A Labor Day Post, Interspersed With Images That Are Links To Establishments, Projects and People Whose Labor May Be Appropriately Inspiring.

On Labor Day three years ago Jimmy and I scaled some chain and link and briars and water and took a self-guided dangertour of the innards and corners of the then-abandoned Royal Mills—the site of the first textile worker strikes in 1922 which spread, from there, throughout New England and resulted in the formation of labor unions and a major shift in immigrants' and workers' roles in state politics.



This is a link to Art In Ruins and you must already know about Art In Ruins, for crying out loud. Gorgeous, crucial, crumbling and hopeful: the disappearing industrial architecture of RI! This site will keep stone and steel and the politics of space on your mind, as if you crept in through a mill basement and left some brain there and it's still, like, thinking, remotely. Remember that it's important to revisit the site often, as J and his collaborators are always adding new photos, news and coverage. I know because he is sitting at the same desk as me while I'm typing this, and just said "see, THIS is why I have to MODERATE the comments". Probably someone wrote something about dicks.

We skulked through the lower mill levels where the floors shuddered like a flan served on a table a tad too close to the mariachi band, and through the dye works where powdered colors coated the floor and ground up into sinister breathability from beneath our shoes. In the basement, where the river had powered the workings of all the works, we saw a broken main gushing unleshed H2O against stone and concrete. I don’t know how long ago the water’d broken free, but in its hydro-reckless spew it had already managed to wear a smooth hole, several feet deep and more than a yard wide, in what appeared to be a load-bearing conrete wall. The air quivered and we stared and then we left, each tiptoeing and testing out different water-wearing-away metaphors in our respective heads.


This is a link to the blog of a writer, living a writing life and writing thereof. Writing the good fight and so forth. I haven't really gotten to know her or her writing yet and am only linking to her on the merits of her having included the above photo in her page.

When we were leaving the building Jimmy looked back up at the black, empty windows of the mill and asked “If you were to look back and see something, anything, in one of the third-story windows of that place that’s supposed to be empty, what would the creepiest thing be to see?”.

I said a horse. I had really tried, too, because I wanted to impress him with some hauntingly irreverent answer, and horse was all I’d come up with.

“Sure” he said. “But no.

Way creepier would be if we were to look back and see Jimmy and Josie, watching us walk away”.

I feel sure that he was right and I've sensed myself just behind my left shoulder ever since.

A link to someone who takes photos of the mundane in such a way as to make them anything but mundane. They are eerie and vibratory and strangely silent and they are totally looking back at you as you walk away.

Anyway, Labor Day seems like a good time to make a posting here, in this place where I almost exclusively ruminate on What Relevance Art Has to Things. In the wide world of labor and revolution and struggle and invention, what can an artist offer? The question is old and getting older, but it’s something that frustrates me and I have this hunch that there are people who have an answer to it. I mean, maybe some of them are simply the kind of people who have Answers to Things and that can be wicked annoying. But others have inklings and are living them. I would like to soak up and share some blots of their inklings.


This is a link to a site that, as far as I can tell with my two Mac browsers, doesn't work at all. I can't get any of the gallery to load and keep getting stranded somewhere between index page and the promised arty payoff. Nonetheless, they have a "mission statement" that states in part that their project is "a visual reminder to not forget our place and our duty as individuals..." and that "we are not limited to a mundane existence. There is no limit placed on our individual potential, except those placed by our own selves..." It sounds to me like they have something to show and tell. Someone let me know if you can get the site to work and if it's any damn good.

An anecdote:
This is part of a comment to one of my painting shows. It was written by someone from the poli-sci department of a local ivy league.
“these painting… take a truly revolutionary stance by inserting beautiful, natural forms into such politically charged and challenging settings. These are political works that refuse to be ignored.”

This is an exchange from a recent interview I agreed to, done over the phone…
Interviewer lady: Are there certain issues or ideas, political or personal, that you’re trying to address in your paintings?
Me: Ummm. Heh heh. I… Well! Yes. I, ummm. That’s a REALLY good question. I, ah… I need to think about this. Maybe I could, like, email you sometime?



A link to some people making a valiant foray into the world of DIY gallery ownership, showing work on their own terms in an accessible space. Also they mention cake on the site.

Just sayin’. I suppose the message is in the brain of the beholder, often, and maybe that’s best. It may be that art-making as a lifestyle is a reminder of human potential and innovative capacity, and by being lived that lifestyle may: insert water-on-concrete metaphor here. Like maybe the lifestyle of artistic exploration wears away at the institutional architecture of the mundane. Or maybe something about how while a union might affect certain changes for the workers within a building, art can, like a broken water main, bring the whole damn thing down. The latter, of course, makes art look pretty bad. Also if you’re a local you know that this whole metaphor is altered by the fact that the Royal Mills were recently renovated by Struever Brothers and are available for sale as luxury condos now.

Or you could build a house.

Now, just one last quote for your day:
Whatever it is that pulls the pin, that hurls you past the boundaries of your own life into a brief and total beauty, even for a moment, it is enough. –Jeannette Winterson

And one last link:


Last but not least: It cruises the country in silver, anachronistic and aerodynamic style, and it is filled to the gills (I don't think it has fenders, but everything needs gills to breathe, right?) with an amazing archive of self-published words and artwork. A camper of communication! A make-out van of literacy! Roll on.

Happy day to you and also... someone I've never met named Brett Cortesi once wrote to me "Never Stop Working. Ever". That's once of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten, I'd imagine. So onward with the labor and gladly.