Good Evening! Giving you a heads-up about how you might consider reading the radio
plays I’ve been posting. I’ve numbered the crime story episodes as the
characters and situations are sequential, so you might want to read them in
order—or not. They can be read as stand-alone pieces, just as you might tune in
to a serial program having missed the one before. Each has its own plot but
references are made in some to what has happened before in others. In one case, there is
a carryover through several of the episodes. And the characters become
relational, forming bonds and deepening friendships—and love interests—through
the series.
From
the time I attended university, I’ve had a near obsession in my artmaking
and writing with series and sequences. My master’s thesis exhibition concerned
visual systems—photographic images taken in circles and vertical and horizontal
directions, then formed into bound books, scrolls, wall friezes, and stacks on
tables. I called these open and closed systems. In one case, I had a friend
take a photo on a pedestal-like table in a gallery show where I’d scattered
images which had been photographed in a sequence. To my mind, the participant’s
browsing through these photos represented a form of constant random order to a
system which had been fixed by how the images had been taken. I was at first a
bit dismayed by her disruption of my idea until my sponsoring prof pointed out
that this opened up the system in a way that was totally outside my conceptual
framing of the work and was, as a result, a beautiful representation of an
“open” system. This same prof, Don
Lipski, came to my home studio once to critique my work and saw a huge bowl of pennies I’d been
collecting over the years—had to have been many thousands—that I had on display
on the floor. When he got ready to leave, he reached down, scooped up a handful
of pennies and put them in his pocket—this after a long discussion on the
nature of systems and how I wanted to represent this idea in art. He said not a
word and I thought it was some sort of joke, not putting the idea together
until he mentioned the opening up of my random system of photos at my show by
my friend’s taking of the photo with her.
Looking
back, I think my interest in sequence, series and systems is a reflection on
the enormous amount of repetition in our lives. We follow routines and patterns
of behavior constantly—often with clocked regularity. And because we are
symbol-and-meaning-making creatures (as Susan Langer has so beautifully pointed
out), we turn ordinary activities and events into art-like shapes and forms. I
was interested in formalizing this in such a way that the aesthetics of our
repetitions, especially those we see, became dominant, and consequently we
label as “art,” as versus, say, psychology or sociology.
For
example, for an exhibition at Haas Gallery, Bloomsburg State College (now
Bloomsburg University of Pennsylvania), I took photographs of sections of a
sidewalk, each photo the size of a large floor tile, putting them together so
they could be walked on, as vinyl flooring might be. The wall directly to the side
of this photo-sidewalk had a series of
photographs of the “scene” that would be viewed as one walked on the sidewalk
outside. The evening of the opening I arrived early and sat near the gallery
door. One woman came out and called to her friends who were about to go in and
see the exhibition, “Don’t bother,” she said. “It’s just a sidewalk on the
floor and some pictures of bushes on the wall.” Those bushes were the hedge
lining the neighbor’s yard of the sidewalk I’d represented in the photographs! But
she had stated clearly exactly what I had done. She just missed the art of the experience—but, hey, perhaps I didn’t represent that “art-part” well enough to
be “got,” at least not by her.
[Press-Enterprise, Keith Haupt]
What
does all this have to do with the radio plays now on my blog? Writing and
reading by their very nature are sequential. Ever go to one of those “new
books” exhibitions where artists present new models of what a book could be?
They are a lot of fun but the form of a book—and a story—have been around for a
long, long time, even as scrolls. We read and listen to stories in sequence,
one idea following another--even flashback get around to coming back around. Pages in books are numbered so if you lose your
place, you can find it again. I’m interested in that sequence and the
development that characters take as we progress through time and action with
them on the page. I’m also interested in relationships. Just as the
walking on the sidewalk also had a peripheral scene that progressively changed during that walk, so we do not live in a vacuum. This contextual world we live in is
pretty self-evident and something we take it very much for granted because it’s
our environment, after all, but when we become involved in story, we suddenly
realize how necessary it is, how aware of it we have to be in order to “get”
what’s told.
The
people in the radio plays, hopefully, are people you find interesting and
important enough to get into what they are doing, what they hope to achieve in
their story. I’ve attempted to make them live with each other in such a way as
to become different as they progress through their episodes. As a writer, this
self-evident stuff isn’t as easy to create in story as it would seem—since it’s
so there in everyday life, what’s so hard to replicate? I spend a lot of time
attempting in writing and artmaking to place those sidewalk tiles together in
such a way that walking on them feels ordinary at the same time that the walker
is reminded of the nature of art, how it informs our sense of reality in a
different way. Lucy Lippard said something like that, as I remember—something
about how good art reaffirms our sense of reality while great art redefines it.
Well,
the radio plays and short stories on the blog are entertainment and aren’t
designed to throw you into a new sense of self and relationships or create a fresh
look at your reality. But if that happens, let me know. I want to revisit what
I’ve done and do it again (and again and again).
____________
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