Don Boyd wrote:
> It has been my experience in trying to get those artists in the school
> appointments that anything so experimental as FLUXUS old or new
> would be beyond the coprehension od most arts council panels.
> I have gotten a couple of grants and been an artist in the schools once
> but not with my fluxus work. Maybe its my age, eh? -Don
Well, what I do, in order to fifth-column some transformational activity
into the public sphere, is to pursue what you might call a "thick"
practice, that is, it has layers. There is the layer of highly approachable
(at least by some standards) work--mimetic, graspable--that modulates into
more psychophysically active work, that modulates into a writing practice,
that feeds my everyday blather, making it, one hopes, full of insight
derived from this notion of being a phenomenological guerrilla, fighting
for free making and perception. So I've got slides that will get me work.
So when I do the work, it has more than one face.
This stems from Gramsci's notion of the engaged insider who, because of
a practiced freedom of perception, a certain discipline, can see as an
outsider (at least that's my take on his good sense vs. common sense thing
in the notebooks) and act as one who is, oddly, of but not in (as opposed
to Jesus' injunction to be the opposite). Anyway, after 20 years of rather
purist practice, doing what were quite wonderful, I think, pursuits and
makings that wouldn't even get me arrested, I got tired of irrelevance, and
acquired the body o work, resume, documentation, network, etc, that would
enable me to act in public ways.
Nice Picabia quote, "If you want clean ideas, you should change them as
often as you change your shirt."
Has anyone seen the Picabia show in NY? Worth going? I've been fascinated
by that bunch of work for years and years--
AK
