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I stopped using clay as a medium in 1996. The galleries that had shown my work previously, generally wouldn't give me shows for the new work because "while we like the new work, I can't think of who we can sell this to."
Ah,
well.
Occasionally, when I do a search on my name I will find a show, always of my old work and usually that I didn't even know about. People are used to the old work, but I felt trapped as an artist by it. And then I had an epiphany in 1996.
Fame and fortune are not goals.
If
I just kept my mind on working as an artist (which was the goal) everything
else would fall in line by itself, especially the fortune part (I have bills,
too.) and 
without any attention from me. So, I got rid of most of the clay
related equipment (I do keep a small kiln that I use to heat and keep one
of my studios dry.) to work in Plexiglas. And the Plexiglas eventually evolved
into assemblage. My work is generally about the same themes I've always dealt
with, The Sacred Heart, art, the material universe vs. the spiritual universe.
But maybe it's not as accessible as in the older work. I'm not as loud as
I used to be. (sarcastic pause) I've become...
subtle!
Our minds automatically work in assemblage or collage mode. It's innate. We take all of our scraps of past experiences, education, sensations, acquaintances, emotions, etc. combine them and paste them together and end up with our present-time opinions and expectations. But it took until the 1900s for the visual arts to start applying this way of working in the physical world and the 1950's for music.Perhaps it took so long because of the idea of "making something truly yours". People don't usually see an image or even an object that was created by another human being as their own. They don't want to be accused of copying or plagiarism or worse, laziness.
But,
it is the artist who chooses the images and/or objects. And then incorporates
them into himself. They become truly
his, like his body or his ideas or his materials. We think of paint, clay,
or bronze as part of an artist's palette to be combined or formed in some
new way. Chosen images and objects or sampled sounds are another
kind of artist's palette. By selecting certain objects, images or sounds while
rejecting others, the artist makes them truly his because he has associated
them with himself and all of his past experiences. They aren't just random,
generic stuff laying around that he happened to grab and put into the work.
I think that's just an apparency because you can never negate the influence
of your own past experiences. Choice and decision are involved even if the
artist is unaware of it. And so is rejection.
Maybe you can imagine a patron of the arts coming into an artist's studio and commenting that the artist or his apprentice didn't grind the minerals to make his own paint and how can a painter truly call his paintings his when he went out and bought the paint in tubes, ready-made. (A little Dada joke.)
This is exactly what sampling is. Different sounds are recorded from other
sources, combined and reordered. Sometimes these sounds are a few seconds
of other people's work. These sounds are often worked over, that is modulated
or warped, and the whole assemblage
is organized around a melodic theme or a rhythm or even the words. The
melody and the poetry (words) give the audience a frame of reference which
makes it more accessible. The general 
audience doesn't have to work too hard
to appreciate the work on a very shallow level because it's easy to appreciate
a song. We all have
past experiences with song or the parts of song, especially rhythm. This is
not to say that this sort of work is shallow. I'm just saying that if you
don't want to think, there's still something there to grab your attention
unlike, the work of say, John Cage.
John Cage used chance to order the sound
and tried to erase the artist from the piece. Cage gave very little frame
of reference for the audience to hold onto and the silences were an equally
important component of his work. You have to start out thinking to listen
to Cage's work which is why most people listened once to be "open minded"
and never listened again. Cage demanded a large amount of input from his audience
during the listening experience which was often too difficult for the audience
to give without the familiar path of words or melody. Cage's work seems more
visual and cerebral to me. And it may
have been that the actual goal of Cage's work was the process and not the
final piece or even the musical experience. His audiences were expecting a
musical experience and he was 
delivering
a more cerebral one. If you really want to
know what a rest can be, listen to his composition, "4'33", but
not with your ears.
Even if an audience inputs all they can into a listening or visual experience they can never experience the work the way the artist does. And really, who cares? The artist probably doesn't have all the significances of his own work. How can he? He doesn't know everything in the universe, he hasn't experienced everything from every possible viewpoint. We all have different palettes with different personal significances attached to them and this is not a bad thing.
I have always admired the work of Joseph Cornell, Bruce Conner, Max Enst and many others who used found objects or "collage scraps" because of thier ability to pick out the objects or images that they've incorporated into thier work. The most successful pieces are the pieces that incorporate objects or images that use Time to advantage. The piece as a whole seems to transcend time, but when I really think about it, the artist has some how chosen objects that allow the entire piece to use Time as one of its components.
I doubt that a piece by Joseph Cornell, for instance, when
experienced right after its creation gave the viewer the same experience
as when it is viewed today or even a year after it was made. His work often
evokes a nostalgic feeling or even a feeling of great loss. Is this because
we see the objects as antiques?
Time does have a way of dulling life's spikes and diluting its poisons. If I use McDonald's Kid's Meal give aways in my work, how will people react to it a year from now? 200 years from now?
How did people react to Marcel Duchamp's ready-made bottle drying rack when he first presented it as a work of art? How do we see it now? Is it more precious now? To whom? What about that urinal by R. Mutt?
The appreciation of a given piece is a unique individual experience and should be, but the more you know, the more "stock footage" you have to draw on, and this is what makes the piece all the more significant to you. You do it all the time when you make a decision, have an opinion, or make a choice.
created 11 January 2001
updated 11 January 2008