Life Is an Adventure for the Adventurous
Back in the Spring I got a phone call from my old friend Picasso Gaglione.
Picasso is an artist, a Fluxus artist, mail artist, rubber stamp artist, assemblage artist and general practitioner of the sort of art that has always had difficulty staying politely inside the boundaries assigned to it. He has been at it for decades.
He is also getting older.
The reason for his call was twofold; to invite me to participate in QuickKopy Conceptualism: Bay Area Dada to Bay Area Punk and that he had decided to contribute a significant body of his work to the archives of the Collage Museum. As I understand it, we are talking about quite a few bankers boxes filled with his Fluxus box assemblages.
Picasso’s boxes are in Knoxville, Tennessee.
So there was the practical question of how to get them from Knoxville to Albuquerque. I could probably have figured out some way to have them packed and shipped. Instead I thought:
We’ll go get them.
And with that, something changed. A shipment became a trip.
Picasso had called me while I was preparing for a 49-day collage expedition through Europe and the UK. During the conversation about the QuickKopy Conceptualism exhibition in Geneva.
As it turned out Geneva was already going to be part of my journey. I was planning to meet the collage artist Berni Stephanus there after Berlin.
Then we compared dates. As it turned out, through no planning on my part, I was going to be in Geneva at exactly the time Picasso’s exhibition was opening.
So Berni, his wife and I attended.
And because I went to the opening, I also had the opportunity to meet the curator, Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University, New York.
None of this was part of some carefully constructed master plan. One thing simply followed another thing. I happened to be going somewhere. Picasso happened to call. He happened to mention an exhibition. The dates happened to coincide.
But coincidence alone doesn’t get you through the door.
You still have to show up and I’ve been thinking about that lately.
We tend to imagine adventures as things we set out deliberately to have. We book the flight to some exotic place. We climb the mountain. We sail across the ocean. We make the grand plan and then execute it.
But I’m not sure most of the interesting adventures of my life have happened that way. In fact, I tend to prefer not planning things out too certainly becuase the future is so uncertain. Still, some planning must be involved and I am usually not too good at that part.
More often something appears. A person calls. Someone makes a suggestion. A door opens. Two unrelated things suddenly turn out to be related.
Something you weren’t looking for crosses the path of something you were already doing. And for a moment there is a little opening. You can walk past it. Or you can say, Well, let’s see where this goes.
My son Zach and I had already been talking about doing some traveling together. He invited me along to Thailand when I was in Los Angeles last December and I decided to go on the spur of the moment. We had a great time.
Zach has spent most of his life bouncing around among creative forms: acting, dancing, filmmaking, writing, painting and music. Lately music has moved to the foreground. He has been writing songs at an astonishing rate and is putting together a country album.
We have also decided to work together more deliberately. Zach is the talent. I have been appointed Executive Producer, which sounds considerably more impressive than my current qualifications would suggest for producing a country album of which I know utterly nothing.
I know how to build a life around making art. The music publishing business… hum... This seems to me like an excellent reason to learn something about it.
So now we have an artist in Knoxville with a collection of work that needs to come to Albuquerque, a father and son looking for an excuse to get out into the world together, a country songwriter with a guitar, a collage artist who has never required much encouragement to turn travel into an expedition, and a vehicle with room for a considerable number of bankers boxes.
That seems like enough ingredients to begin with.
There is one more thing.
Picasso hosts an annual Fluxfest in Knoxville, and our timing happens to coincide with it. Of course it does.
So we’ll attend the Fluxfest. We’ll interview Picasso for the YouTube channel we’re developing. I’ll bring along some basic collage materials and collect more along the way. Zach will bring his guitar. We’ll have cameras and recording equipment.
What we don’t have is a tour. No string of venues. No performances booked. No elaborate itinerary designed to make us appear more organized than we actually are. In fact, we have no idea how to go about setting up a tour.
We’ve decided to call it our practice tour. Practice Tour #1.
The idea is to practice getting out there. Practice traveling together. Practice documenting what happens. Practice making things along the way. Practice recognizing an opportunity when it appears. And perhaps most importantly, practice leaving enough empty space in the plan for something we haven’t imagined yet.
I am reminded of the recent article:
The Best Use of the Will is to be Willing.
I’m suspect that willingness has a great deal to do with adventure. But I’ll leave that thought alone for the moment.
Right now there are some bankers boxes in Knoxville that need to be picked up and a Fluxfest to attend.
We have a guitar and some sound equipment
I have my collage tools.
We’re taking the cameras.
And we’re going to see what happens.
Life is an adventure for the adventurous.
Stay tuned for Practice Tour #1
We are heading out imminently and will be reporting from the road.
And hey, send us some gas money! It’s a long way to Knoxville, TN and back.
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Your adventurous spirit has taken you to all sorts of wonderful places with all sorts of really great experiences. With my knees that scream at me and other physical ailments, I can only have such adventures in my mind and through my art and writing. Yet I allow my limitations to wall me in more so than what I may possibly do.....like a prisoner of my own making, I've gotten way too used to the comfort zones that have cushioned me in and I have become somewhat paralyzed by my choices.