Chilson

The relationship between foto and text. Down stairs is most bizarre. Chilson picks up a public event, any one, he is quite promiscuous. It doesnt matter to him and he records it. Why, I can';t figure, but he does and perhaps that is the significant thing. He saves it.I do also with the special town meeting. THe idea is simple and inexpensive. Save things and fotos and put a text to them. THe text should have sense and meaning.

The Greek work is always one of loss and not gain. I think we need to represent the positive too. Lekakis is t hat, right down the line. THere is always the anonymous worker, experimenting in the night, not knowing or caring where he is heading, but going, always going. TO the next phase of the work. I n my case it is a try to go from the tourist-crititicism to the more positive representation. One which shows the endless joy and song of the ancient style and way. THe cynic does not help here. One is in the realm of Hamilton, I would say. Mangakis is the hunter of dreams. The idea is to live anywhere, with what is given you. The sense that all is fodder for the human will. IN lanny, I will do the poem in some unusual way. Line by line, across the photo. As many lines, each with a picture. You show the prosaic against the magical. Life as fao Schwartz. /Blend the common with the mystical or magical sense of art and the world. Let the work get free. It doesn't matter. NO-one cares to see it. THey move from it always. IT does not inform. It merely uses space and takes time of the studio and staff.

I have always tried to understand this place, as a form of expression , a sense that what is happening here is some vast adventure. Lanny is a start. I have bendel and godiva and the mall itself and the victoria secret. HTe The space is not shopping, but a chance to engage and enlarge the spirit. So lanny is a special form for me. It is space and meaNing aNd an expression of universal need; to say who y ou are. THat is what a mall is a statement of who one is. Who a people is. It is not just a crass materialism but an expression. I t is no different than a flea market. AS a jumble of things under one roof. Only in this one the surroundings are beautiful. You feel as in a church. THE mall is entrancing. You are in a wonderland. AS in a state of drugs. ONly you are straight. YOu walk into an experience and it is look at this or that. It is free. NO admission. Just behave. Don't look homeless. Dress neat. Be polite. /don't steal. Don't try to sell somethjng. be nice. Like some kid at the high school. Act disciplined.

There is a strange strolling about. Not anything you are worried about. Whether on the dock in Rhodes or at the mall, there is a promenading of persons who say I am this or that. See me. It is primordial. Original. We write the same lines, rewrite the same lines. ?Show the same pictures. Over and over. Each ancestor was a hunter of dreams and a voyager, in his life span.

Funny. It is always the line. only thing i AM MIsing is a small rose. or the line, listening to the hiccup of a star behind the door.l

Just a little on LEKAKIS. what the Greek eye sees tends to be what it has always seen. a fullness of wonder. always the idea is concrete and belongs to the human world.For elli. THis being Seferi, I think. She who would become his wife. He is talking of an ancestor. He says." A large man, whispering through his whitened beard, words in our language spoken as it was 3000 years ago..... prevent us from remembering that he too was a man struggling in the world with soul and body,''''.....because he speaks humbly and calmly, without effort, as th ough he were my father.....

Still no kind of hook for Goin down stairs. Take it a step at a time. Relatives bounding out of doors. Out of doors. To the light. From the inside to the outside from what is manmade to the nature and the sky the shy sky and the sounds of the street and the light. Chilson always moves to the kind light. TO the natural and he places all these people, his neighbors, into the nature of Wrentham. He joins his loves, of his people and the nature to tell a story of sorts about his place. He immortalizes the citizen. /witnesses their churchness, their civicness,k their smile and the dressup dress the woman has on.l THe fact thats the woman holds the child so it won't spill on the stairs. THe idea is full. cCommunity is in tact. THat is a message he gives us, thast the people are here and the nature is here and a place is moving about in full swing. THat democrace is full fine thank you ijn wrentham usa and that he is happy to tell the tale to report the wonderful event.

The kind light. Chilson is a light-artist. That is, he sculpts light. He sees no sense in tellling a story, in creating a narrative. He strings together events like elections and church-Sundays and calls that his contribution. It is enough, certainly. He exposes his townfolk to the kind light. His cameras specialize in the kind light. He is democratic. He does not do just the town fathers, but focuses on the town mothers and the town children. THat the pictures may laNguish in someone's video library is of no concern to him. It is in the act of saving that /Chilson is at his best. THat is his mission, to save. Let what will lhappen happen. Once uyou save a thing , deliverance may occur. Of course, it may not.

The world seems to me to be a place of heavy judgement. The sense of sin , of guilt, of anger i s strong in our United States. What will become of us in these hard times of financial and social upheaval? The current state of unease unfolds as we see the murders at abortion sites, the continual racial upset, the political wrangling, the fights over the way our country should move in the future. We don't seem to be happy, somehow. OUr brows are furrowed, though our standard of material life is most high.

We feel all this weight, the freight of the late twentieth century. Then we go out and forget, as we enact our daily lives. We go up to the mall to gawk at the new wonders of the age or we go to Walmart to pick up stuff we need. We go out. We go out to work in our pleasant offices. WE go out . out of the house. WE enter the public space of our towns and cities. WE turn of f the tv and visit kin or friends. WE leave one place and then enter another.

Well, that is what Chilson's subjects do. They leave inside space, enter the kind light , that of nature and go on about their lives. THey are confident. Think of all that haPpened to them in the intervening yeaRsk, between 1950 and 95. Oh, it is only fourty five years. :Yet they move in a confident way. They go out to meet the life around them. They could hardly visualize South Street as it would become. The cars, Cumberland Farms, the pizza places. The world would change. THEy must havae sensed that. But they carry on. THat is what we do to this day. In wrentham and Dover where I come out each day to greet the neighbor, to get the paper, to visit the town hall, to get the jbook at the library, to get gas, to take some fotos.

For me, Chilson, whoever he is, is saying something about release. From the inside , from the duties of a civic nature, from the demands of religion, from voting to the light outside, from the sense of sin to the sense of nature, from artificial light and artificial warmth , to that of the outside. The morning light, the soft breeze, the hard wind.

Chilson is an artist of transition. He captu;res life as it switches from one civic gear to another. He probably just likes taking pictures, that is all, but I have to liven it up somehow, Really, just for fun. I don't know why he films what he does. I hear the people talk in his silent film. I make believe, is all. I admire the figures aND PUT words in their mouth. I pass the time, as he did some years back. It is merely an exercise to pass the time, I guess.