No. 4 - soil

In his book The Medium Is the Message, author Marshall McLuhan states that

"Professionalism is environmental. Amateurism is anti-environmental. Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose" (92)

This quote resides in my mind after a conversation with my graphic designer friend, a dashing man by the name Eagle, about permanence and art. It is, unfortunately, impossible to maintain a record of all art that ever was, and we daily lose pieces to wear, tear, weather, fire, water, pets, children, wild animals, shredders, terrorism, garbage disposals, folding, creasing, crumpling, erasing, and so on.

To be clear, when I refer to art, I include in my definition every last bit of it: drawings, paintings, sculptures, tracings, doodles, etchings, sketches, murals, stickers - everything. Whether the creator is seven or seventy, the piece half an inch on cheap vinyl or ten meters, woven from fine silk, it is art, and I am talking about it.

And I want to know every single piece of it.

I want it captured. Displayed and admired. Put in a museum to be curated for exhibition at a later date. You can't do that. You can't even do that with most art.

What I can do, and I do do, is make my own little museum, in my phone. In my camera roll. I don't care if its crude, or derivative, or obscene. I reach out and grab what little bits of art that I can in some semblance of permanence.

I photograph stickers. Street art.

As Eagle and I spoke, I drew attention to the contrast between architecture - grand statements, of concrete, steel, and glass, made to last a lifetime - and stickers - bits of paper, plastic, and ink that say, each in their own way, that "I am here." It's that conversation between what McLuhan defines as the "amateur" and the "professional", the street artist and the architect.

Quite a good quote came out of our conversation:

  

 

"A building isn't art until someone's vandalized it."

 I'm working on a zine. 

 

Thanks, 

CJM