[Himself on the cusp between “outside” & “inside” poetry & art, Chirot, whose work, both verbal & visual, is a great, too often hidden resource, wrote from an authoritative if barely visible position in contemporary letters. The depth & breadth of his total oeuvre – the rubbings & collages foremost – is outstanding. What we have posted here, in the shadow of his recent death, is a deeply personalized yet far-reaching poetics & a testimony to his life as an artist & poet. Some of the visual & verbovisual work can also be seen at LIGHT REMAINS--NOT FADE AWAY | Flickr (J.R.)]
for Petra & for my children
“If
you would create, relax before moldy, wet walls and feel form shaping out of
the chaotic patterns.”— Michelangelo
“The most beautiful world is a heap of rubbish tossed down in
confusion.”—Heraclitus
“A final glossary, therefore, cannot be made of words whose intentions are
fugitive.”—William S. Burroughs
“All of this happened when I was walking about starving in Christiana, that
strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark on him . . . “ — Knut
Hamsun, Hunger
“. . . the same subject seen from a different angle gives a subject for study
of the very highest interest, and so varied that I think I could be occupied
for months without changing my place, simply bending a little more to the right
or left.”— Paul Cezanne
“Sembrar la memoria/To sow memory” — Bob
Cobbing and Waldemar Niedzwiecki
——
“The
real war will never get written in the books . . .” writes Walt Whitman at the
end of the Civil War sections in his Specimen Days. “The real life”
of my life isn’t written here any more than “the real war” is written in books.
What I give are some stories of how I learned some methods in the “art of
looking” and its companion the art of survival. These methods go into the
making of the works.
The real story is in the works themselves, though I hope these stories are of
interest and use on their own. After all, if wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be
writing this right now. I might be a racing car driver or an astronomer, as I
wanted to be at age ten. In an old-fashioned manner then, we begin with
childhood and its relation to the present.
In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire writes: "But genius
is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will . .
. consider … (the artist) . . . as a man-child, as a man who is never for a
moment without the genius of childhood — a genius for which no aspect of life
has become stale."
I’m leaving genius out of this, it’s childhood recovered that
keeps fresh the story of one’s artist life in working with what childhood
discovered.
Through time and work one finds how consistent and insistent the basic elements
have been, how intricate their rearrangements. Every day the childhood eyes and
hands meet those of the present, a shock of recognition occurs and one is
finding all over again things hidden in plain sight, seen as for the first
time.
Childhood is my source for the basic elements of the found and the physical.
The found materials exist in the physical world and incite ideas and
imaginations in their use and arrangements.
I lived a lot with my grandparents when a small child. My grandfather and
godfather, Jean (John, “JT”) Trepanier, would come home from his steamfitter’s
construction site work with various sized pipes and pieces of steel, copper and
aluminum. This detritus of the day he’d use to make everything from crucifixes
and chokers with JFK half dollars to merry-go-rounds, go-carts, rickshaws,
birdhouses.
Some nights after dinner he’d drive me back to his work sites with him. His
shiny always well polished Chevrolet’s dashboard had shrines and his welded
medallions of the Madonna, St Christopher, St Jean Baptiste, and Christ Jesus.
An immense revolving compass blinking in sun’s rays kept watch among them. The
idea that shrines could be anywhere — and go anywhere—made a great impression
on me. To this day I make “shrines” of found materials, with their own
imageries and invocations.
Grandpa would proudly show the day’s work and demonstrate how to find yet more
useful pieces of metal. The construction site became alive with possibilities,
as alive as a forest or fields, and as filled with a consciousness of presences
at eyes’ perimeters. To this day I am obsessively drawn to construction sites
and finding materials to work with in various media. It’s a way to say hello and
thank my grandfather. The sites are shrines — and mines — to me of his living
on in me in my life and work.
When I was 9, my parents purchased a house built originally as two plus a shed
that had been pushed all together. It was an 18th century
Vermont structure in rough condition. Tearing out the cheap plaster, lathe and
rat wood to get to old beams and walls, we’d found we’d need lot of good wood
and bricks to rebuild from the inside. There were some old long abandoned
houses nearby and my mother, brother and I began hauling away doors, windows,
widow’s walks, thick boards and ancient bricks and stones for paths and
chimneys. My mother showed us what to keep an eye out for, how to find the best
kinds of wood and brick, old glass, tools and nameless objects with lost
purposes of powerful raw beauty. The greatest thrill was to drag home by our
hands and in wheelbarrow loads of wood and stone, then to see them used in
creating a new home inside the old shell. The rearrangements of these materials
as old as our house made things and house “new”; hence my love for a Pascal
quote I use often: “It is not the elements which are new, but the order of
their rearrangement.”
Another immense glory was to go to the vehicle junkyard one of the Cook family
clan had in his cow pasture. The cows grazed on tall grass rising through
rusted truck chassis and chickens roosted in car interiors. For $2.00 or so
we’d haul home dashboards, steering wheels, engine parts, a battered seat and
create spaceships, “cars of the future”, time machines.
One of the greatest events of all was finding a large crow’s nest lying in the
road running along the edges of a forest, blown down by winds signaling a
coming storm. The roomy interior was lined with strips of foil, bright
cigarette packets, shiny coins, bits of glass, fragments of cloth, buttons,
ticket stubs, wiring, chips of plastic and china, shreds of garish newspaper
ads, and most startling of all, the crowning jewel, a Dinky Toy luxury car
intact nestled among woven dried grasses and glittering junk. A vivid example
of collage and bricolage that revealed a vision of combining natural and
industrial elements in creating a home, a space in the world, made of found
elements.
The crow’s use of texts it could not read but valued for their letters’ bright
forms and colors revealed written language as an element among others,
simultaneously “readable” and “unreadable”. Just learning to read myself, this
fired my imagination in the same way hieroglyphs and calli-pictographic scripts
did — recognizably writing, yet beyond fixed meanings known to me. It kept
alive the childhood apprehension of all forms as writings, signs, and
alphabets. The sense of disappointed confinement one felt in discovering there
were only 26 letters was done away with again.
These experiences are the childhood recovered I use daily in
finding and working with materials. The huge part the physical and found play
for me begins in “the genius of childhood . . . for which no aspect has
become stale. The importance of this aspect is its questioning of
imprisonments of the “art of looking”. To see things fresh is a key to
freedom’s desiring.
In “A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects”, Robert Smithson writes:
A great artist can make art by simply casting a glance. A set of glances could be as solid as any thing or place, but the society continue to cheat the artist out of his “art of looking” by valuing only “art objects”. Any critic who devalues the time of the artist is the enemy of art and the artist.
Paradoxically, developing through time this “art of looking”, of seeing fresh
the possibilities of openings of freedom, brings a more acute awareness of
their imprisonments. The powers, processes, and possessiveness which seek to
make of the artist and the “art of looking” an object, a label, a category,
ultimately a corpse are ever more visible.
Developing the “art of looking” and “childhood recovered” is a way of learning
survival, “thinking on one’s feet” and learning to camouflage oneself in the
manner of the things one finds hidden in plain sight.
My first experience of living in cities was in Paris, as a teenager, living in
the streets, abandoned buildings, parks, all night cafes and cinemas. The ways
of seeing and walking learned in the country, one puts to use in learning the
languages of the street. The acceleration, concentration and profusions of
sensory experiences in the city, can be worked with by using the varying speeds
of languages and looking of the city and country working together. One
illuminates the other.
To apprehend events and signs occurring at great speeds, one learns methods of
slowing perception within time. To learn to see within time, in varying speeds,
is to begin to alter the senses of space. Each method one finds and develops
through practice is another way of opening what at first appears to be
confining. The continual drive and direction of working on and with methods of
seeing in time to open space — and vice versa — is the desire for freedom.
Walking in the country and cities I have lived in is the basis of speed I use.
I have never had a driver’s license, so walking, except for public
transportation and the occasional ride, is the first factor in an “art of
looking” for me. Due to a bone disease I couldn’t walk for almost three years
at one point. For seven years due to a broken back, walking more than a few
blocks at a time was almost impossible. These periods of deprivation make each
day of walking fresh, an experience of freedom. Not taking it for granted
opened my eyes to not taking for granted the things seen and heard in the
world. Everything takes on an interest and use because it isn’t “ordinary”.
The effect of this has been to continually widen awareness of the “hidden in
plain sight” of the physical and found.
Another effect of physical limits I use in developing an “art of looking” is
due to my back being broken three times. Since I can’t turn very much at the
back and shoulders, at first unconsciously and then consciously I’ve developed
an awareness and use of shadows and any mirroring surface—they are far more
plentiful than you’d think — to see what is behind me or to an extreme side
angle. That’s opened up more “avenues” to find and work with.
Walking in the streets generates an energy and speed of the “art of looking”
that refuses the conventional limits of “art production” and “art objects”.
Smithson’s “time of the artist” can alter itself and its speeds in many ways,
including disruptions in the “system of production”. Paul Virilio, in Speed
and Politicswrites:
The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words, a producer of speed.
Living in the streets of Paris in 1969 and 1970, where the after-effects of May
68 were still powerfully felt, (I lived in Arles in 1967-8), deeply affected my
ways of seeing and thinking. The interrelationships among street life and
action — “propaganda of the deed”, graffiti, making posters, squatting, “guerilla
theater/art” etc — with varying speeds of the “art of looking” were everyday
life.
The “everyday life” of the streets learned then became my choice of studio.
Almost all my rubBEings and clay impressions pieces are made directly from
things found in the streets which bear the marks of their everyday existence
there. The evidences of time in the existence of the objects and their being
encountered in the time of the artist create the pieces’ mixing of fragments,
distortions, cracks, textures, sonic and visual effects.
For a six year period in the 1980’s my interest in speeds of movement and
seeing in the city was part of what led to my addiction to speed — amphetamines
of all sorts. When I first was addicted, I was writing regular and free lance
film and music reviews, interviews and essays for various papers in Boston. I
also worked a couple jobs and had a busy private life. Speed has a very
peculiar effect on creating. At first it’s a stimulus to work, but then it
takes a strange turn. The speed at which one is perceiving and thinking makes
for a widening gap in the transfer of these to expression.
Everything one sees becomes so filled with possibilities moving at such high
speeds that one losses the ability to hold on to them long enough to “record”
them. Creative arrangement of elements turns into the obsessive collecting of
elements which less and less often are used to make anything. When the gap with
expression becomes too great, creative expression stops and is replaced by a
sense of one’s own mechanization.
This results in the paring down of existence to the automatic physical
movements such as work and dromomania with its endless finding of more
talismanic and unused materials. The “art of looking” begins to experience gaps
and distortions within it. Hallucinations, paranoias, senses of conspiracies
and a greater and greater interest in the synchronicities of events and signs
take over. A “magical thinking” predominates and the energy to create becomes
devoted to an obsession with interpretation.
The speed created ever increasing deprivations physically and creatively. I
stopped reading and writing and became immersed in the signs in the street.
They had no meanings in language at all—but sent signals at the edges of
understanding. These strange signals all but erased writing and replaced it
with wordless signs. The distance between oneself and others grows eerily.
In one of the only good articles I have ever read about speed and its effects,
the interviewer asks a long-time addict how he would show an addict if he
painted a picture of one. “I would show him as looking,” the addict says, ‘but
at what it is hard to say.”
The positive effect of all this was it kept the “art of looking” alive, even if
very strangely, and the dromomania led to encountering many new people. Since
most of them were “street punks” and runaways, it presented a new world of
signs to become involved with that was creating things —art work, zines, music,
events. The DIY aspect of Punk and now Hardcore made complete sense. The only
thing in the way was the addiction to speed.
Williams S. Burroughs points out over and over that no creative activity took
place during his addiction to heroin. It is only the turning away from this
that gives release to an immense reserve of collected experiences, lookings,
soundings, signs, and their interrelationships with the streets and action.
When I got off speed is when I first began daily work on collages, little
handmade books and zines. This was the first time in my life that creative work
became the everyday core of being for me. I found I could make use of all I had
seen and found and lived in those last six years. And now the “art of looking”
developed methods of expression of my own. Due to life circumstances changing,
this went underground again for about ten years.
Since 1996/7 I have been involved in Mail Art and Visual Poetry, sound scores,
event scores, essays, poetry and prose poetry. As Geof mentions, for me the
biggest event in this period of my life was meeting Bob Cobbing. This changed
the direction of my life in too many ways to discuss here. Seeing his work and
meeting him was a shock of recognition. It was the first encounter I ever had
with someone whose ways of seeing and hearing were so like what I lived with,
and had come to think of as being as an aberration limited to myself alone.
After meeting him I never felt alone again in these, and he made me aware that
if I worked the rest of my life there was a possibility of expressing these
things in a way others may understand. That way, one hopes to be able share the
methods and findings of an “art of looking” that may be of interest and use to
them in working on theirs.
So many major events in life and work have happened in the last years — some of
the very best and some of the very worst and most brutal. The most important is
that no matter the circumstances and conditions, one keeps finding ways to be
working and developing an “art of looking” and expressing this.
“Childhood recovered” with the lessons of finding discarded things in the world
to create with taught one early the links between the art of survival and the
art of looking.
“Necessity is the motherfucker of invention” means there is always something
hidden in plain sight with which to work and survive and work some more.
There’s no need to “run away” to “live and fight another day.” All you need is
right there in front of you. And from there a myriad new worlds begin to open
all around one . . . hidden in sight, no end in sight … there for you to find.
[addendum, from a letter 30.xi.17. This is an essay I Thought might be of interest re "Outsider Poetry/Art” and its interrelationship with an "Outsider Life" —
a number of times, presenting my visual works and performance. event scores to some galleries--I was told they did not present "Outsider Art".
Like many persons considered by society as an "Outsider" due to the facts of one's life, or the sense on some persons' part that one does not "fit in"--like many such persons (addicts, prisoners, those living well below the poverty line etc) — or, as we say in Narcotics Anonymous and AA— those whose lives are leading to "jails, institutions and death"--a great many such persons find themselves being "saved" by finding their creativity in making art, writing and performing poetry, and by these means finding a way to "connect" to society in a recognizable way. I know in my case this is very true.
My great friend the Visual Poet and essayist Petra Backonja — wrote me that she became immediately interested in my work on first seeing it, saying it stood out above anything seen in various Visual Poetry exhibits, anthologies, journals, web sites etc — because "it looked like the artist's work was a matter of life and death."
I think that these are all some elements of "Outsider" works — far Outside as the Outsider feels, thinks, exists — there is not only the struggle of literal "life and death" — but also that of a struggle of the "life and death" of the imagination.]
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