I am in a gallery right now. The Wight Gallery in the Broad Art Center at UCLA. I’m enduring a small sense of withdrawal from my anti-depressants (twitching), it’s a warm Sunday afternoon, and I have a Guinness Extra Stout at hand; brought with me in my sundried, brown leather bag. I’m here to monitor the gallery for the next few hours.

I’m sitting in the area of my work and before me is a broken, detached, metal, door I found by a dumpster the night before the opening. Someone noticed it and told me. They later said it was serendipitous that we find it. It’s still strange to me to hear a comment like that. I didn’t intend to be some kind of garbage man. I didn’t know people saw in me what I still failed to see but I was happy. It was a heavy door with broken hinges. I placed right in the middle of my space on the concrete.

I became both satisfied and discontent with the work. The usual part of me focused on my failures. The prints on the wall were all wrong (they should have been on newsprint), the organization was wrong, the arrangement was wrong, the message wasn’t clear. It was the normal kind of mental knee capping I was used to. This time around however I was proud of these failures. This time around, the broken door, wheat pasted, assemblage on the floor made more sense to me than anyone might notice.

Before the exhibition and maybe for some months I feared reacting the way I normally do during events like this. I was afraid I would hide underneath a bridge somewhere. I was afraid I would cry in a hole somewhere. I almost did. Instead I grabbed my drink and threw it on the discarded, metal, detritus. I spilled red wine, broke a glass, spit, stomped, and smiled at the simple conclusion I had come to.

A celebration of a real feeling. A real underground of simple gestures and pleasures. It all of sudden felt like everything really worked out as exactly as it should even if I’m the only one who knows this.

My images were about metaphor, symbolism, and how it has a hard time existing as a piece of “art”. I’m no longer interested in existing as an artist. It’s a role and a figure that comes with too much baggage.

Instead, for some time I have been trying to defend the validity of these “acts” having profound significance outside of the consolidated, category of “art”. My broken glass is the same as the one behind your home. My black balloons are the same as your drunken nights. My midnight, wheat pasting, procession is the same your retreat to your car, with your radio, and your book.

This practice is universally the same.

They tell me it’s totemic, my images. A few times already I’m told they seem totemic and quite frankly, I had to look it up to fully understand what they meant. It is about non-human object representing a spiritual essence. I suppose that’s always been what I’m going for. I couldn’t tell you why though because I don’t know.

I’ve been trying to defend the validity of this environment around us.

These acts seem to be universally the same.