I have a few eyes that l'm pretty sure are those. Back in the 1970's, I answered an ad for some lumber, which turned out to be from a rather eccentric and slightly famous avant garde artist named George Maciunas. He had bought a ramshackle estate in Massachusetts, hoping to start an artists' colony. Anyway, among his many collections there (piles of plastic boxes, avant garde art including a Spoerri Snare Picture, which he was impressed when I identified it as such, a piano supposedly played by John Cage, and a shelf full of carefully labeled animal feces from assorted zoos, etc.), he had barrels of dolls' eyes, the result of having bought a defunct doll factory in New York, which he planned to lease out to artists. He told the story that the building was full of unfinished doll parts, and needing to dispose of them decided to burn them in the building's furnace. So down he and they went, not realizing that this celluloid stuff blanketed the neighborhood with thick black smoke. Sirens started being heard, and next thing he knew firemen were rushing down to the cellar, just in time to see him shoveling what looked like the severed limbs of babies into the furnace, which he said as a childhood refugee from the Nazis was rather ironic. Anyway, when I bought his pile of used mahogany (the seats from the benches of some unknown place), he threw in a few of those dolls' eyes, which open and close with gravity. I had a couple attached to the bathroom door in my former house, visible only when one closed it. I still have a big blue #17 staring out of an egg cup in the kitchen. Some years later in the 80's, after a divorce and remarriage, my wife and I took our kids out trick or treating, and while my costume was a cat mask, a staid suit, and a helmet with antlers (Daddy ogre), my wife had a horrid wig, odd glasses, and a helmet with a bunch of #10 sized brown eyes on springy stalks (Wicked stepmom). The all-or nothing winking, which occurs when they bounce, gives them, with their big lashes, a surreal quality. A good time was had by all, So, thanks go to Mr. Maciunas for a brief anecdotal peek into the unkempt back yard of modern art, and a dip into the bucket of blues and browns, which though they do still open and close, have little other relation to gravity,
I have a few eyes that l'm pretty sure are those. Back in the 1970's, I answered an ad for some lumber, which turned out to be from a rather eccentric and slightly famous avant garde artist named George Maciunas. He had bought a ramshackle estate in Massachusetts, hoping to start an artists' colony. Anyway, among his many collections there (piles of plastic boxes, avant garde art including a Spoerri Snare Picture, which he was impressed when I identified it as such, a piano supposedly played by John Cage, and a shelf full of carefully labeled animal feces from assorted zoos, etc.), he had barrels of dolls' eyes, the result of having bought a defunct doll factory in New York, which he planned to lease out to artists. He told the story that the building was full of unfinished doll parts, and needing to dispose of them decided to burn them in the building's furnace. So down he and they went, not realizing that this celluloid stuff blanketed the neighborhood with thick black smoke. Sirens started being heard, and next thing he knew firemen were rushing down to the cellar, just in time to see him shoveling what looked like the severed limbs of babies into the furnace, which he said as a childhood refugee from the Nazis was rather ironic. Anyway, when I bought his pile of used mahogany (the seats from the benches of some unknown place), he threw in a few of those dolls' eyes, which open and close with gravity. I had a couple attached to the bathroom door in my former house, visible only when one closed it. I still have a big blue #17 staring out of an egg cup in the kitchen. Some years later in the 80's, after a divorce and remarriage, my wife and I took our kids out trick or treating, and while my costume was a cat mask, a staid suit, and a helmet with antlers (Daddy ogre), my wife had a horrid wig, odd glasses, and a helmet with a bunch of #10 sized brown eyes on springy stalks (Wicked stepmom). The all-or nothing winking, which occurs when they bounce, gives them, with their big lashes, a surreal quality. A good time was had by all, So, thanks go to Mr. Maciunas for a brief anecdotal peek into the unkempt back yard of modern art, and a dip into the bucket of blues and browns, which though they do still open and close, have little other relation to gravity,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great story.
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