The day after I landed at Toronto Pearson International Airport, August 18 (click back), I was in Whitby picking up Afternoon at Lumsden Lake from The Station Gallery. I had lost the people's popularity award of a wiki chosen exhibition this winter.

The winner was: Jennifer Dorner

Two days later, this day, August 19; I was at Homer Watson House picking up LandSea.

Two hours later I was at the Blue Mountain Foundation for the Arts in Collingwood, Ontario. I took the day to transport LandSea from Homer Watson House Gallery in Waterloo. At Homer Watson four people had showed up to hear the "artist's talk" that I spent 2 days writing, specially configured for the central importance of the house and The Doon School of Fine Arts, and... illustrated with digital slides projected. I was lecturing my art history master's thesis (years in the conception), Art and Technology. It was well received by all four although they interrupted me several times to offer their thoughts which often strayed from academics into the business of making and selling art for a living.

"No idea about that but... notice how Picasso and Braque used their experiences at movie houses to inspire their Cubism? They were introducing an illusion of the fourth dimension of time, motion, and point of view into the still of a painted surface."

Ron MacRae kindly received the show and stored it for several days before the exhibition opened on August 24 because the La Cloche Expedition final organizational meeting was the next day, the 20th of August. We were due to depart for Killarney Provincial Park on August 21st.

Ron and I retired to a coffee shop to spend the rest of the afternoon talking about art. Ron had given up on making it and I am thinking about giving it up. I was thankful for his sympathetic ear. Most people are astonished and irritated by the audacity of my thinking such a thought.

"Artists don't retire." I am told.

"It has been since July 26 when I completed my last artwork; the longest time since 1965 that I have not worked at it." I confessed to Ron. "It is almost as if my life, my schedule, which is partly out of my hands, has agreed that it is best to stay out of the studio."

Ron talked about music making or what he called "making sound". He has poured his talent into it parfait, sound on sound.

I make sounds too but, it is outing something that does not have a place in the world beyond my own ears either. I am not a performer. I don't like stages and being centred. My ideal would be not to make anything; a pure conceptualism in which I will not make a recording, a performance, a scene, an installation of photographs and/or found objects, I'll make no intervention, no exhibition nor any marking to celibate not doing art, in a public gallery, that cannot be bought or sold.

This new art of mine cannot be egocentric or it would be a strike... an art strike for higher wages and better working conditions. I don't need the money and I have no desire or time for the depravity of adulation. I have no desire for a comfy chair in a university. No, not an art strike to break the art economy either. Revolution for fun is revolting. Not as revolting as art therapy but, close. I get no pleasure from shocking people. I do not delude myself that an angry or bored audience is learning a new lesson. I am not a teacher. Besides, it would be a DADA act to strike any which way when the value of my labour amounts to nothing.

I am not that stupid.

What is this blog? It is a journal, obviously, a web log. Journalism is not, definitely not art. This is a diary, my dear diary designed as decaying, decadent nutrient for my own growth, revelation, and flowering.

Pure art? Music is the most elemental abstraction. Not concrete. Not lyrical. Instrumental. Played, vibrating the air, ephemeral... floating away... fading into silence out of which it came.

romantic twaddle

i make a fool of myself

i should say

and write

nothing

but

the refus global manifesto

paul-emile borduas

august 9, 1948

100 times

on a black board