I just returned from a road trip to California where I helped some of my artist friends with their new music performance called Hand to Mouth, a celebration of the seed from soil to plate.
I was concept testing a business idea Fresh Hot Art Promotions, an Internet mentoring and on-line marketing and promotions service for artists. This is an outgrowth of other Internet mentoring services I was testing with non-technical solopreneurs earlier this year and the curated blog I started recently featuring the "freshest art of the day." I post art that has just been completed on the day or as close to the day it is completed as I can manage. Hmmm. Fresh Art. Fresh Food. What's the connection? Creative unfolding? Journey's? The make or break it function of context? Time sensitive delivery? Like cooking? Like picking fruit? Like innovation? Like product development and delivery? These are all creative endeavors.
My friends have been creating and performing highly intelligent, entertaining and insightful performance art in the San Francisco Bay Area for years and didn't have an on-line presence. With the new show scheduled to open in May and near-term rehearsals and benefit performances coming-up I dove in head first to do what I could to "help grow their audience beyond their mailing list."
Hmmm. Growing. Subsistence Arting? Subsistence Farming? Just barely getting by? Sometimes not getting by? Working a job to support the art? Working a job to support the farm? There are some haunting parallels between ethnography, artistic and farming lifestyles. But what that means and why I care? This is ethnography and the truth is, I'm not sure and its OK. Ethnographers, artists and farmers all have to be comfortable or at least tolerant of uncertainty. It's something we have to be good at or we perish, in one way or another.
My goals were to encourage my friends and their the work in progress, help them build their Internet skills, build them an Internet presence, work fast, work collaboratively, give them an on-line voice with aesthetic integrity and meet aggressive deadlines using free Internet tools, my digital still and video cameras and my (yes, beloved) side-kick, my MacBook Pro. I wanted to provide the how and the why to their what.
The result? Pretty good! We collaborated from afar for about a week using e-mail and then Google applications to share text, jpeg files and build the blog. That required setting up a new IGoogle account and mentoring how to use the applications to achieve immediate goals. Together we wrote a press release and secured a newspaper story, created the content for a set of flyers and posters, chose and then altered an image for these flyers and posters (with the help of artist friends) and rewrote and proofed until I thought I would lose my mind dealing with all of the revisions we created and vetted. I got the flyers and posters printed here at my local copy shop where they give me one on one help to get the results I want and then...off I went on my 1500 mile road trip to document rehearsals and street performances at Farmer's Markets in Northern CA. A two day drive from my place, a week on location and three days home. You do what you need to do to meet the goals right? If your plums are ready to pick, you pick them and can or jam them or you lose them. I wanted to capture those rehearsals when they were ripening, during the jamming, before they were set, while they were fresh!
Here's a taste of the Hand to Mouth blog today; http://www.agapeperformanceart.blogspot.com
I've written before about how difficult it is to be away from a small farm. Farmers just can't leave the the farm long. Plants and animals need near constant attention not to mention the machinery and the family. It was difficult for me to leave my place and leave it to the guys to manage. They aren't as engaged in the farm as I am; they aren't farmer wannabes like I am. My tomatoes were just beginning to ripen, apples were coming on, the broccoli was just ready to pick, pears were plumping up and the horse needs a shelter before the rains. When I got home the broccoli had gone to seed, the Halloween pumpkins had succumbed to an underground attack by some unseen beast, the apples had fallen to the ground, the elk had trampled the little pear tree, my potted flowers were dry as a bone, blackberry vines had grown over my vegetable beds and the lawn was a foot high. There is good news too though. My family is well and happy to have me home, our young rooster has learned to crow, all of the animals are still alive, the sunflowers grew a couple of feet, the tomatoes are still turning red and we have two new sugar pumpkins for our Thanksgiving feast.
What I've learned about real farming is that like artists farmers are virtuoso improvisers, they create highly complex and usually very large compositions and they plan and practice these compositions as a conductor might conduct an orchestra but over a much longer time. A farm is a work in progress for the life of the farmer and the life of the farm. Keeping up with time is a musical challenge and it is a farming challenge. Farming isn't something with a rousing finish or predictable acoustics. Farming is a coming together of man with nature and is a process of composition that is fundamentally dialogic, in the moment and perpetually...fresh.
Farming is far from the simple life that non-farmers might imagine and farmers bring incredible intellectual and creative talents to their work; they are inspired and driven like artists to create irregardless of social and financial reward as long as they can possibly manage to keep going.
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