Work

     Some years ago I spent a few minutes along with some others with the sculptor George Trakis. It was during the Structures for Behavior show at the AGO. Trakis had a piece in the show, one that I remember anyway. It was set up just inside the fence on Beverley Street and if I recollect correctly it was a beam about 20' long and 3' off the ground. The idea was that you looked at the thing, liked it or didn't. You walked or chose not to walk the beam and fell off or didn't. I liked it. I walked. So of course there was all this stuff going on besides just a visual appreciation.
     Well you know ART's a tricky business. Anyway what I remember about the short encounter with the artist in the Gallery cafeteria was a comment he made about his work habits. He was in New York at that time and had a rather damp, dingy studio. Periodically he would emerge and wander into a cafe and write postcards, or engage in some other mundane activity. I remember the postcard thing. This is before cell phones or cell phones that weren't the size of a case of beer. So here was an artist speaking candidly about the need for serious downtime in the creative process. His idea of downtime anyway. I've alway remembered the post card image. You know, Dear Emily, I have a cold and .  .  .  .
     It sounds a little like the Feed, doesn't it?  Well I suppose in the way that a horse drawn cart is a little like a Ferrari.
     I have a small collection of postcards from places like Nassau, Paris, Casablanca, Lima, Bolinas, Mazatlan. They are so old the ink has faded. Many of them are hardly readable, though the generic faces of the cards have weathered well. So the ink has faded and it is only the dodgy archive of my memory that allows me to know one from the other. The details are faded just as the memory has faded and though they are my small treasures, friends, family, others, they are, like coins dug out of a muddy field, surely coins, but so much less.