I'm reading Mary Shelley Jules Verne Edgar Allan Poe Fitz-James O'Brien -this anthology of many interesting Science Fiction writers as they now call them. They used to be thought of in the regular literature. But I like this distinction as it helps identify their work and separate the work of symbolism and imagination.
I think it was Robert Motherwell who traces the modern art movement to Edgar Allan Poe. Though I would, though it may sound pretentious, trace my work to Mary Shelley. It is her wild romanticism and unfurled imagination that appeal to me and her narrator's constant and vain attempts to gain the reader's sympathy seem so in keeping with my own work...
And even Fitz James Obrien's certainly over-the-top and mad discoveries echo my feelings clearly.
I often feel like his mad microscopist that I am part of a small world of scientists and discoverers of this new machinery. And I often think the each of my successive paintings fall closer in the single drop of paint.
The sort of focus this mad spirit of Leeuwennhoek and his gorgeous love of nouns as adjectives which he provides plenty of space for, ah I love it. It just feels so natural and once obsessed what else can one do, you just follow it.
The man who dies, added Van Tricasse solemnly, without ever having decided upon anything during his life, has very nearly attained to perfection. -Jules Verne
All this reminds me of Eno and his Oblique Strategies...it was certainly then, listening to him and to Phillip Glass that I felt my painting must not have so much work in any single piece, but must be constructed of accidents and must have the ethereal alienated static of withdrawal as their imprimatur.
would I be able to create a non-art as art? I didn't know. I still don't to this day.
then you have to make a definition of art.
ReplyDeleteyou would have to confine the concept of art.
i am forgetting the surrealist, or hung out w/ surrealists, the artist who put a toilet in a gallery and claimed, this is art. this was before Warhol was asking the same question.
Marcel Duchamp. I have a book of his that I keep by my bedside. It's been there since as long as we've lived here. His toliet was in the Armory show of 1913. It was hidden behind a wall of some sort out of site. It embarrassed people then.
DeleteNow though it is so out of date that it is interesting to look at. Isn't that always how things are. I know from his work that the same is true for my work. Except no one will bother to look at it. It will die. When I am gone and those of my family are gone it will all be forgotten.