| The basic analogy of fabric to culture is a simple and old symbol. Athena, goddess of wisdom, was a weaver, as were her ancient aunts, the Fates. Ideas, like the threads of a tapestry, can come to the surface to color and form a greater pattern, or they can remain underneath as a structure for a more dominant set of concepts. In 1992, when I started to dismantle and weave color plates taken from art texts, the 500 years since Columbus sailed to the Caribbean was being celebrated or mourned around the world, depending on which side of the tapestry you looked. The triumph of Western Civilization, Science, and Christianity were on one side, and the Defeat of Indigenous Life, Ecological Balance, and Tolerance were on the other. I am interested in the whole: How each side structures the other. Like Lao Tzu's aphorism about the utility of the jar being the "not-jar", the two sides of our culture, the winning and losing sides, form each other. When Emperor Charles V paid Titian for a painting, with gold from an Incan statuette, plundered and melted down by his army, what is the truth of the work that remains? |
Who remembers now that the goddesses of the arts, the Muses, had Justice - Zeus, for a father, and Memory - Mnemsoyne, for a mother? Without memory, people have lost the first tool they need to fight for justice. I assert that the first responsibilty of an artist is to remember.
In my work, I "paint" with meaning. Each image I make is a concentration of hundreds of memories and meanings. My work is explicitly iconographic, and of course it's also emphatically iconoclastic. The reason I often choose religious subjects is to demonstrate how meaning has been distorted. Much injustice in this world is handed down by the same people and institutions that have already distorted meaning. An example: Look at the dogmatism that has ruined the empathy we should feel for saints by emphasizing a false incorruptible holiness; when instead, each saint's struggle with his or her own corruptibility defined their characters, and provided their worth to us as model human beings. Art can't stop injustice; Goya's Los Caprichos didn't prevent the brutality lamented in Picasso's Guernica; art hasn't stopped war. |
But it can reassure people who do fight for justice that they aren't alone, and they aren't crazy to fight, and that someone preceded them and fought and won. This is a Dionysian idea - that art has a purpose beyond its formal qualities. I value Apollonian ideals in art, and I enjoy experimenting within formal limits, but what I'm trying to do is to get that pendulum between these two poles of art to hover around the center. The undercurrent of the twentieth century is irony. The availability of information, about different views on an issue, forces us to ask if truth can exist outside a subjective context. We see that absolutism, whether that absolute is a king, a religion, an economic concept or an aesthetic theory, has ultimately failed to remedy and reconcile this world's disparities. And science itself is as fickle as God ever was, about what it gives and what it takes away. In the coming Information Age, the myriad tapestries of the world's cultures will be open to view, visible from either side. |
