"That's not Art!" : A Speech I Never Gave.

I have a good number of notebooks lying around, Moleskines and others, interesting Paris-in-the-20s distressed covers, each  bought for a project or a trip. (Or sometimes I bought them hoping to precipitate a project.) Generally they are filled up to about page 8,  with a fountain pen if I remembered to bring one. The first pages gather thoughts around a particular idea, but by the end they are a stew of phone numbers in the city where I am, train schedules, international dialing codes, museum hours, and addresses of taxidermists  antiquarian book dealers and friends-of-friends.
I found one of these under a chair this morning and opened it. It contains notes for a speech but I can’t tell at all who the speech was meant for, or if I ever gave it, which is a little embarrassing. But the notes got me thinking. You too, maybe. Here they are, unedited…well, maybe a little.

The Speech
The first impulse is not to have a career, it is to know stuff and grow. It is wired in. We have in us the genetic structure that makes possible vision and speech, and we just have to start the pendulum swinging. Don’t have to to take a class in it. It just happens when we move around, look around. It is like some kind of inverse gravity that pulls upward.
Diane Arbus: “When I make money from a photograph I assume it is not a good photograph.”
Things to learn from Diane A (but don’t do like she did if you can possibly help it.)
She didn’t like to show (sell) work, she liked to give it to people who liked it. Just as well because her first portfolio, editioned at 50, sold 3.
Commercial photogs liked to talk about her because she represented a part of them that they mostly withheld energy from. Avedon was a huge admirer and supporter. At her funeral he said, “I’d like to be an artist like Diane.” Someone replied, “No you wouldn’t, Richard.”
Speech needs to state the notion of reality as constructed , not something ultimate.
To state the true natures of art and commerce and of how one can hold those two in the mind at the same time. Simple answer: don’t ever conflate the two, or insist that commerce be artistic or art be commercial. (Second is tougher.) They do touch at their edges, but not in their ultimate natures.
In commercial work, people do what they should, and there is no bad behavior, nothing extreme. In art people wind up doing what they ought not, what they don't expect to do, and there are oddities and extremes and contradictions, and that’s what makes it fuller, truer. Writers don’t begin with grammar or coherence of structure. They begin by burning with something they need, not so much to say but to find about.
A way to stay alive? Look at pictures, not for what they’re of or how they were made, but for the Change. If you do this, you can start to get a sense of what is seen new and what just fills the requirements.
One thing that seems to announce that art is in a work is that someone says, “That’s not art!” (Thinking of Chris Burden.)
Art is a freighted term, so maybe use something else. Call it Life—or Wake Up! Call it such-ness, awareness-for-it’s-own-sake.

Rude Shock at the Church of St. Paul Strand

 

Actually, St. Francis of Assisi, in Ranchos de Taos, NM. I think it is one of the most beautiful buildings in the country, along with the Olson house in Cushing, Maine. Also one of the most photographed, early on by Paul Strand, followed by everyone...and his brother.

 I first did it years ago, and it was hanging on a wall of a gallery when Ansel Adams spotted it. "Who did that?" he asked, and I piped up. "That's good," he said. "I like that better than mine." It was not true, but it was generous. I'll have to find that print and post it.

I was in New Mexico last week doing a piece of theater that I will talk about when I get my head around it.

Here's another picture of the church. A bit hoaxy, don't you think?

 

Hard, hard work.

        A student once asked the sculptor Richard Serra, “How do you avoid your uncertainty so you can do your work?” His answer was strong and a little ferocious. He said, “You begin from your uncertainty. If you’re not feeling insecure about your work, it’s because you haven’t begun it yet.”  
        It reminded me how I naturally maneuver my working state of mind toward ease and comfort, and how seldom good work comes to me in that state.
        In fact, when we’re really working out on our front edge, we are not at all sure of what we’re doing, and that’s exactly as it should be if we’re to do something that grows us instead of repeating what  grew us some other time.
        The English stage director Peter brook did a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the late ‘60s that was radical in every way, and the upheaval it caused in theater was equivalent to that which Robert Franks’s book, The Americans, created in photography. I know people who say that seeing the play changed their lives.
        When the company was in rehearsal, someone had the foresight to hire playwright David Selbourne  to attend rehearsals and keep a diary. It was published shortly after the play opened, but it has now been out of print for many years. I was able to find a copy recently, and it was fascinating.
        Selbourne simply came home and wrote after each rehearsal. He was writing from right inside the creative process itself, and that’s what he published. He didn’t opine and revise after the play opened.
        What I found so interesting was that during rehearsal no one had the sense that they were doing something ground-breaking. In fact, there was more than the usual amount of insecurity, anxiety and squabbling. And Brook himself was not the Bold Captain, but instead withdrew from the cast’s expressions of insecurity.
        And, in spite of everyone’s discomfort, the production made history.
        Rehearsal is always a time of stretching and trying new things, and if you are feeling serene during this period it is a pretty good indication that you are heading back toward the safety of whatever worked for you in the past.
You can make your own translations of this thought to your work process. But keep it in mind that you want things to fall apart. Either they will stay in pieces, or they will come together in some new way that renews you in the process.
        At least ‘til the next time.

Revisited landscapes

We did a calender project with the printer, John C. Otto. It sent us looking back between 1 and 15 years at photographs of the land, taken everywhere in the world. Here is one of my favorites, made in Arizona.

The Great Books: A Cat Piano, and Singing Donkeys

Gaspar Schott (1608-1666) was a German Jesuit who studied the natural sciences. This is a page from his book on sound. Schott was known for his piety, which apparently excluded compassion for cats. This cat piano used a set of 'tuned' cats, which yowled when keys were pressed that drove spikes into their tails. The suggestion was that such a hilarious sight would lift the melancholy spirits of overburdened kings and rulers laugh and make them laugh.

Apparently donkeys needed no prodding, just some good direction and a little rehearsal time.