Monday, November 24, 2014

real time archeology

Magazines, postal mail,purchase tags etc.  I'm not if you can have this exactly -real time archeology -but I feel anything and everything I use in these is gone forever from the moment I get it down on paper.  It enters my work -the brand of a bandaid, Orrington elementary, our photo of sweet little Rook our bearded dragon -certainly that type of instant photograph, Christmas stickers, the beautiful Mertz store in Chicago, the designs of fabric, the fabric itself, the reproductions of paintings which will no longer exist...-none of these things will have existence within moments...


Their very meaning will be gone erased out of the world.  All these things are fleeting, lost, of no value even as they desperately speak of it to us as they arrive.  They will have no function, no comprehensibility, no weight or substance even tomorrow.  They are the ancient past, the detritus of a culture that no longer exists in a language that no one speaks.  Is this my way of saying goodbye to them?  And to us who will no longer exist whose lives will have no import, no meaning, no value even to bother remembering,  -the past of a done thing.  Even the process of trying to remember how things were will be gone forever, their will be no recorded history, no thought to that old time at all...


What ever thinks or projects some importance will have none.  The very act of preservation is almost gone, life itself is almost over, airplanes will no longer fly, automobiles will be extinct, washing pads will disappear, baths and showers will be the quaint things of another time,  only gum will still exist for those who like it...


Painting will be of no value -no significance.  It is already worn out, dead and valueless, just another cheap commodity...it no longer will have anything to say to anyone at all...it is all over.  Now, sleep well tonight, dream the dreams you have...they do not matter.  It will all change in the next frame...

2 comments:

  1. Doug, have you heard of Samuel Pepes? I'm thinking that many of your 'paintings' are something like his diaries.

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  2. did not they come out in six volumes? I'd like to read them right now...

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