What is Art

I had difficulty in junior high school when I was forced, by curricula, to take an art class. The difficulty wasn't, it turns out, because I wasn't an artist, although the teacher, whose name I have forgotten, thought that was the case. One of my favorite lines now when people talk about art, as in drawing, is that "I can't draw my breath." It solves a whole lot of difficulties in explanation.

No, it turns out, the problem was that I had/have a different conception about what makes art "art." It's not that I don't like traditional art, but I am not as much of a fan of that. Judi is an amazing watercolor painter, and she does traditional art. I love her stuff. Two of my most favorite places in the world are the Rodin museum and the Uffizi. It's not that...

It's just that I like abstract weird art. Actually, although I am not an art historian (never had another art class -- unless you count film history at UCLA as fulfilling that requirement -- I think the proper term is conceptual art. The idea of something that is not quite art, but is, as a result, "art" is fascinating to me.

For example: The longest organ concert in the world

I think my fascination started early, because the specific incident in my art class concerned a sculpture project. We poured plaster of paris into those little rectangular milk cartons (yes, I know...milk...sigh...) that were the staple of lunch rooms in those days, and then were supposed to carve something, that, again, I forget what it was. My carving was abstract...no two ways about it, and I was unashamed about it. Not so good from the teacher's perspective...sigh...

But I remember that I was hooked by the time I got to UCLA and began to explore the works of John Cage -- "music is sound organized in time" --(read about him here and here), Terry Riley --again, here and here -- (In C is one of, if not his most famous work, and I was involved in one of the earliest performances, apparently, since it was written in 1964, and we did it at UCLA in probably 1967 or 1968 --I got to do the drone, which I thought was so cool -- thanks Doug Leedy and Malcolm Cole), and other composers.

So from there I got to the fluxus people, and also to the "visual" artists. I actually did a series of fluxus concerts in Regina (on April 1...nobody got the joke for a couple of years) until they made me stop. The last straw, apparently, was a piece for two tubas. They went out on stage and tried to tune, but one of them was having problems. Upon looking in the horn, there was an "aha" moment, so that player poured a tuba full of water into the other tuba and played the correct note. End of piece. Brilliant. Not so well liked by the chairman, though...sigh...

That's a long way around to this. One of my most favorite pieces of art is the Post Secret project. Essentially, people from all over the world send postcards to a guy (Frank) in Maryland with their secrets on them. Absolutely fascinating. I even dragged Judi to an installation at the Walnut Creek art gallery one time. And I like that more people than the artist are involved. The idea for this post came as a result of reading about how Frank's mail carrier recently "retired" and moved to England. She blogged about the Post Secret adventure here. Great reading.