Joke to Art - the Real Story

Necessity is a great mother for invention.


I needed a new small sculpture to deliver to Gallery 10 tomorrow.


Yesterday I walked into my studio and began looking around. I had been thinking that I wanted to experiment with an "assemblage" - you know - a little of this, a little of that - like the ham salad the other night.

I gathered some layers: a wide frame for a base, a small unfinished canvas, and a smaller scrap from a frame. I kept looking around, poking my nose in here and there and then - - I saw it at the back of a shelf. I saw the hand made wooden bull-shit grinder my father gave me in the 1970s as a joke-gift - teasing me for working as a lobbyist for equal rights for women artists.

The grinder was perfect. It is a compact square - it just fit in the empty hole of the smallest frame and the grinding lever added a new dimension - it made the piece interactive. People could move the lever and actually grind. I could see these pieces fitting together. It would work.

Voila - all that was left to do was some hot glue gun action and I was home free.

Laughing, sometimes giggling, I glued the construction together.

Perhaps someday I will write an artist statement, you know bloated art talk, saying the piece was a social statement. I could say that it was inspired by these recent months and months of Presidential Primaries and all their campaign rhetoric -
and influenced by the art work of Robert Rauschenberg.

That's how art stories evolve - how myths are formed.

Today we know - the real story - about this art work.


I am sure Daddy would like the piece - the re-invention of his bull-shit grinder from a joke to art.

Its a Robert Diggle kind of joke.

Today, however, I get the last word -
my title for the art work:
Homage to My Father: A Great American Bull Shit Artist

from his loving daughter.