25 RANDOM THINGS ABOUT THE ARTIST KEN BOE
1. When I was 19 years old I started hitch hiking, first with a trip from Chicago to LA, and then all over Europe. I had done this as a teenager around the North Shore of Chicago for commuting purposes, but this was the real deal. I eventually even hopped a few freight trains. I suppose I've hitch hiked over 20 thousand miles, though I stopped doing it in 1990. I no longer wished to listen to the cliche stories, or have to engage in the ridiculous banter of men, and their homophobic rituals. For a white man in America the most dangerous thing about hitch hiking are automobiles which kill thousands of people from all walks of life every year. Click here: http://www.kenboe.com/wordpress/index.php?p=30
2. As a child, though I grew up in Evanston Illinois, I spent the summers in Minnesota. I now spend the summers working in Yellowstone National Park. Evanston is a good place to grow up. At ETHS we had an electronic music lab, and did concerts in our planetarium. On the other hand, the fact that kids did bongs right on the front lawn was strange, but that was the late 70's. Good art department.
3. I have waited tables seasonally for a number of years. I can only tolerate this in a tourist situation with few "local yokels". I usually propagandize my guests with how I am an artist and/or poet and/or playwright. This reminds me that though am wasting my time working a job, its to pay for the time I will have off to actually practice very creative stuff. I also get to see where different peoples minds are regarding these things. Its a kind of existential marketing research. I do try to be a good server, however, and I am rewarded with very good tips. But in a local yokel situation this approach does not work because nobody cares about anything but their local yokel meta-narrative. I refuse to become local anywhere. I am currently involved in a "local artist" show, but intellectually I grasp it as an experimental activity. Emotionally I guess I do care. But we are all fellow travelers and that is how you will know me.
4. When I write poetry I like to use all kinds of reference books through out the process. The etymology of where a word comes from often shows a mysterious metaphorical transference through out time. For instance, the word time has been associated with the word thing by this route. Discovering these connections is for me a way of finding powerful and mysterious content. Likewise, the idioms and cliches we speak in can be harvested for their original metaphorical schemas. But it takes me a long time to complete a poem, if I ever really do. It is a great hope of mine that I might someday write great poems which are true works of art. Nothing less will do. As I see it, I either find a way to make the most incredible art works of my age or I haven't a chance in hell of being successful. I will live out my life in the same poverty I do now.
5. I have arrived at the conclusion that I am an "experimental artist". That still doesn't answer a lot of questions for people who want to pigeon hole you, but I walk down many roads. I would like for my paintings to be all consistent like some professional gallery artist, but I also resist professionalism in art because I don't want that professionalism to be the meaning of my art itself. There is a literacy to texture that one develops which is at the crux of modern art. Oil paint, tar, ink, manufactured paper, cultural references in choices of medium all are just as symbolic as any actual picture of something. So an ambitious attempt to be professional (in this age of specialized professionalism) in ones art becomes the art's apparent meaning to the texturally or aesthetically literate. Experimentalism allows one to demonstrate ones knowledge without pandering to imaginary resume building. It also is the only way you will invent or discover your own techniques, ideas, and mediums. So even if my intense and unending experimentation leads to a wide variety of looks to my work, it all still bares the fingerprint of my own techniques and ideas developed over many years. You can invest in the truly innovative, or you can hang some curriculum vitae ditrius immaculacy on your wall. Recently I am doing encaustic painting using an elaborate set up of my own design and serendipity. I also am doing the Tea Pot series, which is part of a greater system of art making I call Image-Ontology where I explore a theme to the point of exhaustion. I usually begin these pieces with a scribble, whip marks, or impressions from man-made objects which have gone back to nature, such as an old rusty can. I seek to create images which have not yet existed, but are rooted in the human experience. I seek to impose a creative vocabulary for those who will be in the presence of my art, engendering what I refer to as Synchronic Alchemy. For more on this go to: http://web.mac.com/satyagraha911/Site/Satya_Art.html
6. One of the best experiences I ever had was the production of my play Enemy Towers by Greylight Theatre at the Old Douglass School in Southern Illinois. The director Jason Hedrick, the cast, the artists, and the volunteers all did a fantastic job. On the other hand, it broke me economically leaving LA to go back there for it and I ended up having to leave LA where in three months I had been in 3 art exhibitions, staged a reading of my screenplay Grey propaganda, and where I had finished writing Enemy Towers. (I began writing it in a David Rush play-writing class that Jason also attended at SIUC.)
7. I am adopted and when I was 21 I tracked down my birth mother Donna Boe, and not long after that my birth father, Norman Michaud. I did all the research myself and hitch hiked to get to the places they lived so that i could meet them. I've never had a normal sense of pride, I guess. I still visit with my birth mother and family quite often, as well as the family I grew up with. As is often the case with men, it has been harder to get to know my birth father, and the fact that he supposedly had a lot of money seemed to get in the way. Its all so very abstract for us men. For my birth mother, who carried me for 9 months and derailed her youth for me, its probably not just abstract. My birth name is Thomas Boe, but I grew up as Kenneth Petersen. I am very much both.
8. I discovered many synchronicities back in those days, something which is much easier to 'notice' when traveling than when on the automatic pilot of just being a worker/consumer. That doesn't mean I understood the synchronicity, or reacted to it intelligently. I am now suspicious of "meaningful coincidence" in that meaning is subjective, so either you can react anyway and that then is its meaning, or if the meaning is rooted in other processes of nature, interpreting coincidences as signs on ones personal journey would require knowing a language of nature we are currently ignorant of. On the other hand, over time one develops an intuition based on experience, instinct, and learning - so that one can react well to mysterious indicators. So maybe sometimes I have, and do respond well to the orders behind chaos. I suspect I do this in my artwork more than I realize, its so built into each experimental moment of making decisions in the creative process. In this way, the synchronistic traveler may be a metaphor for what an experimental artist does.
9. I recently looked through many of my report cards from Unity Nursery School, Kingsley Elementary school, Haven Middle School, and Evanston Township High School. I've also been giving a lot of thought to my higher education, and had a look at some of my papers, or half-assed attempts at writing papers. Though such diagnosis had not existed, its clear to me that I was and am extremely Attention Deficit Disordered. In my 20s the wandering around allowed me to survive in that world. A fantasy world. I feel sorry for everyone of my teachers and fellow students who had to tolerate my constantly unpredictable behavior. I have eventually made something out of it, for though it was impossible for me to master something like art or writing quickly; by not giving up I have slowly, over the years, developed some unique and solid abilities in a smattering of areas. The fact that I work in a number of different mediums is probably due to this constant jumping from subject to subject and the inability to stay on one course. I am not at all ashamed of its long term outcome, though, because its me, and it has its own twisted creative intelligence. But being morally disorganized in my youth made for a difficult path ahead, and I would prefer to not claim ownership for all of the things ascribed to me on that path.
10. When I was a child I was obsessed with garbage picking. My parents did not exactly discourage this. I sometimes found valuable things, and it got me out of their hair. I would go through not just my neighbors trash, but I would scout for miles and miles of allies, looking for good stuff, or objects that I collected such a beer cans. As an artist I still occasionally dumpster dive, but only if I happen to notice something. If I had kids, i wouldn't want them digging their hands through all that filth, needles, diapers, etc. But I did develop an intuitive vocabulary of our society you could say. I also hung out at the dump in Minnesota with the old man who ran it, Howard Hurt. I guess it was in exchange for getting out the stuff he couldn't reach, that I in turn could keep the stuff I wanted. I still use found objects of a degraded kind in my art work.
11. Once when I was a child I lifted a big metal dumpster off of Billy Grossman's leg so my brother could pull him out from under it. Later when I went back I could not budge the thing. When I was 16 I climbed up an elevator shaft at a construction site and got off at the 4th floor. The board I put my weight on was only balancing there, was not secured. As I fell, my body spun around and it seemed that I might hit head first. Not wanting to get in trouble, I put out my left wrist which took the brunt of the 40 foot fall like a shock absorber. I was worried that Brian and Matt would panic and fall on top of me, so I didn't scream on the way down. After regaining my breath I tried to tell them I was okay. Fortunately there was a wrist expert in town. When I was 23 at a wedding I held hands with my date and an older man having a heart attack, as we tried to heal him according to his instructions(what can I say it was the new age 80's, and there was a white powder involved.) He said it worked. When I walked out into the party, the bride looked at me and then rushed up to me and held up my left hand. It was glowing red like an LED light. Not just flushed red, it was actually glowing, and it felt extraordinary.
12. I love gambling. For awhile I was winning rather large jackpots. Unfortunately this just no longer is the case, and I've had to put it off. Truth be told, my jackpots were all outrageous bets that were tinged with a certain mysticism. Now that I have become more knowledgeable of the odds, I no longer seem to do very well.
13. Facebook is an interesting social experiment, but I do have some problems with it. When I was a child I was not indoctrinated with the whole "don't talk to strangers" campaign, at least not by my parents. (I sometimes wonder if my parents wanted me to get abducted because they actually encouraged me to talk to strangers as I remember it.) But talking to strangers is a good skill to have, and I wonder if entire generations are being produced that are pathetically unable to communicate with others, or have empathy, because of all this fear propaganda. Facebook seems to be designed so that now adults are encouraged to not talk to strangers. It has become a near utility like the telephone, yet utterly paranoid, and they have a computer program that can instantly erase you. We are so afraid of strangers seeing our writing, yet we're at the same time handing it over to Big Brother with each key stroke and hit of the return key we make. Myspace is a little better in that you can promote your art stuff on it, but you still have no rights, and they can delete your account for having a classical nude art work. I could gladly leave Facebook at any point. I don't like becoming a local, you know.
14. I pretty much like all kinds of people. This does not always show because I was raised with a bad temper. Actually, I used to have a bad temper. I have improved on this since yesterday, so bug off. Just kidding. Steve Talamo once told me that no one is ever just kidding. Steve was always so cool, but he has passed on now.
15. I have always believed that I would be very successful in life. I am more sure of this today than ever. The difference now is that it is not only rooted in fantasy. I am starting to actually know what I am doing, though why I will be successful will be random.
16. I practiced extreme fantasy meditations since I was a child. From making up songs, to fantasizing how all the races would intermarry into a new race and entire fictional genealogies, I have gone about this almost systematically, especially when I was younger. There have been all kinds of fictional character developments that I have dreamed up again and again, and many business ideas. I can can day dream to the point that I'm having rapid eye movement and my hands are flailing about like Joe Cocker at Woodstock. I try not to be so compulsive about this anymore. I want to reserve my imagination for actual projects I am working on. But there are two risks in over-controlling this. One is that it was tied to going for long walks, and I need that exercise. The other is that I used to sing and make up songs, and I stopped doing that( because its outwardly weird) and my voice has gotten out of shape. Some of you may recall that I was this weird kid walking around singing all the time.
17. I tend to write in long run on sentences because this is how my mind works. I need to have a complete context in a single sentence.
18. I currently live at a place called Miami Art Works. Its a cool place, cheap rent, I do art here, and show art here, and at our associate gallery in downtown Phoenix called Firehouse. Miami AZ is a small old mining town 2 hours east of Phoenix on highway 60. Check it out on a Saturday or Sunday. At Firehouse I currently have little oil paintings which are framed diptychs on sandpaper, short hand text book paper, and even encaustic. Please buy art.
19. I believe one day there will be a middle class of artists just like there are plumbers and car mechanics. Most people will own original art works in their homes. My idea for helping to make this a reality is for a mandated system where all home and business mortgages came with a rebate in the form of a voucher that could only be used to buy "art by local artists". The other reason is that we will come to see that art work is functional. It provides a creative lexicon that people in the same environment of it share both consciously, and especially unconsciously. In essence, people around original art are more intelligent. (See above link regarding Synchronic Alchemy.)
20. I would like to begin working full time, year around, On my art work and writing. I may need a patron or two to do this. People will shell out 1200 dollars to fix the plumbing under their sink, but can't imagine paying an artist that for a painting. Yet the artist worked 5 to 20 times longer, requires much greater and elusive skils, and produces a work that not only will be around longer, not only may appreciate in value, but creates a super-plumbing in the imagination of those lucky enough to be around its one-of-a-kind consciousness and vocabulary. Click here: http://www.kenboe.com/wordpress/index.php?p=24
21. I seem to be in pretty good health in spite of all the abuse I have registered upon myself. I am aware of certain possible downfalls. I assume that I will live well into my 90's.
22. The World Art Foundation interests me because it is what I refer to as Creative and Cultural Infrastructure, just as Miami Art Works is in Miami Arizona. These are platforms on which the human species advances in a diverse number of ways by allowing, encouraging, and/or enabling people to be creative.
23. The human species is not alone in the universe, (one needn't be empirical in stating that.) Communication will be at the crux of coming to understand alienness, and alien communication systems, spirituality, and aesthetics. Artists will evolve with the human species to be transformers in these relationships. I'm not sure what that means.
24. Antiques are about the past. Art is about the future. Yet, when a work of craft or manufactured design becomes both obsolete and rare, thus losing both its functional meaning and the tag of its cliche, it then becomes a work of art. Yes, the meaning of something is not fixed. So some antiques, which are about the past, eventually become works of art, which is about the future.
25. Something wonderful is about to happen.
