Art Must Bear Witness

Akira Kurosawa said that "Being an artist means not having to avert one's eyes". I would take it a step further and declare that "As an artist, it is my DUTY to not avert my eyes". I suppose that's where the darkness in my work comes from, that recognition, that facing up to what is coming for me in a few years.... for all of us eventually.
Someday, when I grow up, I want to curate a show of pieces that allow each artist to do a 'rant' on what moves/outrages them most. It would be extraordinary to explicitly allow each to bear witness to what is most important in their lives, hearts, minds....In that spirit, here's a 'political' poem/lyric for which I have not yet made the physical piece:

Dick Cheney, Sigmund Freud And Gianni Versace Go For A Short Walk
Sirs:
When I remember
the elegantly constructed hunger strikes
of the suffragists,
or think of women carving themselves down past beauty,
past loathing, into tinier and tinier dresses,
or consider the mothers, beaten flat as leather,
suckling fly-beaded babies
on breasts that hang vacant
as empty Walmart bags,
I want to give them all paper napkins,
salt
and steak knives.
I want to fire up a Weber grill,
and seat these starving women on the cool grass,
around a checkered cloth
beside the spot you walk past every day,
on your well-marbled calves,
diseased hearts still pumping nourishment
inside your expensive suits.
I will listen, from behind the bushes,
as you discuss with enlightened dispassion
the politics of hunger, bereavement and servitude,
as I pound stakes into the ground
and twist strong wire across the sidewalk,
taut, invisible,
exactly ankle-high.

The Value of Being Worthless

I have the genuinely good fortune of beginning my scrawled attempt at being a Real Artist on the clean, white-paper premise of being utterly worthless. In the last few years I've made some huge, life rending mistakes as a mother and as a person. I am finally facing the fact that, despite love and good intentions, being a homemaker for the past three decades has been effort largely wasted. Think of the rock rolling, not just back down the hill, but rumbling right over Sisyphus, as well.

How can I explain the amazing value of this feeling of worthlessness to the task of beginning to be a serious artist? Oddly, it makes a person brave. And diligent. Because my time and effort feel insignificant, I can toss my art into the mail in total confidence that if something gets ruined, THERE'S ALWAYS MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM. I can tear my pieces up and remake and truly have a re-vision of how they can be better. I've set artwork on fire and been happy with the result. I can venture experiments in outsider forms and dark, surreal sensibilities that are likely to be completely misunderstood, condemned even. I can quite happily put in the thousands of long, hard, lonely hours necessary to launching this sort of mad venture. I can wear myself out and bang up my body doing it, and it's really, truly all right: Sisyphus strolls back up the hill every single morning. Whistling.

For anyone who has not experienced it, I also want to try to explain the strange and magnificent gift of freedom that comes with truly gigantic failure. Middling-to-large-sized failures are only disheartening and humiliating. If one has enough ego left to be embarrassed, then that's not the kind of self-detonation to which I'm referring. In recent years, as all my desperately held hubris was ripped away, as my most treasured self-definitions were one-by-one annihilated, I can't lie: it was agony.

But then, with ego and the stifling constraint of its walls torn down -- zen thing-- I found that I could look deeply into my own darkness, pain, ugliness, terror, rage, and even mortality and USE them. Now I have black, strong, silky warp threads against which I can weave whatever glittering or profound stuff I want. Now I can open my hands for the wind-borne gifts of randomness, no matter what precious thing I imagine that I'm clutching. Dream with my eyes open. Jump with my eyes closed.

I realize that letting go of my life has saved it. Enormous failure is a free fall that seems to be turning into... flying.

What is "Art Brut"? Profound strangeness...

"Art Brut" is another term for "outsider art" or art that is "uncooked by society" (Roger Cardinal, "Outsider Art"). Back in the early 20th century, art collector Jean Dubuffet began to gather up examples of the artwork of mental patients. His collection gradually grew to also include the work of social isolates, eccentrics and obsessives-- all of whom had no academic art training. He found that their work had "profound strangeness and integrity" and eventually his collection grew to more than 1000 pieces.

The terms art brut, outsider art, intuitive art,  visionary art, raw art, noir folk art-- have come to be applied widely and pretty loosely. "Art Brut" is even a name used by a band! All of these terms refer to work that is produced by artists who are driven by an intense need to communicate their inner vision and who may not have much formal training. Much of the work that would fall into these categories is dark, creepy and disturbing, although much is also joyous and spiritual. Today there are a number of galleries and even a few magazines devoted to outsider art.

I'm enclosing a couple of links for anyone who wants to look at some crazy-cool stuff. I'll list and write more later-- these days there are people who are writing whole Ph.d. dissertations on outsider art. Apparently, now it's finally really ok to be totally outside the traditional boxes-- which is a HUGE relief to artists like me who tend to say "Oops! Was there a box? Well, I THOUGHT I heard a crunching noise..."
   Links: http://www.artbrut.com/index.shtml
   http://www.avam.org/index.html
    http://www.outsiderfolkart.com/index.html

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