Graffiti and Embroidery on a sunny Sunday.

Yesterday i sat with my old friend gsblott down at the Foufounes Electriques, while Under Pressure played out it’s last day, and watched a sweet new friend Tim work his drawing in fat black markers on the wall.

gsblott drew in thin ink, and I embroidered white houses on a blue tshirt, while the graffiti makers and skateboarders swirled in and around us, appreciating Tim’s art. He scrawled layers of faces in thin, clear black line along the white wall from up on his own scaffold walkways, and came down every once in a while to talk about drawing games we could play in the fall, and friends who throw collage parties and fill a wall of their own exposition with things made by folks from the community who came out to play with magazines and paste.

We talked about politics and how odd it is that something so important to the functionning of a civilization could get so full of spin and glad handing as to be completely alienating to passionate people.

We talked about Wittgenstein, who I haven’t read much of but George has, and we agreed that art might very well be philosophy in practice. I like this formulation. I like how well it sums up my feeling about artists. The ones that aren’t lost in consumer-oriented self-promotion, are practicing their art (and promoting their work, and work they love by others) out of a feeling about the kinds of goodness and knowledge that might be in the world. and so they’re playing like kids with their skills to see what happens, and because they can’t quite help it. And I do think that to be always making “art” is to be seeking the opportunity for the connection that comes in the appreciation of labour and skill and story. Or the connection that comes that’s like a start of joyful recognition. Or the connection that’s like a slight reorienting of the world with new perspective. Or the connection that’s like a wave of foreign sorrow, an incoherent but complete feeling of someone else’s sad and unimaginable story.
Or the connection in the body of a garment that knows your curves and gestures and eliticts a stance and performance from you that feels perfect.

Or or or. Art at its best is connections, and if/when politics gets sick with polarized and blinkered war-like thinking I think we need to look to art to find a humanizing, complicated, intertangled-up direction for connection making. And we need tools within our reach to communicate those other patterns outward into the warring world, and that’s why at Indyish we focus on art with a wide definition; and on free, open source tools for artists; and on playful art-making real world events.

The Indyish events so far have all managed to experience that phase transition type moment that turns individuals into insta why-not smiling friends, and I think that has something to do with our underlying assumption that we’re in a room of fellow muddlers and makers and that we’re all also potentially eachother’s fans. Anyway, whatever the cause of it I feel very lucky to have been a part of it so far. (So much so that I’m waxing poetic before 9am on a Monday morning.. hmm, can you tell I don’t want to go into day job work today? but I should and so I’ll stop this lovey ramble now, and pick up on it again soon.)