Re: Enigmatic argyle detours

> >I'm sorry you didn't get anything out of the piece I posted, Judson,
> >but I am not inclined to
> >defend it when it feels like all I can expect is
> >list-as-competitive-computer-game.
>
>
> personal space invaders.
>
> sorry, jim, wasn't meant to pick on you and your piece but the vast
> majority of art advertising on these lists. no defense necessary. i
> really would just like to get some kind of answers from SOMEBODY
> though. these aren't rhetorical questions.
>
> PvB said something recently on the Thing (if you're on 6 art lists,
> you might be on that one) about "sometimes artists ask ?s for other
> reasons than getting the answer". But I was brought up in the
> mid-west. when i want to get an answer, i ask a question. (Is that
> the problem? Artists might assume questions are really statements
> with funny punctuation?)
>
> hope your having a happy day.
>
> Judson

I see that my post was unaware of the context in which it appeared, Judson. My bad.

Thanks for writing again.

When posting work on lists, particularly if one isn't familiar with the list, it's hard to know
how to present the email so that the work is in a useful context. I should have waited longer
before posting work to the list.

You asked why artists want people to experience their work.

I imagine there are many reasons. When I was a child, I remember trying to tell my parents about
the amazingness of having felt that I was flying when I was running down the sidewalk. They
assured me that I hadn't been. I knew that, but what I was trying to get at was the amazingness
of the intensity of the feeling that I had been. Ah yes, very nice. Yes but yes but what is
real?, I might have asked, if I'd had the language for it. Uh, you felt like you were flying but
you weren't.

I came to the sad conclusion that there were things that you just couldn't communicate, that
words had basic limitations that ruled out the communication of a lot of interesting things.

Then when I ran across William Carlos Williams's poem The Great Figure in grade 5, it seemed to
me that, ah, poetry breaks all those boundaries and you could communicate anything if only you
found the right words, at which point I was hooked, and it's been all downhill from there.

Thanks for your post, Judson.

ja