Another Day in Marfa

A couple of days ago I met a woman visiting Marfa for some quiet time to work on her PhD in philosophy. We met at the gallery which gave me an opportunity to talk about my work with her and specifically about phenomenology, as I find that to be as useful a system as any in describing my work and its intent.

She asked me where I found the patience to do the work, a question I don’t think I’ve been asked. I did not have a ready answer. Since then I’ve been thinking about her question. Where do I find the patience, being a restless, anxious type? I’m thinking patience is akin to focus and that focus requires a quiet mind, so the question has morphed into “How do I quiet my mind.” The best answer I have for that is to give the mind something to do while I do something else.
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This afternoon, late, I lay in the lawnchair in my backyard, gazing up at the piercingly blue sky framed by the new, green leaves of the elm. The doves and grackles and birds I don’t know names for called from the trees and electric lines where they perched. I pretended I was on vacation.

I scratched Zackdog behind the ears in his favorite place and watched his eyes glaze over in bliss. The he went off to be by himself and do his own gazing, at late afternoon walkers, the neighbors going to the dumpster, a car driving by, ever watchful for the odd bunnie that might make itself visible and then freeze (as if that were some brilliant defense mechanism).

This is my idea of a good time and it’s when I fall in love with Marfa again. At times, something deep inside us guides us without our conscious awareness and we are compelled to act. We owe it to ourselves at these moments to listen deeply to ourselves and not the noise around us, or the well-intentioned advice of friends or colleagues or lovers. To be selfish.

Yes, on days like today Marfa is a piece of heaven. Don’t move here.

Just caught up on reading all the emails I’ve gotten from e-flux over the last several months and, as usual, found a couple of interesting links which, then, led me to other links…and so on and so on and so on. Potentially a very dangerous way to spend the day. One, Hassan Khan’s RANT published in the e-flux online mag, the other a blurb on a group in New York, W.A.G.E. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy).

Before I go any further, it’s probably best to explain that for the most part I have exited from the ‘scene’ criticized in RANT and found my way back to the work and, that on the topic of galleries, get snarky, which is a waste of energy better spent daydreaming, napping or reading a novel.
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Sometimes I feel compelled to explain myself. This is one of those times and what compels me is the unquestioned assumption by many who when confronted by an object that requires only quiet contemplation demand the object have a story behind it. This, then, is an attempt to describe what that story might be even though, under it all, there is no story.

The paintings are a reflection of the unfathomable, that for which there is no complete narrative, only brief and infrequent glimpses. And I don’t mean to be overblown; that’s simply what they are. They are also a mundane history: I made these marks with this color for six weeks last November; in the fall of last year I spent one week collecting the seed pods from clumps of tribulus terrestris (goathead or puncturevine).

My paintings and other objects I have created are unabashedly retinal. They do not possess a narrative as in ‘this painting is about…’ This lack of narrative, I naively think, is obvious in the works themselves. They are, actually, about no story, no narrative, a reflection rather of a state of being as no-thing gazing out at inexplicable phenomena. Most of the time creating a work is not done in the actual creation, but in this state, sitting on my front porch, for instance, looking. And if I can recapture a way of being in which I lose track of the names of that which I see, something truly miraculous can occur during which all there is and me are all subjects gazing at each other.

If you take away what you do and the stories you tell about who you are, if your history were erased, your family and everyone you know were to disappear, who is left? And what is it that that subject which is left is experiencing?

Calm down
what happens
happens mostly
without you