I linked up on another online art magazine after finding Tracey Emin. A black male artist who grew up in some southern town had sold a piece to the local museum. The piece was comprised of photographs that connected his memories of growing up in that city. His family had found a roost there after the Civil War. So, his family and he had seen the city through decline and growth over to few years shy of a century. If I remember correctly, the piece was set in a boat pulling reminiscence of the local river. My first reaction was how kitsch? Then, how nostalgic? Then I quieted into a confirmed overgrown scrapbook. Why does this piece glorify what single mom’s do while the kids sleep? What made this inappropriate for a photography exhibit? It donned on me that autobiography runs to close to the dynamics of a family reunion. From Aunt Fannie’s drunken stupor into the house come dusk to being photographed with you kissing your third cousin by the dock and his hand down the front of your shirt. Those are the only memories that strike my brow looking over the profile shots from Olan Mills. Yes my humanity is blunt and maybe just maybe you family is the same, but I get tired of gazing into the perfectly posed sepia toned nostalgia and listening to the docents proffering the life of opportunity in a antebellum era for blacks.
The approach is a little sappy and a little divorced from a life a level below. I wonder how much of an obligation a museum has to collect the identity of a city displayed in municipal offices, convention centers and visitors bureaus. What about the life a few levels below common exchange? What of the prize of the foreigner? A painting of the lines at INS? What of common currency two streets behind city hall? Human trafficking? What of the faces of poverty today? I doubt if anyone remembers the man in the front door stoop in the three-piece suit holding on to three bags of tapestry laid luggage. It was the middle of New York City and he asked every face for help. That was 1992. He was not prepared to go down low. Is anyone ready for that these days?
I refuse to argue where each stitch is motivated. I am in denial and refuse to copy in image in the family photographs. It is enough to use the images mom was going to throw away for writing exercises. I do not know these people and I never will. It is more than two degrees separation because she has forgotten who they are as well. Even though I know there is something in my history that could help another, I preserve a protective shell to shield telling about them or me. I still refuse and rather keep those moments to color friendships and mentoring. Maybe I am just too afraid to be called out in a manner worse than what I comment about Tracey Emin. There is the release from confession and there is the fallout. There is the respect for memory and then there is silencing yourself.
I speak and create in abstraction. I mentor in parables and subtractions. I submit to that which is greater than I to facilitate healing. I would not be struggling with autobiography if something where not already brewing in my subconsciousness. Using self as source in the past has come in the way of Vuillard’s and Bonnard’s approaches. Intimate depictions of interiors; records of places I crashed, healed, and slept. In college I was spending the winter break with a boyfriend some twice my age. We broke up and I had no place to stay. A great friend picked me up and I stayed with her family while she worked. I pulled out illustration board or gessoed cardboard and oil painted the rooms, hallways, and corridors that I found solace in. Those boards are somewhere between Ohio and Texas never to be seen by me again. That is so, not by choice.
The autobiography thought feel better here. They feel the push and understanding that feelings have been processed and made meaning from them. Right now, cameras seem a short cut and a coward’s way out for what attachment unfolds in the reading by another viewer. We see the artist hand in the way of the Nabis (Vuillard and Bonnard). In the places where we dwell. In the places where we act out. In the places where we affect. The implications read stronger than posed and postured photographs or staged elements in high trafficked arenas. I remember reading about the artist who drew with menstrual blood on cardboard the diagram of the places she lived during her menstrual cycle. She wrote notes on the boards as well. The piece is a document of life that comments on a passage most women experience. In the finish, the art is more than a composite of parts and comments on a part of society in a manner greater than an act of egotism.
I am in this ego defying pursuit to understand my intellectual heritage. It does not sum up in a visit to the African American Museum of Art, but it is a ghost chase though my ancestor’s cooking, dress, jobs, collections, and a handful of memories. My insistence runs from this: In the blood testing, only men have the ability to trace both sides of the family. Women, on the other hand, can only trace through women. It has been a while since I heard that and I am still angry. Therefore, blood only does one thing and that is connecting continents and giving source. To flesh out the animal I have other work to do. Meanwhile I float between research and activity learning what culture and land is to many a peoples. For now, I am navigating symbols and rendering in fabric and stitch. My growth from it all is slow and I am learning intention and patience with each piece. Friend says no one sits for an hour let alone three to work. I log these things away until I understand what they mean.
As ever, stay hungry and curious.