Nedrock 5

This might sound a little navel-gazey, but each of the decades that I've lived through has had its own feel for me. I'm talking about the calendar decades, the '60s, the '70s, and so on. I don't really remember the sixties. We don't really start remembering things until the age of five or six, and I was born in 1964, so I don't remember much from before 1970. In fact, I have a distinct memory of myself walking down Marlboro Avenue in Barnwell on New Year's Day and saying to myself, "1970. How about that." I had an idyllic childhood in Barnwell. I lived in two nice houses and half the time my parents didn't know where I was. I rode my bike around the Circle like it was my own personal racetrack.

Nedrock, Augusta, Georgia, ca. 1975

In 1980, Mom remarried and moved to New York and Dad came back from Wyoming and got a job in Hilton Head, so I moved down there with him. I didn't mind. The eighties were cosmopolitan and academic. I went my last two years of high school on Hilton Head, moved to Charleston upon graduation, and visited my mom in New York as often as I could, usually twice a year. I finished graduate school in 1990.

The nineties were sex, drugs and rock and roll. I worked as an editor at ----------- magazine in Manhattan from spring of 1990 to spring of 1991 and again from 1995 to 1997. Following the first stint at the magazine, I moved back down to South Carolina, initially to start teaching, but I ended up doing what I had deep down wanted to do all along, which was go back to tending bar in downtown Charleston like I had done in college, only without the encumbrance of having to go to class, just to enjoy the lifestyle, which I did for three years.

Even though I went to high school on Hilton Head and hung out with stoners in college, I didn't actually get high until I was 28 years old. It was the summer of '92, I was house-sitting on East Bay Street, and some friends of mine and I went to see Lollapalooza in Charlotte. About twenty miles up the interstate one of my friends pulled out a joint, lit it, took a hit, and passed it around. I was, like, holy shit. I had studied and written about mystical experiences all through college and had always wanted to experience immediate reality, but it turns out all I had to do was smoke some grass. 

I loved it. After learning to play guitar, I spent the last two summers of the '90s "playing out," as we called it, playing cover songs in clubs. And I really enjoyed this lifestyle, fancying myself a veritable John Lennon, using the drugs to expand my mind and enlighten the masses through song.

I literally spent the entire decade of the ohs, as I call them, in a dilapidated mobile home on Johns Island. This was a transitional period for me, as I finally began to learn how to behave like an adult. The decade parameters are not as neat here, as I taught at the College of Charleston for one year, 2005-06, and then taught at Trident Tech from 2008 to 2012, so there's a little bit of overlap here and I can't really say that the ohs were all about finally teaching. The ohs were really about exile in the wilderness and the teens would turn out to be the decade when I truly began adulting. The teens also roughly coincided with my move to Staunton.

Unfortunately, the teens were also about the onset of diseases, but I'm not talking about that here.

Even before they came along, I had been thinking that the twenties might be my decade to be an artist, when I would finally break through into the culture. Four years in, I'm beginning to think that this might be the case. When people ask me if I'm an artist, my first response, of course, is to say, "What is art?" But I have spent my entire life trying to be some sort of artist or another. I played with colored pens as a kid. I wanted to be either a priest, a teacher, or an entertainer when I grew up. After a while I realized that I basically just wanted to be the one standing up in front of a roomful of people. Teaching in the classroom is a sort of stand-up routine.

In the '90s, I did a series of crayon drawings and in the ohs I participated in a few group shows in photography. I've become a songwriter and I have joined a sketch group. And there is the Regarding series of art photographs. (What is art?)

Today, I consider myself to be a conceptual artist. In 2020, I started sending note cards of my own design to a core group of friends at various times throughout the year. We send Christmas cards, I reasoned, why not send Vernal Equinox cards and Labor Day cards? In 2021, I transitioned to postcards and over the past three years I have mailed over 400 postcards to friends and family, usually in dedicated series. I hit upon this idea of telling a story through a series of postcards. You can call it mail art. It's also some sort of performance art.

Giving the Van Gogh lecture was definitely performance art. The PowerPoint slide show is a work of visual art. There's also the Werner Trittleiter Affair. In a way, you could say my whole life is performance art. Those postcards might be worth something.

Nedrock, Staunton, Virginia, 2024