07-26-2023
Necessary to note the Zoom visit we had with Jack Becker, yesterday. It was, for Rayn, Pam and Victoria the occasion to meet a very well known figure in the Public Arts world. He used to publish a magazine, “PUBLIC ARTS”, which we followed through its different transformations. From presenting objects/sculptures/models, originally small in size but which could be enlarged into architecture-size pieces, to community-related projects which eventually translated into large public works, Jack really served his readership well and kept it educated. Now, he is retired but still volunteers with the magazine, at this point in a digitalized format. He also donates time to organizations like ours. And when I asked him if he would consider coming to Charleston to meet with city folks and ourselves to promote our particular type of in/with community art work, he did not say no!
This emboldened me to ask him if we could envision a two-step strategy where our group would meet again on Zoom, with him, to specifically prepare a visit here, to Charleston. In my mind, this would give us all, and particularly Victoria, time to contact local people susceptible to work long-term on the development of TINYisPOWERFUL. Then, Jack would come here and meet the whole team.
I was very interested to hear him speak about a proposal he made to an art group whose name I forgot. He proposed that, instead of spending its good money on an outdoor sculpture, said group should start a local outreach, long-term community program! This is always what I propose when we are approached by folks with ambitious, expensive schemes. Same for the coming Charleston International African-American Museum: instead of an expensive building, create an in/with community long term program around the History of the Low Country, for example. I even remember asking Gwylène to imagine what such a program would do to the city! Amazing I suppose. A full Reparations campaign. An example for the nation and the world, really! To refrain from massive, symbolically mighty, architecture and choose quietly genuine work at the grassroots level for as many years as it takes to exhaust the pile of money collected to build the museum!
But, would so much money ever be raised for an in/with community effort, even exemplary? That is the question. Funders, mostly foundations or corporations, demand mighty projects to feed and sustain, to co-opt and impose their corporate straight-jacket, their controlling ethos, don’t they? Anyway … I think Jack Becker is going to be our next visitor of importance, after Marty Pottenger and Francis Whitehead, three and two years ago.
And now, I believe I am more optimistic than yesterday morning, BEFORE the Jack Becker meeting. At the time, when I entered the Zoom space for the creative sync, there was Victoria. She appeared to be very stressed. I did not ask of course. But when Rayn joined, and when we brought up the topic of Collective/Community Care – the Care Culture – I seized the occasion to tell her, (Victoria that is), very simply that, within a context of Care, I may have been less hesitant to ask her how she was doing! ” …’cause – I told her – if you think I did not see you were having a hard time, you are wrong …!” She smiled.
To me, Care means proximity. Proximity, necessarily, requires Trust, inter-personal Trust, that is. Nowadays, in America, interpersonal Trust is undeniably weighted down by male domination, violent male domination, with all its consequences on the discriminatory practices hampering women’s rights, reproductive rights particularly.
Within this dark sphere of male oppression, I feel very free to cram together childcare, daycare, children rights, gender identity, transition, LGBTQ+ …. since the opposite side intentionally confuses its public by amalgamating loosely related issues in the same dead end. A political ploy facilitating recessivity and dissociation.
07-31-2023
For the last few days, I have been occupied with studio work: the isometric drawing of a social housing unit. I have been laboring on a 3D model of it for the last 6 months! The only piece since the cancer operation! Better be good! As good as the show at 701, just before Wim’s death.
As a matter of fact, this short slice of time has proved to be key in my itinerary. There was the 701 event, then the operation, then the death of Wim and, for sure, the exit of Morgan from the scene, which signed the debut of my status as sole(itary) sculptor at TINYisPOWERFUL. Not that Morgan had done much with the group for quite a long time. She had practically dropped us altogether, really. But, for me, she still was an artist to talk to with our sculptor’s mindset, so to speak. We would still meet in our studios once in a while. I would still send her images of works found on the net, which I thought related to her own art. Weird, how a fraternity had taken root, in my mind, a mythology of companionship, based on the sharing of a common trade. Now and again, I am still missing the second sculptor in the collective!
In any case, here I am, this fine morning – after an uneventful but extended dental extraction session (!) … – deliberately and with with a clear mind, making sure that the spirit of ‘a Tale’ and its 3D interpretation remain coherent, despite my rarefied time in the studio or at the drawing table for the last year and so! Going back to Morgan, and totally unbeknownst to her, she is still a catalyst for my stubborn determination to see this project through, of course! Tired as I was of hearing her declare that my work was conceptual (a curse!), because it contained words – many words I admit – I had decided that there would be no words at all in my visual version of the Tale! Therefore, the meaning of each sculptural/formal/visual gesture was to be either representational, symbolic, archetypal, referential, suggestive or all five simultaneously … yet be as accessible as a children book! Because such is the nature of a tale. As mysterious as it may be, the imaginary world it opens to is so focused that although, at the subconscious and unconscious levels, there is unlimited room for interpretation, the lexicon serving readers’ verbalization remains limited. I should not really use ‘readers’ here, since there are no words! ‘Decipherers’ maybe?
A puzzlement – you ask.
A Tale – I respond.