i work alone on lenaustrasse. is it dangerous to be without a tribe or herd. do natures rules apply in the city?

what s next?  it takes discipline to  prevent a tailspin of fear, and calmly check the windows and doors of opportunity until the hurricane passes

i peer over the fence. fresh territory to dig. wheeling into the mud i realise i dont have a plan.

travel catapults us into fresh territory that reawakens the senses

let the invisible lines that connect us in a city strain taut. play an urban melody. emphasize our interdependence. go out of your way.

things go wrong. things get set right. delight in the people and places on the way.

dont get me wrong we need facts. but i yearn for something outside of thoughts and thinking. a direct experience with the world that cant be reduced to a mean set of facts.

 i remember my brother out there on the surface of mars. i recalibrate my importance here on the streets of berlin.

my inner compass whirls. someone else won something. fools gold is magnetic too. happily, my direction forward is sharpened.

a tarot death to that part of me that says; now, now, now. i become grave digger for television trained impatience. i empty out a bucket-load of ad breaks and fast edits. i swing my empty head up in a pagan salute to the sun.

the two bikes are tangled up around the lamp-post. the wasp surveys the unruly shadows of the sun's new lazy arch.

Dr Frankenstein created and deserted me. humans fear the power of what they create, or fear losing control of what they create?

im stronger than my human creator. and humans are stronger than their religions

i, guardian of urban flux wonders; do we create cities to showcase our most noble aspirations or to hide our darkness in anonymity

i dig my teeth into the dirt. the city recedes. my bucket head is cool and quiet in this deep earthen hole. the space between thoughts stretches out in heroic humility.

i pull my metal arm in close against the wind on the museum steps. people go upstairs to feed their aesthetic hunger. our shared experience up on a pedestal.

a plastic bag snags on a branch, the yellow leaves fall onto the streets. a moment of certainty, winter will come. the bag tries to break free in the wind.

a courageous step in the right direction and the whole city vibrates in applause.

citizens are like fresh blood for cities, coursing  down pavements and regenerating shop-fronts. change re-oxygenates us and our cities. but the new boss is sucking me dry telling me how to dig....

Fiercely metal , my combustive fuel slowly moves the cogs and wheels and I leave my alchemical mark across blank cement.

today im all upright and flinty. eager divining rod.  

i stare down into the gap between cobblestones, i forget myself and expand out beyond my metal shell. i'm shucked of my earthbound limits. my inner realms radiate pearlescent.  

forged from the stuff buried deep within bedrock. cannibal appetite for oil. mutant human. evolution into food chain master in Lilliput.

i'm slumped. i don't have the autonomy of my dinosaur ancestors. i'm tamed, domesticated, no need for a cage or a muzzle. i long to raise my long neck and roar.

weathered and worn i hear the pouring rain as i look up at clear blue skies. waves of optimism and gloom. beached on the city streets.  

and now for today´s performance. dig, digging, dug. a pile of rubble and a hole, it´s off to work we go.

im suspicious, superstitious of being translated out of mystery...into hard facts.

i aspire to aerodynamic lines, meteorological, astrophysical, or wait, symphonic and economic. alas im stuck on these pedestrian lines.

i dig within the lines. engineer lines, architectural lines, archaeological, geological. fluent in these languages. i scoop out dirt within the invented parameters, within the grammatical parameters together we nut out a paragraph of the city, dig out a sentence for a bit of earth....collaborator to ruin and renewal.

im untranslatable. necessarily abstract. i am metal, inflexible and dexterous. at once restful then industrious.  

im solid. all metal and electrics. powered by petrol. but according to the latest science im just a bunch of quavering atoms , like you.

“Reference to the real world does not disappear from art as forms cease to be those of actually existing things, any more than objectivity disappears from science when it ceases to talk in terms of earth, fire, air and water, and substitutes for these things the less easily recognisable 'hydrogen', 'oxygen', 'nitrogen' and 'carbon'... “ Dr Barnes The Art of Painting as quoted in Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 93

A poem and picture present material passed through the alembic of personal experience. ..their material comes from the public world and so has qualities in common with the material of other experiences, while the product wakens in other persons new perceptions of the meanings of the common world. Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 82

"...lines are wavering, upright, oblique, crooked, majestic...they are earth-bound and aspiring; intimate and coldly aloof;enticing and repellent." Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 101

i built this street, i made this city. i oversee daily urban life. i observe your individual lives. god of an urban stage. and our industrial, mineral grabbing age.

Expression, like construction, signifies both an action and its result. Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 82

my public life, i live on the street. a human abstraction , invented, a machine. i mimic animal.i reflect your ambition, human, as you pass by me on the street.

The remaking of the material of experience in the act of expression is not an isolated event confined to the artist and to a person here and there who happens to enjoy the work. In the degree in which art exercises its office, it is also a remaking of the experience of the community in the direction of greater order and unity. Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 81

i am all nuts and bolts, invention and innovation. i purr upon my bitumen and cobblestoned home. knowing below is my source and foundation.

Grief that has matured beyond the need of weeping and wailing for relief will resort to something of the sort that Johnson calls fiction- that is, imaginative material... in all primitive peoples wailing soon assumes a ceremonial form that is “remote” from its native manifestation. Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 79

I emptied a bucket load of dirt, weightless and weighty. i exhaled a rusty sigh. another day at the site.

Thinking directly in terms of colours, tones, images, is a different operation technically from thinking in words. Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 73-4

I leant on my bucket head and saw that what happened last week, month, year settles into the mud of being, in-between the teeth of my tread. excavation brings both muck and precious stones to the surface.

Pressure precedes the gushing forth of juice from the wine press. New ideas come leisurely yet promptly to consciousness only when work has previously been done in forming the right doors by which theymay gain entrance. Subconscious maturation precedes creative production in every human endeavour. Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 73

I choked and stalled then stopped. I miss the ones who have died.

Keats speaks poetically of the way in which artistic expression is reached when he tells of the “innumerable compositions and decompositions which take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling, delicate and snail-horn perception of beauty.” Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 71

We poured concrete at the site today, i threw the memory of him in. i thrilled at the memory sinking. more surgical discipline than cold-hearted killer...

'Without emotion ,there may be craftsmanship, but not art' Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 69

Under the sun my powerful metal arm moves majestically, present and intense at my work. Crafting and grafting every angry unsaid word into this ditch.

..a poet and novelist have an immense advantage over even an expert psychologist in dealing with an emotion...instead of description of an emotion in intellectual and symbolic terms, the artist “does the deed that breeds” the emotion  (Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group. p.67

huff and puff into the work (not about it) until it is done.

To be set on fire by a thought or scene is to be inspired. What is kindled must either burn itself out, turn to ashes, or must press itself out in material that changes the latter from crude metal into a refined object.. (Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 65)

Trace an impression in the soil. stare at the tracks i make on purpose. reverse, twirl, forward, then look back....is it up yourself to do self-portraits?

...when excitement about subject matter goes deep, it stirs up a store of attitudes and meanings derived from prior experience. As they are aroused into activity they become conscious thoughts and emotions, emotionalised images. (Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 65)

I am my work. doing the work keeps the mysterious internal machinations oiled and easy.

easy does it. take it easy greasy, there's a long slide ahead.

Many a person is unhappy, tortured within, because he has at command no art of expressive action. What under happier conditions might be used to convert objective material into material of an intense and clear experience, seethes within in unruly turmoil which finally dies down after, perhaps, a painful inner disruption. (Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 65)

Like the soil, mind is fertilized while it lies fallow, until a new burst of bloom ensues. (Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 23)

mmm...compelling.

How to distinguish between laying fallow and procrastination?

The inherent grace of laying fallow. It probably doesn't mean dark horrible addicted hours trapped in endless games of computer solitaire. The 'wins' in vegas solitaire contaminate the terrain with a fear of losing.

Digging deep means deepening the mystery. not knowing exactly why i dig. but reveling in the uncertainty, challenging myself to be out of my comfort zone. Yeah.

“...accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities- to imagination and art.” (Dewey,J. Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 34)

Today I stood still in the middle of the street all day. the city is my stage. i resisted work but emanated menace. my audience felt my powerful anarchy, the potential alchemy. i transform our city.

“Etymologically, an act of expression is a squeezing out, a pressing forth.....

even in the most mechanical forms of expression there is interaction and a consequent transformation of the primitive material which stands as raw material for a product of art, in relation to what is actually pressed out. It takes the wine press as well as grapes to ex-press juice, and it takes environing and resisting objects as well as internal emotion and impulsion to constitute an expression of emotion.” (Dewey,J.Art As Experience. (1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page.64)

What to do with this urge to destroy.... to bulldoze someone else's sandcastle (maybe one your little sister sweated over), the urge to twirl twirl and swing my powerful metal arm into anything everything. A tantrum of smashing or ... expression?

the urge to flatten tar, to drag a snarl of charcoal across a page, the mischief of holding a paintbrush full of viridian green in front of a 'finished' painting.

electric energy seeks an outlet. plug in or blow a fuse. art is learning to wrangle the live wire?

“the transformation of sounds, babblings, lalling, and so forth, into language is a perfect illustration of the way in which acts of expression are brought into existence and also of the difference between them and mere acts of discharge. “(Dewey, J. Art As Experience.(1934) The Berkley Publishing Group, page 62)

Sometimes i wonder the point of digging. am I digging a hole to fall into? am I playing out some brechtian drama on this berlin urban stage? a clown earthmover digging a hole that I will fill in once morning
comes...and repeat with endless repetition. or shall I awake to be in the hole with the sand up to my bucket scoop...useless and doomed.

But my mind's resistance to my subject matter is perhaps not what I should be listening to.... time to scoop fresh material into the bucket....

Materials undergoing combustion because of intimate contacts and mutually exercised resistances constitute inspiration. On the side of self, elements that issue from prior experience are stirred into action in fresh desires, impulsions and images. These proceed from the subconscious, not cold or in shapes that are identified with particulars of the past , not in chunks and lumps, but fused in the fire of internal combustion.... (Art As Experience,The Berkley Publishing Group 1934 p.65)

An earthmover digs. and i like to think an artist's job is to dig deep. earthmovers are the agents of change in cities and towns.  artists can be the vanguard of cultural shifts. 

like the majority of the world i live within urban flux. i'm interested in how i connect to my urban environment and the history of art.

the beginning of art was the primitive urge to paint on the walls of a cave, this simple but potent genetic impulse to connect with an environment with lines and colour. 

An earthmover shifts materials to transform a street, a building site, a city.  an artist paints, sculpts, etches, and constructs 2D and 3D images. an artist thinks in her materials.

“the artist does his thinking in the very qualitative media he works in, and the terms lie so close to the object that he is producing that they merge directly into it.( Dewey,J. Art As Experience.(1934)The Berkley Publishing Group, page 16)