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2 years agoThe Journeyman Project [Concept Paper/Proposal Draft (Beta1)]
[Note: In 2003 I went home to West Virginia to care for my elderly parents for a year. That entailed closing my Nashville studio. Except for work with Shane Kennedy, Dane Carder, Max Abrams and John Guider, this move brought an end to the very productive period of solo and collective artist work (DDDD/01) based in the Music City. I had already committed to do a residency in Eureka, CA (Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes, w/Morris Graves Foundation and the Ink People Center for the Arts). When I returned from that project to West Virginia, I used the plentiful free time and web connection to do write and do research. I’d been asked to compose a white paper of my 4D analysis of Eureka’s cultural topology. That morphed into a near-unintelligible free-association, in which I made a sincere attempt to define 4D for production. It’s pretty embarrassing to re-read this text. After showing it to several very accomplished and practical arts-friendly businessmen and producers, who kindly instructed me to go back to the drawing board, I was compelled by circumstance to move on to other projects. In some important ways, this part of the JP Proposal became a foundation for the work that would become my thesis. I also set out in the JP Proposal to actually write a proposal for patronage of the project. Unfortunately, I possessed no working knowledge of such things - my experience, which by this time was fairly extensive - was rooted in fieldwork. My agreements were usually of the handshake variety. My support infrastructure relied primarily on informal goodwill. I had almost no understanding of the standard forms and protocols, and I think a very naive POV on how the institutional art world functions. Since the writing of this proposal, and my education at the Drucker/Ito School + MFA training at CGU, and due to continued engagement at those levels of cultural social architecture here in the mainly art-ambivalent USA, plus oodles of research independent of the company line, I can say that my comprehension of the field, its mechanisms, levers, and switches is much improved. I recognize now that my Journeyman Project was doomed. It has been reformulated more realistically into the New Art in Action program proposal I recently published and which I will begin pitching this week. To summarize, the big text that follows is a lump of coal that I hope will start burning better now that it’s been pressurized over what seems like a few million years. Finally, I perfunctorily reformatted the text, but made no great effort to clean it up for pro apps/print. Please think of it as a rough Beta.]
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