Painted Steel
17’ x 12’6” x 10’
2019
Photo by Margot Geist
On Success and Failure
This piece is what I put together in my attempt to get a new large sculpture delivered to and installed at a park during this year’s Venice Bienalle. As I stated in another post, for a variety of reasons that attempt failed to fully come to fruition, but as you can see, the sculpture is here now, and in fact has landed in Santa Fe at the gallery Fritz. As I look at it now I am quite happy with the preposterous nature of the thing.
Lately I have written a bit about my childhood obsession with the inner workings of imagination and my need to utilize that imagination to somehow shape my world .
You can read some of what I have written on the Vasari21 web site here:
(In The Beginning : Non Biblical Version)
And my getting older continures to awaken me to such childhood longings. Such things are closer now and much more in focus, if only because of my increasing awareness of just how damnably short life really is.
And this year, in an attempt to grapple with such things as mortality I set some goals for myself.
I am and have been pretty busy pursuing those goals (this sculpture being one of them).
Perhaps that is why the noise accompanying the vexing questions of success and failure have subsided a bit.
But then again, it might be that I have managed to stumble into and out of my own "dark night of the soul". At a fairly young age, I heard about this and fixated on the phenomenon. I can remember thinking back then that "if anyone is gonna get a dark night of the soul, it will probably be me."
So maybe I did muck about in the dark night for a while. I certainly don’t have a better explanation of my experience. And who am I to argue with St John of the Cross or whoever first came upon the thing.
But it seems to me on this side of "the dark night" (if that is where I currently am) questions of failure and success are mute.
Or perhaps it is that the sounds of life have drowned them out and dulled them into submission.
I only know they have not vexed me all that much.
The only questions I have right now are relegated to the subject of what thing am I gonna make next and how do I set about doing it.