Daniel Mack

Looking at a collection of made things one can ask: What’s happening here?

 

Too often maker’s answers start with the word “I”  as in

“I have always been fascinated with…”

 

But biography is a very partial and low-level answer.  It doesn’t honor either the unseen forces at work or the crucial importance of the object to take on life

ONLY when it comes in contact with an Other

 

The maker, aware or not, has at least two elusive roles:

to go deep into the old, the unspoken, the messy, the ambiguous, the irregular to go out, bridging to the sensibility of others.

 

Down and Out.      Out and Back.

 

It’s a changing rhythm the maker sets up and some people respond..

The maker is never quite in control of this rhythm. There are parts beyond control. Because accident, chance and coincidence are powerful, ever-present and humbling forces.

The down, for me, is the realm of the marginal, the common, the regular.

In sticks, bark, leaves, logs, stones, feathers, bones

 

The hunt for the sacred in the profane. Is it there??

 

The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas puts it this way:

Split open a log and I am there; Lift a rock and I am there too.

 

This leads to an interest in folk, outsider, the raw, the found, the surreal

The word “foris” has appeared. It’s that place outside the control of the authorities; where the knights become demented.

 

It keeps me tied to decay and fleeting materials: Testimony to Impermanence

 

It impacts technique too.

Just how much fussing is necessary to make the point?

When does flourish of technique get in the way of the connection?

It’s always so alluring to make it more perfect, more admirable

… and more remote.

And for that impact on Others,

Duchamp said, maybe, “Don’t do as I do, Do as you do.”

Just go find stuff and put it together.

 

Daniel Mack

May 16, 2013

Artist's Clan:

Trickster

“The Guide of Souls who allows a plot to be deeply rearranged is rarely an obvious actor in the story at hand, for durable stories are self-containing, self-defended against change and fragmentation. The high gods set guard dogs around their sacred meadows. If there is to be change, its agent will have to hypnotize these dogs and slip into the shadows, like an embarrassing impulse, a cunning pathogen, a love affair, a shameless thief taking a chance.” Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes the World, p. 91.