Phil was an ex-marine, poet, literature major who I roomed with while I was in art school. He had a determination to write the kind of poetry that was appropriate for himself regardless of how others would in the moment attempt to define the arts. For me that kind of dedication was a refutation of those who attempted to subsume art within their own limited visions. In spite of that fortitude, though, Phil could actually be as pragmatic as he was idealistic. For example, there was the day when we . . . well first . . . Joe separated from his wife and moved onto our sofa. He was a grad student who T.A.’d a class in Cuban revolutionary cinema. Joe was also a Marxist and a fervent consumer of any altering substance that happened to be in his vicinity. He believed in his work: the exorcising of popular myths about love and politics and revolution.
Getting back to when I interrupted myself, I was beginning to tell about the day the three of us, individually, decided to participate in a student demonstration to give voice to our beliefs about the circumstance of apartheid in South Africa. We were all in support of the view that companies and organizations, including the University, should be condemned for investing in and profiting from the then racist South African regime. This march presented us with a vehicle from which we could express in a voluble way our then embryonic visions of a more equitable world.
On the morning of the demonstration we left home together eager to join the march. Notably Phil had pulled out his old Marine knapsack and fatigue jacket. The complementarities of his red beard and green paraphernalia juxtaposed against the deep blue northern California sky seemed to exemplify, on that day, the occasion of presenting oneself in the commitment to a principle. We began walking near the front of the rally and, with some 400 other energized and animated students, made our way up the hill to the University administration offices where, much to our mutual surprise, talk soon began to circulate about entering and taking over the building. It was a weekend and employees were not present in the offices.
Which brings us back to Phil, and Joe as well. You see, Phil, ever reactionary, had a host of warrants for parking tickets that he had dumped without paying and Joe, activist revolutionary that he was, had his teaching position to be concerned about. I could sense them both rapidly calculating the risks involved in stepping into this more explicit and egregious aspect of the adventure. After what seemed to be an appropriate moment of hesitation, Phil bent down, picked up his tired knapsack and jacket; Joe wordlessly turned his back on the administration building, and together they slowly strode back down the hill toward their futures. They had effectively acknowledged the primacy that pluralism places on all our decision-making.
As I sat in the concrete slammer that night, without my roommates, there was plenty of time to ponder the issues they had left me to hold; dank issues like the morose concrete ceiling and walls that enveloped me – issues that brought me to face the naivety of having conviction about the possibility of a coherent world, or faith in the underlying importance of art, particularly during an era of condescension – a consequence of the ascendant focus on both individual and collective financial and physical power. In a world that is continually revising itself, wherein the judgment that one develops along the course of their personal history must be constantly reevaluated in relation to the present; in that world I realized it is impossible for art to exist distinct from its environment. Particularly amid a circumstance of continual transition, it seemed necessary for an artist to literally construct a foundation of importance, relevance, and value in relation to pursuing their art making. And it is within that construction that the artist’s connection with culture is established.
That night, in the silence between the bangs of the large metal door slamming behind my compatriots, as they were taken one-by-one to be booked, decisions about the pursuit of my career should have been elementary. In the wake of the early defections of my roommates, I should have been faced only with a question about the possible compromise of my own beliefs. But it wasn’t quite that simple. After Phil and Joe had departed from the area around the Administration Building I ran into Barbara, a woman I worked with in a coffee shop on campus. We talked and, when the time came, we both entered the admin. building. And in time amid the blare of police bullhorns and the chatter of students taking advantage of the University telephone system to call friends around the world, Barbara and I quietly made out behind a desk in one of the offices.
It seems there is always the ploy of inside against out: inside the art studio; outside in the world; making art; surviving and relating. That night, in the men’s slammer, during the anticipated confrontation with my belief system, in light of the compromises made by my mates, I was at the same time immersing myself in the originary fantasies of a newly born relationship.
Several years later I lost touch with Phil and so have no idea whether he continued to write. I did in fact see Joe a few years ago. He was presenting at the CAA in Los Angeles. Joe was living in Mexico City, teaching and writing about photography and film, sometimes receiving U.S. and other international visiting professorships. But this is not solely about them or the way they each chose to maneuver their lives. It is more about how we all, artists that is, go about creating an atmosphere of productivity for ourselves and in turn how that production manifests the reality of art itself.
The relationship that began that particular afternoon, its inception interrupted by a night in jail, lasted 18 months. Not only did it influence my future art making, also did the events around the demonstration and sit-in. There were weeks of meetings and visits with lawyers until, ultimately, the authorities decided to let it go and leave us with minor misdemeanors.
To Phil and Joe the event was a comic saga, an opportunity for “guys” to be dismissive of a friend’s experience. It was effortless of course to return the sentiment by reminding them of the significance of their “transgression.” Surprisingly, the issue seemed to be too considerable to be engaged unemotively. The conversation does, though, beg a question about whether one actually transforms through the accomplishment of an unusual experience, or whether one has simply taken advantage of an opportunity to evolve closer to whom one already is. Phil and Joe seemed to care little about the competitive advantage I was trying to maintain during this interaction, whereas I also wished to bask in the belief that I had persevered through a risk encounter in which I had willed myself closer to the snapshot of personhood I hoped to attain.
Barbara was also a writer. Her journalistic synthesis of the free flow of Kerouac and the word play of Joyce could slice through the belly of any sacred cow. Sometime after we had split up she went to Nicaragua where she got a teaching job in a language school. She would travel to rural areas and send periodic bulletins in the style of her prose. They described the everyday plight of people caught in the hostilities between the Sandinistas and the Nicaraguan government. She mailed the bulletins to a friend in Maryland who in turn copied and forwarded them to other of her friends around the country. They had no other purpose but to communicate artfully the situation she had encountered. I read them as an expression of her art, a trade she had studied and practiced.
There were the four of us employed in art or art-related endeavors with our attention at those particular moments focused on matters seemingly divergent from the production of art. It seems difficult, in this vein, to separate personhood from art-hood; to excerpt a singular word like “beauty” or “charm” or “meaning” and declare that word alone represents the substance or intent of any one artist’s work.
For me those years were primarily a time of learning. I had mentors who brought me their vision of what art should be and others who encouraged me to explore through the considerations they had initially set. It was a time when questioning held sway over acquiescence and the pursuit of individuation marched alongside an ideal of collectivism and community.
Yes, the march. The march was the force, the combined vigor of unique personalities in common pursuit. That is what, due to my investment in all of the day’s activities, I neglected to focus on that evening. The march included Phil and Joe and Barbara and four hundred others. Distracted by the law and the relationships and the process, I had disregarded the march. In this case, around the issues I am presenting for your consideration, art is the march. Matisse crafted art of beauty and charm, but also spoke to perception and intellect. Duchamp addressed thought and also produced works of impeccable craft. It is unclear whether any of these qualities will be primary attributes of an art that is truly relevant to today or tomorrow. These characteristics in fact have little relevance with regard to the issue of what art will be. It is the momentum of the march, propelled by a collective will, which marginalizes the influence of flawed positions; and it is the march, the resultant of the whole, interactive, fluctuating mass, which at any point in time tells us what the shape of the determinants of art really are.
Today there is work being created in media and concept and politics: placed on billboards, on water and in the air. There is mail art and book art and variants on every interest. These diverse forms and genres may include issues relative to beauty or concept, or they may not. They are under reported: individual artists and groups communicating blindly through electronics or with their own print to unseen and unknown recipients. Their individually unique product, taken together, determines the breadth of art. And by extension, as art can do, that product reflects back to us the disposition of our contemporary world.
2005