Bruce Nauman, The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign), 1967

Off to Seattle tomorrow to see this and many other fine neon texts by Mr. Nauman at the University of Washington's Henry Art Gallery. Today largely spent strolling outdoors, walking and talking. Green trees gently bent in warm grey overcast.

"I once saw a cartoon sequence of a painter painting a very long landscape. When he'd finished he cut it up into four landscapes of the usual proportions. Mostly one doesn't meet others from the same picture. When it happens it can be unsettling." (Russell Hoban)

Nomad was declined by the folks I proposed it to in Toronto. I'm going to Toronto by myself in early June to make it anyway, a D.I.Y. "gesture" that probably reads as quixotic or arrogant. I don't agree with either assessment; I just want the experience of inhabiting the piece, and evaluating it after-the-fact: did it work out more or less as planned, or was it DOA from the start? Critically analyzing one's own production seems all the more neccessary if not traversing the path that leads from high school to art school to artist-run center to regional art gallery to grants, institutional sales, biennale participation & etc.

Call this counter-path disenchanted utopianism.

Quandry: you admire institutions -- the artist-run center; the commercial gallery; the regional gallery; the international art fair -- because they were the conduits that first brought you close to works you still admire (Shadbolt's; Rauschenberg's; Ian Hamilton Finlay's; Richard Serra's; Yoshitoshi's; Kay Rosen's). But those institutions are either too busy to care about what you're doing now, or beseiged by people just like you, or have noticed you, negatively. Eg., your work's not that good. And early work is a lot more likely to be not that good than merely adequate or (even less likely) good. So, do you want to remain subordinate forever, proposing things to institutions, or get on with the (harder; more rewarding) work of making things, getting them out into the world, and improving?

Or do you want to make work, and criticism, and a distribution system, and exhibition venues? That sounds like exhaustion. That sounds like early alcoholism, failed relationships, angry ex-friends and colleagues, bewildered institutional employees. . . .

Or like culture. Like a life.
- posted by cjb @ 5:45 PM