to unbox, perchance to dream....

[gurdonark]

My own Achilles heel is disorder. I wish I could say that I am congenitally incapable of keeping my desk well-organized, but blaming inadequacy on a birth defect seems a bit too easy to me. Soon I must head off for a brief walk, praying that the recent rains don't ruin the experience, and then to my office to finish unpacking the boxes newly moved into the new office. I have a reasonably good critical eye,
but the devil in the details of this sort of thing keeps taking my soul, and I don't even get Helen of Troy or incalculable riches in exchange; perhaps some more mundane trade was elaborated
on my credit card application.

I am eager to see the world in my little suburb and edge of the suburbs area. I need a strong dose of butterfly, bird, tree and flower.
I also need a diet Coke, but that sentiment deserves its own sentence, since "one of these things is not like the other".

In a downturn in my personal self-satire, my little poetry book failed to sell in 2 straight auctions. This is not surprising, since its time is really the xmas season, when people impulse buy things and are willing to check out a simple
bit of humor. Surprisingly,though, rather than do what I have done before--pull it from auction for a few months--I've put it up at a nickel auction minimum. My per-book cost is extremely paltry, but not quite a nickel. I guess the reason I like to auction the book, rather than give it away, is that a buyer, however insignificant the sum, has given a solid indicia of wanting something. Like most mediocre creators of art, my own greatest fear is burdening someone with an obligation to say thank you for something they don't want. Once I ran a Dutch (multi-item) ebay auction for my book, with an auction minimum of one penny, touting it as The Worst Chess Book You'll Ever Own, drafted in the style of a Ronco or QVC spot. The books all sold, at a penny each (don't scoff--that's SEVEN CENTS, and at 12 percent interest on the stock market, that would be worth 1.08 in only 48 years) and I loved that much of the feedback said "Book was EXACTLY as advertised".

Ah, capitalism...I felt good when my first print run became "profitable", even when the profit was roughly twenty dollars for the whole run.
Is art like the Mr. Micawber tag in David Copperfield...."income twenty pounds, outgo nineteen pounds seven shillings, result: domestic bliss, but income twenty pounds, outgo, twenty pounds seven shillings, domestic misery" Result: the difference between bliss and misery is about a pound.

When I spent a summer in London, the folks at the school cafeteria would give you a pound coupon
in lieu of a hot meal. A pound coupon would buy a samosa, a scotch egg, some little golf chocolates, and a world of other things.
That pound was bliss--continual self-judgment is the only real misery.

I am very attracted to the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's concept of "cheap grace". Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves, that little self-assurance that our flaws are really okay, and that the odd paths we know we shouldn't be pursuing will somehow save us. We should all try to weed out the cheap grace in our gardens and try to plant useful things like marigolds or mint. But I think that Pastor B. missed a key point--hesitant as i am to take on xtian martyrs. There is also "cheap damnation". This is the inner voice which says "you're not a writer", or "if it doesn't make money, it's not worth doing" or even "what's the point of *this*". I think we all have far too much to do to spend so much time sentencing ourselves to petit hells. Then again, perhaps hell is 30 boxes in a cool new office, and no way to put the things in an ordered way.

In Heaven, they give you kool-aid and your desk is always neat and seraphic.

Comments

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Your points are all very valid--especially the *selling as a means of interest* reason--there is a lot to be said for someone taking out their wallet and being willing to plunk down cash because they want something that much. And many have made the case to me-- that if something has no price, it has no value. I try to make the counter argument that somethings have no price, because they are *priceless*... but even priceless treasures eventually are sold at auction and command a definitive PRICE, at least for the moment of sale. I tend to make the mistake of thinking that if I give something (that to me at least is priceless) that the recipient will value it as much as I do. Usually that's not the case. Sometimes it is, but rarely. And I also have made the mistake of hoping that somehow by giving a person this gift, it will draw them closer to me. Which has also, all too often not been the case. In fact, sometimes it has the opposite effect entirely and the person runs for their life probably thinking I'm some strange lunatic. I'd like to get out of the *love me, love me* mode-- but I'm just too fucked up and needy. So it becomes an endless cycle back to the abyss I just crawled out of.

Re: I like that red book

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

We are in agreement that art is "priceless" in the sense you mean. I'd be surprised if a "market" permitted you to generate in a sale format the kind of money these "pieces" should generate. Because your work is intellectual without being art-culture-infected, I suspect that its true format is a display, a theatre of theaters, with an admission. A library van at a state fair, or what have you...the rural
eccentric museum i've mentioned before.

I completely agree that the price paid per se does not capture the Experience. I do not believe that money as a measure of an art's worth is a slope worth ascending. I think you see the danger in the "exchange of a thing for love" construct better than I can express it.

I believe that neediness and the serious pursuit of art just go hand in hand.
I do not believe that this should be so.
But essentially complacent people, needwise, such as myself, are fundamentally "not" artists, while "real" artists are altogether needy.

I amuse myself when I make strident comments about art when it was just a few months ago that the mail artist who suggested I give it a try was calming my fear that I was so awful at drawing that the game was not worth the candle....that's another non v. real thing...
the non forgets the Van Morrison song about how it's not why, why, why, it just is....

but at the same time, the artist's awareness of the mercantile potential of art is important.
I do not believe that money is a dirty word.
I'm a believer that pursuit of a living through art is likely to hamper one's best art.
That's why I believe that all art, poetry, fiction, music, etc. should be avocational.
But that doesn't mean that money always is a bad thing to seek. It just means that dependence on funding, as with dependence on other externals, seems to me to detract from what you in another context call the "priceless" quality of the experience.

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

The problem that has always been inherent (to me) about selling art is the whole parasitic gallery system that controls the flow of art from the artist. And also determines what will sell and what won't sell. If gallery owner after gallery owner decides for whatever reason that your work won't really sell, then you don't even get the opportunity to try. In this way, gallery owners control what the public even gets to see, and they manipulate public tastes in what get's sold too-- hence the whole nature of *trends* in art. This is why I've chosen to show my work via the internet alone-- because at least it's me decide what I want to show or not. This doesn't even begin to address the 50% commission fee the gallery sucks from the artist. Do you get the sense that I loathe people who own art galleries? That is correct. They are one step above child molesters.

Re: I like that red book

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Yes, I see your point about art galley owners. I come from a different place. I see them as limited reeds, like the frame shop owner or the McDonald's manager. The difference is in pretext.
While a McDonald's manager pretends only to sell me 3 sausage biscuits, the gallery owner pretends to be selling the Experience of art. In fact, they are only selling "what will sell" to "who can buy". I don't so much want to disagree with your point, as to say that I feel about them as I feel about major record labels and even, to a lesser extent, film companies. They are merely in business, extracting the most favorable terms from artists, selling to consumers at the highest profit. When art critics write articles which glorify this rather "glorified frame shop" capitalism, I want to run for the hills. At least at a "real" frame shop, one gets a decent frame for the trouble. In an art gallery, the gallery owner is a participant in a system in which essentially nobody wins. It's the model that's at fault, IMHWO.
When the artist and the gallery owner must "make a living" at it,
then too much economic pressure is put on the system. If the artist had a "day job", and the gallery were based on making space available for display only, without the trappings, then we'd see better art, more art, more consumer participation in buying art, and altogether less pretense.

I have a reaction similar to my feeling about record labels.
Let's take one of our Texas acts as an exemplar. A pop folkie named Sara Hickman is ambrosia personified in concert.
She put out an incredible indie album on a local Denton (our north Texas jazz center) label. It was a great first effort, and she could gig anywhere in this area to adoring audiences. Then she signed with a major record label. They immediately tried to convert her into an "easy listening" (adult oriented, I think they call it) act, departing from her folk roots. They tried to glamorize her up a bit, and her arrangements went from a spare guitar to lightweight stringy stuff. When she was dropped from their list, she had to pay them money to buy back her masters.

I read article after article about how Sara had been "done wrong" by the "big record label". But you know, I think by the 1990s,the "word was out". Record labels want to make money off the backs of
artists. They distort sounds. They change careers. Sometimes it works. More times it fails. Their contracts are "fine print forms".

I don't know Sara Hickman, and I still admire her work. But
I'm not going to cry for the Argentina of ambition and
signing adhesive contracts. The word is out. They're out to make good money. They take away your independence. They don't care. In LA style, they tell you they love you, and then
never call. I have to see art galleries in the same way.
That's why I think direct outlet marketing is it.

I was amused when I talked to a co worker's sister some time ago.
She was a researcher at UC Berkeley. She was thinking about changing jobs. I asked her if she ever considered going into
industry. She said she had thought about it....but she heard those companies actually want to *make a profit*.

I buy a lot of major label records, but I'd rather listen to an indie CD nowadays of heart felt stuff than a record packaged label.
The analogy is imperfect, but surely teenytheaters.com is the equivalent of that small indie label. If profit becomes what you ultimately want from it, I'm sure you can find it, too.

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely the pressure of *economics* puts a damper on everything. But people have to eat. That's why a lot of the so called *successful* artists actually came from big money to begin with-- how many have degrees from Yale? or Smith? of Brown? or RISD? LOTS of them!!! and beyond that there's MONEY. And if the artist truly comes from a humble or impoverished background then he's been *taken in* by some wealthy patron who sees them as a fun project for a summer or two. There aren't a lot of really successful artists who come from middle class backgrounds, educated at low-class state universities-- unless somehow they've gotten an enormous *break* from someone of great wealth. Scratch the surface of any artist who's become *successful* and you'll see a myriad of wealthy connections. Money begets money, and it's really all about money when you sell.

I've always had a day job until recently when I've been too ill to maintain one. And the only artistic venture that ever gave me monetary satisfaction was the business I created myself--Mars Tokyo Rubber Stamps (http://www.adornedsurfce.com/)
I wholeheartedly agree that the most satisfaction comes from one's own enterprise. With the least amount of outside interference.

Re: I like that red book

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

I sure don't know much about careers, but I like to think that graphic design and even web design have given outlets to people who are "really" artists but who need to earn money in the cold cruel. I base this in part, I guess, upon
my friend Ken Mora (http:\\www.kenmora.com) being a web design guy in his day job, and folks like you being a graphic designer.

Similarly, so many writers day job as teachers, as attorneys, and as folks in service professions.

Of course, I respect folks who work at Wal Mart or weld or what have you. I like in that Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, where she took "lower wage" jobs, she found a world filled of artists and writers.

I hate to make a point fifty times, but I'll still say that I don't think that Doubleday Books or galleries in NY or Exquisite Corpse ezine should decide whose voices are heard.

Cutting against my point is the time I looked at the trafford.com publish on demand authors' catalog. I am a firm believer in tolerance of every faith, but it is still somehow imperfect for my theory that so many books were new age tomes on self-help. I enjoy a good new age tome on self-help, but I'd have to think that more voices are out there in the literary climate.

The 'net, the copy shop, the print on demand, the art fair, the flea market...it's that
which will cause the interconnection, and yes, if that means that folks will have to paint on Saturdays and weld on Monday through Friday, that's what it will mean, but I'll still
respectfully submit that this beats the alternative of having a Borgia for a patron.

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Well, I can't speak for Ken Mora, I can safely guess that he's much better paid and respected than I ever was in graphic design (solely because he's male)-- but I've seen a gradual and soul sucking change in clients since the advent of personal computers--
First off: because they have a PC with Print shop or some other piece of PC garbage, everyone thinks they're a graphic artist. Everyone sees how easy it is to change a font or a size and BAMMO suddenly they're as much of a designer as you are-- who's spent their whole career doing it, was trained and educated in visual art, and also just happened to have a natural gift as well.
Second: Because they *think* they know how to do this-- everyone is a critic. No longer do you submit something and have them say-- Gee that's a nice job, I sure couldn't have come up with something like that. No, NOW you have, HMMMMMMMMMMM let me take this by Joe because his little girl likes to play around with their computer at home, let's see what she thinks.... OR you get--- hmmmmmm what if we changed made that type there 2 pts smaller... and put this over THERE, and blah blah blah-- in otherwords-- they really LIKE doing your job for you. The rub is, they have NO visual sense or education or natural gift and their ideas STINK and ruin the piece which you somehow have to take credit for. There goes anything you can put in your portfolio. Not to mention what it does to your self-esteem or sense of worth.

I really wish people understood the damage they did to truly creative people when they get into this *let's pretend I'm as creative as YOU are* mode of thinking. But they don't. They just go on feeling like all's right with their world. Because it is--- they just ruined someone elses.

Re: I like that red book

[nacowafer.livejournal.com]

I've been wanting to get in on this discussion but had to let things stew for a little while. These are all very interessting ideas to consider. I love it when livejournal really begins to be about the "examined life."

I will take issue with a few points you raise, not because I necessarily disagree, but because they are good to think about.

I believe that neediness and the serious pursuit of art just go hand in hand.
I do not believe that this should be so.

I'm curious as to why you feel this should not be so? If you don't have a serious need or drive to do something, doesn't it become ultimately meaningless? Art is meaning laid bare, made real. It may still be abstract, but through art meaning is made tangible. Otherwise, what's the point? It's sometimes a big leap from aesthetics to meaning. If you've lived long enough and care enough, you find more than mere "beauty." And the person who creates art has to have the need for expression, the need for communication, the need to rid themselves of something or to share something...otherwise it rings hollow. And hollow-ringing art is bad, and not really art at all. (But that's new and difficult territory...)

I also wonder about your statement that you are "essentially complacent." Then why are you so prolific? Why do you even bother? You take photographs on your nature walks. You feel compelled to capture something and then share it with others. You seem to have a deep sincere appreciation for the beauty and wonder of the natural world...And your interest in mail art, I find fascinating. I find it a mistake to leave out the "why" when considering most everything.

I have a lot more to say...but doughnuts are beckoning...more later!

Re: I like that red book

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

neediness

I admire and exalt the need to express, the need for connection, the need for what I pretentiously (or is it sententiously?) call the Experience. The neediness I wish I could "say it ain't so" is that inner pain that seems to go with 'real art'. I'm not disparaging the reality of incorporating angst into the Experience. I'm talking about the "life on hold due to my art" aspect of things. To me, art should be as natural as a nature hike or a good day at work or a good book. I love that phrase "meaning laid bare"...but too often, the meaning is laid bare as a gash or wound...I want it to be laid bare sometimes as a smile or a quiet moment....yet, how often do we see the pendulum between the "cute and "trite" and the "real". It's a false construct, but I live in that construct, and I'm pretty sure you do, too. We have to shake out of this thinking...art is not misery.
Connection is not torture. The Experience is all--it's grace, it's the Kingdom Within...it may be our only bit of eternal life....but we live in a social construct in which it is an agony, experienced on the outside....Do you know the composer Harry Partch? I never quite finish his bio, but I'm always struck by at every turn, he rejected those who reached out to his odd musical scale and home-made instruments....he could never accept "fitting into" a life that worked...it was so much better being misunderstood and underappreciated....there's a parable there somewhere....

On complacency

I try to live my own view of art, poetry and writing.
My view is that we must liberate ourselves from the suffering of the "artiste" to have a child-like enjoyment of the "Experience" of interconnection. As life goes on, I feel we all lose too much time day dreaming about getting a paycheck and 100,000 readers when what would really make us happy would be ten readers who *understood* and kept reading. That's a virtue of LJ, but it's also part and parcel of my own argument that the artist/writer/musician must keep as much control over the means and course of production as possible. I'm not knocking those who get a "deal" and want to try to "make it big". Just don't come crying to me when it turns out to all be about profit. I love money,don't get me wrong. If one can make money doing something, well and good. But we build a twin wrong-headed construct:
a. one must outside the "real world" of financial sophistication to be an artist; and
b. one is not a "real artist" unless the dark satanic mills of marketing say one is.

The corollary to a. above, which I find pernicious (it must be Sunday for me to use the word pernicious), is that we get the illusion that only miserable people can be creative. It's a notion I associate with the early 20th C. French avant garde, yet it's now a truism as rooted in all our consciouness as Ivory soap. Because I've been socialized to think that way, I always assume that my own art is "complacent" and hence not "real".

It's not hard to detect from my journal that I'm essentially a quite happy person, albeit a person with depressions, frustrations, shortcomings and challenges more than suitable to my station in life. In my own mind--and in spite of my strong belief that it should not be so--I am incapable of creation partly because there is not "artist's journey" for me....I write for fun, in hope that people get a quiet chuckle or pause for a moment and Experience.

I think my relative contentment and my socialization combine to tell me my art is not "real". In fact, both the silly conventional marketing of art and the equally silly avant garde overstated reaction to that system have combined to create a "nobody wins" sort of situation. The internet, in particular, lets us break that paradigm. If I have one thought about art, it is that we will all beging to "really live" in art when we all break out of this "artiste v. capitalist" construct and interconnect with one another....I am for a folk art of the mind,
for the outsiders to come in from the cold.

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

Wow, this topic is really expanding.... The issue of degree of pain and suffering involved in order to make *real*art or *good* art is a bunch of bunk (IMHO) and I'm a prime example-- okay, I have major clinical depression and have all my life---and yet the following things hold true:
a. I have continually produced work whether depressed or not.
b. The amount of medication has not hindered my ability to produce good work.
c. The work I produce in the depths of a depression is no better than what I produce in the throes of mental health!
d. If given my choice, I would rather feel good than bad.
e. My recent work (done in the depths of severe depression) still has the ability to be interpreted on a superficial level as being *cute* --or even *pretty*-- which doesn't bother me, because I understand that the viewer is only looking on the surface.
f. The same work can also be delved into by introspective viewers and a whole host of serious and far differing interpretations can be made. ( I see this aspect as what constitutes the works success).

Re: I like that red book

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

Excellent point, well put.

I guess it's the faux artism I fear.

When I was in high school, I went to an arts church camp. The week long camp put together a production of Jesus Christ Superstar (complete with grafted on proper Methodist resurrection scene). I played one of those priests with the "rat" voices.

The older teen who played Jesus, and the
older teen who played Mary Magdalene were
a tres chic couple, blond and obsessed with one another; as holy as any camp romance, I suppose, and that's a form of grace, but
not "holy" at all, if you see what I'm saying.

At one point late in the week, Jesus pitched a small fit. He expressed in pained and anguised tones about how he wasn't getting the support
that Jesus needed. Here he was, playing the
Role of a Lifetime, and the other kids were just at camp....I'll never forget his anguish as he considered the enormity of his undertaking. Because we were all involved in High Art, no camp counsellor said "just shut up and try to remember the lyrics".

I guess what I'm saying is that people take on that mantle of pain when they do not have pain.
People who create art do so in pain or out.
But I think we glorify a twinning of art and pain, and I think that's unhealthy.

But that's not contradicting your point. I think it fits perfectly with your point.

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

At one point late in the week, Jesus pitched a small fit.
I want to see this sentence-- just isolated and on a billboard!!!!

Re: I like that red book

[gurdonark.livejournal.com]

"At one point, late in the week, Jesus pitched a small fit".
a message brought to you by the makers of paxil

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

HahHah!!

Re: I like that red book

[marstokyo.livejournal.com]

I think a certain amount of emotional neediness IS necessary to motivate someone to make art-- because a lot of making art is about reaching out to someone else---all artists want their work to be seen by others. All artists want feedback. And yet, if I were locked in a tower and told that no one would ever see anything I ever made again-- I would still keep making art. Because it's also my way of talking to myself. And if I'm in a tower by myself, I need to talk to someone.
When Gurdonark said he believed that the neediness shouldn't HAVE to be a factor-- I thought he was expressing his wish that it didn't have to be that way. That art could be made without suffering. And indeed LOTS of art IS made without suffering.... then we get into the grey area of determining what is REAL art, or high caliber art, and what is schlock art.... (starving artist sales at your nearby Ramada INN? painted on conveyor belt in Chinese prisons? scenes of idyllic peace in Swiss meadows? Sunsets in the mountains?) -- that's an area I'm not going to touch with a ten foot paint brush.