A delay in glass
I haven’t posted much lately here. This is not to say that I don’t think about the blog, or the creative dialogue I’d like to have. I’m still adapting to the wordpress thing; I am, at last, satisfied with my blogging method. I’m also adapting to more change in my life. I was offered a full-time position at my job midway through May. I took it, with some relief.
If there isn’t enough time to continue to develop the vocabulary, to bring forth, wow I become cranky! I became an artist in part because of this necessity. That energy builds, and it needs to go out into the world as images, as words, as created stuff. My friends Karen and Tait both talk about being channels for their work. I think of it in terms of the Sufi dervish – we are flutes, or instruments that are played by the cosmos or the Great Friend (g-d). Or, in Kaballah – each person is a gate allowing energies into the world through the choices made every day.
Having had the privilege to lose everything that was important or precious to me on two distinct occasions in my short life, I wonder at the grasping for creature comfort that drives most human activity. Its not that important. Things are not the point; instead, it is how human beings use the thing to create in the world.
Painting remains at the center of my creative practice, in part because the technology is so simple. A wooden stick with animal hair, some refined pigments from the earth, a glue, some paper, some fabric. Make a picture. I don’t show the paintings, in part because they are things. I want the audience to have the experience of seeing the work in time. I want everybody who sees the work to have the same access to it. Nobody can own the original of a digital video work – it is always a copy, from a master file, a bunch of data housed in an electric box somewhere.
Video is work without class access or privilege.
So why not make art honoring our daily disappearance? Art as ephemeral as us? The LITANY has disappeared, having flitted across the consciousness of the community for a week or two. So will we. Stop and smell the roses. That’s all we are.
