Posted by jonvon on August 23, 2002 at 13:09:32:
In Reply to: don't miss a thing..... posted by giveawayboy on August 23, 2002 at 09:38:39:
: : but anyway, i've been thinking lately that i think we have the start of something that could happen right here in our town. we need more artist types and we need to all hang around and plug one another in. we need to take ourselves and our art seriously and do stuff. and its cool cuz we kinda are doing it, even if serendipitously/accidentally as we stumble over things. right. anyway i think some good things are happening and its only going to get better, i hope.
: the main thing is not trying to create a scene. it's more like doing our craft, whatever, and being a loving tribe and having enthusiasm.
yeah, this is good to say. its like as soon as you start talking about zen you aren't talking about zen anymore. movements are for historians, mostly. the minute you realize you are in the middle of a movement, or worse if you can label it then its already dead. this is a generalization of course, but its very true in a way. you know, its all that do or do not do, there is no try and so forth. yeah, yoda rocks.
i can't really spend the time to give this a proper treatment, but i've been thinking i might like to say something about it when we get together on sunday. the thing is, we need to take ourselves seriously. sometimes its someone else taking us seriously that helps us. so we need to take one another seriously as well. those people doing the dada and surrrealist stuff, they took one another seriously. they wrote manifestos and whatnot, for goodness sake. i'm not advocating we do that in particular, to me this is the first sign that what you are doing is already dead.
the thing is when that guy said to you that you could do an art show at his place, he was taking you seriously. then you took yourself more seriously as well, and you started working and working. pretty soon you had a bunch of stuff on big pieces of canvas. you never had that before. suddenly you were productive. and in the public eye. and now there will be more shows, and more pieces of canvas filling up with your amazing wonderful stuff. god i love it.
my wife had a well known artist tell her that she needed to be writing. i don't want to spill all the details, i'll let paula do her own thing on that tip as she may or may not want to talk very much about it. but suffice it to say that she is working on a book now, and she's writing a lot of other stuff. someone took her seriously. and she has been taking herself seriously too, and paying attention to the fact that she needs to write and that she has a creative temperment and so forth.
another thing that happened when everyone got serious about your art bill, man a bunch of people came to your opening. and suddenly there we were interacting with a community of people that most of us didn't know at all. it was real. there weren't any weirdos going around with tracts or getting freaked out. nobody was pissed off. it was all good. business for the shop was good, we all had a good time, it was wonderful. people who hadn't seen one another in a long time suddenly were hooking up. i spoke to robert cologn for the first time in a looong time. that was cool. i got to hang out with your mom. yeah, it was groovy. so there are all kinds of collateral things that happen when we take one another seriously, in a real way. we come to life. and the community comes to life around us.
all that other stuff you said, you have been doing this for a long time, telling everyone that they MATTER. keep that up. we need to follow your example.
ok, thats all, i have to get back to work. :-)