BLOG

LINKS

An Exhibition of Concrete Poetry

.

................

Collector's Statement: host-organism Steve Calvert:

Like many artists who talk about themselves formally in the third person plural, Bachelor Machines is a composite entity, magpie, packrat, bowerbird, like other nesting creatures who daydream they contain an entire hive of honeybees... driven by restless curiosities, compulsive search functions tuned to narrow wavelengths and selection pressures... From great volumes of collected data, impossible patterns of information emerge, visible only to the shizoid intuitive compound eye of attuned otaku... we shall all be one....

I'm a collector. I very much enjoy a very few specialized things: books, drawings, music, poems, ideas and the people who make these things - I also cultivate gregarious social impulses to know what other people are doing, with the coincident impulse to share what I've found with those whom I think could be interested. Hopefully, with this project, I can do us all the respectful service of facilitating a physics of connection, providing gravitation between certain points, to produce some frission of energetic exchange betwixt our individual economies of attention...

I have the unmistakable good fortune of knowing alot of really spectacularly talented artists. I presume I am not unique in this, but I've decided to make something of it. Incined toward solitary pursuits, I still prefer to work collectively, even in the abstract. My participation in the Intermission Artists Society from 2001-2006 confirmed for me that life is far more rich and buoyant when your work's concerns and motivations draw from more than simple self-interest. Cooperation beats competion because there is no more struggle. A tao of we. Always the best preference. I can't, or won't, think of my own art without considering and directly implicating the influence and context of my colleagues and antecedants - those artists and friends whose work and camaraderie I so greatly admire, respect, and appreciate.... As personal praxis solution and service salutation to my colleagues, I've been striving to build up this project for nearly twenty years...

I keep a library, and an art collection, and love finding and tending these collections... many industrialized people do, I imagine - how unique do you really guess we are? We all shop at the factory store on these colonial plantations... 'The collector regards the collection as a matter of near constant attention' ... these are activities I do anyways, have to, and would very much like to see happening on a much larger, more distributed level. Many of these producers, including myself, didn't previously have websites. Of necessity for an an online portfolio, I built this simple set for myself and some friends. The solution has quickly spiralled into a much larger ideation for a longer term integrated research and production project ... In late 2009 we will introduce Mechanical Brides. In an effort to provide the consortium with the access to the means of production, we shall formalize a publishing venture.... coming soon, watch this space...

Conceptualism, abstraction, proceduralism, formalism, toroidal reflexivity, in drawings, humour, detournment... a list of intertwining subject headings begin to spontaneously self-assemble - constellations which would seem to articulate a coherent and importantly enduring contemporary aesthetics of play - [ed. it may be noted that these qualities at interest won't necessarily describe the author's own art - his curatorial interests diverge slightly from his own productive milieu]. He knows obsession is not driven by narcissistic or selfish impulse - each should be productive in surplus sufficient to feed also his friends and family. Bataille's solar potlatch. 'Pataphysics does however describe something of the sensibility which I consider to be relevant in art, so my role is to celebrate and elevate the virtues of the 'good' - also preferably the awesome and the astounding... - in this and other modes, we resist the injunctions against the individuality of taste, but what appears contextually unique has a statistical probabiltity of being emergent elsewhere also, likely spreading rapidly. I 'believe' in a zeitgeist, in the collectivity of consciousness and the morphogenic field. The individual can assert proud solipsism only in his alienated state, we're all in this together... This argument will play out in these pages. I know this point of view is not shared by some in our company...

Drawing together a network of creators attracts my own project toward what feels like a developing connective synthesis - a grand idea gathers its threads backwards from the future, casting a fractalline shadow in time, indicating an approaching event-object, moving in close across the fog of synchronicity... The actors in this becoming-drama are all around - significant people with brilliant ideas - the discussions we're having are momentus, we wish to have recorded and transcribed them all... - soon, in important ways, these ideas will fit together in perfect complimentarity - clearly there is only one thing remaining to do...

Bachelor Machines is my attempt to chart the constellations of what is, in my estimate, a substantial philosophical phenomenon - one form among many, granted, and struggling in obscurity for relevance like the rest. But this particular one, very importantly, is directly known to this provincial journalist by close proximity and deep longterm interest. This website functions as a fanzine and archive - a gratuitous gesture of praise in recompence for all the ridiculous brain-twisting glee these artists' efforts bring to me... Like satellite imagings of a particularly exquisite remote nebula taking formation, in the western lands of creative and pataphysical activity, BMO will report with salubrious affectations upon those spectacular and crystalline vapor-forms emerging from these young stars...

I pull these names together because I see and love their work. In many cases we are acquainted personally, to varying degrees, but as the project expands and correspondences develop, this will cease to be the case. Otherwise, links to expanding collections about particular artists known to me will continue to accumulate here. Other than my selecting them, they are of themselves a disparate and unaligned groupings of independent creators. By chance and good fortune we are colleagues.

My curiosity and enthusiasm for other interdisciplinary artists makes me feel compelled to celebrate and expound publically on their significance as contributors to the contemporary art of the third millennium's first decade. I salute them as magnificent human beings who generously produce their compositions with great skill, humour, and sophistication - For this they receive my deep thanks, and deserve your fixed attention - anyone aesthetically inclined should someday know the names and clever wits of these gentle men and women. All my relations, but man these kids are good...

--- Steve Calvert - Vancouver - March 2008