If I were asked to name the chief benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.
Gaston Bachelard, Philosopher.
I needed to try and capture that place where I spend most of my hours for a project I discovered recently. I'll write more on that when it happens.
Today the sun came out for a while and this is what I saw ...
"I want to be myself. I want to be LP. I want to be that person whose had this history, and this life.
It's good to be yourself."
Source: brilliant interview below, with a woman I admire intensely.
I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made half a century ago. Minimalism does not need to hear from me. I do not want to travel to distant places to give talks about art I made yesterday. Contemporary art is making enough noise without me. I do not want to be filmed in my studio pretending to be working. I do not want to participate in staged conversations about art—either mine or others past or present–which are labored and disguised performances. I do not want to be interviewed by curators, critics, art directors, theorists, aestheticians, professors, collectors, gallerists, culture mavens, journalists or art historians about my influences, favorite artists, despised artists, past artists, current artists, future artists. A long time ago I got in the habit, never since broken, of writing down things instead of speaking. It is possible that I was led into art making because talking and being in the presence of another person were not requirements. I do not want to be asked my reasons for not having worked in just one style, or reasons for any of the art that got made (the reason being that there are no reasons in art). I do not want to answer questions about why I used plywood, felt, steam, dirt, grease, lead, wax, money, trees, photographs, electroencephalograms, hot and cold, lawyers, explosions, nudity, sound, language, or drew with my eyes closed. I do not want to tell anecdotes about my past, or stories about the people I have been close to. I refuse to speak of my dead. The people to whom I owe so much either knew it or never will because it is too late now. I do not want to document my turning points, high points, low points, good points, bad points, lucky breaks, bad breaks, breaking points, dead ends, breakthroughs or breakdowns. I do not want to talk about my methods, processes, near misses, flukes, mistakes, disappointments, setbacks, disasters, obsessions, lucky accidents, unlucky accidents, scars, insecurities, disabilities, phobias, fixations, or insomnias over posters I should never have made. I do not want my portrait taken. Everybody uses everybody else for their own purposes, and I am happy to be just material for somebody else so long as I can exercise my right to remain silent, immobile, possibly armed, and at a distance of several miles.
Robert Morris, Artist
This amused me so much that I had to share. Morris was replying to Robert Knafo's request a studio interview and he is very clear on precisely why he won't give an interview.
You can read more on the story over on the Slow Muse blog.
This is the last Saturday of my fifties. The needle isn't moving to the left or to the right. I don't feel or look 60. I don't feel any age. I have a near-perfect life. However, I grew up on tennis courts and beaches in California during the sixties, where we put baby oil on our skin to deepen the tan, and we got hundreds of sunburns. So maybe that was not ideal. I drank a lot and took a lot of drugs and smoked two packs of Camels (unfiltered) a day until I was 32. I had a baby and then forgot to work out, so things did not get firmer, and higher. So again, not ideal.
My heart is not any age. It is a baby, an elder, a dog, a cat, divine.
My feet, however, frequently hurt.
My skin broke out last week. I filed a new brief with the Fairness Commission, and am waiting to hear back.
My great blessing is the capacity for radical silliness, and self-care.
I'm pretty spaced out. . I don't love how often I bend in to pull out clean wet clothes from the washer, and stand up, having forgotten that I opened the dryer that's above, and smash my head on the door once again. I don't know what the solution to this is, as I refuse to start wearing a helmet indoors. I don't love that I left my engine running for an hour last week, because I came inside to get something, and then got distracted by the dogs, and didn't remember I'd left the engine on. It was a tiny bit scary when a neighbor came to the front door to mention this, and I had to feign nonchalance, and act like it was exactly what I had meant to do all along.
Anne Lamott, an extract from her Facebook post.
Really my works are narratives, I am really interested in stories. I find different visual ways to talk about narratives, political narratives. My work is about conflicts and politics, but it links in very kind of intimacy like soldier sleeping. I am interested in getting very close to my subjects, and I live how they live, or share things with them.
Tim Heatherington, extracted from an interview on Periscope.
I have read war photographer Robert Capa's book and more than a few books about him. Over the years I have collected and read the stories of war journalists John Simpson, Christina Lamb, Frank Gardener, Kevin Sites, Kate Adie ... and more. I have the dvd titled War Photographer, about the work of James Nachtwey too.
There is something I have been trying to understand.
Tonight I watched 'Which Way to the Frontline - The Life and Time of Tim Heatherington'. It is a documentary created by Sebastian Junger ('The Perfect Storm', 'War') and in it he seems to take the whole 'conversation' about motivations and understanding war to a level I've never really found before.
In tracing Tim's career back through the years, Junger's intention seemed to be about honouring, remembering, and revealing the truly fascinating man who was a war photographer.
Tim Hetherington was killed while covering the front lines in the besieged city of Misrata, Libya, during the 2011 Libyan civil war.