The conflict between what you know and what you see..
Today is the Day of the Dead, and there are offrendas everywhere. Last year, Karen and I made an effort to go to see a number of them, but I am just enjoying seeing the ones I run into, there are spectacular ones, but there are a lot of more humble ones that seem to me to demonstrate the interest in this celebration at a more personal level. Even here at Antonio's, he took the time to make an offrenda installation in honour of his father. There are three beers set out. I bought a votive candle and some cut tissue paper stencils, and some sugar skulls. There's some yellow marigolds and some brandy and even a plate of cheese. It's like trying to bring Santa Claus. The yellow flowers are to allow the spirit to find your installation, and the food and drinks are supposed to be the things they liked. Many people go to a lot of effort for this. It is a great thing to do something so illogical. I don't particularly believe in the supernatural, but I like how this is a great opportunity to recognize the place of someone you loved in your life. To remember your need for their love and for the love that they gave.
Painted a couple more paintings today, Hopefully will find some interesting
locations for them tomorrow. Just seeing them photographed on the table is
kind of interesting. Like this:
I'm just painting these from imagination. I should try to get some photos to use as references, but it just seems too complicated,.... Well, that's another way of saying I'm too lazy or that it's not important to this work. I am aiming for a more symbolic feel. But just don't ask me what symbolism. I painted the room photo before the other two, I think maybe I"ll try for some kind of dialogue between the paintings of the bird and the room. Photograph the bird painting in a room, with the bird painting in the background, and then photograph the room image on a wall. It's kind of like one of Duane Michal's assemblages. That was one of the first photo/texts works that I ever saw, and loved it. I copied that format with a photo series of how a bird hit the window, dying and then me throwing the body of the bird onto the compost heap in the space between the shed and the fence. That was in my foundation year of art school - 1981... I'm just trying not to think while I make these works. Hoping that the images that come forward are coming forward for a reason that make sense to the subconscious.
I worry that this work is so one liner - but I like trying to make people laugh.
More painting. It's like I make one mistake, then spend the rest of the time painting to try to fix the mistake. I look at the works I'm making here, and they seem to be an attempt at a kind of stand up comedy in painting. I wish I could say that I was trying to make profound cultural statements, but if I do, it's a happy accident. I want to say that I'm in control of this poetry apparatus, but I'm afraid not. I'm just trying to make myself laugh. Either through exaggeration or connecting disparate elements that make for a humourous intersection.
Here are a couple of the latest paintings. Now where should they go? Don't know. Maybe I'll find something...Do I walk around with them in my backpack or wait until I have an idea?
Here are a couple of images from the other day...
When I went to the tienda (corner store) to buy beer this evening (Victoria), I brought a dozen empties, but I only wanted to buy 6 beers. The guy running the counter seemed really nice, but was hesitant about giving me credit for the other bottles. The deposit is quite high here, relative to everything else, like 20 cents a bottle or something. I don't think he had the change in the till to give me. It reminded me that some people and businesses fly very close to the ground in terms of how much money they have to operate. Places just don't have change if you give them a 100 peso note for a 15 peso purchase. Maybe it's just a theft thing, not having your cash around in case you get held up.
The question on my mind these days is one that I tried to shape 12 years ago, about how can I describe masculinity. For me. There are books that offer critiques of masculinity, but somehow I don't want to live with a critique, it's easy to say what's wrong with heterosexual masculinity, but I want to be happy being a man. I want the people around me to like me being a man. I want my manliness to be a good thing. For women, for the planet, for the animals that live here, for other men. The minute you start trying to label masculinity, or look at it, the traditional definition/perception starts to deflate. When I was a teenager, there was an article in National Lampoon that said in big bold letters: My Vagina. It is a story of a teenage boy who wakes up with a vagina and tries to figure out what it is, and what to do with it. I think what I like most about it is the attempt to imagine being a girl from a boy's perspective. One of those impossible riddles, like figuring out superstring. or imagining more than 4 dimensions. Yesterday I tuned into CBC radio on the internet and caught some of Quirks and Quarks, and a physicist was talking about "branes" short for membranes, the only term they could come up with to describe this multidimensionality... What a stupid name. First, homonymically, it refers to brains, as in thinking brains, giving it this "intelligent design" reference. Right away my Christian Coalition alert goes off. OK where was I... trying to figure out how to be a man. Could I be a man without a cock? Yes, there are men who have had accidents and lost their penises. Could I be a man without balls? Yes. See the previous answer. Is being a man, then like saying something is art? You just call it art, and it is. It's more important art if you spent your life calling yourself an artist, and you call something art, but it is something anyone can do, essentially. There are examples of Native american societies raising girls as boys, because they needed boys to go hunting, so being a man was almost an arbitrary designation. I think I went to some conference where this was described, and there was a description of the trauma that was inflicted when some of these children were obliged to adopt their original sexual identification later in their life. OK so we're into a bit of a nature/nurture thing here. and what to do. It all gets so complicated so quickly. Are we given a basic blueprint for behaviour that we adapt or remodel according to opportunity and training? If I was to call myself a dolphin, could I be one? No, not really, so there are some limits to the definition. Where does it end? I have nightmares of being a wolf. Not of actually being a wolf, but of being a wolf who is being hunted by beer drinking hillbillies who want to shoot every living thing with an automatic weapon.
I can't say that I'm advocating some mushy masculinity. I like people who take charge and know how to get things done. But that's not a definition of masculinity, Paul, that's just a definition of self confidence. I like people who challenge gender stereotypes, but I can't say I have much patience for affectations. I know these are non sequiturs, sort of, and I'll figure them out in my next life, when I'm more organized.
Well, what does this mean for the art work? There's this art work that I never quite threw away. It's embarrassing, but I hope to find an interesting place for it one day. For a whole summer practically, I jerked off, and wrote the fantasy that I imagined on an identification card, like evidence. Then I attached the card to the paper tissue that I cleaned myself with. How come you can't end a sentence with a preposition, anyways? That one never really stuck with me. So I thought that perhaps one could glean a quasi scientific approach to sexual identity, and I guess in a Kinseyan way, was trying to figure out where I was/am on the hetero - homo continuum. So I determine that maybe I'm more straight than gay. How does that mean you live your life. Your straight side has to develop a consensus with your gay side about how you're going to face a particular issue. It's just that my gay training doesn't get much exercise. OK so we can talk about being bi, but these are all labels. What can we do with a label? I like the idea that labelling the straight white man can undo a bit of the power that is cultivated by Hollywood representations, but I am an iconoclast, and squirm at the idea of wearing any label at all.
Later... Back from seeing the film "The Constant Gardener" with Ralph Fiennes and Rachel Weisz. So the question that is running around my head again, is, What does a perfect world look like? It seems the more wealthy people are, the more they want to inflict their will on the vulnerable around them. I imagine that when a village is small, the person who wants to be the chief has to be physically ready to establish dominance, and they have to live close to the people who are adversely affected by their quest for power. As tools and population grow, the distance between the most and least powerful people grows. If you are going to control the people around you by fear, the distance you can control people with a gun is farther than that you can achieve with a knife. As the person trying to establish control it is easier with more powerful weapons, and especially engaging other people who will do your dirty work for you. Ultimately we end up with a corporate power structure in which the very wealthy are very far from the people who are most adversely affected by their actions. It is easier to ignore feelings of guilt when those who are affected are on the other side of the planet. It seems to me that the only system that would work would be a collectively applied communism, where everyone is obliged to participate in the administration of a society. But is there room for artists in that world? Where does the free mind live in a collectively administered society? I guess this is the manifesto of Paul, except that there are no rules yet. You would have to have a feeling of individual responsibility for the well being of everyone. We are a long way from that at this point.
Maybe the project of building ever more powerful computers is a way of creating a governing system that will have a better way of managing people's existence through logic as opposed to emotion. It is not logical that we destroy the earth. I kind of doubt this, but maybe there's hope here. I'm just trying to imagine the people of Haiti or just about any underdeveloped nation being governed by a computer. Although maybe we'll create The Matrix and we'll all have to dress like Keanu Reeves, or otherwise be food for the machines.
I just reread the previous entry. Sorry about that. A bit indulgent, like asking people to watch me take a dump. Glad it's out of me now, though. This evening, I'm going to the prodigy concert. Have to find the Palacio de los Deportes. I'll be stuck somewhere up in the rafters at the back. Maybe there'll be lots of seats down below and can slip down after a while. There's been zero publicity for the concert, maybe I'll have a private show. I wish. I just want to see the scene, I doubt the sound quality will be very good.
So I'm trying a few more things for the project. Like a texture thing. Here's something.
My ears are still ringing. The show was pretty OK, more arena rock than I would have thought, and they actually had a real drummer. They spoke to the crowd in English, which was tolerated, but for all the screaming, people didn't cut loose or anything. It must be hard to be a rock star when people don't worship you the way you think you should be. Actually, there seemed to be a bit of a lack of committment to the concept from both sides. It's like the formula wasn't quite working. In the end, my $20 ticket had me right down by the stage. There were only about 4000 people in an arena that held 18,000. They had all the upper sections curtained off, good thing, it probably helped the sound. Outside.. vendors are flogging the t-shirts for 80 pesos before the show... about $8 CDN, and I forgot to check the price on the way out. I bought a prodigy coffee cup for $20 pesos about $2CDN. It seems to represent their direction pretty well. Still, I get into the sound, if not the attitude. Heavy breakbeat with rock/.rap
Spent today going to Teotihuacan and hiking around the pyramids there. I went with Maritza, a woman I met at the Esmerelda, and we met at 9 in the metro station near me. She didn't speak any English, so my Spanish got a workout. Good thing. We went to Indios Verdes, where we caught the bus to the pyramids. We took the bus that stops at all the towns along the way, but for the section we were on the highway, we were stuck behind a convoy of armoured tanks and humvees. Seems they had to pay the fare at the toll booth, go figure. The bus just passed right on through. Mysteries abound. On the way there we passed many many grey houses on the sides of hills. Grey, as in the colour of cinder block. I think this is where many of the city workers live. The police, the garbage collectors, the house cleaners, the security guards. I don't know, I'm just guessing. The Pyramids are impressive, they're huge. The larger pyramid of the sun was covered in tourists, a couple of dogs, and schoolchildren who were being told to lay their hands on the summit to receive the energy of the pyramid. There were some other types up there doing the same, but were burning incense as well. There's been a lot of reconstruction work, and I wonder how much of the reconstruction is an erroneous interpretation. The Aztecs found it, and built over it, calling the original inhabitants Teotihuacanians. There were up to 200,000 people living there up until about 700 AD. I guess they used up all their resources.
I would like to follow someone for a day with the video, or maybe just the still camera.
Hairy Chest on crushed lava rock.
A cart full of coloured chickens and baby ducks. I asked the man if they were
for pets or for eating, and he replied, "They're for selling"
I see this pretty often. Babies in plastic carry boxes.
Went to an opening at Nina Menocal this evening for the opening of a Cuban
artist Rene Francisco Rodriguez, who I don't know. Very well catered opening,
lots of hor d'oeuvres and rum and scotch on tap. Well, out of the bottle anyway.
I was somewhat early and when I started looking at the work, Ms. Menocal started
talking to me and I missed half of what she was saying, it was in Spanish,
but at least figured out that she was the gallerist before I put my foot in
my mouth. Then she asked me something about who I was, and I started talking
about being an artist in residence, have a studio at the school etc. I think
I have to come up with something else. I get anxious about being written off
sometimes, and try to make myself sound important, but end up sounding desperate
or something instead.
Oh yes, the work. The art was a series of paintings made in this kind of pencil
glob pointillist style. Glossy paint. In the upper part of a painting, a kitschy
symbol from the 50s of some vacation type logo, and in the foreground, gray
people watching the middle ground. Very well rendered from a gray scale pixel
style of painting. There is an interesting disturbance in the different styles
of the two elements. But personally, I get lost in the repetition. According
to the blurb, the artist is referring to a time in Cuba when citizens were
free to travel out of the country, and the logo/ads reflect that time. The
grey figures watching and waiting. Waiting to leave perhaps. Seems like a big
oversimplification of the Cuban dilemma.
Spending too much time in front of the computer. Surfing digital camera sites, looking at the new Nikon D200 and Canon 5D comparing and wondering if I got those cameras if I could take better pictures, as if.... Then trying to figure out what machine they are printing my files with at the lab downtown. How can they sell a 20x24 printed on photo paper for $8.00CDN? Never did find it, but it ate up at least 2 hours, while I learned about printers that print on photo paper using lasers.
This just goes into that huge bank of partially useful information.
I want to name to some of the things going on in the work. Here's the list
so far:
- Creating a context for a painting within a photograph.
- Photographing a painting and the context it exists in. Or perhaps it's better
to say creating a specific context for the painting.
- Challenging my own history of photographing artwork by not following the
rules of good art photography.
- Learning to paint. At this point, I'm only able to paint a few things with
illustrative style.
- Playing with the surface - photographing flat things kind of disrupts the
reading of the objectness of the photo
- Meaning/symbolism of materials
- background/foreground
- political aspects of a material choice
- making myself laugh
I was saying to myself, the day before yesterday, that I should get another
10 images or so done, then I can get on with another project. Well the first
thing I do of course, is stop working. Think it's in the bag, eh? THink again.
Can't even follow my own rules.
What's in a material?
So what of the symbolism of materials: Can a garbage bag symbolize a location?
A way of thinking?
Just chewing on an idea from Mike Kelley in the art21 series, that the function
of contemporary art is to generate a negative aesthetic.
Last night, went to the opening of the exhibition of works that were made in homage to Velasco, the 19th century landscape painter. There was a performance of Tchaikovsky, and at the end of the performance, they set off some huge explosions in the art gallery. I mean huge. They broke the light boxes surrounding the flourescent lights, and filled the whole huge art gallery, which is in front of the theatre, with an incredible amount of choking choking smoke. I can't believe this. Antonio is one of the organizers and makes a small speech, He has made a diptych of one of his paintings and a photograph I took of him wearing his mask and holding my painting. There are hundreds of people here.
Karen's birthday today. I went and bought some flowers to celebrate. Two dozen roses in the colour of pink/salmon that she looks good in.
Today, I just cleaned up the house. I think when I was stretching for my run in Viveros a couple of days ago, I overdid it and pulled the tendon in the front of my left hip. Just have to let that recover, so I didn't want to do too much.
If you've been following this blog closely you'll notice that I deleted the section about a-holes and shaving. I just couldn't handle it on a second reading. Sorry.
This evening, I went to an opening of a friend of Antonio's - Gabriel Macotela, and it was a bit surreal. Like many painters here, he works in a kind of 1950's style of painting. Jackson Pollock, Rothko, Stella, deKooning, PIcasso... These painters seem to be the heroes, and I am trying to get a handle on it. At first, I was dismissive, as at the opening of the Velasco show the other night, where a good 75 percent of the painters work with this era/style of painting and I thought, god, talk about a backwards scene. So I've been thinking about it some more, and wondering why is it that I am so committed to art being an experimental and always contemporary response? What if I liked 1950s painting? What if that spoke to me? I would try to make it, no? It's interesting that it still holds so much weight here. This is still turning around in my head.
OK... At the opening, in one of the 3 small rooms, there were a lot of his notebook drawings, all from 1978-80 or so, held on wires close to the wall with miniature clothes pins. The artist was talking about the artists he loved, Picasso, deKooning.. the ones I just mentioned. You can see that in the drawings, too. In the other room, he had some prints on the wall, made this year, of fairly modern shapes, more like Siqueiros, a very influential Mexican artist who would have been a contemporary of Pollock and Riopelle. (Continue to think of a 50s aesthetic). So this is fine, he seems to be in a good mood, there's only a few people there.. Over the next hour or so, a few more people arrive, and he decides to reorganize some of the work on the wall. A kind of performance installation thing. Then it's time for some action painting, and Gabriel gets everyone, including me to make some marks on the wall. It's hard not to try to be a 1950s Jackson Pollock, but I manage to make a few small marks, two collections of dashes with hopefully some kind of tension between them. Everyone else is making these very trained movements, big sweeping motions. I should mention this is with a pencil on the wall where one of the larger etchings was... Then he asks everyone to write words on the wall as well. I write "Lucha agradable" - "an agreeable battle". Who knows what's going to happen, it just gets more and more chaotic. Then the words are taped over, ostensibly to protect them from what's going to happen next. Splatter paint throwing.. This is kind of fun. I like this kind of audience participation in an opening. Well, Gabriel then just keeps going, and asks Carlos to wrap him up in tape and paper and paint on him. This is great, but I decide to leave, because I don't really want to know how it turns out, I like thinking about what it could be, and not what it probably will be. Also, I'm really hungry and not feeling too well, probably because I haven't eaten a real meal today and not enough. Just reading this, I feel I'm oversimplifying what I'm seeing, and want to reserve the right to take my dismissive tone of the art scene back. I should mention that I like Gabriel, he is committed to his work and the people around him. I had a great time at his house a week or so ago, watching Led Zeppelin on a huge screen TV with the sound turned WAY up, and I mean WAY up and then jamming on the drums with a bunch of people afterwards. I was in heaven.
I leave, and end up walking towards the Zocalo where there's a huge concert on that seems to be ending, and all I can think about is trying to get home when 80.000 people are trying to get into the metro. I walk past some big black sleeping dog, and notice a bag of a street vendor's possessions on the sidewalk, with a string tied around a window security grill connecting it to the bag of stuff. I keep thinking that whenever I leave my camera at home, the best photos are missed. Oh well. Better in my head and on this page. I turn back and head for home.
Some people escape their time, more or less, like Duchamp, I think his work is still contemporary, and experimental. We have yet to move beyond Duchamp. Maybe it's because we haven't learned to master his language, and lay it to rest in some history book. He was Post Modern before Modernism even happened.
I miss seeing the strong women I know in Montreal. The macho thing here is starting to bug me. Maybe that's why the 50s thing is still so strong in Mexico. It was the last expression of an uninhibited, oligarchic masculinity that ceded absolutely nothing to women. Except for Lee Krasner and Peggy Guggenheim, who made their own space, more or less, within that world.
This afternoon, in my lost moments I went to the market in el Centro de Coyoacan. Note that this is different from Centro Coyoacan, the very chi chi shopping centre mentioned a week or so ago. Came across this gem of Mexicana. 110 pesos. Expensive for here. But worth every penny, I think.
OK, while we're in shameless mode, I should admit that I've let myself develop a bit of a bad habit (besides jerking off, OK), I have let myself indulge in the guilty pleasure of eating Twinkies. Only here they're called Tuinky. I know, it's bad, and I promise I'll quit when I get home. (Eating Twinkies, that is). FYI, I usually eat the whole pack of three at once.
In other news, I noticed this house yesterday, and photographed it this afternoon
Across the street, there is a broken cement lamp-post, of which there seem to be many, all of which are in the same condition.
Went to Tepotzlan, which is about an hour south of the city. The fact that
it's lower means it's warmer, and it was like leaving Mexico to find... Mexico.
Also the small town thing means that people are less paranoid. Doors are open.
I think I made the worst painting yet. Will continue to work on it, maybe bury
it altogether under a layer of something.
The problem is that it's too busy. Like my head.
I rented a room in Tepotzlan that happened to come with a view
of the pyramid. It turns out the pyramid is closed while they rebuild the staircase
that's near the top.The room was in the attic of the hotel, with the celing
only tall enough right near the wall, as the slope of the roof generally made
it too low.
The room, #13 of course. I couldn't sleep. Too many dogs barking, roosters
crowing and church bells ringing all through the night.
The photo in the room was more than sufficiently intriguing. Two women. One
with her hands around the head of the other.
the view - a telephoto one - that's the temple at the top-middle-right
My only memory of this place before was finding the little stalls of wooden temple sellers and then climbing up the ladder behind a women who was going to the temple in a dress. I was embarrassed to look up.
There were lots of beetles, slow moving monsters that couldn't turn themselves
over if they were on their backs.
In town, the church entrance gate had been decorated with a bean drawing.
Really careful work. Puts DIego Rivera to shame
.
And another Mexican moment. A baby in a crib and a duck in a pool.
My apartment is the white building on the right of the picture, the dogs and
taxis hang out in the alley to the extreme right. The tree makes me feel
like I am in a tree house.
Dogs and Power
The barking dogs have been slowly driving me crazy. The night before last, it seemed that they would never stop, so at 2 am got up, put on some clothes and went to see what was what. Behind the apartment is a short dead end road that serves as access to the condo complexes behind the house / apartment where I'm staying. I pull up a stake to use if I have to get into some self defense. From the dogs that is. There were a bunch of VW bug taxis parked there for the night, but there were no drivers. Behind them, there must have been 6 or 7 dogs lounging around, with one in particular making all the noise. I raise the stick in the air and not knowing what to say, not too loudly, it is 2 am after all, "HEY!" and point at the barkiing dog. Well, all of a sudden about 3 of the lounging dogs tear into the barking dog. They make those really vicious sounds and the other dog starts yelping, and runs away down the alley, accompanied by another dog, to start barking much farther away. The remaining dogs assume their previous lounging positions and I decide that that's good enough, and go to bed. No more barking. The street dogs may be annoying, but they're pretty smart. I guess the barking dog was annoying them, too, but they just needed a little encouragement to deal with it.
This attitude of not taking action seems to be reflected in the people here as well. There is no recourse to police, so if you want something to happen, you have to do it yourself. You need to protect your property, do it yourself. Hire a guard, if you want to feel safe. It is so inefficient. If you paid the regular police force properly, they would do their job, and you wouldn't have to spend $500 dollars a month in hiring a guard. In the area where I am staying, everyone seems to hire house cleaners or other kinds of servants. What kind of attitude does this generate? Well, I guess if you're not used to taking things into your own hands, you get nervous about even thinking about it. There seems to be a culture of resignation to being a victim to some degree here. A victim to bad driving, bad policing, dogs barking, pollution. People here seem to blame it on being part of a third world culture, but I don't actually buy that, at least not in this neighbourhood.
So I wanted to make some relationship between the dogs and people. In the last two weeks I've heard the term, "the veneer of civilization", my dad uses it, and I think it came up in the context of the riots in France, and I am thinking about it with regards to the need for men to have power and how the dogs deal with their social relationships/power structures. It seems our ability to reason is not ultimately strong enough to deal with our need for power. Watching the dogs form an association and assert their power over another dog was very efficient in a way. But it seemed to have been precipitated by my presence. I think the dogs were able to identify my annoyance, and in order to prevent me from making a generalization about all of the dogs, making them all move to a new location, decided it would be less effort to remove the annoying dog. It was violent, and effective. I don't think we are so different.
At this moment in time, humanity needs to function with reason if we are going to survive. If we submit to our need for power, it will kill us all. Our ability to consume is an expression of our power, seeing as much of the time we consume for pleasure, not necessity. I'm talking about US and Canadian society in particular. Is it possible to intellectualize the need for power and divert it into a more useful action? Can society as a whole move like that? I have to find a place for the left wing revolutionary in my thinking here, justifying a violent response to violent oppression. Can you be a quiet zapatista? Can you live the revolutionary life without the gun? How does the intellectual zapatista reason this animal need for power and living with the planet. Managing our need for power, understanding that it is in many ways bigger than us.
I've been having a lot of little rage fantasies lately. I think they come from not enough social contact. They remind me that I am an animal, full of some kind of needs. The more I am involved with people, the less this occurs. I think this is related to the power thing.
My impression of corporate culture is that it is ruthless, and is all about power over others. When the TItanic was sinking, those business men hopped into the few lifeboats first, and damn the rest. This is the dog attitude to life. It works in small groups, It is a deeply embedded response in us, but we are essentially bacteria on the planet, a spreading infection, and we will either kill it, or be thrown off, or the best we can hope for is that we will enter into a symbiotic relationship with the planet. That would be a modification of both the planet and us. As a species, we would have to recognize how our need for power affects us. That's what good parenting can do. It gives us a sense of our own power, and gives us a direction. Most of us have to try to figure it out on our own, and fail for the most part. That's why men are so fucked up, they were never shown how to deal with their feelings of need. Need for love, need for power. Most men were never even told that they had feelings at all. That's true of the Calvinist, protestant culture that I am a part of anyways. I try to imagine how the Taliban man deals with this. Why controlling the freedom of women is so important. Why do single, independent women have no respect in that culture? I think it represents a huge, general lack of confidence in their own power. That's why it has to be expressed every day in a visible way. "I can feel my strength in my ability to control you". Perhaps because they feel so powerless to control anything else. For a man, the power to destroy is still power, and if it's all you've got, you'll use it.
Here's a comparison of the sizes of Mexico City, Montreal, and Vancouver.
Sorry, I can't seem to get the scales exactly right. Mexico goes right past
the frame. Click on the images to go to the google maps of each one, they
will open in different windows.
