To Houston With Bust
Artist and Renegade Bus contributor James Michael Starr’s sculptures are sometimes large and unwieldy, making them tough to delivery to shows – especially out-of-town. This is the first in a series of dispatches from Starr as he takes his work to shows in Austin and Houston. The show in Austin is fittingly titled “Anxiety.”
Photo: Graham Hobart
This is part one of a four part series. Click for part 2, part 3, and part 4.
If I’d been smart, I would have been a watercolor painter. Easy cleanup with soap and water, as they say. And works on paper relatively defy gravity, shipping cost-wise. You could just about trust them to the US Postal Service and a few postage stamps.
But more to the point at the moment, I wouldn’t have to spend the weekend making a near 650-mile round trip, down I-35, then up I-45, to hand deliver two of my not-so-easy-to-handle found-object sculptures to concurrent group shows in Austin and Houston.
Early in my art career I hadn’t yet learned that the fast and efficient shipping companies we’ve come to rely upon will, at some point in the journey, absolutely positively shoot your package out of a cannon. Now that I’ve seen what can happen to a fairly well-constructed piece of sculpture after crossing only one or two state lines, important decisions that shape my work, or at least determine which pieces show where, may be made partly on the basis of portability.
One returned crate sat on the floor of my studio for 7 or 8 years before I got up the nerve to open it and see how bad the damage was. It had been one of my first pieces, shipped out to a gallery in Los Angeles. When it arrived there, they called to say it had looked fine on the outside, but everything was in shambles once they opened it up. I couldn’t look, until my work had progressed beyond that early style, and I no longer had an emotional attachment.
Not that I let such concerns control my creative output. Ask Ian Eisenmann and the guys in my welding class at Brookhaven. I’ve earned a reputation for making dangerous art: things I can’t even pick up by myself without pulling something; assemblages that are constantly falling off the work table and threatening to take out half the class; constructions with sharp, twisty, pokey metal parts sticking out in all directions. Yes, welding is all fun and games until James Michael puts somebody’s eye out.
But to paraphrase, art wants what it wants, and for the most part, I have little control over the direction things go once a piece finds its stride. So I end up making rather impractical art, things I kinda wish I hadn’t made, and then driving them all over the place, feeling I ought to qualify for sort of special license plate, a tag dangling from my mirror, or maybe even an AOV lane.
Next stop, Austin – where I’ll deliver my collage-on-found window frame, entitled Going to Heaven, for a group show at Pump Project. How appropriate that the show should be called Anxiety.
Since you are not only writing about yourself but referring to yourself in the 3rd person I thought this might help you with the next step…
You’ll probably recognize George Andreas, he always takes an ad out in Modern Painters Magazine among others. But this was by far the best.
An Artist interview by the Artist, as transcribed by himself, as an advertisement:
Interviewer(Andreas)–Mr. Andreas, have you truly created and new way to make art and at the same time redefine the term “mixed media”?
Andreas–Yes I have by connecting philosophy, psychology, political science, literature, poetry, and cinematography. This is the new mixed media. Combined with my knowledge and long experience, these forces are used simultaneously and equally in my work. Each contribute to the unique total.
Interviewer(Andreas)–Why haven’t you embraced the art establishment, critics, galleries and media, like other major artists?
Andreas–These market forces have the potential to doom art to mediocrity. My art can stand on its own.
Interviewer(Andreas)–You believe this so profoundly that only you should interpret your work?
Andreas–True. My work is created to be a one on one experience with the viewer. It is complex work. Only I can interpret it in the way it is intended. The cycle is complete when it is explained correctly.
…and you can only imagine where it goes from there.
24 August 2009 at 5:26 pm