30 April 06 - 14:26career advice – being a poet

being a poet is very easy work
most of the time
you can do nothing at all
sometimes
when you feel inspired
you write things down

being a poet does not pay very well
being a poet pays next to nothing
being a poet often pays nothing at all

© Allan Revich 2006

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25 April 06 - 21:51Allan Revich Does Circles

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25 April 06 - 21:45Alan Bowman Does Dots

Alan Bowman Does Dots 

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25 April 06 - 16:36Things That Matter

Her Mom: A Found Poem

She’d spent most of her time in factories
or in kitchens, stocking shelves
or making beds in hotels
She’d never had health insurance
Her $11,000 a year paycheck was too much
for Medicaid
so she had to quit her job
apply for disability
and pay the first hospital bills with her savings
F--k, I’m so sick of this country.

http://ajaxproductions.blogspot.com

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19 April 06 - 09:57For and Against Anti-Art

The following URLs link to various articles about anti-art. Some dispute the opinion that I offer in my previous posting.

Making art out of anti-art by Travis Hugh Culley
(a very well written article)

Anti-Art Is Not Art by Michelle Marder Kamhi

The "stuckist" argument against anti-art
(The "stuckists" are an interesting phenomenom of their own - a bit too proud of being stupid)

Dictionary definition from ArtLex

Create your own anti-art

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19 April 06 - 09:42A Bit About Anti-Art

What is anti-art anyway? Can anti-art even exist? Isn't anti-art still art?

These are all good questions. Anti-art is obviously still art. It exists within the cultural context of the art world and it cannot exist without art. Before one is tempted to be smugly dismissive of the anti-art movement though, one needs to consider that just as anti-art exists within the world of art - art cannot exist within the broader context of culture without its own opposite - which is anti-art. So, anti-art must exist, even it it is a part of the art world. This is akin to the idea that post-modernism requires modernism to exist or there would be nothing for it to be "post".

OK, so in a nutshell, anti-art is still art but anti-art does exist. So what is anti-art anyway? I like to think of anti-art not so much as being "against" art, but as being more of an "antidote" to the dominant culture of art. Anti-art is art at the margins. It is art that exists independently of the dominant commerce driven art world. It exists even independently of the dominant so-called anti-art of the academic world (even if many artists involved with anti-art are a part of that world). Anti-art is art that exists and is created purely at the desire of the artist, for the edification of the creator. It does not depend on approval from anybody else. It doesn't even require the approval of other anti-artists. This does not mean that communities of like-minded creators cannot exist. Artists or anti-artists, or anti-art artists are still human - are still social beings. Why should they be excluded from broader communities?

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18 April 06 - 15:31Allan Kaprow

From a biography of Allan Kaprow at World Wide Arts Resources:

Allan Kaprow is mostly known as the inventor of “happenings,” a concept of performance art. He studied under a variety of teachers including musician John Cage, who gave him the idea of chance in aesthetic organization. Initially a painter, Kaprow abandoned the medium for assemblage and environmental art in the 1950’s. In a 1958 article in Art News, he introduced his idea of happenings, stating that craftsmanship and permanence should be forgotten and perishable materials should be used in art.

Kaprow Links:

http://wwar.com/masters/k/kaprow-allan.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/04/07/allan_kaprow_1927200.html

http://www.the-artists.org/ArtistView.cfm?id=F767B358-0F32-4CA3-970E3FD5D29F85E4

http://www.ubu.com/historical/kaprow/kaprow.html

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14 April 06 - 16:57Fluxlist Blog

On April 3rd of this year (2006) the members of Fluxlist established a collaborative community Blog. Incredibly, in less than two weeks the Fluxlist Blog has 36 members and has agathered more than 120 posts. All of these posts incorporate the Fluxus spirit of intermedia and collaboration. I recomend a visit by anybody interested in the new directions that Fluxus is taking while still maintaining the heart and soul of the original Fluxus movement.

http://fluxlist.blogspot.com/
Be sure to click on the "Archives" at lower right.
It is a busy blog with much to experience!

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11 April 06 - 10:36Ray Johnson Update

From a biography of Ray Johnson at http://www.rayjohnsonestate.com/

As his contemporaries became famous, Johnson receded from view, cultivating his role as outsider while maintaining his profile by communicating via mail art and the telephone. He parodied celebrity in performances, fake openings, photocopy-machine art, lists of famous names next to obscure names, and rubber-stamped signatures such as "Collage by Joseph Cornell," or "Collage by Sherrie Levine." Johnson, referring to himself as a "mysterious and secret organization," achieved legendary status as the conscience of artists. This underground reputation prospered well into the 1980's, despite his general absence from the scene, and the gallery-going public's sketchy notions of his output.
 
Johnson's suicide became the first opportunity to examine his work of the previous fifty years. Stored in an eerie construction of boxes inside his house, the work was as precisely stacked as a large three-dimensional collage. With the help of Frances Beatty, Vice-President of Richard L. Feigen & Co., filmmakers Andrew Moore and John Walter spent the next six years probing the mysteries of Johnson's life and art. Their collaboration yielded the award-winning documentary, How To Draw a Bunny, released in 2003. The film examines Johnson's life, art, and ambivalent attitude toward fame.
 

Buy the film "How to Draw a Bunny"

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10 April 06 - 18:57Fluxus: The Persistence of Flow

A great article about Fluxus and the Fluxlist by Kamen Nedev posted on his emit Blog.

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09 April 06 - 21:28Portable Hole 2006 by Allen Bukoff

This project by Allen Bukoff is absolutely fabulous!
I have included one graphic and a bit of text, but you need to visit the site to get the whole picture.

The (w)hole story is can be found at:  http://www.fluxus.org/FluxusMidwest/PortableHole/index.html

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05 April 06 - 21:40Allan Kaprow; 1927-2006

Memorial Picture

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03 April 06 - 20:44Fluxus Poetry - Can a Sonnet be Fluxus?

Fluxus is about spontaneity, chaos, and the inherent beauty in the accidental. The sonnet (or Haiku or other formal literary form) would thus seem to be anything besides fluxus. But fluxus is about more than just chaos and accidents. It has also concerned itself with "the accident within the box". By this I mean that while fluxus celebrates the accidental and the incidental it also celebrates the package in which the accidental is presented. So a sonnet can indeed be fluxus. For example:

Red Henries

All along the midnight rambling
The samba crews were near
The sweet smell of herring gambling
Brought the night light still with fear

So whither walks the midland fairy
Whose quiver stuffed with rabbit fur
Eats long the whisky whiskers hairy
Or drinks with him as if with her

But far from fairies o’er the land
And near to Henry’s Henries’ ships
The view from there was ne’er grand
As to fill ones heart with pursing lips

Thus were all the kings of lore to die

Thus did the princes’ wives all lie
is a sonnet that I recently wrote.

It conforms very closely to the traditional sonnet form, but the content consists entirely of "stream of concioussness" literary imagery in the fluxus tradition.

John M. Bennett, a fluxus writer has written poems that also conform loosely to the fourteen line sonnet form. For example:

Lug gage, De traction

Lug gage
 
aut o ph age an dun cing c hopper you col
lapsed the steamwork tasty wrist  .was t
hat yr lEg I gush ered nightly sweet  ?fore
lap  ,c lop meat  ,tun lugg age b leathing sot
lector as h you c lick the me or s hiny
g lass my fin gers one by on e into yr mout
 
De traction
 
t ape my ling dex to yr shad ow aqua
tic s tone gut s pending d ust spotting  ,fun
nel ectric s punner c loathe my sock you
orsinine re traction of yr dup eht ylf
.sh rug an di p an cr awl against the b lade
yr s haker f lopping on the floor  .sneeze

This poem can be read as as a single fourteen line sonnet (1 plus 6 and 1 plus 6).

John may be pushing the form further in his example than I do in my own, but that is the beauty of fluxus. There is room for nearly anything, except for maybe the boring or ordinary ...unless of course the ordinary is being celebrated for being extraordinary!

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John Bennett Comments:

Very interesting that you saw those 2 poems (yes, to me, they were 2 separate poems!) as a sonnet, and of course you're quite right:  there is a sonnet there.  In fact, the previous form i had been working in i did see as a sonnet, in the pattern of 4-1-4-1-4 lines.  So it's now clearer to me what i was doing with those 6-line things.

John M. Bennett

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