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Seems most of my pieces set up as kind of learning pieces, as ways to adapt to something, kinds of practice sessions for things which might happen...like lots of my stuff last year had to do with setting up regions...or people as regions...in ways that one region would intrude upon another region or combine with another region, like the piece where I'm standing near a person & intruding on his personal space, picking out a person looking at the exhibits & taking over his personal space by forcing him to move because I intrude on the space he set up for himself to look at the exhibit in...or like opening up a private region, or closed system, like I do in that piece with Kathy where she has her eyes closed shut & I try to force them open...so seems lately I've been using mostly other people in my pieces, or animals...before it was mostly me turning on myself, involved with myself...now I'm thinking a lot more about interaction...Getting more and more difficult to separate the two, the art activity and the daily living, and that's what we're working toward, no separation, tho ultimately showing it in an art context...I find that kind of performance tends to clarify things for me, as a kind of model experience...working toward the work...
My sense now to be getting out as much work as I can, constantly, doing 'public' things...so that what becomes public is not so much finished pieces but a process of working...dislike my pieces considered in isolation...like them more to appear as a kind of working notebook than finished pieces...like to document them not just in photographs & description, but along with the notes in a notebook I keep while working on them...the way words, in the notes, can suggest the process of the pieces unlike photos & lead to sense & ideas outside it...like one reason Nauman's work impresses me is that beautiful neatness and completeness to each piece, but it's almost the direct opposite of what I want myself...like Oppenheim perhaps the most influence on my whole sense of an artist today, but going back, I'd say for instance Faulkner was the biggest influence of any kind I ever had, like his lack of desire to finish a sentence, his sense to keep on going beyond where you could possibly follow (Did I say flow?), like sentences that go on for pages...with so many reconsiderations & hesitations & alternatives, his sentences seem to be consciously or unconsciously trying to subvert a fantastically conservative framework...I think they win out...like in myself I sense as a kind of impulse to overcomplicate things, to mess things up, or thicken the plot, of my daily life, to where I almost can't handle it...& finding ways to put things back together...just how far the risk goes: still feel I've got incredible safety mechanisms built in, but the push toward opening things up...learning something...about how it keeps together...
Jasper Johns' sketchbook notes the biggest thing that happened to me, in '64, '65, when I was feeling I'd reached my limits in writing poetry...
A constant attempt to get to, to bring out, all that might be there...to get in, like I think the push is really toward content, real content, and because you're not concerned with perfection, like in Nauman's pieces, it can be very messy, you can use anything, any content, that helps you get there...Terry Fox & Howard Fried a couple of other artists I relate to as working in a similar way...concerned with the mental superstructure or process that is applied to every day things & events...like Fried's moving into a new loft piece...Andy Warhol?...the incredible examination of veneers, pushing of veneers or roles so far...but I'm concerned with acting as if the mask doesn't exist really, even tho it does...healthy would be the mask...that keeps you safe...so that acting as if that mask doesn't exist at least lets you get close to try to see what other possibilities are there and that's just what messes things up, because you get so accustomed to one mask - or one home - you keep trying as many masks as you can...probably the most natural thing would be a combination of many masks, this ability to combine in yourself...wherever you get too vulnerable, the art context, as you are true to it, keeps you safe...so much of my work seems to be about personal relationships...true it's metaphor...a model experience...setting up another less familiar mask, as we were talking about it before...i.e. obviously I wouldn't ordinarily lie down naked on speakers...get tangibly into the music...and at the same time listening to the music is a part of my every day experience...or content...getting at it in fact, which is to say opening the bounds of metaphor...been a long time since I read anything looking for metaphor, it's mostly looking at content, like in books on psychology, sociology...and the same sense of when I'm writing, the language secondary to the content...because it's always in combination with other activities beyond the page...an extended physical space, not mental space, but which needs text to point toward the larger range of mental space...
One real aim of most of what I've been doing is looking on an art work as a way to experience something more than a way to present something...trying to set up situations in which I have to constantly pay attention, to experience things in my way...but the first attention is to what, beforehand, I can bring into that piece, the content, and not how to set up that piece as a dramatic presentation...I like to set it up in as clear a way as possible and not any complicated subtle way...so I'd like it, a piece, to be taken as a model of a certain kind of behaviour, rather than a model of a certain kind of piece...not so much the way a piece can be carried out, but one way a certain life activity can happen...
- July 22, 1971