—Biography of Van Huebner—Go to Van’s Interview
There’s an awful lot of reading and thinking that started back then, in the early eighties: basically, I had an artists’ crisis I called it, for lack of a better word. I had just gone to a lecture by Rudolf Arnheim after his book Power of the Center came out. I instantly threw aside art for art’s sake and went on this quest for something more meaningful than regurgitating representational images. I was all about “Visual Thinking,” to use Arnheim’s phrase… but, also I was disgusted with how shamefully dependent the visual arts were on plundering the earth for the sake of Investors and the consumer.
Anyway, Foucault’s Archaeology of Knowledge too is in there. But you have to think visually about this burgeoning of my new intent as a non-artist. You won’t understand it otherwise. Together these two Authors, then – though there were many others, too – can kind of illustrate my consciousness, though their influence was not a philosophical undertaking for me, not a linear argument I was learning to express. I was reading the shape in their thought! And this I continue to do, by the way.
Arnheim, ironically left me with this sense of their being a core we are always drawn to; and Foucault – Foucault was always throwing these parentheticals at you, and talking about this place between objects, asking the reader to take “rash” steps to find this non-center place of origins… So, to lamely cut this short and rely on typographical symbols, here’s Arnheim: # or maybe * and here’s Foucault: ( ) or better yet I saw this: )(
Forgive me for making this so overlong, but it can’t be helped. There is no short understandable version of the “how I became an artist.” In fact, in school I completely skipped over any acceptance of the concept of trying to become anything. At first I was saying I was already an artist and just wanting to get better at it. Then suddenly I was saying I’m not an artist, I’m just trying to get better at seeing.
Today, it’s as if I stumble around with blinders on because everything is so painful to observe. Finding an available moment to draw fairly saves me from oblivion.