The layman gets it, "Good job," he says, "That must have taken a lot of time." The idea came to me when I won first prize in Bisbee. IFSM.. Artcarism. All the movements now are neo. But not this. A car is really amazing. It's a 3-dimensional canvas. Picasso tried to get 3-D with cubism and couldn't do it. On a car you have four sides, a roof, fenders. And then there's your medium. Plastic, wood, whatever, it's your paint and how you arrange it. I paint with plastic. You write with trunks, TVs, cow skulls. It's all put together for art. You can put anything on a car and it's not shit, it makes sense. This needs to be done. People say wow! A mother says, "Mary, John, don't touch the car." I say "TOUCH THE CAR!" It's interactive art. Anything you sign your name to when you're an artist is art. But a baker can't do that. Being a part of all this is what I believe in. I've only been in on it for a year, but I believe in this thing. Somebody's gonna come up with a name for it, but its not gonna be us. It's gonna be some schlep with media savvy. But I'll tell you one thing, we're NOT folk artists. We're abstractionists. We are a part of this fucking thing. Some people will say that we are fucking insane, but were not. My friend Rob Moore, a teacher at Mass college of art, he painted squares, all the time squares. Solid color. It's continuity. Paint, toys and glue. Continuity. We don't worry about weight. Does the glue look good? Who cares, it doesn't matter. Ned works in roofing material, foam, makes a big bump, what happens next? Every thing is fucking silver, continuity, better and better and better, you don't sit there and draw a fucking tulip. That would be folk art. Ramon, documentation, celluloid, cataloguing the movement for lay people to understand. Spontaneity, working it to death. You learn the materials, you get the feel of the materials. Monet got kicked out of the salon because he was doing impressionism. This needs to be brought out to joe public who is ignorant to art. It's VISUAL CANDY! It wakes you up. Why do you like it? I don't know, I just do. The gallery is too pristine. What is this, totally anti-authoritarian? Is he more confused? Probably, but he's looking at my postcard. We're pioneers, we're going to little towns, bringing the gallery to the circus for free! Like that guy at the truck stop.. Are you an artist? "No, I'm a trucker.. here's ten dollars for the art." We've got editors parking at every on-ramp waiting to do a story on us.

THEY'RE STARVED FOR A NEW ISM!" When you're in a state of confusion, you're in a state of if-ism. The more we do what we do, the more we make the decision. I am totally supportive of Ramon. He's cataloguing all this. I'm in it neck deep. My life is a crank, I'm cranky! Some people take over the CB radio and I get irritated and flip it off, but then I flip it back on because I might be missing something. I would be missing out on that moment of spontaneity! IFiSM! Artcarism! I see Ned's fins over the line of cars and everything is Finism! Why don't we string some yarn from car to car? Because that's what it looks like going down the road. I really believe that this is a revolution, that this way of being with our art on the road is the new thing. We're making it Americanized in the grandstand!

[End of rant]

Sunday morning in Rapid City, SD. Or so they tell me. When we rolled in here last night just before dusk, I was half asleep in the trunk sculpture staring out at a swirling sky as Duke did the wagon circle thing with his fellow art cars in some supermarket parking lot. It was beautiful, really. Plugged into my Walkman and Enigma, flat on my back I watched a single oval cloud spin in place as though Duke and I were the very spindle on which the great green Earth spun like a top.

Anyway, I have no physical evidence of my whereabouts. And as for the date, shit. I haven't known what day it was for awhile.

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Last update April 1, 2004