Recently on our trip to San Francisco, we saw a Matthew Barney show, called”Matthew Barney: It’s Me Me Me and some more ME”

Nah, just kidding…it was called something like Matthew Barney Drawing Restraint.

I’ve never really liked him much and in fact, in New York once I almost got sick at one of his shows although that may have had something to do with the Guggenheim with it’s circles and circles, ack. Garp.

Anyhoo, this time in SFO I liked him better and saw a little of what he’s trying to do which in some ways isn’t that much considering how much STUFF he puts out on the floor. It’s really amazing to see all the stuff he generates, I’d hate to see his garage, it must be packed to the gills! I mean there’s vasoline this and vasoline that and videos and movies and some more vasoline, there’s movies’ about movies about vasoline and there’s little watercolor drawings and there’s big boat rigs made of vasoline.

I’d say he’s Vasoline’s biggest customer hands down.

What gets me about it is how BIG he seems to be thinking (even tho as I said, his ideas sometimes are kinda small) and it makes me think that I too should be thinking bigger.

So I went home and I started to think bigger or at least tried to.

Which really didn’t work.

I don’t know, maybe some people are intended to think bigger and some people aren’t. I’ve always been a guy who looks at smaller things rather than the big obvious things so maybe there’s just no way I can do otherwise and it’s impossible to change.

On the other hand, maybe you don’t always know how big you can think until you finish thinking and possibly you ain’t finished thinking until you actually stop thinking. That if somebody is destined to think big he or she will start thinking and one thing will lead to another and before long BAM he (or she) is making BIG TOPIARY PUPPIES AND PUTTING THEM ON THE GROUNDS OF THE MUSEUM AT BALBOA!!!!
Maybe one thing leads to another in some people faster than it does in others.

I think it is true that one idea does lead to another and sometimes the end result is nothing like what you started with. You have a hard time even eggs-plaining to somebody how you even got to where you did, it’s so different than where you started.

And another thing to think about is, just because something is big in size doesn’t mean it’s good. I think that’s the case with Matthew Barney, he just overwhelms a person with how much stuff he has that you think well he’s GOTTA be good, just look at all this vasoline!

I bet if you asked one of these people who do things on a grand scale how they did it, I bet they all would say something to the effect that in order to do this BIG old project over here, they had to first do that small little project over there, that the big thing didn’t spring from nothing.

And the key to it all is to do something. You can think and think all you want, you can come up with MAGNIFICO ideas, but it aint’ gonna amount to a hill of beans unless you actually produce something, even if it’s a small thing.

I bet people who work on a grand scale are people who aren’t afraid to try something, aren’t afraid to fail and who (most importantly) produce things, probably very rapidly. The one thing leads to another leads to another and bingo you’ve got great big slabs of steel in your backyard and you got your neighbor complaining to the police!

So forgedda bout this thinking stuff, you get an idea you do it. And that gives you another idea you do that too and you don’t think AT ALL about it, not one bit.