Incredibly Stupid Bliss

For a while now, art hasn't meant a lot to me.  Think it has something to do with the Pandemic and Trump and post-Trump and social-media and my age and just a total new feeling inside my heart and head that art, whether it is capitalized or not, isn't really worth it.  Doing or seeing.  Plus a couple of my best friends have passed away.  So there's that.  But still something about this era of polarization and dialog flaming into monolog and all the things -- something has evaporated culturally.  Art and life have disconnected in a lot of ways, and when they do connect it often feels manneristic and self-serving and just plain, well, worthless.   All of the above sounds particularly melodramatic I know, but I don't want melodrama.  I don't really feel like I'm missing anything.  I'm perfectly fine.  But I do just want to say:  art has sort of become an old acquaintance that I once had a deep crush on, but now when I come across ...

Charles Williams made a lot of these, circa 1983-1998:  pencil holders.   They are still haunting me, after seeing them at the Intuit Art Center in Chicago a little over a month ago.  The functional capacity of these objects is what gets the whole aesthetic sensation going.  A concept so banal and delivered in such strange little packages, the whole thing feels almost not-art, which is kind of where I like to live aesthetically.  In the Land of Nod, I guess, the place where knickknacks and sculptures and pieces of litter and jewelry and pill bottle lids, etc. all combine into a sort of bracing nothingness.  All of that pseudo-philosophy right there makes Mr. William's whole project feel like a catatonic junk-drawer and a mesmerizing memoir combined.   A lot of the holders are fashioned from the extruded plastic he took from his job at IBM, off the factory floor.  Foamy detritus like candy-colored tumors, like toys melted in a fire. ...