ARRANGEMENTS AND COMPOSITIONS

THE CONTAINMENT OF MEMORY

A BLUES PROJECT

Site-specific installation and objects

“Blues is African American”

­­‑Amiri Baraka, The Music

This is not a research project. By this I mean there is no outward attempt at historical documentation of facts or incidents. This project started the spring of 2000 in response to re-reading Leroi Jones/Amiri Baraka’s book ‘Blues People’. I wondered if I could visually re-present some of the same emotions that are theoretically the ‘blues’, Love, Joy and Pain, Celebration and Remembrance, and Sex. So it began; small, mixed media collages, then, box constructions, drawings, found objects and freestanding assemblages.

My interests include the development of various Africanamerican cultural traditions. Some of these traditions can be traced directly back to West African societies. Others are amalgamations of traditions and the conditions of the meeting of Western European cultures and African peoples in the ‘new world’. Many are specific to the United States and the adjacent states and territories in the Caribbean and Central America. Most of the typical spiritual practices having to do with birth, puberty, death and other important life events are from numerous ethnic groups in West Africa. They represent themselves as symbols in the objects I have made. The specific use of items and ritual practices come from fieldwork done by others, recorded and documented in books. I have relied on the poetic resources of poor materials and daily (functional) elements that evidence changes in a period, these can be labeled as remains or discards.

Objects produced are in response to various other readings as well ‘Blues People’. Such readings include ‘Black Art and Culture in the 20^th Century’ and ‘The Blues Aesthetic, Black Culture and Modernism’, both by Richard Powell; ‘Can’t Be Satisfied, The Life and Times of Muddy Waters’, Robert Gordon. The catalogue of artwork from the exhibition by Rene Stout, ‘Dear Robert, I’ll See You At The Crossroads’ influenced this work as well work by others. I have always gleaned information from the work of Antoni Tàpies, Bette Saar, Nancy Grossman, Robert Rauschenberg, Joseph Cornell, Duchamp and the California Assemblagists, such as Bruce Connor, Noah Purifoy, John Heartsfield, Charles Frazier, Gordon Wagner, Wallace Bergman, The Kienholzs and John Outterbridge. A new influence in my work is the Catalonian artist Rene Brossa.

The box constructions comprise the majority of these objects, at first I used found boxes, then started to construct my own. To date, there are more than seventy objects in various stages. They range from sketches with dimensions and materials to pieces near completion. Several have audio components.

The project is directly connected to the work of Mateusz Fahrenholz and the essay ‘The Containment of Memory, DUCHAMP, FAHRENHOLZ AND THE BOX’, Paul Crowther, Art & Design Magazine, NO. 40 1995, London.

“…the need to contain, secure and transport things are themselves recurrent elements in the way human beings in all cultures organize experience. And these practical functions are implicated in deeper psychological and physical needs, bound up with security and the ability to adopt changes of circumstances. The box is an artefact with high degree of actual and symbolic potency. For it can thematise the practical function of containing, securing and transporting contents and thence the broader psychological and physical needs these functions serve… …the box itself… is not one which the artist physically made. These works, in other words are important elements in a boarder context defined by Duchamp’ s ‘unassisted ready-mades’ i.e. these objects ‘found’, rather than made, by the artist, which are offered up, nevertheless as works of (or elements within works) by him. To function in this context means that interest is entirely shifted from the any question of craft or skill. Attention is rather focused on the broader implications of the specific relation between the container and its contents…”

"i found myself making boxes.  And I thought that box was as important a form as the rest of the art forms or categories.  The professional scribblers were not willing to consider it as main stream art.  I stubbornly persisted in waiting for new verbal criteria to be formulated.  I am waiting still."

-Lucas Samaras 1972

AND EVERY DAY I HAVE THE BLUES