Monday, March 4, 2024

Education Without God Makes Crafty Devils "Thing"

Since I write most days, and have done so for over 20 years, I’ve amassed a lot of words, too many words, like way too many words. Most of them deal with the boring minutiae of my day to day, or thrift store encounters. Most of what I write equate to doodles in words, you know…aimless writing. Sometimes things come together to form a proper structure. Sometimes this just randomly happens and other times it’s intentionally. The joy of having a large archive of words, no matter their reason for existing, is that you can always plumb the depths of your doodles to create something new. Being these doodle can be searched with a basic keyword, you can have a loose, theme in no time. Keyword “teaching” or “school” produces dozens of returns. Put those returns into a long list and you have something that is almost cohesive.

The cover made from a recycled thrift store book image.
So yeah, that’s what I did. I took all of my notes and put them into a long and meandering text connected through the keyword of “teaching.” It was a lot of words, initially over 100 pages, a “thing.” I can’t use book here, zine seems somewhat wrong, so thing it is.

I put all of this together a couple years ago, not sure what I wanted to do with it or even sure I wanted people to see it. If the “thing” feel into the wrong hands, I might have to answer some questions I didn’t want to.  I’d start playing around with it, and then feel like I needed to abandon it. This happened a handful of times. A couple months ago, I found the file and started playing around. I started whittling out uninteresting doodles and references to anyone or anything specific. Does it really matter? After making a lot of things like this over the course of years, I knew no one really cared. I knew only a few people would ever read it, and I doubted any of those people would be bothered by my interaction with a student from a decade ago. I’m fascinated by people, and the weirder the interaction, the more I’m drawn to it, and then better chance I’m going to write it down.

Pulling teeth for money. I don't like this part.
Without thinking too much about it, I finished up my mild edits, and ordered 25 printed copies through a self-publishing / printing place. I guess it’s published if it has an ISBN and its printed if it does not. 25 sounded like a good number. I didn’t expect to sell that many, but I know I could definitely mail off that many. When they arrived at my house, they were larger than I had expected. They were magazine sized when I thought they were going to be trade paperback sized. The difference means more postage which means I lose more money. Over the next couple of weeks, I tried to see who was interested in a copy, and then pulled teeth to get them to send me the ten dollars, which barely covered the print and postage. In trying to sell them, I didn’t want to eat the whole cost, just a portion. It was more important they exist than I make money. Surprisingly, a lot of folks came through with the monies, making it a viable thing. I’ve sold more than half and given the rest away. 

They exist, 3-D and all.
Now that I’ve done this once, I know I’m going to do it again. I’ve actually gotten a few ideas lined up for the next few editions. The next one is just going to be broadsides, no reading. The one after that I want to be a large collection of writing and images, a best-of all the garbage I’ve mailed over the years. Maybe one on my Richard C. collections and writings, but that’s way into the future.

Friday, January 12, 2024

Children's Block by Block, Glueing It All Together

The amount of paper I have upstairs (where I do most of the makings) is staggering. It’s mostly organized, but there’s a lot, so some of it isn’t so organized. There’s the stacks of old magazines and books, the piles of “processed” paper (paper ripped from old books), and then there’s the cut pieces, or pieces ready to be incorporated into a collage. The latter is the last step in a long process that could take years. Anyone looking at these piles might not see pattern, but I do. It all makes sense, mostly. Because things are put together in such a fashion, I can dive into collage-making in no time, which for a very time-conscious me, is important.

Over the past year, I’ve focused mainly on creating paper collages. When I have an hour or two, I can go upstairs and be making something within minutes because of my “system.” It’s one I’ve not deviated from too much. I’ve forced myself into a pattern for more than a year just to see how things change and morph over time. Even if you do the same thing over and over, you’ll do it differently over a stretch of time. I’ve forced myself into repetition. 

Lots of old cardboard, pieces of board games, and even some Japanese money in there.
And then I had a lot of collages leftover from my Christmas making period, like a lot. Most of them went into thrift store frame destined for little libraries around the area. Some of them were stuck to books and some were affixed to pieces of wood (children’s blocks and toys) for no particular reason. Side note, making stuff without purpose is freeing. When you find yourself gluing for an hour and taking stock of what you’ve done, it’s a great feeling. Trying to identify what to do with three dimensional objects is a puzzle that comes from repetition. No way am I going to mail them because of heft and thus price, so now what?

Books and magazines have a section upstairs, but so does non-paper items. These things go into two drawers built into the side of my work space. Honestly, I don’t know what’s in there, not really. I find stuff for free, or at a thrift store, and it gets dumped there. Maybe I’ll use it or maybe it’ll last forever and ever in large piles. My wife and I have been in our house for six or seven years, so those drawers are full. 

The "frame" is a children's puzzle.

Yes, that's Shirley MacClaine's eye in there!
So…I have a bunch of small pieces of things I glued together without a plan, blocks and dice and small bits of plastic. I went digging in the drawers and found two painted boxes that puzzle pieces once went in. No idea how long ago these were painted, or even why they were painted? Some of the glued pieces fit right into these painted boxes, giving them a shadowbox feel. Think Pop Art Joseph Cornell. In a couple of these boxes I worked in a baby doll foot, a paper collage I had on my desk, board games pieces, and some repurposed old cardboard. I really love old cardboard, I have a giant box of it upstairs. Slowly something started to emerge. I went from being bored at my and desk and indiscriminately gluing stuff, to somehow producing these objects of varying quality.

Now that things have taken shape, I have a focus, a vision for what might come next. For me this means a lot, namely I’m thinking about these objects during my daily routine. This changes how I go into thrift stores. Over the coming weeks, as I try and finish up some more boxes, I’ll think of what can be included. I’ll look a little longer at thrift stores, especially the kids section. Taking apart children’s games is so much fun and cheap. And I’m sure I’ll dig through the trash a little more than I normally do. Just yesterday I bought some things with the express idea of finishing a couple these boxes. I found some plastic balls and tiny bowling pins and a few old board games with 50 year old cardboard inside.

Side note. I’m fascinated with signs, I love signs. You know signs, like the ones that give you direction while you’re driving, I think they’re terse poetry. I’ve always made things like these. I especially like them when they’re not doing exactly what they need to be doing. Signs that confuse as much as clear up. Signs that play with puns while trying to tell you something in just a few words. I’ll end up making a lot of these with blocks and scrabble letters. 

This is capital "A," art!

 

 

 

Thursday, September 28, 2023

Marko and the Magic Magnet

First off, thanks go to Marko Reid for sending me pictures of the solo magnet show he curated in Portland Oregon.

Perfectly positioned on a Portland Oregon street.
When he posted the images, I started to think about all of the strange objects I’ve encountered in my life, whether they were at a thrift store, or in a public space. When you see something that grabs your attention, you generally try and make sense of how it got there. You fill in the gaps the best you can imagine, but you’ll never truly know. The not knowing is the excitement! My goal with this entry, is to completely ruin that excitement and describe how my magnet ended up on a Portland Oregon street.

And all the assholes ask, “How long did it take you to make that?”

I collect a lot of magnets. I think a refrigerator with well curated magnets is a happy refrigerator. You can tell a lot about a person based on the magnets on their fridge. Since I’m always curating my own permanent refrigerator magnet show and randomly making things, I decided to put the two together. Simple, collages (and other ephemera) on magnets, stick them to places, and see if others would help me move them around the world.

The backs of the pieces in this Portland collection, come from a variety of sources. One of them is a children’s block that I spray-painted and put scrabble letters on the front. There’s nothing more fun that taking apart old board games to see what you can make out of them. Another piece is simply a collage stuck to a thin magnet sheet. Two of them are those magnets you get on trips; you know the ones with a picture of Amish country on them. Yeah, I just spray-painted those different colors and in one, glued a collage to it, and in the other one, glued two pieces of a board game to them. The perfectly square magnet came from a recent trip to Scrap Exchange in Durham. They had a bunch of religious images on a magnet that I quickly made blue when I went home. The black backing is from an off brand dollar store in Thomasville North Carolina. They have a bunch of those thin pieces of wood for a $1.25 that I buy in bulk. The blue image on the far right is a description of the show, printed on blue cardstock, and then put in a premade plastic frame with magnets on the back. I found the frames in a pile of stuff in my makings room, I’m sure they came from a thrift store.

The collages themselves are made up of pieces of paper picked from all over North Carolina. Chances are much of what you see here came from the “free bin” at McKay’s in Winston-Salem. I generally focus on religious books, out of date medical books, and in the case of one collage, classical sculptures. I generally look for line drawings and poorly printed images. Sharp, deeply colored images aren’t my thing. I want what I create to look a little shitty, like it was a copy of a copy…punk flyers. I want it to look somewhat old after it’s been freshly created.

On the magnet, third from the left, you see two circular images. Both of these are stickers that I printed off on my home computer. I broke that printer this summer. One of them is a scan of a man looking down the barrel of his gun. The other image reads, “The Nice Price.” If you’ve spent any time looking through old records, you will have come across this sticker. The sticker was affixed to a lot of cut out or severely discounted records.

Over the course of many weeks, I amassed a lot of collages made of various materials. They were organized into piles of five. I tried to make sure there was some variety in each show. No street could handle an art show made up of just my face on square tiles. I had to move those around, dilute the sexiness.  I added a sheet of directions to the pile and then put them in cheese bags I collected over the course of a couple years. Don’t worry, I washed them out. From there I posted online that I was looking for people to curate these magnet shows, I took down names, and then mailed to each person who request them. Folks generously put them up in their town, sent me pictures and video, and then I posted them to my social media. To attract as much attention as possible, I shared the shows with multiple online groups.

Let the magnet hit the floor.
Marko posted images and video from the show he put up. A few days later, he followed up his initial post with the following photo. It seems that one of the magnets had been taken from the show, per the directions, and deposited on the street a couple blocks away. Someone must have taken it from its original location, walked with it a bit, and then tossed it away. Here is where I wish I had cameras set up. So often I do these sorts of projects that I know illicit a response, whether confused or amused or completely annoyed, but I never get to see them. Just knowing that they occurred makes such an endeavor worth it. Marko found the magnet in this helpless state, face down, and by public utilities. Rightfully, he took it home and put it on his well curated refrigerator. The magnet needed a rest. It had traveled a long way. 

Home on a happy fridge.
 So yeah, it took some time.