Photographs by Malcolm Childers: September 2014

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"A Taxonomy of the Barrier Canyon Mind"

Sego Canyon, Grand County, Utah

I generally don't make images about art but this one piqued a definite interest.

It had started to snow again when Harold Snider and I got out of his pickup near the entrance of Sego Canyon. It was November 2010. The light was flat and the color in the sandstone canyon, was saturated and brilliant. I wondered how the falling snow would appear in the finished work.

I made several exposures for a panorama I wanted to create later. I wanted to see if I could I could reveal a resonance between the mystic mindset of the Barrier Canyon people and the of wildness that was both the substrate for their art and their world.

 The oxide paintings created by these stone age people could be as much as eight thousands old and yet, like the cave paintings at Lascaux, France, they show an untrained grace and skill that seems to have erupted spontaneously from their consciousness. The fact that the style seems inherent rather than learned is still the one of the outstanding mysteries.

It wasn't until I finished the 32 by 72 inch panorama some months later that I noticed all the other marks individuals had subsequently added farther down on the panel. Anasazi, Fremont, Ute, frontiersman, Chinese, cowboys, and modern day travelers. My first reaction to the latest additions was, "What is it with these people anyway? Why do they feel they need to scratch their names and dates all over the place. This is isn't a bathroom wall. It's a site of significant historic substance!"

 Then, laughing, I found myself, trapped in a conundrum mid sentence. Age and unanswerable mysteries tend to make things seem holy. There is a big aesthetic difference between something an illiterate human painted in the deep past and some tourist's name and date scratched there two years ago. None the less, everyone who had made their mark there, in a very primal way was doing, exactly the same thing.

 If I could define what they were doing, I could both, draw a circle around one of the core evidences of modern man, and define something I had been seriously involved with for sixty years. It could change the question, (What is art?) to a statement, (What art is.) Even if such a definition solved the question for me and no one else, it would be worth the effort.

 What art is, begins with an urge to do something brought on by an awareness of our self beyond the demands of bodily need. This happens after our animal core is satisfied and there is still an emptiness needing to be filled. However we choose to fill that emptiness is, in a very concrete way, us celebrating the awareness of our own life in the now. What we do to satisfy that conscious need is the Art. What is left i.e.: painting, drawing, sculpture, video, text, musical chart, record or memory of a performance is an evidence of that action not unlike the receipt of a transaction. Therefore:

ALL ART IS A CELEBRATION OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

The following poetic is my gesture of respect for those who left their marks on the Sego Canyon sandstone and helped me comprehend, not only my life passion, but one more piece of the mystery of human nature.

 
THE BIRTH OF ART

It is with such indifference

that we the sentient

drift incrementally

into dust.

The Natures,

like mother in the glow

of a back porch twilight,

call us in for the night.

The door closes behind,

and all that we were

is lost,

like toys in the moonlit grass

of a dream we called

life.

We could have done more.

We should have

stood up from the stories we were telling

as our distant ancestors did,

selected the best rocks,

and good flat walls of stone,

rich in patinas of brown and red,

to paint, peck, or scratch

our dreams out

for all to see

how it was

to be,

us.

Here we are.

Great hunters with spectacular genitalia

and weapons blessed by the spirits we see in dreams

in the very act

of turning our hard sought animals

into food.

When we return to our fertility goddesses,

'we scratched images of them on that other wall,'

there will be feasting, laughter, greasy faces,

swollen bellies, and warm breasts

to curl up with until dawn.

Even when we follow game to the far horizon

There will be something of us here,

And when we return next year

we will laugh at what we have done,

feel good and make more images.

Us in this place now,

and even if we never return

we will still be here forever,

good work.

"AN ANCIENT CONSCIOUSNESS AWAKENS IN THE VANDALISTIC SOUL OF THE TAG PEOPLE,"

CAVE HENRAUX, CAMPAGRINA, ITALY

This next image continued the "nature of Art" conversation in my head. Before humans developed a written language, pictures were the only permanent way they could convey conscious meaning to themselves and others.

With the development of symbols to stand in the place of their language, there was considerably less need to spend time making pictures. In the Sego Canyon photograph above, this shift is as remarkable away from pictures to words as it is from words to pictures in this next photograph.

Even though I revel in the range and energy that the written word provides, I know there are places that writing can't go. Writing is limited by the time someone has to read and the continuing varieties of language, The visual image delivers its initial content with much greater speed and has a much longer expiration date. Try reading Beowulf in the original text and you will see what I am talking about. Unless you are an expert in primitive English you will probably get more comprehension out of a sculpture or mosaic from the same period that you will from the Beowulf in the original.

The abandoned Henraux quarry had the usual detritus of scrawls and spray paint. What captured the eye when entering the opening was that someone had painted the face of a girl on the marble. It was so out of sync with the usual graffiti it was hard not to be moved by the shift in mindset. Please note; In my definition all of the graffiti including painting are still art, just as all cars are still cars whether they are in a showroom or a junkyard. Art is a action, not a qualitative assessment. What gave the Henraux quarry portrait its gravity was that in the field of conscious expressions available to the eye in that place, the portrait was an effort of obvious love. Either the person who painted it, loved their ability to make the image, or their love for the person they portrayed drove them to the effort or both. To project something as ephemeral as an emotion into a future beyond one self is both a signal feature and undisputable evidence of consciousness.