Re: posting at duchimp
Gerald O'Connell (goc@gacoc.demon.co.uk)
Fri, 22 Jan 1999 14:23:32 +0000
In message <36A87939.6FAB864B@iname.com>, Barry Smylie
<barrysmylie@iname.com> writes
>
>
>Gerald O'Connell wrote:
>
>> In message <36A72E65.CE2FD0FB@iname.com>, Barry Smylie
>> <barrysmylie@iname.com> writes
>> >
>> >
>> >Avi Rosen wrote:
>> >
>> >> Hi Barry!
>> >> of course we r artists in traditional way, but since ducimp sorry Marcel
>> >> duchamp introduced the 'ready made' to the art world, there r new ways to
>> >> make or look at art!
>> >
>> >You are quite right Avi... Duchamp's ready-mades did change everything. But
>> >Duchamp is
>> >history... he represents the Dada stream of modern art and a major branching
>> >leading towards
>> >Pop Art and Neo-Dada and Conceptualism and Installation and Performance.
>> >Duchamp and Dada
>> >are a force, like Cubism that must be understood if we can proceed.
>>
>> Or maybe there is no need to 'proceed' - did you think of that ?
>>
>> Sometimes the best things happen by accident, not by an intention to
>> proceed. Maybe it is OK to just paint, draw, make movies, take
>> photographs and so on, and see if the next bunch of chatterers who pick
>> up on what you do call it 'progress'. If you have skill and imagination,
>> and some kind of inner spiritual worth, then what you do will be
>> 'original'. But the originality will come from the way your hands and
>> mind work together, from inside you somewhere. Not from your desire to
>> be original.
>>
>> The twentieth century has been littered with people sitting around,
>> trying to be different, disappearing up their own concepts and achieving
>> nothing. Something about The Age of Acknowledgement has made them too
>> tense to actually do or make anything (except noise....).
>>
>> Gerald O'Connell
>>
>> http://www.gacoc.demon.co.uk/
>>
>> --- from list avant-garde@lists.village.virginia.edu ---
>
>there is no need?
>how can it be resisted?
>i would like to be free of any obsession including the desire to do art
>
>i love this medium
>it has to much potential
>and is so seductive
>i have become totally enamored
>the idea of publishing in paper has become obscene to me
>the stillness of it
>i cannot bear the tactile nature of 250 gram hand laid rag paper
>my fingers caressing it and thinking of paris rag pickers
>i cannot confront the hundreds of hours of planning and drawing and etching
>the grinding of stone on stone - the vent of fumes
>i loath the idea of rushes and revisions on plates
>trying to dissuade the "artist" away from labor intensive
All lives (and therefore lifestyles, of artists or others) are
absolutely equally labour intensive: according to my recent calculations
(painstakingly checked by the National Records Office) it takes exactly
one person exactly one lifetime to do exactly one life. Every time.
Whether you paint, surf, draw, contemplate, masturbate or just debate.
Where I am coming from is this: I don't think it is necessarily a good
thing for an artist to respond to external pressures too much in
choosing a medium or style or mode. Especially when those pressures take
the form of a construction of mere critical reality arising from within
the academic/critical/commercial nexus of the art establishment. Artists
are valuable because they can step outside the everyday, back into
themselves and then hold up a mirror for everybody to see the different
reality they draw (I mean 'pull' but see how the language does our work
for us in this innocent little accidental pun...) from within.
Artists must choose their tools with care, not have them chosen by the
awful weight of history. This applies to breaking with tradition as much
as to staying within it.
If you are superstitious about the decimal system, then I offer this
thought: as both century and millennium drag their heavy feet through
the final weary days of time's tragic trudge, nothing could be more
conventional or conservative than yet another outbreak of
originality....
And the WWW ? At least we now all have a way to share the same
sketchbook...
>revisions
>the shear effort of it
>burdens me
>and the thirty years i put into it offends my sensibilities
>
>the internet is like a surf side game party beach blanket skipping school day
>with simian pals
>
>
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>http://members.tripod.com/duchimp
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> --- from list avant-garde@lists.village.virginia.edu ---
Gerald O'Connell
http://www.gacoc.demon.co.uk/