Monday, May 6, 2013

Visiting Artist


Visiting Artist Lecture Series
 Tom Konyves


Tom Konyves was the third  visiting artist for the MCA visiting artist lecture series this spring.  Tom flew in from Washington state.  He seems like a really nice guy.   He is kind of an old school west coast intellectual beatnik type guy.  Although he seemed very well reserved and mannered, I can tell that he was a pot smoking hippie in his day.  I bet he likes some Van Morrison and Trini Lopez on the 33rpm still to this day.   He had shear fabrics that looked like Persian rugs or beads as room dividers and smoked out of a green porcelain king cobra bong.  

Back in the day, Tom was a hippie beatnik type and probably aspired to be a filmmaker of sorts.  He also was “hitting it”… a lot… and starting jittering down some thoughts and made his way to some trendy coffee house in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco one day for a poetry reading.  Eventually he probably decided that it was time and he got up and sang out some words that he felt were near and dear and someone appreciated them.   He may have gotten a phone number from some young hippie chick and that was all it took.  The man was up and running with his Dad’s super 8 and a projector he got at a salvation army over in Oakland.

Tom is a well known video poet.  I am not sure what that is exactly, or how to describe it, but that is definitely what he is.  I had never heard the terminology, but once I saw one of his pieces, I knew that I was seeing video poetry.  It just made sense.  Video Poetry is an arty film that plays with words in some shape or fashion.  Usually, this is not the spoken word, but generally some visual reference.  It is somewhat like a short blip that you might see if you were watching “The Electric Company” on PBS. Sometimes the video poet (filmmaker) will refer to strictly concepts of tangible things, like grass  for instance, by showing us a repetitive image that references this.   For instance, the idea of “Grass” might be conveyed through through a swirling pattern of imagery and images of a park.   There are also the ideas that sometimes the work is about a pattern or repetition.  One of my favorite works that Tom showed was just three guys kinda bro slapping on one another to what might be considered a hip hop beat in the early 1970’s.  it started out really slow… thump….and a pit... then a pat.  But soon the three guys were a pitter pattering and slapping a happy slap to a viral beat that emerged as something really really cool.  I was amused and entertained for a couple minutes.

Tom really liked to talk a lot.  In fact, he couldn’t seem to stop talking.  He talked for an hour and a half at the visiting artist lecture.  Maria Bibbs had to get on the stage and drag him off (practically).  She definitely did have to tell him the lecture was over.  He was so long winded that in the 3 hours he had to talk with 6 graduates about their work, he had gotten an hour and a half behind schedule and we had to omit one of the critiques.   I had to go to dinner with he and Haley.  It took forever for the appetizer to get to the table.  I thought I had died and gone the ‘other way’.  Funny thing about this guy.  I think “the stuff” really hit his brain cells hard. He lives in Vancouver B.C. and did not even know what the Puget Sound is.  I told him.. It’s the large body of water where Seattle, Victoria and Vancouver rest.  Wow.

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