A Fragment from August
studio notes...
August 18, 2006.
Lac Ouaureau, early morning.
This last month, because after at least forty years of near
universal disinterest in my collages of the late
1950s through mid 1960s,
suddenly two different art dealers are seeking them for possible promotion
to collectors thinly scattered everywhere, and because the dealers' and their
clients' motives are unthinkably far from mine (see
the comment about the
crystal dish in the September Brief Essay), I thought to preserve
the images from the collages for my myself by making copies of them to
keep while giving the original collages to the dealers to sell for
whatever reason the client wants them.
Then, this morning while
thinking about that plan, I thought…
We’ve been fighting, time and I, for maybe all life long; and now it’s
come to this. “You can’t go back.” (And why would; you want to?)
I want to go back because
it’s like after Jean died when I came to know my art works are the stones
of my arch of life—lose one and the arch is weakened, lose many and the
arch falls. The plan then was to save everything by making computer art of
it that I could both keep and give away.
Now with the 1958-66
collages, the same situation again. My plan these last few months has been
to make transcriptions of some of those old works the way I did of some
work back in 1984, and then to use contemporary digital methods to print
and distribute the images as aesthetic objects—not the “existential
artifacts” they are for me.
However:
1. I must recognize that the art object is one kind of thing in the heart
of the artist and another kind of thing in the art market.
2. What I must do is to
let the children go. Sure, keep their childhood photos on the piano and
their memories in my heart. But I must let the children themselves go to
live or die their own lives in whatever world may come for them.
3. I must remember when I
learned the artist is a silver salmon: only by scattering a thousand eggs
can a few spawn survive. And that—survival from the failure and ruin of
the years—is what my art is about.
August 18, 2006.
Lac O., mid afternoon.
Thinking this afternoon about what I wrote this morning, I see
that I am high on the shoulder of a mountain, looking out and down over a
wide landscape. The mountain is my life, the shoulder is my now, the
landscape below is my past. And every work I make now has in it all the
time of all my past and all the opening of all my future. (See September
2006 Brief Essay,
About Time
and about Souriau's
insertion point and Sauvage's T1,--the physical time
of the work of art, and
T2, the time of the viewer's viewing.
