Spectatorship

You know the story about how Velvet Underground only sold something like 3,000 copies of their first LP, but everyone who bought it formed their own band? I wonder if there's an artist with the same kind of influence.

I became a spectator. I say artist sometimes because I think about art a good deal, but practically I'm a spectator. I don't even know if there's an in for me with art. Are people in it? Now I don't think I've ever gotten it. I know I loved it, but that's love. I'm talking about social immersion of some kind. Having business at an opening, or needing to exhibit something...That eludes me. No family ties. I enjoy going to certain art galleries like the Belkin Gallery at UBC. But I don't respond in kind. I get disappointed that art has to be within a certain series of protective layers. And theatre, public art, publishing - all of that - has to be ensconced in its occupational ideology. I think it used to be a form of food and was necessary as such. But today it's more of a cuisine than a sustenance. There's a stance one takes.

When we talk about inside and outside are we talking about belonging and not belonging? Is alienation a kind of necessary condition for participating? I mean, otherwise, what is participating? What is one trying to get across, or through, in a practice? What is a practice other than a series of trials and errors?

I don't want art to soothe me.

Yesterday I was working as a cashier at a drugstore. Everyone was soaked, it was dark at four, Phil Collins was playing over the p.a. and a toddler was wailing - bawling relentlessly just aggravated and fed up and finished with the whole scene. He gave voice to everyone's basic condition. Wherever there's a kid wailing like that it brings everyone to face their mortality.
And I was wearing a pin on my uniform that said "I'm new. Thank you for your patience."