My notes from my trip to MoMa today.
John Cage - “We don’t create silence”
-- My Summary: Performance is Music is Art
His thoughts and way of going about things sort of gives the artist permission to play ‘Simon Says’ with the audience, with their time. their perception and their ideas.
This is seen in the Yoko Ono poems and how the pieces written by those taught by John Cage and inspired by him are worded.
from J.C.’s Silence: attention to the activities of the sounds
it is poetry - but it is all technical
there is no filler or concepts
My favorite thing that I saw was Ian Wilson’s Discussions
the one post there was a conversation with Robert Barry
It starts with Wilson: “Oral Communication is my art”
Oral communication is an “extension of self like a painter using vision instead of paint”
--Me: are concepts ‘concepts’ without being called so? These are concerns that arise during this conversation. It was so immersive, the experience of delving into this conversation and ideas with the words of these men on paper. The concept they are discussing was a concept before they had this conversation and even before they decided to type it up word for word and present it as art, but it would not have been physically presented to me in this way, if they hadn’t. It would not be tangible. That does not mean that it would not exist or does not exist in a time before it’s oral communication or its presentation in ink on paper and then its display in this public arena of such concepts and ‘art’.
Are ‘concepts’ self-contained in meaning and existence?
W: protection of saying something is having it dissolve into emotion; a security you don’t have when something is printed.
W: Timelessness & Spacelessness
W: Language is the grammar of behavior
The artist is not a mystic.
a mystic simply experiences without the concern of communicating what has happen while the artist is intent on the communication of experience
Sol LeWitt - Good Art is a very simple idea
Seth Siegelaub on Barry’s ‘Inert Gas Series’ : he called it ‘real and imperceptible’
--Me: is it really? Are you actually communicating the idea of ambiguity and the transient nature of creation via elements in the world that escape the obvious detection of the eye by presenting your audience with what seems to be blank piece of paper?
I think it is worthwhile because it challenges the audience but without the plaque beside it or the artist’s guidance can the audience reach the beginning or any point within the ideas that Barry is trying to communicate and transcend at the same time it seems?
Robert Heinecken - My second Fav
The thing I did not like about it was the disruption of the female form. Perhaps it is because I’ve grown in such a sexualized and commercialized time in America that I want more from art, no matter the decade. I want you do something with a form or show me something if you are going to chop it up, esp. the female form because she hangs in pieces on billboards and in magazines and in imaginations far too often.
She is almost permanently synecdoche only sadly I do not thing that her parts refer the mind to the whole personhood of women, they are just presented as fragments and objects beside other objects.
I was so impressed by the mere size of those kodiak film rolls. It is the wet dream of film junkies like me.
I discovered the softer, more sensual and intimately hilarious Heinecken in his Poloroid SX-70 sets.
He: When does a mole become a beauty mark?
She: as you put your tongue on it
from He: that’s a very nice place for a mole
Too hilarious for me to quote or write in full were:
He: I like pool for it’s geometry
This was honestly the best pillow talk I have ever heard or read or experienced. Better then my own, I should say.
Jasper John’s most recent collection: Regrets
It seemed to me though the work of an artist that executes repetion with no remorse and I found that endearing. Of course, I walked in with reminants of ‘Nighthawks’ on my mind and I expected a collection that was visually similar or evoked that same sense of sensitivity to space and loneliness.
In a way that is Johns and I think who he is personally. No matter what he draws that comes seeping in, but perhaps I am projecting.
The collection’s title is derived from a REGRETS stamp that Johns made and used on account of getting a plethora invitations and engagements that he either could not or did not want to attend.
That’s the Jasper Johns I know and love.
most of the museum is filled with Sigmar Polke, how could I forget to write about such a radical dude.
I liked the plaque I passed where he was quoted as saying that work was done after a smoked a lot of pot. He’s seems to be immersed in the idea of who is and was as an artist in each period and wave of his career and life.
He never settled for the definition of ‘art’ that he was given or that had found to be true.
That is really inspiring to me.
The pure amount of shit that was there was so impressive. I found myself thinking around room 7 or 8 of 10 rooms fileld with Polke all over the walls, “How?”
One must take himself very seriously to keep all of these things as an archive of one’s own creativity. That’s bold and simply out of this world to me. All of those rooms as distinct as some were from others, they all came from one person.
One man, one artist, who refused to settled for what he knew the day before and traveled deeper and deeper into his wondering, into the world, into his own perception and then he made ‘art’.
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