midwife to the soul of the idea
Posted by Morgan Garwood on September 04, 1997 at 17:46:20:
phase two... along those lines... I am hopeful that we can utilize this space in a more dynamic, socratic, fashion soon... the idea of a studio, a mental workspace, where thought can be tangled with and mapped out is compelling. Rauschenberg was the reason art ever held any interest for me in the first place, and not necessarily because I liked every example of his artistic output per se; it was the underlying mental process, the combinatorial dexterity, his instinct for plenitudes and voids, his 'voice', as it were, that moved from celebratory to elegaic, his capacity to find the ordinary in the extrordinary, and the extrordinary in the ordinary that ineleuctacbly divided him from the pack... he was coming from someplace else, and if you wanted to guage how distinct he was, in spite of his superficial carelessness, take a look at anyone who dared to imitate him... how he managed to be both a painter and an anti painter was probably the result of some deeply engraved internal paradox that worked its way outward to the surface of his paintings... now what the hell does that have to do with this ? If nothing else, we'll have interactions with other artists here, and the goal is to 'paint' with ideas, linkages, trains of concept, and so on; perhaps it IS possible to levitate the form of Rauschenberg's thought, and operate in that domain, without being trapped in his materials or his appearances... perhaps an impossible dream, probably unattainable, pretentious, absurd, and without reason. However, the seeds of post-art were planted at black mountain college at a time when noone had the slightest idea of where the fusion of d t suzuki, john cage, rauschenberg, etc. would lead... and that which was once possibility and spirit has ossified into formality, hard bound textbooks, scripted blather, etc. some of the original plasm may have retained its genetic vitality... we'll see
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