Josef Albers

I am the first to admit that none of these bare any resemblance to Josef Albers...it's just that I want to talk about his work for a minute or two, actually not his work so much as my introduction to it.

Back in the early 70's I was in school down in southern Ohio with Ethelred Eldridge and Jenny Holtzer (who was also a student there).  I was also babysitting to make a little money.  

I had one job in a small house with a nice couple who had a little girl.  She had already gone to bed when I got there.  And what I was to do was sit there while she slept and read a book and maybe watch television while they were out.

But I was too nervous to do anything.  I kept wondering if I should go check on the girl but I decided not to.  I didn't want to wake her.  And I was afraid she would be scared since she had not met me.

I didn't even want to watch any television, since I never did anyway.  And so I just sat there in a chair in that tiny living room. Right next to me in the only light available was a picture painted by Josef Albers.  The professor had told me about him, and I was interested.

But I was too nervous to get up and look through the professor's books on him, so I just sat there and stared at it. All night.  Till late. Till the professor and his wife came home.  I got to know him a bit that night.  Just me and him in a very small room.

I didn't move that evening.  I just sat in a comfortable chair and listened for the little girl's breathing and looked at this peaceful painting, one that seemed to offer solace and a promise of harmony in it's inner workings.

on being an artist

on being an artist -Where do you work? -do you work 'inside' or do you work 'outside?'  

To work inside is to deal with the internal conditions of the work -the melodies, the textures, the rhythms, the lyrics, the images.  -all the day-to-day things you imagine an artist does.

To work outside is to deal with the world surrounding the work -the assumptions, expectations, legends, histories, economic structures, critical responses, and so, on and on.  You might think of these things as the frame of the work.

A frame is a way of creating a little world around something.

Is there anything in a work that is not frame actually? -Brian Eno

we are all so odd aren't we?  We constantly think of "I" as in I did this and they did that...but really do we ever really think "I" did anything at all?  Who was that "I" anyway?  It must of been a long time ago and he was just a kid, a very naive kid too,  and that lasted a long time, well up to the present at least and into the possible future.  I will lay down tonight and contemplate this "I".

changing ourselves

Changing ourselves.  Surely that must be what we are after when we look at pictures and watch movies and listen to music.  It sounds more Californian than it really is.  Changing ourselves includes switching on the radio when we are bored -going from someone who is bored to someone who is less bored, or bored in a different way.  -Eno

This one below is another in what seems to be an endless homage to looking east as the sun comes up each morning.  It is just simply stunning, ever changing, a voluminous blast as that fiery orb blows through the thick cloud cover and lights the horizon on fire, and changing the water to any color it fancies.

But of course we would like to think that the art we venerate does more than feed us sensations to keep us from the gloom of everyday existence. -BE

Why would I prefer that?  What's wrong with the opposite?  I remember someone saying that all human creativity is a desperate attempt to occupy the brief space or endless gap between birth and death.  We would like to think that art remakes us in some way, deepens us, makes us "better" people.

-Eno

Well I guess I obviously hope it deepens us, helps us to remember all the beautiful people we have come across in our brief/endless lives.  One time me and Jerry Jordan were in the grocery store and Maynard G Krebs walked up to us.  He was such a cool Beatnik...and, man, like he was Jerry's uncle.

And my cousin Suzie and my big sister's friend, gosh darn what was was her name, they were both wonderful and beautiful people to know.  They were nice to me.  They were smart and clever...I don't meet people like that every day.

I remember Johnny Mead, my first childhood friend, who's mom was the only person I knew who owned a washer and a dryer, and she taught me how to read a clock...wow.   From then on, I knew how to tell time.  Me and Johnny could go in and sit and stare at the washer while it did an entire wash.

Bernadina de Niabla

Stop thinking about art as objects, and begin thinking of them as triggers for experiences. That solves a lot of problems: We don't have to argue about whether photographs are art, or whether performances are art, or whether Carl Andre's bricks or Andrew Serrano's piss or Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" are art because we say, "Art is something that happens not a quality, and all sorts of things can make it happen. -Brian Eno

The term "confidence trick" has a bad meaning.  But it shouldn't.  In culture, confidence is the currency of value.  Once you surrender the idea of intrinsic, objective value, you start asking the question, "if value isn't there, where does it come from?"...

...It's obviously from the transaction.  Its in the relationship between me, the observer, and something else.  So how is that relationship stimulated, enriched, given value?  By creating an atmosphere wherein I am ready to engage with and perhaps surrender to the world it suggests. -Brian Eno

What makes a work of art "good" for you is not something that is inside it, but something inside you 

-so the value of a work of art lies in the degree to which it can help you have the kind of experience that you call art. -BE

Yesterday, my son and I had a fun time with my cousin Edith.  I haven't seen her for 30 years.  Of course, that seems almost unbelievable. How can it be that long, how can we have lived that long?  How can my son who just turned eleven, be so young?  We were looking at pictures of Bernadina de Niabla and Enrique Guilbert from 1850, our great great grandparents.  How could they have cameras from those days, and how did we somehow manage to keep those photographs?

inarticulate dredge

They seem to think artists bring up a passionate inarticulate dredge from some primitive center -Brian Eno

And I suppose in some instances they are right.  But as we look at them -which is mainly what we do

-we begin to understand more about the picture, or what our pictures are becoming, or maybe coming from, and to slowly attempt to articulate the knowledge of what that is. 

And we do that through the pieces we make.  It's just work, painting is just that, but it is fun work, interesting work, rewarding and sometimes frustrating, sometimes apparently going nowhere,

or sliding backwards,  not going anywhere, not moving in any direction.  But then, in some detail of a painting we spot the diaphanous object behind the sheer curtain, a small spot of light, and we throw out a line in that direction, hoping to bring it nearer, and to explore this point, this small configuration.

Yep.  It's a little difficult to explain, this painting, but no more difficult than the entire morass of activity that consumes people, whether it be cooking, or dissecting small living things, or collecting butterflies, or working with tiny diodes for years to capture some sound for a guitar pedal.

Really we are a funny lot we humans.  We get attracted to something, we wish to shape it, to perfect it, to develop it and form it, whether it be a tool, or something as abstract as a musical device.  Look at Bob Moog's synthesizer, an utterly new instrument.  How often does that happen, every thousand years?

And Leo Fender's magnificent electric guitar, and even though he didn't invent the electric guitar, it was his instrument that allowed an almost unknown form of creative expression to bloom and flow all over the world, and that only took a few years after its initial development.

And I wonder, though I haven't read anything directly about it, how do we think that new instrument affected the entire field of expression in painting, the work of a Pollack and Rothko.  Or even the writing of of maybe Jack Kerouac, who we know was under the influence of music most of, maybe all of his carreer.  I had nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion. -JK