Artist's Statement?

You mean like - A didactist formalist with neo-pre-Rapheal/Nagy leanings, I have, through the medium plastic transmograpication, rejected the post concretist topography of ironic, one might almost say iconic, statementalism to forge a new visionistic visage in the vacuous vacuum of viability?

Good grief no.

But if you are still worried here's a quick out.

• Who is the artist currently known as Tony?
• Is he really and truly an artist or just some nerk with a swelled head?
• And just what the bloody blue blazes is a Noctonaut anyhow?

Tony Spadaro is a fellow who has managed to live on this particular planet for more than half a century without doing anything particularly notable or getting hanged. With every passing day this rather simple accomplishment begins to look more and more like a miracle - at least to me. For I am Tony Spadaro.

So I am he and he is me and we are me and us is all together.

That was simple enough, so we can move on to:

Now we got us a snag. What is an artist? Do artists have degrees they can frame and hang on the wall? I don't. Do artists drink a lot and hang around with other drunken artists. Not me pal, I hate drunks and the smell of old beer is just plain sick making. But maybe it's only painters that drink all the time - something about the proximity to turpentine. I'm a photographer, and no one in their right mind drinks hypo. No one in their wrong mind drinks it either. It tastes terrible, and the hangover is absolute hell - - so they tell me.

Okay, we have this photographer who has the temerity to call himself artist -- and go into third person narration to boot. How did he/I decide I/he was an artist in the first place? Was there a lot of soul searching? Was there an excelsior moment? It was not a quick or easy decision. It took time, and the help of many many people. People who would walk up to me, a complete stranger (yes there are those who say they've never met anyone stranger), and without any preliminaries, any introduction, or any prior communication whatsoever, say to me "Why are you taking a picture of THAT?"

I've tried a lot of different answers:

• "It's my science project."
• "The city pays me to keep a photographic record of possible toxic sites like this."
• "In two minutes the Lord will appear right here - I have to get pictures for next week's edition of All Along the Watchtower".
• "Shhhhh - big drug deal goin' down. I'm with Outerpol."

The answer that gets them off my back the fastest, in fact, instantly most of the time, is "I'm an artist." Usually they do a quickstep out of sight before they even get to hear the follow up -"Can you spare a ten spot so I can get this film printed?"

If that isn't enough for you, try this: My pictures must be 'Art' because they are assuredly not anything else.

I haven't got a "theory" about my art. You can't really be an artist these days unless you talk and write more about it than do it. I don't care about movements, and I'm not interested in trends. I've even "wasted" my Manifesto by making it a site of harmless photography instruction instead of a pointed indictment of the fashionable well fed photorati (Adams was a running dog lackey of the imperialist park mongers). There is no wish to topple the recognized icons or even the recognized iconoclasts -- I'd collect their work but being a photographer I can't afford it -- I need money for a new lens. I always need money for a new lens. Can you spare me a ten spot to get some prints made?

There is also a complete lack of political agenda in my pictures. There is nothing of the social realist, or anti-social pictorialist manipulating these shots. I started a series called "Suburbia" last year. It was going to be a scathing satire of the oversized houses on the undersized lots and enforced conformity of the new sub-divisions and yadda, yadda, yawn, yawn... yawn. It ended up being a study of shapes and shadows, of sunlight gleaming off fresh surfaces. I simply am not much of a scather. After all they are only houses and the people who live in them look pretty much like me. I'm dreadfully bourgeois, and live in the 'burbs' myself. It's just an older sub-division, with smaller houses, bigger yards and more trees -- a whole lot more trees, scads more trees.

When it comes to listening to others analyze photographs I try to zone out as quickly as I can to avoid headaches. I can only just take so much artspeak (about half a sentence - less if it involves any bloody gestalt figure/ground dichotomy (when dichotomies get in the roses bring out the Black Flag). I do respect the integrity of the surfacial plane of my concrete medium -- meaning my pictures are printed on flat paper without any holes... except for some of the posters which are ripped and layered... but that's neither here nor there (unless you go to Breadmen's, in which case it will be there - and so will you I presume). My idea of the Plastic Arts is messing about with Legos.

On the other hand those guys who say "I just take pictures and that's all there is to it" aren't fooling me a bit. Not when they spend an hour waiting for something to move out of the way or into the way or for the light to change angle ever so slightly, or when they arrange and re-arrange and re-re-arrange a couple of bits of junk a dozen times over six months. This is not family snaps that just happened to fall onto the walls of a gallery folks - this IS art. But photography is not a spoken/written art - and never can be. The only language I've ever seen that could possibly begin to explain photography is dance - not music - dance. Not even photography can explain dance. Maybe a bit.

Currently I'm working on several series (seri?) including Terrains Vagues (again keep the 's') which is in many ways an offshoot of Moving Pictures. That particular series actually goes back to before I owned a camera, when I would take pictures from the window of my brother's car with Gramp's 616 Kodak. Only one picture survives from those days - the first in the series The Poster Project The negative is long gone and I worked from a damaged print. In more recent times my wife has done the driving but I've also used long shutter speeds or assembled multiple pictures to create Moving Pictures. Eventually I intend to do more images using rollover effects - this is something that obviously can never be printed, and is an awfully big step for me. The print has always be the goal and I'm not sure I'm ready to accept cyber-prints as legit.

By far the largest section of the site is The Noctonaut. I am he, and he is... we've been this route before. The Noctonaut has been with me from the earliest days too. The first Noctonaut picture is a self portrait taken on one of the same films as the Objects Domestics. The most recent Noctonaut adventure was in December of 2001 - but there will be more. I'm a creature of the darkness - a picture vampire - a stealer of souls in the night - but only warm nights. In winter a smart Noctonaut curls up in front of the radiator and sorts slides.

The Noctonaut is also about words and typography. This is the first time I've put a narrative to my pictures - and I enjoy it. I'll be doing more in future. In a way the Noctonaut is a movie, of a different type but in some ways similar to the moving pictures series. Maybe I do have a theory, but it is not based on the integrated plasticity of the concrete medium and the plane of the synchronistic surfacant.

The Noctonaut will ride again, and if you live close enough he could ride your way - if you are interested in becoming a noctonaut, or performing for noctonauts be sure to read the article on joining my little team. HERE You might already be a noctonaut who merely has not yet shown any symptoms.

That's the artist's art statement -- you don't want to see the artist's bank statement. It's more fun to go back and check out the Galleries.