of coyotes in the donkey meadow. I jumped and went out the door hollering GIT, loud like the giant that can kill you by looking at you. I had to holler several times. Each time I hollered, one or two stopped, until after half a dozen or more monster roars they quit. One stayed behind. It sounded hurt. But their yipping sounds like they're screaming in pain anyway. It continued to squeal for quite awhile after all the others were quiet. I hope Jenny nailed one. If she did, word will have run through the pack by now that donkeys fight back. I don't know how Jenny responds to coyotes, but I do know they scare her and Jack. It tickled me to show Jenny and Jack my psychic power over the coyotes. When the ice cream man brays, the coyotes scatter. After attempting to frighten coyotes by clanging shovels together or clanging pots and lids, I learned quickly they paid these noises no mind. But holler GIT in a bold monster voice, it gets their attention. They know it's the monster that lives in the barn. I don't mind the donkeys having coyote experience. Donkeys can kill coyotes, but Jack and Jenny don't know it yet. A highway of trails the night animals use runs just the other side of the donkey meadow. The night animals know two donkeys are living here by now.      

 

harry

 

I stopped by the tractor shop, Maxwell Equipment in Whitehead, to breeze with the fellers, smoke cigarettes and talk. It was Jr's shop, which Ross has now. Ross and Jr were friends since Ross was a child like Justin and I have been friends since he was a child. Ross is the natural next one to keep Jr's shop going. Zak went to UNC Chapel Hill in philosophy and makes pottery at home. He has a short-legged black and white dog named Rimbaud. Harry is a retired Army and Air Force jet and helicopter mechanic. Harry gets so much in retirement, he doesn't need any more money, so he hangs at the shop and works all day for something to do. All three of them have fast minds good at taking IQ tests, putting round pegs in round holes. Every job that comes in is something to do the first time. They use their minds figuring out as they go. All three were involved in work today they had to focus close attention to, so I left them to work without distraction and walked around with the camera. They know I stay out of the way. I've known the shop for so many years, it's as comfortable as being at home. I remember sitting in wooden chairs with Jr gazing at the cars and trucks going by outside the big garage door, talking for hours. These are people devoid of pretensions. None of them is going kiss anybody's ass to get ahead. In New Age speak, you might say they're grounded. All three are from here, all three from families that have been here a long time. They're Appalachian Americans, hillbillies, and wouldn't have it any other way. We are each very different people who share a respectful memory of Jr Maxwell and a love for these hills, would rather live poor here than rich someplace else. We are all people who have withdrawn from what we take for a fake society and live our lives the way we want to. Patti Smith sings in my head, Outside of society, that's where I wanna be. These are people I value, people I look up to. I see them natural human beings as opposed to correct or right or best. I call them good people. Some may not. I don't care. I present them as examples of people I am drawn to who live closer to the earth than to the world.

 

found art

 

 

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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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