Interruptions and Transformation

Yesterday, Joren Lindholm and me (no, not I), attended an artist talk by Don Kimes at the Katzen Center- AU Museum.  As I listened to Don Kimes speak, I was amazed at the ability art has to connect such wide berth of subject matters.

The recent work by Don Kimes, was catalyzed by the destruction of 25 years of work  due to the flooding of his studio. This type of a loss for a professional artist, is to say the least, a major interruption in the status quo of art production and artist identity.

Kimes talked about his early sculptural work and stay in Italy, the walls of Pompeii, the layers and architectural structures built on top of each other over  a span of 3,000 years. These walls informed the work of many artists, including Rothko, as well as his own work. I was humbled by the continuation and dedication to practicing art, I glanced over an saw a former professor and accomplished painter, Tom Green, and thought about my arrogance as an art student. I hate eating humble pie.

As Kimes began to talk about the interruption the flood had in his life, and the process of recovery, I began to reflect and feel at peace with my own interrupted art career. Behind Kimes, I could see another exhibit of work by Andy Holtin and Galo Moncayo, my eyes fixated on the screen  playing a video, in which a faint misty line poured down, making  little cerulean blue pigmented powder mountains, eventually rendering a landscape. Once the landscape completed,  an anonymous god-like hand, wiped the landscape clean, and the  process would start all over again.  Listening to Kimes process of reconciling with a life time of work lost, and looking at the creation and destruction of  an abstract landscape, I began to think of  the notion of  interruptions and the "Law of Tabula Rasa".

"The Law of  Tabula Rasa", are well known themes in my own life. They offer freedom to live many lives and become reincarnated as a new being. Unlike Kimes, most of my archives are internalized and intangible. Perhaps, this is a result of being up-rooted from the U.S., then  growing up in Cuba, to then be transported back to the U.S., and having to start over again. It becomes easier to move, and start over, if you have very little possessions, including relationships. A new social circle, grants the opportunity to create, without any reference to the past . This strategy has now been interrupted, Social Media connects me with people, I assumed I would never see again.

While tabula rasa,  has its merits, I have begun to see its liabilities. George Lakoff states in his book The Political Mind, Self-Transformation is a  popular Meta-Narrative in 'American' culture. We have no Pompeiian walls that speak of 3,000 years as archeological evidence of  empires coming and going. My own belief,  that every human has a divine right to create a new life despite his/her past, socio-economic status  or ethnic identity, reflects a mixture of my own Americanism and Catholic social values. At the same time, I firmly protect the past, glorify ancestors and feel irritated by a simulacra Pompeiian walls so prevalent in suburbia. The past keeps me grounded in reality. The material process in which Kimes arrived at his  new  work, departs from his past, that is the illegible marks and traces that were left on previous photographs. These are scanned and projected on to a canvas, and Kimes is then able to move forward, engaged in his own creative process.

A fragment of a female figure, emerges in classical form in one of  Kimes abstractions. This painting created clarity in all the postmodernist theories, I had been subjected to in grad school. I also recalled some of  Borges writings, the title of which I can not recall. Borges, speaks of a fragment from ancient civilization that is found, and displaced from its original context.  This fragment becomes the whole, the point of departure,  new meaning gets created. For Borges, like myself, the danger in this, is missing the big picture and being disconnected  from  past wisdom. It is our current Postmodern thinking, that allows a professor  in a newly founded pseudo-management-science grad program to tell me, that Postmodern this emerging social science, is different than the one  'you guys use'  (meaning Arts and Humanities). As an artist, I can't buy this type of Wisenschaft. It's all connected, just as Kimes presentation bridged his personal experience of the visually rich material walls in Italy, with the many human hands that have touched these walls over the centuries.

We buy our transformation, perhaps subconsciously in our attempt to keep the type of interruption that left Kimes in a three year depression, questioning his identity and sanity as a professional artist.  The market knows our desires for self-transformation, clever advertising campaigns  hook us into buying packaged transformation. Plastic surgery, rags to riches programs, possibilities, the American dream are memes to appease our lives of quiet desperation, but not really interrupt. We seem to think we can engineer and control our interruptions. These controlled interruptions, never seem to truly deliver on  their promises. As Americans we have our own version of Abraham, like Joseph Smith, and Sara Palin. We wake up one day and declare ourselves artists, without paying  dues or training in this ancient profession. Conversely as an immigrant nation, if one was a Doctor in the old country, here one transforms as a dish washer. Effective transformations in our Meta-Narrative for self-transformation , must also produce the Horatio Alger or some type of material wealth. All the wealth of an artist is in his portfolio and a lifetime of work, but also in the skills he learned that  are the intangible capital of his trade and identity. The same skills no natural disaster, political upheaval or economic downturn can take from me.

I like to think of a scene at the end of the movie "A Civil Action". Kathy Bates, playing the bankruptcy judge, asks "Where is all the stuff? Where is all the material things that make up our lives?" Where did it all go?". John Travolta who plays the lawyer filing for bankruptcy in this movie, doesn't answer. In fact his character developed through out the movie. Taking the environmental case was a self-seeking move, one that would have advanced the protagonists' career and fortune. The loss of his fortune, was an interruption he had not planned. The interruption transformed this lawyer, although he never speaks of this. This is our paradox, as a culture we are bound to our material possessions to prove our identity. Globally, we are known to have historical and cultural amnesia, yet at times we join the rest of the world. Our current interruption in greed and unlimited growth due to the collapse of Wall Street creativity with derivatives, offers hope, a chance to get out of a rat race that was killing us, an opportunity for real transformation and authentic, sustainable living.

These devastating interruptions are what people in 12 step programs use as part of their growth and development. They are referred to in code as, 'life on life's terms' or  'AFGO' (Another Fucken Growth Opportunity). These  interruptions are not on the market. They happen at the worse possible time, and are not part of anyone's plan.  In fact, these interruptions are usually what we pray would never happen. My own AFGO, comes from seeing how easily I  rid myself of  my studio and art practice, after 9/11, arrogantly thinking it would be easy to start again, using the 'Tabula Rasa' methodology, and re-inventing myself as a business person. After ten years, people are not buying the projected business person, and still refer to me as an artist, and nag me to death about getting back into the studio. I must be showing some traces or marks like Kimes post-flood photographs.

At the end of the presentation, Kimes, affirmed passionately that the flood was the best thing that could have happened to him as an artist. In his experience, the work was by far, the most authentic that he had created. Kimes also emphasized that in producing the work, he had consciously sought to produce beauty in the superlative. The paintings were both beautiful and truthful, I think Keats would have been happy. This capacity to create beauty out of devastation and destruction, is the most healing aspect of art.  Our human spirit is designed to create and thrive, as a result of  hostile and adverse environments and catastrophic events. Knowing this, I can let go of creating idealistic and utopic environments,  stop buying transformation, and use the interruptions as a source for my own art practice. As my mother always says, "All roads lead to Rome".

Visual Inspiration for the Day

Getting Back into the Game

Dubuffet was in his forties when he decided to leave his family's wine business, move to Paris and be an artist. This decision was in 1942, during Nazi occupation. Dubuffet had previously an ambivalent relationship to art and its value. After 10 years of trying to make it, trying to prove my value in the workforce, and now in the worst possible time, I am choosing to get back into my art practice.

My intention had always been to get back to it, once the circumstances in my life where ideal. Once I could procure that financial security, that man, or achieve the highest level of transformation and enlightenment. There was always something more important than making art. It also didn't help that I was isolated and subjected to all the preconceptions that most people have about art and artists.

Art has always been my raison d'etre, its funny that I resist this and would rather be a mortgage broker.