Nature's Silence

This entry is in response to Cory’s comment and to similar questions I have been asked in the past.

Cory wrote: “To me, what is important in art is reaching deep into the silence of nature's ‘building.’ I do not find theoretical understanding of art helpful in this pursuit, and I really just want to know if you do.”

I think I understand the spirit of the question but I disagree with its underlying premise. The question, consciously or unconsciously, frames an opposition between “the silence” and reason, an opposition that, in most cases, comes from prejudices about the nature and use of reason as well as “the silence.” I don’t think we are able to reach into “the silence of nature's building” but it might be possible to sense aspects of what I think Cory means by “the silence.”

However, I haven’t met too many people who have a direct channel to this silence, or perhaps it is more accurate to say I haven’t met many people whose claim to direct channels seem credible. Any help in clarifying one’s work— theoretical or not—is good and necessary because, for the most part, we are lost. Each of us has ways and methods we prefer—as it should be. Of course, there is a time for everything; a time for theory and a time for doing; a time for looking and a time for not looking.

The Hand

When I cut my left hand the words from the Hagakure, “At that time is right now,” came to mind. As I looked at the hand, life was both—and not contradictorily— more factual and more dreamlike, and what was happening was no longer in the future but right there. The first part, the taking off the glove, was the hardest. Once I had seen it, there was nothing but coming to terms with things.

It happened while I was carving a large wood sculpture. I was going back and forth between a chainsaw and a high-speed grinder equipped with a chainsaw blade, which allowed me to move quickly through the wood. I almost remember the moment when my hand touched the blade but I remember better the moment just before and just after.

My life will soon continue, more or less, as it was. The turn, however, did happen; in my case a minor turn, for which I am grateful. The turn has been worse for others. In the ambulance I couldn’t stop thinking about the people losing body parts in Iraq—the American soldiers, the Iraqis, the children. The images that came to my mind seemed then—as they do now—unjustifiable by any policy or by any excuse.

Right now, someone, somewhere, holds on to his or her dismembered leg, arm or hand, or to the dismembered part of a daughter, a father, or a friend. That we can know that and continue on with our banal lives clearly says something about the machinery of survival.

Nietzsche an underpinning to my aesthetic ideal?

In response to gawalt’s comment to the previous blog entry.

No. I was trying to distinguish my ambivalence towards the value of work I’ve done with Nietzsche’s certainty.

But your question regarding the underpinnings to my aesthetic ideal is interesting.

It might be Nietzschean but it is difficult to say, particularly because Nietzsche’s aesthetics and his views about the function of art changed throughout his life.

When I was younger I read Nietzsche and other authors influenced by his ideas. Those readings had an impact on me, among other things because they came at the right time and because I didn’t have a well-developed frame of reference. So I think it is likely that to some extent Nietzsche has influenced my work—possibly to a large extent—but the way in which his ideas influenced my work and thought are indistinguishable now from the foundation of my point of view. I probably read him too early.

It makes me think of an old friend who, regarding the books of Hermann Hesse, said: “Demian” is a book that should only be read when you are starting your life and “Steppenwolf” a book that should only be read when you are coming back from life. I am not sure what he meant but it sounds right.

As a youth it is easier to feel comfortable with adoring Nietzsche.

On Looking at the Work Done

“I find it an impossible book: I consider it badly written, ponderous, embarrassing, image-mad and image-confused, sentimental, in places saccharine to the point of effeminacy, uneven in tempo, without the will to logical cleanliness, very convinced and therefore disdainful of proof, mistrustful even of the propriety of proof, a book for initiates, "music" for those dedicated to music, those who are closely related to begin with on the basis of common and rare aesthetic experiences, "music" meant as a sign of recognition for close relatives in arbitus [In the arts]–an arrogant and rhapsodic book that ought to exclude right from the beginning the profanum vulgus [The profane crowd] of "the educated" even more than "the mass" or "folk,"” wrote Nietzsche in regards to his book “The Birth of Tragedy.”

But despite his accusations and reservations Nietzsche found value in his book because he trusted the intent and the merits of its subject (the history of Greek tragedy and the psychological/philosophical distinction between the Dionysian and Apollonian spirits), and also because Nietzsche had an ability (coming from clarity, arrogance or both) to see his own personal enterprise in a historical perspective: “this audacious book dared to tackle for the first time: to look at science in the perspective of the artist, but at art in that of life.”

For two years my studio has been working on a series of books documenting the work I have done since my days as an apprentice. It is not a work for publication. Nonetheless, seeing it in the world, even in its limited visibility, makes me consider the value of much of what I have done, and in turn, much of what I am doing. Looking at these books I have feelings not unlike the ones Nietzsche had in regards to “The Birth of Tragedy,” with the exception of his conviction of the work’s importance.

There is one argument the books make very convincingly: some things won’t be again.

Being Cuban

For some time questions and bewilderment about my “Cubanness” has hovered around my work and me. From what I gather, it seems to some people that my influences, my behavior and public choices, and the way I go about presenting my work do not easily conform to notions of being Cuban, or even Latin American.

Today I will contribute my opinion to this minor debate.

I have often thought that Tolstoy’s first line in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” is not only a fine remark on the specificity of misery but also a warning against the tendency to trust generalizations.

Undoubtedly, ethnicity and nationality contribute to self-definition, but are they as relevant in day-to-day living as our individual experiences of class, family, exile, disease and books, and our happenstance of epoch, encounters and genetics? Furthermore, if we are heirs to values and assumptions that influence the manner in which experiences are lived and perceived, how do the experiences, in turn, influence those values and assumptions? And in the arts, where does heritage begin and end? For instance, in the question of Joseph Conrad’s “Russianness,” where is Poland, orphanhood, lost nobility, the sea, sickness, exile and language? Is Conrad’s Russianness something more than an aroma perfuming the man and his writing? And what in T.S. Eliot is American? Is Pablo Picasso’s work Spanish? Is Jorge Luis Borges a traitor for preferring English and German?

I won’t attempt to answer any of these questions. Instead I offer them as disclaimers to what follows.

For me, being Cuban is about the tone of my childhood and subsequent exile and, less importantly, some values and fears that colored the way I was raised.

My childhood is a childhood of images I still don’t understand and hence, to be Cuban, for me, is to not have been in Cuba long enough to understand them: poorly lit rooms decorated with furniture that couldn’t be bought anymore and therefore couldn’t be used; standing in dilapidated yards on bright hot days; watching adults mourn our impending departure; talks of “El Norte;” talks of Fidel; surreal juxpositions of old toy soldiers and caged birds and billboards of the revolution; suffocating asthma attacks on a sweaty bed; leaving on an “Iberia” plane knowing we will never go back. To be Cuban is also to have lived in Spain as a foreigner; to have endured the jokes; to have learned to speak with a Castilian accent; to have gone to Mass only to look at the girls; to have been poor in Madrid in winter; to have sought country in my family, compatriots in my brothers and fistfights in school.

To be Cuban is also the Cuban writers who I read as a kid: Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Nicolás Guillén, José Martí, Reinaldo Arenas and Alejo Carpentier; it was the Spanish translations of Kafka and Tolstoy and my mother’s choice of reading to me a story about the sinking of the Andrea Doria at nighttime.

I did most of my reading in Puerto Rico, however, where being Cuban meant being an outsider but also a fellow “Caribeño.” “Caribeño,” in the 1970s (and probably still), was being part of the sea, Colonialism, humor, food and a collective sense of inferiority. It was also reading Kant in Junior High School hoping we were smart enough (we weren’t) to understand it, but free of the idea that the German philosopher wasn’t speaking for us.

To be Cuban, for me, means more letters than country, more a way of looking at things than memories. It also means nothing really "is," everything is becoming, including self-definition; every idea can be my own and every failing possible. To be Cuban, for me, is to be thrown into the recognition, as Kristeva has suggested, that the foreigner is within us and that, consequently, what some people don’t understand about me and my work—German and Scandinavian influences, American literary references, Physics, concerns with time, Jewish parallels—is nothing but an attempt to makes sense of that foreigner.

The Architect

Thomas and I drove to Encinitas to see a juggler who goes by the sobriquet “The Architect.” The drive this time of year is pleasant but I was happy when we finally arrived. The show was arranged at an old ranch—the type of production you know has some poet behind it. We sat under a eucalyptus tree with a good view of the stage, which was maybe the size of a small bedroom. The excitement built as the crowd grew, and when The Architect appeared we burst into applause. The Architect was dressed as a nurse, which at first seemed confusing but after a while began to make sense. His entrance was nothing to speak of, and during the show he barely acknowledged the audience. The show, however, was enthralling.

He began with one red ball, which he easily kept in the air, ease he exaggerated by looking at his watch while the ball went up and down. Then he brought in a second ball and about the time that second ball went up, a sudden breeze crossed the stage. The two balls were easy for him but the insistent little wind was definitely disturbing their trajectory. A third ball went up and a fourth. Each new ball exaggerated the unpredictability of the others, but The Architect didn’t seem to mind the chaos when four or five or six balls were in the air and his skill was enough to hide the balls’ uncertainty. But when the seventh ball went up the situation changed. The Architect’s efforts to compensate for the wind became noticeable and his movement lost some of their grace. The ninth ball ended the act.

We were walking towards our car when we saw the juggler coming out from a barn. He was not wearing the nurse uniform but jeans and a t-shirt. Thomas, who likes to talk to everyone, complimented The Architect on the show. The Architect thanked Thomas, said something about the wind, and introduced himself as Rick Gibson.

The Lucky One

Thomas asked me today what had I earned and I answered, “Nothing, everything I got I got by luck.”

“That’s a fancy, muchacho,” he said, “you’re not that lucky.”

Then I remembered this:

‘Till, gaining that vital centre, the black bubble upward burst; and now, liberated by reason of its cunning spring, and, owing to its great buoyancy, rising with great force, the coffin life-buoy shot lengthwise from the sea, fell over, and floated by my side. Buoyed up by that coffin, for almost one whole day and night, I floated on a soft and dirgelike main. The unharming sharks, they glided by as if with padlocks on their mouths; the savage sea-hawks sailed with sheathed beaks. On the second day, a sail drew near, nearer, and picked me up at last. It was the devious-cruising Rachel, that in her retracing search after her missing children, only found another orphan.’

“I guess I earned at least one pleasure,” I said.

“That’s the one I was thinking about,” he said.

Kierkegaard and The Present Age

An excerpt from Søren Kierkegaard, The Present Age and of the Difference Between a Genius and an Apostle, trans. Alexander Dru (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962)

If a precious jewel, which all desired, lay out on a frozen lake, where the ice was perilously thin, where death threatened one who went out too far while the ice near the shore was safe, in a passionate age the crowds would cheer the courage of the man who went out on the ice; they would fear for him and with him in his resolute action; they would sorrow over him if he went under; they would consider him divine if he returned with the jewel. In this passionless, reflective age, things would be different. People would think themselves very intelligent in figuring out the foolishness and worthlessness of going out on the ice, indeed, that it would be incomprehensible and laughable; and thereby they would transform passionate daring into a display of skill…The people would go and watch from safety and the connoisseurs with their discerning tastes would carefully judge the skilled skater, who would go almost to the edge (that is, as far as the ice was safe, and would not go beyond this point) and then swing back. The most skilled skaters would go out the furthest and venture most dangerously, in order to make the crowds gasp and say: "Gods! He is insane, he will kill himself!" But you will see that his skill is so perfected that he will at the right moment swing around while the ice is still safe and his life is not endangered…

Men, then, only desire money, and money is an abstraction, a form of reflection…Men do not envy the gifts of others, their skill, or the love of their women; they only envy each others' money…These men would die with nothing to repent of, believing that if only they had the money, they might have truly lived and truly achieved something.

The established order continues, but our reflection and passionlessness finds its satisfaction in ambiguity. No person wishes to destroy the power of the king, but if little by little it can be reduced to nothing but a fiction, then everyone would cheer the king. No person wishes to pull down the pre-eminent, but if at the same time pre-eminence could be demonstrated to be a fiction, then everyone would be happy. No person wishes to abandon Christian terminology, but they can secretly change it so that it doesn't require decision or action. And so they are unrepentant, since they have not pulled down anything. People do not desire any more to have a strong king than they do a hero-liberator than they do religious authority, for they innocently wish the established order to continue, but in a reflective way they more or less know that the established order no longer continues…

The reflective tension this creates constitutes itself into a new principle, and just as in an age of passion enthusiasm is the unifying principle, so in a passionless age of reflection envy is the negative-unifying principle. This must not be understood as a moral term, but rather, the idea of reflection, as it were, is envy, and envy is therefore twofold: it is selfish in the individual and in the society around him. The envy of reflection in the individual hinders any passionate decision he might make; and if he wishes to free himself from reflection, the reflection of society around him re-captures him…

Envy constitutes the principle of characterlessness, which from its misery sneaks up until it arrives at some position, and it protects itself with the concession that it is nothing. The envy of characterlessness never understands that distinction is really a distinction, nor does it understand itself in recognizing distinction negatively, but rather reduces it so that it is no longer distinction; and envy defends itself not only from distinction, but against that distinction which is to come.

A Witty Age

The moralists are running to the microphones, their chest inflamed with indignation. They make an example of Eliot Spitzer and their theatrics remind me of that other Eliot, who thought the world would end with a whimper rather than a bang. If only some would avoid speech, as in that other line of “The Hollow Men.”

“What an age,” Thomas Hoveling once said and then, when I didn’t say anything, he added, “Wit. Don’t forget the wit.”

Here is a little fantasy:

I settle for smelling the orange blossoms as the powdered wigs walk by. Everyone looks so good under the glass tears of the chandeliers. Everyone but me, I say to Thomas, and with a finger smeared in saliva, I remove the dirt from my shoes. I sit in a corner trying to fit in. Experts in irony, the moralists, with their flaring cuffs, hold the little hands of the academics as they glide on the dance floor. The entertainers and the financiers talk about their retirement accounts while the rebels listen in.

I do fit in. And where are the arts?

They waive at me from the other side of the room where a small auction is being held. All of them, even the critics, are wearing Hirst’s Manolo Blahniks. On the men, the Manolos seem a bit puffy.

Soul Searching

“A great nation deserves great art” is the slogan of the National Endowment for the Arts. It is catchy but what does it mean?

A nation inches towards greatness, in part, by assuming it doesn’t deserve much, and it maintains its greatness, in part, by understanding “greatness” is not a coronation or a title but a reflection of the quality of becoming.

Moreover, the relationship between great art and great nations is by no means tidy. Spain in the Seventeenth Century, for instance, was losing its hold on the empire and was burdened by disease. It was also entrenched in the Inquisition and abusing the American provinces. So did it deserve Velazquez, Zurbaran, Lope de Vega, Luis de Gongora, etc?

Perhaps it is more accurate to say—in the case of Spain as well as in many others—that nations get the soul searching they deserve in the work of their artists. Art is the mirror in which nations who think of themselves as great must see themselves, often, as otherwise. But that is a less catchy slogan.

Santa Monica Studio

We have finished the construction on the Santa Monica studio, and seeing the effort, some people have asked me if the project takes away from my work.

The question seems to point at a more definite understanding of my work than the one I have. To me, “the work” is always shifting and always feeding on that shift. The question also underestimates the value of this particular “detour.” It would be hard for me to make a categorical distinction between the process that generates a painting and the process that decides I should hang the deer head in the studio’s library. In each gesture I am trying to sort myself in relation to it and to find something refuge-like in the final assembly. Space and furniture, for instance, are something quite distinct from the position one takes towards painting only if the purpose itself is quite distinct. For me, the studio is an embodiment of the same point of view that generates the artwork.

The artwork and the studio have many (though not all) of the same aims and provide me with similar comfort and discomfort, so what is the meaning of lost time or interruption of the work? I gain energy by using it.

The End of a Lovely Season

The measurement of time seems more arbitrary than it did before. Seasons come and go, and it is hard to satisfy the hunger of their coming and going.

As my last entry for this year I am including a working excerpt of a conversation between Thomas Hoveling and myself (which in its final version will be included in the catalog for my exhibition in Australia), and a brief description of the weekend workshop I will teach this summer at the Anderson Ranch.

The Lovely Season
Excerpt from a conversation between Thomas Hoveling and Enrique Martínez Celaya.

“Tell me about the children who appear in many of the recent works,” he said while turning on the lamp by his side. I thought about our other conversations about childhood and I wanted to say something new, even if it was not true.
“Everything seems possible with them but also, they might show signs of the many things that will not be possible.”
“How about the two sculptures of boys?”
“Maybe they’re to the image of a child what a petrified tree is to a tree.”
“You don’t see these children as symbols?”
“No. I realize there’s a tendency to read images as symbols to be decoded though psychological or political machinations, but to me images are flatter. They represent themselves first and foremost. To stop at the thing…,” I said fearing I was sliding towards my typical, and dull, philosophical observations.
“Do you think our society is becoming more sophisticated about images as it is often said?” Thomas asked.
“I guess it depends what you mean by sophistication. One way to see our world is as a river of images moving quickly past our consciousness. Everyone is quick with the glimpse and the quick interpretation. But the whole thing is fairly trivial, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know anything about that world, really. I’m out of the loop,” he said.
“The current seems to be moving towards small screens with little movies and a taste more defined by sampling than by sustained engagement; the art fair booth with the one painting by each artist, the music download with the one hit song.”
When I finished talking, we remained quietly sitting near each other, while I tried to dissimulate my embarrassment. I shouldn’t have been speaking in front of Thomas about the restless spirit of modern life. It must have tested his patience.
“Let’s eat,” he said.


Brief Description of Workshop at the Anderson Ranch

Stumbling Towards an Artwork that is not as Terrible at it Could Be

Topics to be discussed include the challenges of making art in the age of careerism and art funds, the struggle between entertainment and art and the obstacles and help in the formation of an artist. In addition to the lectures, a selection of critiques will be held as a well as a “symposium” between the participants, the artist and his created character, Thomas Hoveling. The “symposium” will include debates with volunteers regarding artistic worldview, question and answer and interviews.

Each day will consist of a lively discussion followed by a critique and/or a directed argument.

Tall Words

I have mentioned earlier on this blog the unnecessary tall words used by galleries on press releases. But the problem is not limited to that type of advertisement. Fancy terminology and confounding statements are, more or less, de rigueur in the art world. The reasons why this is might be illustrative of collective and individual anxieties but rather than explore those, now I just want to suggest we desist on the usage of terminology and postures that are not necessary.

At times, the need for clarity and precision requires terms and methods that might not be familiar to everyone. But arcane notions ought to be tools in the search for truths rather than veils to hide lies. It is more productive to study great thinkers to understand the mechanism of their thought than to find a quotable phrase or a hook for one’s deficiencies; even minor understanding of a good mind brings forth humility. The temptation is always there to firm our soft understanding with the prop of the big word or the important framework, but these affectations tend to hide truths not only from others but from ourselves as well.

Partly because philosophy and literature have played a role in my work and are part of my vocabulary, it has been a challenge for me to avoid the failings I have just described. Whatever the excuse, I am disappointed whenever I can’t find a way around fancy terminology. I think most people should avoid the embarrassment of sounding like intellectuals—particularly if they are intellectuals.

Foolishness

The Head of the Extension Program: Don’t forget your notes on Beckett. Work hard. Remember: The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom

Marty The Fool: It is always a late arrival. And no one is waiting for you at the palace.

The heavy bottom lip of the Head of the Extension Program lost whatever shape it had.

Golden Ratio

I understand the desire for ideal proportions, but the cult of the Golden Ratio seems puzzling to me. For all its divine attributions, the hope for a perfect ratio seems very human, and nowhere are the characteristic limitations, distortions and tenderness of humanity more apparent than in the need to find clues of the definite importance of the Golden Ratio—Fibonacci numbers, pyramids, ideal buildings. In the case of paintings, for instance, it might not make sense to decide shape independently of “content,” and once content has been taken into account, other criteria will reveal the secondary importance an a priori proportion.

The Prince

Richard Prince recently said something along the lines of “my favorite place is the studio.”

It would be nice to see his passion somewhere else other than the market.

Darling of Exhuberance

I am now writing from the Santa Monica studio. We have been working at it for some time and it will be some time still until it is finished.

A rainbow-colored butterfly flies over Dante, Milton, Swedenborg, Blake, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, Jung, Heidegger: the flowers of beauty and death. Here is some pollen from Blake.

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.

Exuberance is Beauty.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.

Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

The cut worm forgives the plow.

Nebraska Reading List

The following is a starter list of readings that might useful to the University of Nebraska MFA students. It is by no means complete. In addition, for those so inclined, I would suggest some introductory readings on Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, because they have had a significant impact on art and literature, also John Dewey's "Art as Experience," which I suggested in an earlier reading list. For those of you with a sense of humor, I recommend reading Semiotics. Also, take a look at some of the other reading list I have posted.

Nietzsche contra Wagner by Friedrich Nietzsche
Art as the Communication of Feeling: from What is Art? by Leo Tolstoy
The Definition of Beauty (from The Sense of Beauty) by George Santayana
The Dehumanization of Art by Jose Ortega y Gasset
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin
Truth and the Stereotype by Ernst Hans Gombrich
The Origin of the Work of Art by Martin Heidegger
Abstract, Representational, and so forth by Clement Greenberg
Romantic Survival and Revival in the Twentieth Century by Robert Rosemblum
On the Vernacular of Beauty by Dave Hickey
Boring Art by Frances Colpitt
The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism by Craig Owens
Modernity: an incomplete project by Jürgen Habermas
A Lecture by George Steiner

Books for the Artist

Book suggestions are a frequent request. It would be useful—and probably more interesting—if these requests were included in the comments.

For now, a brief but useful list of books for the artist,

The Power of the Center by R. Arnheim
The Germans and Their Art: a troublesome relationship by H. Belting
Art as Experience by J. Dewey
The Epic of Gilgamesh

Reflections on a Return

It has been five days since I left Florida. I am now in Los Angeles as if I had never left and in other ways, as if I had never lived here. Undoubtedly, my mindset is different, though I don’t know how or if it will affect the work. From a distance, and without whatever clarity time might bring, Florida seems an important period. It might not be inaccurate to think of it as a self-imposed exile, thought I have to smirk at the idea of exiling oneself to anyplace in which there is a mall and a beach. But it was precisely that resort-quality of the little town in which I lived that wiped away the romantic aspirations to self-discovery and “toughness” that inevitably come up in pilgrimages to deserts, to Alaska or to New York. The charm of a little beach town, the homes decorated with coral, the gentle nights and the Lily Pulitzer outfits, meant that whatever ideas I wrestled had to be my own and, frequently, foreign to the day to day conditions. In other words, the angst of the artist in the little beach town is felt in sharp contrast to its surroundings. There is no nasty grit of the city or garbage or frostbite, no traditionally-grand landscape or historical weight to echo the brutality of living or to applaud the act of getting up in the morning.