RECYCLED DRAWINGS and COLLECTIVE ARTIFACTS

I do this sketchy work to reactivate the meaning of MY/OUR journeys or their many steps; to dissect them for their relationships before and after the moment that made their creation or fabrication possible. Their reality is not only linked to a past but also to what they may have generated for YOU or for ME or for someone else. This does not attempt to be a good documentation of previous works, but an activation of potentials; a new memory; a re-activation of sorts, for YOU and ME and OTHERS maybe.

I/YOU – Engaging in MY/OUR past – or future? – and using MY/OUR/YOUR accumulated artifacts, photographs, stories, many links. Exploring, imagining/practicing an endless present, an endless presence… This work may become a way to expose OUR/MY practices and discoveries of collaborations, communications and, basically, life. It attempts to interface or embed links/bridges between different geographies and times. It desires to talk about the infinite possibilities of the arts when involved in our human/social/civic/love/loving relationships, when they act together in a space which provides past-future-present-future-past-present-further. It creates a place to turn working years or decades into potential assets for ME/YOU or SOMEONE ELSE. I don’t think in terms of a near future but in terms of a MOVEMENT WITHIN past/future/present/further that may mean ancestors/babies/people and all, seniors/students/sisters/… Most of OUR/MY/THESE artworks cannot be re-installed. Some of them have engendered a road of their own. My role, here, is to tentatively bring out and project the larger story, the potentials. This fresh work is a way to re-CYCLE/up-CYCLE leftovers, artifacts, older artworks or their documentation into new productions, which reset the perception and understanding of that journey with OTHERS – artists, activists, educators, youth, tiny businesses – mixing races, genders, age, cultures, socio-economic status, classes, educations, maybe geographies… All that WE/I have chosen as values or power for the ARTS-IN ACTION support OUR/MY/MAYBE-YOUR attempts to challenge inequity. It offers OUR/MY grip on what Art In/With Community conveys with and for the Arts, the search for that meaning civically, socially, culturally today and emotionally; aesthetically as well. A sense of urgency pushes me to do things fast, not only because there is so much to do but also because the GENERAL VISION often becomes more significant than the QUALITY OF THE CRAFT. The series may be more crucial than each of the parts, even if the series and each part attempt to survive independently. Films like TESTIMONIES (FUT#4) were taken in the action by ME/YOU/OTHERS. No professional filmmaker or photographer was ever following us for long. Do I/WE regret it? Sure. However I, maybe WE and maybe YOU believe quality and beauty cannot take priority over engagement and amplification of others’ voices.

I am not a specialist and I won’t be specialized. “The artist expertise lies, as for [Paolo] Freire’s, in being a non-expert, a provider of frameworks on which experiences can form and sometimes be directed and channeled to generate new insights…” Pablo Helguera. Paolo Freire (1921-1997) believed that education was a process of self-discovery, in collaboration with others. This may not work in a traditional male-oriented capitalist fine arts market, but here attempts at social change are parts of the equation. And there are moments when the mass of knowledge, materials, information, pictures and images, is unstoppable, exposing the widening of the unknown. I kind of avoid making the type of selection that a master artist is supposed to make. I produce a mass and mix all elements together.

YOU/THEY/WE are actors and audience, makers and viewers, insiders and outsiders, creators and critics. In fact WHO are you all? named or not?… YOU, my co-workers, my mentors, my friends, elders, fellow travelers and family; YOU, who influence me and whom I may have influenced; YOU in pain, or who have passed away too early or at least before we could converse further; YOU, JEMAGWGA, the Charleston Rhizome & Collective, Alternate ROOTS, the Cafe people, Fast & French & co., CAIRN; even YOU I believed, whatever the result of our exchange; YOU, the artists close to me although we don’t think the same way. I recycle/reprocess/recover/reclaim to honor what we concocted – and still concoct together – as without YOU/ME, I/WE may not have been engendering thoughts, art tools, unlikely friendships, stories, performances, visuals, … and maybe some unknown, wonderful or questionable, transformations.

We know portraits are artsy bullies, erasing in the memory all other aspects of the models. So these solidarity ENSEMBLE tableaux of sort do not mean to represent anyone. They crave to reveal PEOPLE, GROUPS, PUBLIC, POPULACE, MULTITUDE, COMMONALITY, OCCUPIERS, COMMONALTIES, FOLKS, ORGANIZERS, WORKERS … and maybe YOU!

This text is also an ‘UPDATE’:

• on how the Cooperative CAIRN co-founded with Bernard Crespin, Jean & Jacqueline Dupanier, Jacqueline Larrieu, Jean-Claude Marquette, Marcus aka Chôschu, Jacques Sirot, Anne-Cecile Levrat and others, still remains stubbornly in MY/maybe OUR mind, with its principles of no selection, no competition, which are social concepts as much as dreams; and the artists’ ability to collectively create journals and media without the eye of a middle-man, a critic, an academic.
• on the unplanned consequences of some friendships –>collaborations, Jean-Marie Mauclet and I (co-teaching, moving to Charleston, a café, co-artmaking, co-businessing, co-intimacy, co-living, co-signing: “JEMAGWGA“…), Camille Shafer and I (Paris–>NC Bluff–>Azule),
• on the beauty of Jean Piaget‘s conversations with children as they develop their perspicacity and intelligence: What do you think with? Your head, is it full or empty? When the sun sets, does it care we are here? …
• on encountering Alternate ROOTS. ROOTS showed me the difference between I and WE in communicating. Until then the ‘I’ seemed so individualistic, indifferent to society or community, while the ‘WE’ respected multiplicity. At ROOTS I understood that MY/OUR & WE/I did cover it all, their psychology and sociology, AND their interaction. This brought me back within the necessity of collaborations. Thank you Kathy DeNobriga, Alice Lovelace, Nayo Watkins, Hope Clark, Omari Fox, Carlton Turner, you are heading a long long, long list!

It took me a long time to understand that perfectionism, (artistic) excellence, could be a tool to keep segregation/white supremacy/stereotypes in place and certainly a way to exclude many people by promoting one set of norms only. I do agree with others that a work of art must bring you to THE UNKNOWN, open barriers… All photographs are not great here, only necessary. No frames are readily welcome for long; because the arts must be a field of freedom, a field able to accept whatever is not fitting other fields; a field to explore without pre-designed tests. It may be a room for deepening oneself, but not opposed to working with a community – as long as its members are not used just as a labor force. It is to provide room for its thoughts and visuals to become content, let it expand with actions in its own terms.

OUR/MY/YOUR practices/productions do not exist in a void. They live in circumstances which reflect our many communities, our educations, our cultures, our supports, the media and the fields of the arts:

• how WE/I value or not, gifts, competitions, audiences, charity;
• how do time availability, professional activity, stress effect objectives, fabrication, mis/understandings, conceptualization, transformation;
• how I/YOU think about the potentials to navigate, to share, to transfer any powers, to amplify the voices of others;
• Before reducing art to a commercial space, have you pondered Walter Benjamin’s “If the concept of ‘work of art’ can no longer be applied to the thing that emerges once the work is transformed into a commodity, we have to eliminate this concept with cautious care but without fear, lest we liquidate the function of the very thing itself…” or Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Beauty is but the first degree of the horrible…“?

The joining of OUR with MY and YOUR acknowledges the fact that, in collaborative art practice, the following two statements are at work:

1. EVERYONE is an artist, “with the deep need and fundamental ability to create and be creative” (after Joseph Beuys and others).
2. BEING an artist demands Engagement/Endurance/Attempts/… Creativity/vision does come with challenges, liberations and failures.