oh yes--"text based"--that is form the Puritans, for sure
thou shalt make no graven images etc--worship statues!--talk to
stones--let alone trees etc--and animals--
is there any difference between a bullfight and the Mass?
one wonders--
something i was thinking of--that show on american art done by
--australian art critic--i noticed he misunderstood american art in one
essential--it is really about engineering--
which comes form the Puritans, the only art had to be expressed in
minimal terms through things which served a function--
so we have even in american great poetics of say william carlos
williama ("a poem is a machine made of words")--Olson--always speaking of
"use"--
this is important to american art--Fluxus and things like the
beats--subverted this--
idea that as Kerouac wd write, art, poetry--"eyeball kicks"--yet
for him not passive spectatorial "slumming"as one wd like to so condemn
it--but active participatory "reporting" "recording" eye and hand and
voice--via his "sketching" in n notebook pages of "jazz improvisations" of
daily before one "happenings"--this goes back to say Hawthorne AMERICAN
NOTEBOOKS, Whitman SPECIMEN DAYS, poetry of Emily Dickinson--Thoreau
journal entries--Melville "Logs" of whaling and other enterprising
& allegoriacl adventures turned into hay wire searches on vast Pacifics--
Huck Fin pondering over books--and how they affect Tom
Sawyer--while he himself wants to "light out
" for Indian territories--
when you think of things like "eyeball kicks" --means not
ownership of the materials--"happenings' a Flux--yet one may participate
and
encourage by active involvememt, from an ongoing street level, or out in
fields-anyplace, your kitchen full of paint supplies or as many wonderful
people wrote in--for transfers--
"the proverbial kitchen sink"--for sure--
"to close the eyes is travel"--emily dickinson--
the american tradition seems to be a continual struggle between
Puritan ideas of limitation, territorialization, colonialization,
oppression of anything "radically different"--and --all this Other flowing
in continually--
the text based Ann notes-we have too much about
us--continually--is
a way of codifying what is basically always coming up with something Else--
mainly rooted in --funny here the discussion seems to keep
coming back to blood!--
but is a Flow, like Fluxus, or Happenings, or anything--going on,
is part of the circulatory system--and so, "wisdom of the heart" as pascal wd
say
in a funny way, the american way has a certain--use!-- to be sure,
as one may be at times strewing blood all over the place--and quoting long
dead French philosopher/religious person/mathametician--
from far off places we are near at hand--
and vice versa--
is important to remember--
here is also somehwhere else, and we make for the here to there the
kind of machines i suppose if one wants to deem them so, to move from here
to there as many as possible stowaways--
dbc
On Wed, 6 Dec 2000, ann klefstad wrote:
>
>
> David Baptiste Chirot wrote:
>
> > My first memories of hearing about Fluxus and Happenings--I was
> > about ten--in 1963. Some friends who visited a lot from New York City
> > talked about it--my brother who was seven and I were fascinated--
> >
> > "Happenings"--"Fluxus"--sounded like the amazing things one saw
> > continually as small child in small Vermont village--daily things of
> > startling import and awe inspiring magic--that were always in "flux" or
> > "happening all around us"--
> >
>
> my god what a great recounting of a life in flux! Reminds me of my own
> childhood, and the things that happen in rural places that have no handy
> context for what's "normal" (no tv then). A whole hell of a lot can seem
> normal. Or at least, just the kind of thing that happens.
>
> When the old couple made blood sausage for us, the taster was the blind lady.
> Later I used gallon jars of blood from the same little slaughterhouse for a
> piece--I had it in white cafeteria bowls. I watched them kill the cow, an old
> Holstein, and when they split her in half, the milk ran in with the blood
> across the floor, beautiful white swirls in the red.
>
> And yes, all that damn textbased stuff. The world and its beauty and stink
> evaporating in the clouds of language-- What is that impulse, some puritan
> thing? the second-order real? Heaven just above the ground?
>
> AK
>
>
>
>
