Automata

Tatlin claimed to have a machine-heart, said, long before McLuhan, "the material is the message". Material is certainly a medium. His effort was to move from the abstract to the real and leave aesthetics behind. The fusion of art and life. His followers in Germany, Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy (a Hungarian, they're always lurking) formed a Constructivist group in Berlin in 1922. Moholy-Nagy taught at Bauhaus where the program was based mainly on Tatlin's ideas. The ideas still percolate, the sense that materials determine how they are to be used has been increasingly important to me for the last several decades, almost everything in and on my house has a natural edge. The Wrack Show is all about the materials. Too much time with the 11th Britannica, small print edition, hard on the eyes. Headache. Take a walk, air and birdsong to relieve the pain. Some self-medication. Volume 27 (my favorite is Volume 26, SUB to TOM) where there's no entry on Jacques Vaucanson, of the famous Duck, automaton of the first water. I manage to waste an hour, reading the entries on Typography, Utah, and various Vampires. Finally get some information online. Pierre Jacquet-Droz made a writing child that scripted perfect letters. Duchamp worked on a piece for nine years, became 'The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even' usually called the LARGE GLASS. By mid-afternoon my brain is a bowl of pudding, I eat a cold can of pork-and-beans directly from the can, another of those awful habits I picked up camping or when I was living out of my truck after the separation. When you're on a butte, alone, in the middle of nowhere, no one cares if you fart. The cookstove is acting up, not drawing properly, need to take it apart tomorrow and clean the smoke chase (the envelope that takes flue gases around the oven before they exit) and as that is a messy job, I postpone the Saturday bath. I would have worked on the stove today, but I had already started a fire and buried my head in a book before I realized there was a problem. Not a huge problem because there is a second damper that by-passes the chase and sends smoke right out the chimney. An important feature as it allows heating a small area on the stove-top hot enough to cook, without a lot of extraneous heat. Spring and Fall. In the summer I grill and eat a lot of raw things. I took in butter beans and a Key Lime pie for the staff, they squealed and ate the pie first. Good call. The beans were very good, Pegi asked how I did them, I blenderize a small onion with a couple of cloves of garlic, add that and a can of chicken broth to a bag of frozen Baby Limas, throw in a bay leaf, lots of black pepper, a couple of chunks of smoked jowl, bring to a boil pull off the heat and simmer for several hours. I stir them occasionally and sample a few, until they dissolve on the tongue in a satisfying way. The skin explodes, in a minor eruption, and the interior magic reminds you of home. The best fried chicken is like this, in a slightly different way. Aunt Pearl did chicken that well; I do a thing with eggplant where your tongue is surprised and sends mixed signals. Next week begins several weeks from hell, but it's on the schedule and we're not surprised, so we should be able to do it. I could hang a show in purgatory, if that's what the job was, in and out, you wouldn't even remember what I looked like, tall or short, heavy or thin, he may or may not have been wearing a hat. That's me. No one ever sees the birthmark nor the tat. Some things are left better unsaid. What we thought we might be looking for. Hey, I'll let you in on a secret, I never had any expectations. I was just watching.