So I did a series of improvisational projects that were based on "seven African powers." And these are all monoprints. There are a combination of monoprint and wood cut, where I would do a monoprint and then look at the monoprint and decide from the monoprint what kind of woodblock needed to be cut to go along with it and print those both those things just one time. So there's a series of those. This would be the one that's SU. And this one's actually in the show, the Mastry show that's traveling.
So anyway, you're starting to get the picture. So by the time I started art school in 1977-- so I graduated from high school in 1973. And I was born in 1955. I think Jessica said that. But if you think about what was possible-- so what was available to artists to do in 1955, which was the year I was born, 1955 was a good 41 years after Duchamp had used the ready made object as the emblem of an artwork, when the idea that an artwork wasn't something that had to be made by an artist. It was simply something that could be selected by an artist navigate to this website. That was 41 years before I was born. They had already exhausted almost all of the strategies that were developed out of cubism, surrealism, futurism. All of that stuff had already been exhausted before I was born. Abstract expressionism was almost kind of on its last legs by 1955 when I was born as well. And so all of the options that artists could deploy were already codified and were already on the table. So it wasn't a question of people inventing new things, because if you look at what's happening in the art world from the 1950s on up to now, we're not really talking about the invention of new things, we just simply talking about the way in which things that are already available to us are now deployed for purposes that they hadn't been used for or utilized for up until a particular time. And so when all of-- as somebody had written, you know, writers like Foucault, Benjamin Buchloh, I mean when they write about the way in which all of the options are kind of already on the table and that at the moment in which people arrive at conceptual art, we're engaged in what they call endgame strategies, where you're doing a sort of shifting a little bit here and a little bit there, but you're essentially doing things that have already been codified and defined. I mean, at that moment, then the question becomes how do you choose from the available options you have to do things that those options hadn't been used for up until that time and then to solve some problems or answer some questions about representation that hadn't been asked before? So that's what the question actually becomes at that point. And for me, so the notion of the artist that's the kind of singular expressive individual who is invested in a kind of internal dialogue with himself of which the manifestation is a kind of artwork, that kind of question and that kind of argument that seems sort of out of play. And that at that point, when you know so much about the kinds of things that can be done, you can't make the claim that you don't have a clue when if you are making a work and you end up-- you go through a process and you end up with this thing in front of you that you can't somehow define, that just doesn't work for me, because I don't think you can make that kind of claim any more that you have engaged in a kind of mediumistic practice wherein you go into a kind of a trance, you do some things and when you wake up, there's this thing in front of you and then you subsequently can't define it with language. This doesn't appeal to me. And the history of what I do sort of suggests that. You can find a lot of motivations, a lot of reasons for and a lot of things that will help you to generate a new artwork. So these collages actually happened to be based on the refrain in a poem by Aime Cesaire, called "The Notebook of a Return to My Native Land." They don't look like it.
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