“Mondays in the Art World”

I realize that removing Art with a small or large “a” would leave a very dry and inhospitable world for us to enjoy. Animals don’t make art unless cajoled or tricked by humans. Early art was to convey to those who follow, meaning those that come after the dead art maker was gone.. where to go, what to get, what you need. I always thought that the cave paintings where   shopping lists of what to eat, where to get it, and how to catch it. Basic survival stuff. Many people must have suffered from food poisoning, or unsuccessful hunts before the lists where compiled. They must have been closely guarded secrets, deep inside of clan caves, allot of it was oral but then again if you where trying to convey something to another clan maybe a picture would get the message across much faster.

I have been admiring early Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient symbols and current crop circles, where the boundaries of art thin out into an alternative visual form… let’s say the Flower of Life symbol. This is an image that is a sign post of higher meaning and possibility. It is not merely a visual representation for contentment and requires much more contemplation and understanding . I think art all the time, it’s almost like cataracts or some brain astigmatism.

It’s an invisible screen that filters all the information around me. As of late I have wondered how other people, without that filter experience the world. Allot of people don’t know valid art from a hole in the ground. Allot of art pushers will sell you on their ideas, theories and the like in hopes of making you like something you might not have an affinity to or understand. Much like religion they look for your inadequacies and offer a solution. Thus goes the salesman 101 way of the world.

I am not suggesting that all art should be removed from the world or diminished, but somewhere somehow we are going to have to realized that the current escalating glut of art production is more a symbol of an altering mind terrain. As the work place diminishes more and more people will be making art, making it and endless repetition of the battle cry `there is no bad Art`. Excuse me !

I will continue to make Art simply because somehow somewhere in the core of my being it is required to help me keep my sanity and belief that there is more to life than all the stuff that keeps most of humanity in this self destructive tailspin. I never liked the idea of most of it, specially the things that seem to degrade our home “Earth”. The endgame is always somewhere in the room and I have always been hyper aware (hypocrite) of it, that’s why I am a sixty five year old artist that just keeps working away. I am not under the illusion that my work will transpose me into some immortal sphere of consciousness or become a legacy that mankind will cling to in hopes of seeking a higher awareness of the meaning of life.

My work is not a shopping list of what to do or what to say or think, it’s the somewhere removed shadow place of the in between, the many lifetimes within this lifetime as it fades with the setting sun. Speaking of shadows ever notice how fluorescent lights obliterate shadows, when I was a kid I thought that fluorescent lights had been invented by vampires to conceal there presence among us.

Anyway, I live by the words of Theodore Adorno, “Every work of Art is an uncommitted crime”, when I first focused my attention on making art at the age of fourteen I had an alternative plan, to become a criminal.  Somehow I didn’t have that overriding sense of being able to take advantage of people so the criminal world would have destroyed the childlike innocence within me. I decided to make a break from adult life, bypass maturity and  play till my last day on earth.

I don’t think I will ever know what a world without Art looks like because it’s embedded so deeply inside who I am and my psyche. I don`t mind Moondays, I make it my Sunday, and refuse to engage in nothing but reflection, revitalization, renewal.

NB