Everything S. Q.

The title of a piece I just made in my book: displaced and replaced clear packing tape (now yellowed and loose) had once wrapped a Pete Volkous “turd” (how symbolic is that, some forty years after grad school) when I had mononucleosis and wasn’t able to produce the typical huge and heavy Sculptures expected by my peers; so I painted Papier-mâché turds for Pete’s applause and my final grade in the class. These sculptures overlaid one another creating an oversize tic-tac-toe figure, laid out on the floor.

Today I removed the tape and pasted it into my journal, a 1973 sample of work that traveled, body and soul with me to be reformulated in Fornells, Menorca, Spain, in 1997, and now safely tucked into today’s Jungle Town Journal.
 

Absent this text the piece represents the ‘pure abstraction’ of my aesthetic rebirth-roots in NYC, schlepping across the United States of America to Texas, and then moving to the jumping off place in JingleTown California, where we’ve recently been informed that the building is in escrow.

What’s the point of living without dreaming?

TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles

 

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ButohDrawing

7/10/09
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In ButohDrawing you try to change the space around you for as long as possible, even after everybody’s gone home.

When the work is done right it has so impressed other people that they walk away remembering it and pass it along to others; it’s their own version, not the version of the so-called author or actor or mind reader.*

The work isn’t exactly transparent because its intent in the first place is to do something unusual, different, weird, perfect, whatever – however far you can get. 

interpretation, recombinant reading, image-thought that’s actually spoken or acted, communication in butoh state
– pay it forward.
--= play it forward.
*My favorite writing model is from Roland Barthes:
‘a really good “read” is when it seems to have been written in a foreign language, translated.
It’s well written__ it’s not doxa, it’s paradox.’ (bUtom’s version).


TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles 

 

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popopomo

25 June 2009
The key word for this my virgin blog is popopomo, evolving critical culture from the Dark Ages to modernism through postmodern deconstruction and spiraling ad infinitum, temporarily hovering at popopomo as a cute gay, new marketing strategy for hi capitalism and the WWW.

My notion of Blog ideology is: how many crap islands do we need floating in the seas / orbiting the galaxies?

Present day humans compulsively read. It doesn’t matter if it’s quality, they’ll read n twitter anything as long as it’s in a familiar tongue; the root of High Capitalist virus that spawns and begets mediocrity, crapshoots, so maybe even recombinant reading could be on the way – look in the back door.

TW aka bUtom


Tom White
Professor Emeritus
California College of the Arts CCA

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ButohDrawing Articles 

 

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