DAY FOUR: UP FROM THE DEPTHS

One of the goals of the hiatus was to return to the wife’s mother’s house and clean out the closets where the wife still had piles of stuff. While doing so, the wife and I came across something we had forgotten was there; a relic – perhaps artifact is better. We found the oldest extant piece of Thomas Knauer art – though no promises of quality are made.

I am pretty sure there are some early childhood things somewhere. I know there are a couple of intolerable ceramics things here and there. But this is the oldest thing that could actually stand some form of test of art-ness. It is part of a post-apocalyptic cityscape series I did in high school [my school had a pretty good welding studio]. It is not particularly good, but it is the beginning of the sculpture career. At some point during the college years I gave it to the wife – before she was the wife – and she has had it ever since.

So… We found it in the closet, but since we did so as part of a purging process we had to decide what to do with it. Luckily I am not particularly sentimental about art [my undergraduate comps show went up in a spectacular bonfire in 1997; some 22,000 feet of twine burned that night]. But, we decided to keep a memento, a fragment of the found treasure. So, vice grips in hand I pried off the fragment of the Battle Of The Planets lunchbox that was part of the piece – the relic that was part of what became the relic. The lunchbox had never been mine; I found it in a Detroit thrift store. That was back when my found object fetish was just beginning.

I find it particularly fitting that the fragment of the earliest period of my artistic practice is a fragment of someone else’s life, something too valuable, important, or simply useful to be simply thrown away. I am looking forward to framing this memory of a memory once the wife and I find a house; a simple shadowbox to hold the relic that will someday become a relic for a child or grandchild of mine.