Call Smuda - procrastinating - I was thinking about how many shows I'd been in since 1966, no idea everytime I add new shows to my resume old shows are coming off the end. It's pointless, and what have I learned? Not much I'm afraid, it's a practice which often never or once in a long while.I get ink when I do things but the material payoff is slight, I don't even have a fan club. I heard from Bill Griffith on the Wastebook, he does a weekly comic in a wide flung syndicate that has a spot in the St Paul Pioneer Press . He's been doing this for years ifr not decades. I always like his character Zippy The Pinhead, it's one the great sixties icons Zippy fit in with a world where everything relates to commercial products and ideas.I'm surprised it didn't drive Bill nuts. ///// Peter Saul once told me not to get too interested in other artist's art and not get too interested in the rich. From where I started everything was up working people just don't get no respect in this world. My family was extra poor thanks to my Dad's drinking and that wasn't unusual alcohol was the antidepressant for the working poor. And Jesus cheered us up since it was harder for a rich man to get into heaven unless he could pass a camel through a needle's eye. And nobody wanted to spend eternity with the boss! ///// But Peter was right about taking too much interest in other artist's work. You have to have something unique and something personal something that can make your project desirable. It's hard to spend all your life fascinated with art and then act like you are in some vacuum when the nearest art magazine shows you some of what's up. Save for my youth I have managed to focus on my own work.Sometimes it's been a ridiculous task of following some of my own ideas and images into nonsensical end games. Living in the fallout from Minimalism and Conceptual art makes for a more tidy process but an often more convoluted outcome. I've made some very unusual paintings and drawings and little books. Far more bizarre than I had expected my art to be, putting away 4 of these monsterpieces reminded me that I definetely was an experimental artist. Selling some large pictures to the Walker Art Center was great but it's taken a long time for this institution to pony up for difficult art from the place they reside in as if art only happens elsewhere. But it's a different age and different flags fly atop the museums. Some of the fears have abated and too I'm grown old, my days are not countless as in youth. The politics I championed have had a victory in these acquisitions and it does help the future comprehend us as an aesthetic organism . It wasn't all just shiny boxes their was a different flavor about the cities Artpolice posited the question -Why not include everyone? Let a thousand flowers bloom and let here be a place a creative place too that is part of a global web of connections we call art world. After all who knows what art might go unseen if the work is hidden or used to cover a hole in the wall.
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