CAPTAIN BILL

Captain Bill

Everything I have artist-stated so far can be summed up in the following seven points.  First, that when I make a piece of art I am chasing after some personal notion of visual and also thematic “balance” in the finished product.  Second, that I am driven by compulsive habits to have balance in the process too – turning uptightness into methodology.  Third, that I am excited by the realization that I can apply this methodology and simultaneously clean my apartment by making artistic statements out of my teetering piles of broken or useless stuff.  Fourth, that making art instead of working is not economically viable.  Fifth, that maybe it is.  Sixth, that art is a type of ritual performance with stone-age roots.  Seventh, that the thrill of making art is essentially primal.

I will now elaborate on all of these things, but not in that order, after I tell a story.

In the 1990’s in New York City a man known as Captain Bill lived on the traffic island of Broadway between 80th and 81st streets.  Every refuse-and-recycling collection day Bill would scour the neighborhood for discarded wreckage – old bicycle wheels, broken lamps, empty picture frames, rotting luggage, etc. – and assemble it in one spot on the west side of block.  These compositions were always impressively tall, up to seven feet, and, more amazingly, bilaterally symmetrical.  Somehow Bill managed to find two of almost everything.  Next, the police would arrive and make him take it down.  This happened every time.  So, the art-piece itself was ephemeral, and even had there been no police, Bill’s exhibit was still an accident waiting to happen.  Bill’s transitory display was merely the vespertine part of his day-long ceremony.  That this is an example of art-ritual taking precedence over art-product is underscored by the fact that Bill had nothing to gain from his junk-piles in the form of reward or praise.  The significance of these constructions was that they expressed through accumulation the larger action of collecting for its own sake.  And one might speculate that Bill’s solemn observance of garbage day was fueled by the moment of euphoria when he found a second nick-nack to properly counterbalance the first one.  Eventually Bill got a job and died in a work related accident.