These Animals: Kinesthetic, etc.
My responses to my own work and to the artists I relate to have been multisensory and kinesthetic. When they are good I can hear them, and taste them, and feel them all by only looking. I want my pieces sing. So I could talk about Hank Williams. Hank worked in the popular vernacular of hillbilly music. He used a vocabulary and subjects of ordinary things always within a deceivingly simple formal structure, (like my belt & shoes). His melodies and sentences float like exquisite lines (again like my belts and shoes). They are always within the simple structure of a two or three cord song. There are surprising intersections like:
“I don’t care who thinks we’re silly, you be Daffy & I’ll be Dilly. We’ll order up two bowls of chili settin the woods on fire.” And “My hair’s still curly and my eyes are still blue. Why don’t you love me like you used to do?”
These are all things that I have seen or felt directly within my work. A “surprising intersection” would be the meeting of a high-heeled pump and a leather belt turning into an eye socket and an ear. When I was working on these pieces I began to deliberately try to find things that could not possibly work for the place that I was going. And I found out that almost always with a little improvisation and a different “viewpoint”, I came up with a “perfectly logical dislocation.” The same thing as the surprising intersection)
The great jazz pianist, Thelonius Monk is another connection that I have felt a number of times. There is a more complicated formal structures but the same exquisite floating lines and logical dislocations. And, with a lot less improvisation, just as much surprise, and a large dose of zany humor is another connection: Spike Jones. I like the way his seriously supercharged humor comes close to anarchy and yet always careens back within the structure. These are all parallel and kinesthetic responses to my work and theirs.
Ken Little 2002
