Tony walking in front of his wind chimes
El Rancho New Mexico
I'm screwed up here, but i know Tony would want his web-presence updated so that the state of its electrons accurately reflected the state of his electrons as they radiate radially outward from us. Maybe there'll be big science stuff soon, and we'll light-sail out of here and catch up to Tony's radiated patterns someday - scoop them like electric fish up in a net and have us a nice chat as we sail on out toward the edge - where Tony always wanted to go anyway.
Meanwhile - i'm gonna go sit out on the pier and eat a snickers and think about all of this, or nothing. I can hear Tony saying "Maaaark ... it's just meat Maaark."
The image above is how i'm thinking about Tony right now...
and this image below was how Tony was thinking
late at night
while he was wheeling his Mac's mouse around up there in Reserve...
Not many of us saw this digital drawing stuff - which is a damn
shame. There were 300+ of em on his hard drive - it's easily as significant
as all the hardware stuff - closer to his mind. Man could carve space like it
was going outta style.
Ask the Friends of Tony Price if there isn't some way you could buy an archival
print of one of these. Nag em about it until they put out a nifty catalog with
color pictures and offerings in various sizes and media. The sales from the
prints would help to raise the money they're looking for to preserve and show
the Atomic Sculpture...
Tony is - dead. There's no getting away from that in my head. I wake up thinking about him and i go to sleep thinking about him and i dream about him, the things we did and said and the things we talked about doing and didn't - yet.
Meanwhile, Tony's EMF field has expanded quite a bit out into the Universe.
Time for us to get crackin on the details, ok?
Reach out a virtual hand ... give some shape to
this nascent formlessness that'll be the place Tony's sculptures will live on
in.
Even though Tony's meat is no longer with us, his Art is - but the "is" where it is isn't doing anyone any good and y'all should have a chance to look at it.
So ... to address these current (FEB 2001) issues,
The Friends of Tony Price would like some of your money - and we're not asking
any questions about where you got it, ok?
[a] All that ATOMIC ART up in Reserve needs to be properly photographed so that we won't be stuck with the poor image collection on that CD that me and Rosé and Guy slapped together.
(Rosé says man with camera - James Rutherford - is working on it...)
[b] Mount a show of the sculptural work. Moving that much delicate stuff around - even if we had Tony to direct it since he is probably the only person on the planet that could put it back together if it broke (i know - i've tried) - is expensive. It would be nice to see it displayed nicely in the right venue.
(Rosé says: We got some of that wired, but
we need more, much more money - just give us everything you've got and move
lightly through the world. See Friends etc, below)
[c] Find the sculptural collection a place to live for a long time. Someplace
nice, where people can see it and think about it would be good. This is not
the kind of stuff you have to bury in a mountain for 20,000 years... OK - this
entity known as the Eco-Versity in Santa Fe is nibbling at the bait. This Tony
Stuff would be a good anchor and magnet and place to fulcrum an Artistic Lever
as anything you could want... Go for it guys...
So - please forward your old Green Stamps, War Bonds,
appreciated stock, negotiable instruments, currencies in any amount from any
nation or planet, real estate deeds, 1st born children or saleable works of
art - and it will be put to good use and you'll feel good about it. Do it before
the government gets hold of it. Just think about it...
I am told that the below named is the entity now handling the Art and Development
end of the issue.
The Friends of Tony Price
PO Box 9024
Santa Fe, NM 87504
Donations are currently not tax-deductible but they're working
on that again.
Checks should have written on them:
The Friends of Tony Price
followed by a large number and your signature
Save this checkstub - it could become once again tax-deductible
Of course, you realize you could just pony up some serious loot and give all 144 exquisitely crafted members of Tony's Atomic Pantheon a home, and his estate a hand up toward dealing with the financials. The Perverse Atomic Gods - which still afflict us and remind us daily of our combined stupidity as a species - would appreciate having a home in which to display their lesson to us.
You can reach out directly and contact Tony's good friend Rosé at
And he'll fill you in on what's happening now and how you get involved and maybe even read you a poem.
Here's a statement from Tony that I cribbed from an Article in the December 1998 issue of THE [Santa Fe's Monthly Magazine of the Arts].
It's probably as authentic a statement that'll you'll get, and probably the most clear-sighted eulogy he could have - seeing as how the bulk of it comes from Tony's hand and is as straight as I've ever heard him lay it out.
(Preface from THE (Santa Fe's Monthly Magazine of the Arts)
In 1965 sculptor Tony Price found himself in Los Alamos where production pieces that had been made for building atomic weapons were being sold as scrap material. While standing in line to buy some of this historical salvage, Price had a flash: to create icons of the world's religions out of this nuclear scrap with the intention of plugging the two energies atomic weapons and religion together.
These sculptural pieces would then act as valves. Each sculpture would set up a vibrational tunnel, an energy transference, allowing the two energy systems to become doorways to each other. For 33 years Price has immersed himself in creating a body of work titled Atomic Art that is an alchemical statement of what we as human beings have had to deal with in the 20th century.
This thing below is one of those valves Tony's talking about - connecting something to something else. What else is there?
TONY PRICE on Art
THE ART WORLD/EXPLORING CONSCIOUSNESS
Many artists are experimenting but only to a degree, because most of what they do turns out to be copies of somebody else's stuff. It's that way because that's how people are trained and it's that way because of the attitudes of the people who buy. More to anyone who can produce something that sells, but it's what they do that matters. I want to discover. I want to find out why. And all I can rely on is what I have been given and what I have found to be true. If I go off and believe in everyone else's trip, I lose my identity. There are no gurus. I'm the guru. You're the guru. We just have to figure out how to look inside in order to discover how the thing that we are is made and how we work. And then, once we discover something that's worth talking about, we have to produce. Output. Show something. Art is supposed to be about these guys and gals who build bridges between dimensions. I'm a person who explores his inner being and understands that there are other dimensions. The question that faces ail explorers is: How do you get inside and explore in these other dimensions? Right now, my way of getting inside is through my music. I build music boxes made of four walls and a ceiling of piano harps. I get inside it and play open guitar beginning with a basic harmonic. When it lines up as a pure harmonic, the energy produces an overtone. Then I line up the overtones and they split into two, four, eight, sixteen. To do this you have to totally listen to what you're doing. Listening is surrendering to what you want to hear and puts you in the now. I've found that when you slow time in the now, you have a virtuality to explore. Everybody has some abilities in this consciousness area but why have they forgotten? Why are we here? What's going on? Those are the questions. And consciousness is the truly important work that we can involve ourselves with. Everything else is just not hitting it. Wake up! Remember these things. I'm in your world and you're in mine. The true payment an artist receives is in the creating, because creating puts the artist in the flow of creation.
There's the guts of 4 or 5 pianos in there, and tape decks and
microphones and there's i dunno - 80 speakers up in that ball above it. You
crawled inside that little trapdoor on the right side - it was like crawling
inside the gearbox of the Turing machine of music technology - and scraped
and banged and rattled things until you couldn't tell the difference between
you and the resonance of all those strings ... and all the time it all came
out the top and scared the hell out of the magpies and ravens circling around
TONY PRICE on his work
When I was eight years old the first nuclear blast was set off at Alamagordo.
Within a few weeks a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and a few days later
the same thing happened at Nagasaki. Was this madness? How could man do this
to man? The world had just seen the Nazi death camps. So many camps, so many
ovens, so many millions turned to ash. I wondered if our world had a future.
For the last 50-odd years we've all been held hostage to this idea of death
from nuclear weapons. Some people were for nuclear weapons, some were against
them, and some didn't care. Just like religion. And just like a magnet - positive,
negative, and neutralizing. Nuclear weapons themselves became a religion. I
believed that if I could make a crucifix out of this nuclear scrap I could plug
Christian energy into nuclear-weapons energy; if I could make an image of Hanuman,
Hindu energy would plug into the weapons' energy. For over three decades I've
been making icons of the world's religions out of nuclear scrap - scrap that
comes from the birthplace of the atomic bomb, Los Alamos. I believed that by
doing this the energies would dissipate themselves and balance out. And this
is just what happened in my world. This collection of 144 pieces is historical
work. It needs to be seen together and it needs to be kept together as a body
of work, because that's where the power of the work lies. With this collection
I have finished my statement about what I call Atomic Art. This collection is
now for sale to the person who can see it for what it is.
