I did my second live Facebook event of the week on Saturday afternoon at RoCo. Wednesday’s Margaret Explosion stream from Ken Colombo’s phone was primarily for Bob in Chicago but Peggi and I watched it when got home from the gig. The two songs he caught, our first two with Phil Marshall on guitar, sounded pretty good. My Artist’s Talk did not. My voice is to meek to reach to back of the room where the camera was positioned. Peggi video it as well and she was sitting in the front row so I posted it here. One of the audience members mentioned he read my blog every morning so this post post goes out to him although, as I’ve noted before, I do this primarily for myself.
Bleu, RoCo’s curator, made the talk a breeze by asking me questions. Funny how the best questions are the ones that have no answers. By the end of the video Gary Pudup can be heard trying to bail me out by saying, “like Freud said, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.'” At which point I was fumbling for the Duchamp quote, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” but I could not come up with it until it was over.
After my talk we headed over to Visual Studies Workshop to see “Implement,” the sister Rochester Biennial show by ILLSA (Impractical Labor in Service of the Speculative Arts), an evolving publishing & public practice platform committed to investigating labor, time, and what we value. Co-founder, Emily Larned, gave her artist’s talk as we examined the show. The visuals take some explaining as they are intended to explore and expand the potential of the toolkit, inviting participants to consider and share what they deem to be essential tools for living.
At the end of the talk we participated by filling out a form where we answered three questions. “What is one of your essential tools for living? Why? Where do you find it? Peggi and I answered them all similarly. “Eyes, Ears.” “They enrich our life.” “In my head.”
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I thought the thing at VSW was pretentious baloney that has been done so many times before. Meaningless. And, as I’ve said before, artist statements and talks are redundant- the art is the statement. I wish we didn’t have to see artists trying to explain something that can’t be explained.
Before electronics sailors used variations of dead reckoning to make passage across their world. Some piloted by identifying landmarks ashore to gauge their progress. Surprisingly for me popwars.com is such a marker. Like a distant cliff or shoreline I seek not to go to that place but only to help guide my own route. Just as Paul (and Peggi?) don’t write for a possible audience, I read for reasons all my own…
Thank you Tom. So good to hear that.
Tom, This is Paul’s writing. I’m just the (sometimes) editor. I was talking to Rick Muto after the talk about the visual artist/writing thing. Interesting when both co-exist. Paul’s writing talents only had an outlet when he began his blog back in Nov 2007 except for his lyric writing in Personal Effects.