Essays (English Only)

The work starts for me with questions. Is beauty a surface quality? Could it have an inner source? Is beauty like snowflakes, which in infinite number of snowstorms fall billions of unique crystalline shapes; never identical yet each fashioned by the same physical principles. Indeed is beauty a singular ideal or a pluralistic class of possibilities?

Why do I ask these specific questions? Perhaps because my restless eyes have looked at spinning tires along highways, Jasper Johns, Shiva and the calm mudras in Buddhist miniatures and dimly wordlessly felt the connection. Because this particular body has walked in and out of relationships, shopping malls, skyscrapers, Ferris wheels, and Gothic Cathedrals all the while still imprudently seeking the link. Because my curious hands have opened and closed doors, windows both glass-paned and virtual, elaborate carved boxes, books, junk drawers, my own mind, and a facsimile edition of the Commentary on the Apocalypse by Beatus. My questions and my experiences turn and curl and form shapes inside my mind. It is with these same hands, same body, same eyes and the same formal questions I make objects. Objects that open and close. Objects with words and wheels. Objects with mudras and targets. Objects shaped like questions.

ROLLOVER SOCRATES: Definition of the artist in society
Okay, How to start? In early December 2008 I attended the European Convention of Visual Artist 2008 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. I had to deliver one of my mirror pieces to a client in Paris...


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WHY ALL OUR INFLUENCES WOULD FEAST ON OUR ENTRAILS IF THEY COULD
My favorite essay of Smithson is What really spoils Michelangelo? It is the most intelligent and incisive backhanded compliment ever given from one artist to another. The short answer is next to...

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WE LIVE IN A MID-EVIL WORLD
We live in a mid-evil1 time - an age scholastic, conformist, nominalistic, authoritarian and in turns mendacious and mendicant, ruled above all under the rack. How else could a word...

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ORIGINS OF THIS CHANOYU OCCIDENTAL
The idea for making an occidental tea ceremony isn’t new. It came to me as a teenager of perhaps fifteen after I read Okakura Kakuso’s The Book of Tea some twenty years ago. It occurred to me that the...

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DISTRACTION IS THE MUSE OF THE POOR.
Every one knows that the sight of cats or rats, the crushing of a coal, etc., may unhinge the reason. The tone of voice affects the wisest, and changes the force of a discourse or a poem....

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THE WAXING AND WANING OF SPACE/TIME
Is the universe contracting or expanding or is it still? For each artist the answer is unique, yet each addresses the "weak signals "from the "void"...

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LIVING AND WORKING IN A CAVE
Yes Virginia, People still live in caves. Originally either natural caves or open shaft stone quarries to mine stone for the great churches and chateaux of the Loire Valley. Caves gradually

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HIV, ILLNESS AND MY WORK
To say that having AIDS hasn't affected my artwork I would be kidding myself. Yet in some real senses AIDS has not been a direct element in much of my work. Only a few pieces, mostly

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