For instance, would it be more successful if I filmed myself mopping the floor of a giant airplane hanger instead of filming myself paint a painting? I actually don't think so, since that airplane hanger will be an airplane hanger once I'm done mopping it - relinquishing itself from it's art objectness, the painting will forever be a painting. Although, I think I'm just using the painting itself as a facilitator of communication. Paintings are known fairly universally as an "art form" and does have some sort of role in someone's life, if not just to make a wall look, 'pretty'. This one just has quite the past.
Back to airplane hangers - there's someone whose job may very well be mopping that same airplane hanger and I'm not sure it's really that, well cool to take away someone's job or use that job as a means of expression. I think it's very important and there's much self responsibility for an artist to do things in the name of "art".
I think that may be what people forget; there are many mediums to work with, but the medium isn't the artwork, what you do with the materials as tools is what makes something simply amazing. If I ever see some film of a white guy mopping the floor of a airplane hanger repititiously, I'm going to think just that - it's a white guy, who's much to much full of himself.
Some ideas and poem fragments (they're all fragments and poems) from Hamish Fulton's "Walking Artist" Book (isbn: 3-933807-26-3)
Lost, In Thought
Making art should be as simple as sweeping the floor
In the night, in the sleeping bag inside the tent in a storm
A familiarity with the distance of seven days
walking: practical, not theoretical
I am not a studio artist, I am a survivor
When I am not walking, I eat and drink too much (Stimulants)
A walk has a life of its own and does not need to be materialized into a work of art.
Movement exists in relation to its apparent oppostive: stillness
I have chosen to record my walks out of respect of their existence
The texts are facts for the alker and fiction for everyone else
make art resulting from walks
My orientation to words results from the east of carrying pen and paper - not chisel, hammer and stone.
artwork = control, walks = freedom
The obvious does not need to be explained. The obvious needs to be stated.
Like a flowing river, the days cannot be repeated.
More emphasis on the recoding than the event being recorded? A handful of stones, and a pack of cards.
Question: Is, "The Walk" - really - "The Art"? Answer: The walk - can be thought of as 'an artform', but unlike an, 'artobject' - a walk cannot be sold.
A photograph of a mountain is not sacred, the mountain is.
I stumbled upon Hamish's book quite by accident last week at the library - I never ever really look for a book in the catalog, I just go through the rows of art books. I think I was at the library actually to make out with a stranger, which is a story onto itself, but I got bored waiting and went to find some more books. And found this one.
I've been wondering how I can better interpret the photographs I myself have taken on a recent 2,350 mile bike ride down the Pacific Coast of America. They're not really tourist snaps, they look like this (for example):
The photograph has as its subject a very small scultpure made up of a few straight pins and clippings of paper. The location of the photograph is actually in the Avenue of the Giants, a pretty famous and quite spectacular Redwood Forest grove - but you wouldn't have known that, unless I told you.
Going through my photographs, I was a bit dissuaded at the relative disattachment some of my photographs had. In other words, I didn't like that you couldn't tell where the photograph was taken. They didn't represent, nor express, *motion" or *traveling*.
I had solved this before, by having a few photographs of the same scene, at different scales. For example, I would take a macro shot of say, a barbed wire fence (with a similar sculpture) and then a picture of a width of 30 feet of barbed wire, and then a picture of my car, next to the highway. It's quite amazing I didn't go a few more steps further: A picture of me getting into the car, putting the key in the ignition; a photograph of nothing by the mileage marker...
Although you did get a sense of scale, you also lost the, as Fulton would perhaps say, the poetics of not knowing everything. Fulton would go further and say that there's no way a viewer of the photograph would know what it was to experience that time and place and I certainly doubt anyone except myself would understand why I'd put tiny sculptures on the side of the highway -
And since they wouldn't understand, they don't need to have the obvious explained - just stated. Everything is fiction, so let's give them less obviousness spelled out and more mystery. So I'll state that the above sculpture made of pins and cut text from a book is on a giant fuckin' redwood, which you is only represented by fairly abstract blobs of color. You really can't understand what it's like to stand next to these trees and I doubt a photograph would help. In a sense, the abstraction by giving less information will allow your mind to unravel and just wonder what it may all be about. I really like that.
And I guess my viewpoint of that aircraft hanging mopper has changed - if just somewhat. I still wouldn't side on a project that dealt with mopping an aircraft hanging as an art performance, but I can say I don't really know what a mopper thinks of - what they actually experience. I can guess - but that is a fiction, isn't it? I do stand on the idea that there's really no reason for me to exploit mopping for some stupid art project. But I do understand now that some stupid art project doesn't have to be any more onerous than mopping. Or sweeping your studio. Or singing a song. Or murmering nothings to an infant child to make them go to sleep. Or laughing with a friend. Or dancing on the tops of pedestrian walkways. Or eating lunch.
So the flick of me sweeping my floor? It's just a flick of me, sweeping my floor, but I did try to understand how I felt sweeping. But it's true: I can't honestly tell you what it's like. You'll just have to experience the experience yourself. And maybe you and all will both work up to walking a month at a time, through Indian (etc), like Fulton
(a slight counterpoint)
If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art. At this point art became more of an activity and less of a product.
