Labor Day - Just returned from Chicago and Indiana. The Lake Michigan region. Said lake is big enough to fly over in a jet aircraft and not see either side for twenty minutes. It's big enough to look down on from the clouds and see white caps, as one sees when flying over the ocean. It's big enough that in Chicago, they refer to the waterfront as "the beach," and there is sand and surf and seagulls too. For all that size, Toddrick, who lived in Chicago for six years, tells me that in the winter, when temperatures can drop to 40 below, that entire lake will freeze solid and chips of ice can be lifted off of it, sailing on the wind through downtown's city streets. "Great city to visit, hard city to live in," he mumbles.
I traveled to the northern midwest with Richard, Danica and Salomón. Richard has been doing a documentary on Salomón, a painter whose art was being featured in a show at Notre Dame. I didn't know Notre Dame was in South Bend, Indiana. I didn't know I was going to Notre Dame. Some of my pep for the trip had subsided when I found out we would not be spending the majority of our time in Chicago. There's something about the big cities that has always lured me in. San Francisco, New York, London, Tokyo, even New Orleans, although it is not known as the massive metropolis some of the others are. These are places that have layers and layers of human history that no amount of urban renewal can ever completely remove.
Before we could even get off the ground at LAX, we were delayed for about an hour due to some kind of security breach at the airport terminal. No one passed through security during that time. We all just stood outside on the curb in the pre-dawn darkness, while our planes waited empty on the other side. We speculated on the changed nature of air travel and the false sense of security these new measures provided. I wondered why someone could not swallow a condom filled with explosives and find a way to detonate it on board. Drug mules swallow condoms filled with drugs.
We stayed at a hotel on the Notre Dame campus called the Morris Inn. It was nice, comfortable. Although Salomón accurately pointed out that from the outside it looked like a prison (all beige concrete and right angles), inside were pieces of furniture that looked expensive, which always makes people feel like they are getting the best. In the bathroom were hung quaint Irish proverbs - toasts and prayers. The legacy of the Irish is felt strongly throughout the school, although it was founded by a French priest. The driver who picked us up from the airport, a student of politics who was born in Guatemala, recounted for us the origin of the "Fighting Irish" mascot. Apparently, the name stuck after the Irish went to rumble with the Ku Klux Klan, who were attempting to set up a chapter in South Bend.
After we dumped our junk in our rooms I sat outside for moment to enjoy some fresh warm air. There was a bit of tropical humidity, but not enough to make your shirt cling to your skin. Cicadas hummed. The campus is all manicured green lawns and large shady trees.
There was a large dome on campus, topped with what looked like a gold plated figure of Mary, mother of Jesus. Notre Dame. Our lady. Makes sense. There was a building across from a massive football stadium with an arms-uplifted mosaic they called "Touchdown Jesus." Jesus was everywhere. Most of Notre Dame's student body is Catholic. Richard and I took a walk at night and discovered "the grotto," a candlelit stone recess where students came to pray during all hours of the night. The quiet flickering candlelight was serene, a marked contrast to the nights of screaming and beer drinking I remember from UCLA.
Notre Dame has an Institute for Latino Studies and a guy named Gil Cardenas is the Director of it. Although there are ethnic studies departments at most universities, I wondered if Notre Dame was making a special appeal to potential Latino students (known statistically to be predominantly Catholic), as they may have done in years past with America's larger population of recently immigrated and Irish Catholics. Gil's an interesting guy. He lives in a massive house that seems to keep expanding into more rooms as you travel through it. It is just outside of the campus and sits on the bank of a calm green river that reminded me of Tom Sawyer Island in Disneyland. Every inch of interior wall space is covered in art; above bookcases, under stairwells, in bedrooms, in bathrooms, above the toilet, art was hung. My first and second nights in South Bend, I moved about the rooms of his house, following the dozen-plus artists who had gathered for the show with a video camera and making them slightly uncomfortable.
It has been a long time since I have done any shooting. It was a nice change of pace, scenery, action, mood. Not the sunless edit bay of the Cimarron Group, air-conditioned to 70F everyday. I didn't mind playing paparazzi, it was good exercise, but there was very little I could do with the camera on or off that would make me feel like more than a functionary, a walking lens.
I know nothing about fine art and my attitude towards it tends to be ambivalent. There is fine art that I can admire and relate to viscerally, but the scene surrounding it seems to be about qualifying good art over bad for the purpose of creating value. I hate the snobbishness of gallery spaces and I despise the idea of people gloating over their precious private collections. Gil seemed to have a real passion for all of his art though, and his repeated attempts to get artists to sign books or do sketches for him stemmed from both his nature as a curator and his desire to create and maintain personal relationships with all the artists he admired.
The artists and work gathered for the show were all quite different from one another. The show was titled Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration, so it all focused on immigration or the immigrant experience in the US. I was a little too overwhelmed by new faces and information to remember names, but I saw video installations, photography, traditional paintings, and silkscreened art. Some of the artists made three-dimensional sculptures and one created a mural out of twelve panels which were printed from woodcuts. Another guy made masks out of mirrors that were intended to scramble the wearer's facial features with those of the person who looked at him.
Richard chats with Marcos Raya.
Marcos Raya's work caught my eye. One of three men in the show whom I never saw without his hat,
Raya had a lean and nimble figure. He spoke seldom, seeming to reserve speech for comments which were necessary or worthy. He was impossible to gauge; after looking at
his work, I had no idea how to begin a conversation with him. Regardless of the fact that he was fluent in English, I found myself wishing I could make conversation with him in Spanish, feeling that might help bridge the intellectual chasm between us. I suspect I know less Spanish than Japanese these days, which doesn't say much for my capabilities in another language. I felt out of his league, even on my linguistic home turf. His art is surreal and incorporates a lot of imagery of technology, seemingly gone haywire. He paints himself into some of the images, and other times incorporates himself in a much more unusual "first-person" perspective, showing the inside of a skull and the view through a pair of eye-sockets. He's got a Fellini-esque fascination with asses, bulbously distorting the naked shapes of women and driving foreign technological shapes into the flesh of his human subjects. Sometimes his colors are bright reds, blues, greens, and sometimes his paintings look as though they were made with ash.
Malaquias Montoya gave off a much more approachable, almost grandfatherly vibe. I guessed him to be in his mid 50s, but he had that mellowed, good-natured air that people usually ease into once grandkids appear in their lives. Never once did I see Mr Montoya without his fedora, or a paint encrusted stopwatch which he hung around his neck. Shaking hands with him was like shaking hands with a tree; his skin was calloused and weathered from years of working with brushes and chemicals. His smile was carved by deep lines in his face. One never expects to find brothers in a place far from home, but I learned that Montoya had lived for several years in my hometown of Oakland, and taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts. I was introduced as well to his son, Maceo, whose work was also featured in the show. It was interesting to see the artistic lineage being passed down, the same way a carpenter or mason or other craftsman might pass on their knowledge and skill to a son or an apprentice. Malaquias' silkscreened image,
UNDOCUMENTED, was chosen to represent the show. On the return flight, I flipped through a book of his images, based on the theme of capital punishment. I admired him for his idealism, which is nothing more than rational thinking, but so uncommon. I recently watched "Gangs of New York" and recalled a scene in which four men were pulled from the streets and hanged to create a political distraction and the illusion of civil control. I remembered an argument I had with my family over the execution of
Stanley "Tookie" Williams, and how plain it seemed to them that vengeance was the right answer to crime. Malaquias' paintings depict the graphic deaths of several hanged, electrocuted and poisoned convicts, not simply to garner sympathy for their suffering, but to question the humanity of the perpetrators. Making that argument verbally, I could not do anymore than have heads shaken at me, and I doubt whether these paintings would make their way into many people's homes. I sympathized with Montoya's placement of his principles above his concern for offending an audience's aesthetic sensibilities.
Much discussion about the purpose of art and the ways to connect it to an audience was had during the conference which followed the exhibit. Particularly since this show focused on Chicano art, which is by nature political, there was a deep concern with how to engage the public in the issues addressed by the show. Jose Limón of UT Austin made the valid critique that a museum show, with limited public accessibility, was not an effective way to engage people in political ideas. I thought that the inclusion of a Lalo Alcaraz "
L.A. Cucaracha" comic strip panel came closest to representing art from a public sphere that people could easily relate to. Fine art does not seem to me to be a part of many peoples' modern lives. I think graffiti and stencils and Xeroxed posters and other street art that augments/alters/vandalizes advertising is the most interesting type of "fine art" going right now. It addresses some of the same ideas that the artists in this show are concerned with, but it makes itself visible in places where people already are, it does not wait for people to find it. And it uses a familiar visual language. Some of what you find on the street is just self-promotion - many people are branding themselves with an image the way Shepard Fairey did with Andre the Giant. But other people are coming out of the advertising world and using the visual language of advertising, which is common to everyone, to tackle political issues, even if their message is not always totally clear. I remember distinctly the wave of
iRaq posters featuring Abu Ghraib silhouettes that lampooned the Apple iPod campaign. It would be cool to see a show that tracked down more samples of this kind of political art.
Salomón Huerta stands before an early piece in the home of a collector.
Richard observed that this show was attempting to "canonize" Chicano art within the "mainstream" world of fine art. Salomón Huerta had some interesting points on this. He appears to have carefully managed his career to avoid being "ghettoized" in an ethnic artist category. He's achieved fame for dealing with ethnic identity uniquely, by painting the backs of subject's heads. Where most Chicano artists seem to qualify themselves as Chicano first, Salomón seems to want to achieve notice simply as an artist. He struck me as an incredibly smart guy who kids around a lot and projects a kind of casual but super-confident indifference, like my old friend Joaquin, but with the chops to back it up. There has been plenty
written already about his heads and suburban houses, so I won't try for a critical summary here. My sense was merely that, behind the wisecracking exterior, there was another kind of cool - a patient, watchful eye, as observant of color as of behavior. I realized with Salomón and some of the others that they've done art most of their lives, and whatever art you do, that level of practice and discipline nurtures highly developed thought, because it is a constant meditation on oneself and one's surroundings. I never quite viewed myself as an "artist" and I think being in the company of these guys made that distinction in self-perception and commitment apparent.
Lastly, there was Chicago. I finally made it there for a day of roaming around and to take in the Cubs against the Giants at Wrigley Field. I've now repeated to various people that the Wrigley Field experience is a must, not just for baseball fans. I am not a sports fan of any kind, but the flavor of that field is distinct and historic. It's situated in a neighborhood of brownstone apartment buildings, from the roofs of which people gather to watch the games. The field is one of the MBA's smallest, which supposedly accounts for more balls sailing out of the park. We saw Barry Bonds rock one out, around the 4th inning, to mixed cheering and boos. The Giants took the game 7-4 (although we left in the 8th, when we thought it was over at 4-3).
From Wrigley Field we moved on to
Millennium Park, a new development on the lake shore which opened in 2004 and purportedly cost in the neighborhood of $500 million. Taking in the public art pieces, it was easy to see where that money was spent. One of the favorite pieces was referred to as "the bean," and was a chrome kidney shaped lozenge, with enough of a curve for several dozen people to pass under at once. Because of the distorting reflections, I smacked my head up against the side of it while trying to pass under, haha. Like a carnival fun house mirror, people loved just standing in front of it, taking pictures, doing strange walks and dances, or just smiling and pointing at themselves and each other. I was slightly more impressed with a piece a few hundred yards away. It was two towers of video screens facing each other, projecting images of faces with pursed lips. After about fifteen minutes, water shot forth from the pursed lips in a thick stream like a suspension bridge cable while naked kids dodged and danced underneath it. It was such an unusual sight and people seemed to be having so much fun splashing in the water around it. There was also a massive outdoor public theater designed by Frank Gehry that bore quite a strong resemblance to LA's Disney Concert Hall. Gehry also designed a winding overpass bridge that pedestrians could walk and park themselves on, suspended over six lanes of downtown traffic for stunning views of the city's skyline. There were public gardens filled with grasses from around the world, from which a small rabbit bounded out and nibbled on the lawn at the foot of Gehry's bridge. There was a large grassy field where a free jazz festival was being held and beyond that, the massive water fountain I remember from the opening credits of "Married... With Children." There were museums everywhere, all of which were closed, it being the Sunday of Labor Day weekend. As we walked downtown, Danica pointed out a
large sculpture by Picasso, sitting in a public square. The guys were somewhat skeptical about it being a Picasso, but Danica was the only one of us who had been to Chicago before, and taken a guided tour of downtown landmarks no less. The sculpture was large enough to walk on, which Richard and I did. Salomón seemed a little disturbed at the idea of skateboarders busting ollies off a Picasso.
Richard suggested we try a restaurant that his friend had given the glowing recommendation of "best Mexican restaurant in the US." So we went in search of it. Along the way, we found a massive drawbridge which had been left abandoned in the vertical position. It stood, arm upraised at the elbow, at the base of the Chicago Sun Times. It looked as if it might crash down at any moment. The river winding through the city reminded me of Tokyo and the ferries that one could take to get around the city there.
Even at 9 or 10pm, there were large numbers of people on foot in downtown areas, walking under skyscrapers, near L-trains, past storefronts and restaurants, outside of jazz clubs and blues bars. I decided I needed to come back to see the rest of this place: all the art inside the huge museums, all the old buildings, all the historical landmarks, all the unique neighborhoods, all the old bars, hear the music, ride the trains.
Yeah, it's definately on the list of places to return to.
While we were talking, a family of three approached and the husband started talking to Martin about the guitar. As it turned out, he had stopped by to listen to Martin for the past few nights and was a guitar player himself. After a few minutes of talking about guitar and sanshin (a traditional Okinawan stringed instrument), the man sat down and began to play a couple of Beatles tunes on Martin's guitar. 
