Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine’s Poet of Exile

an interview article by Nathalie Handal

“Absent, I come to the home of the absent,” the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students. In his latest collection, Judarieh (Mural), the poet finds himself in between love and death, wondering which of the two will conquer. “After the stranger’s night, who am I?” Darwish writes. So, when I speak to him by phone on March 22, I ask him who he is. He rapidly responds, “I still do not know.” On many occasions he has expressed the notion that only poetry can bring harmony to a world devastated by war: “Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by,” he has written. I ask him if he still believes that. “I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe,” he responds, “but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.” Darwish has published twenty books of poetry, five books of prose, and his books have been translated into more than twenty-two languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Lotus Prize (1969); the Lenin Peace Prize (1983); France’s highest medal, the Knight of Arts and Letters (1993); and this April he will be honored with the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom. “I am still not a poet, and sometimes I regret I chose this way,” he tells me. Still, he is finishing his forthcoming book of poetry, State of Siege. His work speaks of his internal exile and uprootedness, his meditations on his historical, collective, and personal past. Many of his poems mirror the loss of homeland, the frustrations of being under siege, of being occupied. Here is a couplet from “The Earth Is Closing on Us”:

Where should we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky? Other poems allude to myths, draw parallels between the Native American and the Palestinian experiences, speak of his mother, or address a Jewish lover. In “Rita and the Rifle,” he writes: Between Rita and my eyes There is a rifle…. Ah, Rita! What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours. In “A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies,” he writes to his Jewish friends: I want a good heart Not the weight of a gun’s magazine. I refuse to die Turning my gun my love On women and children. He describes Palestine as a metaphor–for exile, for the human condition, for the grief of dislocation and dispossession. In “Eleven Planets in the Last Andalusian Sky,” he writes: I’m the Adam of two Edens lost to me twice: Expel me slowly. Kill me slowly With Garcia Lorca Under my olive tree. Darwish was born in 1941 in the village of Birweh in the upper Galilee of Palestine. The creation of Israel in 1948 meant the wiping of Palestine off the map and the destruction of 417 Palestinian villages. Darwish’s village was one of them. The same year, he fled with some members of his family to Lebanon. Months later, he returned “illegally,” but too late to be included in Israel’s census of the Palestinian Arabs who remained. There was no record of his existence. Thus started his absent-present status. When Darwish eventually left in 1970, his absence made him even more present in the consciousness of Palestinians, and his poems became extremely popular, especially “Identity Card,” written in 1964, and excerpted here: Record! I am an Arab And my identity card is number fifty thousand I have eight children And the ninth is coming after a summer Will you be angry? Record! I am an Arab I have a name without a title Patient in a country Where people are enraged… Early on, he discovered he could write, and that his words were weapons. Darwish tells me that his childhood dream was to be a poet, adding that he published his first poem when he was about twelve years old. “It was not a love poem,” he says. “I described our journey from Palestine to Lebanon.” Darwish published his first collection when he was about eighteen or nineteen years old. Some were love poems, he says, and some were political poems. “I was very strongly influenced by Al-Mutanabbi and the Mahjar poets (emigrant poets such a Kahlil Gibran) and modern Arab poets such as Qabbani, Al-Sayyab,” he says. When I ask if any Western poets influenced him, he says, “Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Yeats, and today, Derek Walcott is probably my favorite poet. I also like the Polish poets, especially Symborska.” In 1960, Darwish graduated from high school and moved to Haifa, where he became editor and translator for al-Ittihad daily and al-Jadid weekly, published by the Rakah (Communist) Party. In 1970, the poet left for Moscow to study political economy, and from then on his life was one migration after another. In 1971, he arrived in Cairo to work for Al-Ahram daily. It was the first time he went to an Arab country, the first time he saw everything written in Arabic. In 1973, he went to Beirut, where he edited Palestinian Affairs, published by the Center for Palestinian Studies. He joined the P.L.O. soon after and played a significant role in it. And he became the unofficial poet of Palestine, a description he rejects. “I do not like the label; it is a burden,” he says to me. In 1981, he founded and became editor of the pioneering literary journal Al Karmel. But the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon led the poet on yet another migration, this time to Tunis and Cairo, and he eventually settled in Paris. In 1993, he resigned from the P.L.O. Executive Committee and protested the Oslo accord, saying that he wanted peace but a fair one. Darwish says that real peace means being equal with the Israeli society, and that the Palestinian people should have the right to return, that the question of the refugees, of Jerusalem, of the settlements should be resolved, and of course, Palestinians must have the right to self-determination. After thirteen years in Paris, Darwish immigrated to Jordan in 1995, and in 1996 started living between Amman and Ramallah, where he continues to edit Al Karmel. During a brief visit in 1995 to Galilee and Jerusalem (Israel granted him permission to return for the funeral of his friend the writer Emile Habibi, and an unlimited stay in Palestinian self-rule areas of the West Bank), he said that he “felt like a child.” Thousands waited for him, welcomed him, told him he was loved, and asked him to stay. He was deeply moved, cried, and said he would never leave. But he was not given permission to stay in his hometown for more than a few days. He still longs to go home, “although I might realize that the harshest exile is in my homeland,” he says. Thus, Darwish remains a stranger passing through. When he lived in Israel, the government harassed him and several times put him in prison or placed him under house arrest for reading his poetry. In 1988, one of his poems, “Passing Between the Passing Words,” was even discussed in the Knesset. He wrote: So leave our land Our shore, our sea Our wheat, our salt, our wound. Israelis claimed he was demanding that the Jews leave Israel. Darwish disputed that, saying he meant they should leave the West Bank and Gaza. Yossi Sarid, who was Israel’s education minister, suggested in March 2000 that some of Darwish’s poems should be included in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared, “Israel is not ready.” Darwish insists that terror is not a means to justice. “Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism,” he wrote, condemning the September 11 attack on the United States in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam. Concerning the current situation, he tells me: “We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair.” I ask him how he sees the future. The Israelis cannot “give us back our house but live in our garden, in our living room,” he says, his voice rising. I ask whether a Palestinian state will exist. In a firm voice he tells me, “A Palestinian state already exists.” He adds, “The Palestinian people feel that they are living the hours before dawn. Their national will is stronger in reaction to the challenge. They do not have another option but to continue to carry the hope that they are going to have a normal life.” He says there is a simple solution that only seems complicated and that the two sides can resolve the questions of the borders and all the other issues under negotiation. He repeats a number of times, “There is hope.” After a lifetime of longing, perhaps Darwish is too optimistic, too wishful. A few days after our conversation, Israel sends tanks into Ramallah. I call Darwish back, finding him this time in Amman, Jordan. His voice, far and fading, tells me that it is all “so barbaric, so cynical.” But I get the impression that he still feels there is a place to go “after the last frontiers… after the last sky.”

Nathalie Handal is a poet and writer living in New York and London. She is the author of a poetry book, “The Neverfield” (Post Apollo Press, 1999), and is the editor of an anthology called “The Poetry of Arab Women” (Interlink 2001).

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Frank Gonzales of “Manito”

 

A Star is Born in A Brilliant and Gritty Film

 

…Infinite Loop

 

Review and Interview by Melanie Maria Goodreaux

 

Frank Gonzales, otherwise known as”Frankie G.,” heats up a seat at the House of Tribes Theatre, a small black box on the Lower East Side of New York City. With a quiet confidence and intense gaze that could melt Alaska, he sits inside the red theatre seat in a black jumpsuit and sneakers, donning a chiseled jaw, gracious humility, and the smoldering eyes of a rising star. He looks like”Junior,” his touching role as the foxy and dutiful big brother in Eric Eason’s Manito, but assures me that he’s not.”I never experienced Junior’s story, but I had a friend that did, and I drew from that,” says Gonzales, his voice thickened with a Brooklyn accent.”Acting is going into someone else’s mind- jumping into their spirit, their body,” says Frankie G., who recalls drawing upon his grandmother’s death to fuel his performance as Junior in Manito.”I couldn’t stop crying,” says a remembering Gonzales,”I felt Junior.”

 

Junior, the character posed as Eason’s”big brother” in Manito,(which means”little brother” in Latin slang), is a hard working, married man, who did a prison sentence because of his involvement with his father’s drug ring. He served as the spy for the cops on the corner in front of the bodega where his father sold sandwiches, candy, beer and drugs to pull off living in the Washington Heights area of Manhattan. Junior took the rap, did the time, and never sold out his father. Once out of prison, Junior works hard as a contractor, who hustles gigs without a license to make ends meet and to throw a big high school graduation party for his”manito,” the scrawny and yet brainy brother of promise who has plans to go to college. A frighteningly believable twist of fate happens on the subway as Junior’s little brother Manny is traveling home from the party with his girlfriend and a wad of cash that the community has given him to send him successfully into the future to fulfill his dreams and theirs. Then the plot twists and the subway turns—two men harass the couple, they flee, his girlfriend gives him a gun, and then our”manito of promise” ends up killing the gangsters and having to do time. His future is now dimmed by this twist, all the hard work and hopes of the family are slammed into yet another jail cell-and Junior can’t do anything to raise the money to get his little brother out of prison besides asking his father.

 

Eason creates a thick distance and tension between Junior and his estranged father. In the early moments of the film we see papi preparing a huge hoagie big enough to feed the entire guest list at his youngest son’s graduation party. He prepares the sandwich graciously enough to feed a king- but once Junior sees the huge hoagie at the dance hall before the party starts, he grabs it, throws it in a van and speeds through Washington Heights only to throw the sandwich out the window. It lands as a demolished heap of bread, meat, lettuce and tomatoes in front of his father’s bodega. Later, while giving a tearful toast to his younger brother at the party, he eyes his father at the door and rushes through the crowd to beat him down and send him on his way. Obviously dad’s affection and attention comes uninvited and a little too late for a Junior that is bitter and angry about doing time for a man that has no genuine love for his family, a man that never visited Junior in prison. When Junior is forced to go to his father to ask for the cash to bail out his little brother, cash that Junior’s pride kept him from asking for in the first place, cash that Junior is well aware that his father has–his father still refuses. The impassioned Junior, hurt by hopelessness and his father’s cold display of heartlessness ends up strangling him to death after he is beaten with a bat. We catch each blow of the bat, we hear every desperate suck for life as he is strangled beneath a hand held camera that makes the viewer feel like it has just caught a domestic violence episode ending in death on a home video. The film ends with a repetitive shot of Junior running frantically from the scene of the crime. All hope is snatched away and there is no one to blame but the rugged, ragged, random monster of chance. This is what closes in on these characters, this is what makes Junior run. Manito’s characters are twisted into a fate of recycled hopelessness and trouble.”A lot was going on in Junior’s head,” says Frankie G. of his character,” he was running away from everything, running away from his problems-he didn’t want to go back to prison.”

 

Even though Frankie G. was just doing his job as an actor by”jumping into the spirit” of Junior in Manito, doesn’t mean that he and Junior haven’t faced some similar salt. He says that playing Junior made him think of his own family’s struggle as working class folks from Brooklyn.”I thought of my family and their suffering, what they went through. My father worked hard so that we could move out of the troubles of the time.

 

When I told Frankie G. that some of the Latinos at the Julio Burgos Center in East Harlem argued that the film played up negative stereotypes of his people, he strongly shrugged it off saying,”This film was not just for Hispanics and Blacks. They’re upset cause they feel the realness of it. It was a reality check. It’s just a story, but it felt real– like a documentary. These people were trying to make a life for themselves, that’s life, period. How can someone think the film was just about drug deals?” Who am I to play the devil’s advocate with Frankie G.? He’s an actor who is sitting in obvious support of fellow Puerto Rican director Lou Torres, who also served as actor and producer of Manito. The two are part of the theater happenings at the House of Tribes this weekend. Torres is directing one of Juan Shamsul Alam’s plays and Frankie G. is coming to hear the work and watch the spirits do their jumping.

 

Gonzales’ magical delving into his character, the brilliance of Eason’s strong and gritty script, and its true to the times camera work, make Manito a classical addition to film history. Eason brought Washington Heights to film, and Washington Heights Manito style is as gritty as the city itself. Manito’s hand held camera shots make it come across as a documentary while actually delivering a great story built thick with suspense, a story that Frankie G. calls”soo good.” Rugged, raw, and real, Manito makes you feel a moment away from ordering yucca at the Cuchifrito, and a spot away from the little things in life blowing up into big drama. It documents what is both charming and mundane about neighborhood living in New York City. This juxtaposition is exactly where the style of filming matches the story. Manito masks its edgy story within a”reality television” style. Eason brings brilliance to a style that received lots of attention years ago with the disappointing Blair Witch Project. The audience witnesses intimate and unseen moments of”real life” in Washington Heights. The impromptu conversations of neighborhood Latino teenagers rapping about the comings and goings of their high school scene, being taken inside of a Washington Heights apartment with sexy prostitutes adorned with hot tops and big tits, skirts with slits, pale blue eye shadow and lip gloss, and the toasts of all the folks at the graduation party who feel like family, dancing and swaying, wishing Manny well through champagne, tears, and sweet Spanish Music in the background are just a few examples of scenes that are cut to look uncut. The viewer is in awe of the familiar, without being suspect of Eason’s brilliant storytelling. As a society, we have become numb to taking a movie camera into the privacy of our lives. We look in on first dates, on high priced dare devil reality game shows, and are dazed by watching hours of shows like”The Real World.” What may make audiences feel uncomfortable about Manito’s drama is that it could easily be anyone’s drama.

 

Gonzales’ humble brilliance as an actor matches the edgy, raw, rugged, and realistic vision of Eason’s masterpiece, a masterpiece that has already won awards at Sundance, Urbanworld, Gotham, and the Miami Film Festival, just to name a few. Yes, Frankie is all that and a bag of chips, as they say. He’s got the edge, he’s got the bomb of a first big gig, he’s coming with talent and good looks, AND he’s just finished working with Dustin Hoffman in Confidence? The intimate space of the House of Tribes Theater sets the stage for a moment that starts to get even smaller- I realize that Frankie G., the handsome and humble talent sitting across from me- is about to”blow up” or already has. And although our new star might not have ever faced the same hopeless brick wall as Junior, he certainly has had people around him trying to bring him down and keep him down.”When I first started acting, I didn’t tell anyone. At one time I was going to give up because of all the negative feedback. I had a lot of my own people telling me that I couldn’t do it, telling me that they knew that I wasn’t going to make it. They had such negative vibes. I had to prove myself. I had to believe in myself. Now I can tell them,’I told YOU so.’”

 

Frankie finishes up our talk by assuring me his visits to Hollywood are just that– he plans on staying in New York He offers a bit of hope to any young talent that may come behind him,”Believe in yourself. Don’t listen to people with negative vibes. The ones with positive vibes will lead you to your path.” It’s time for the play at the House of Tribes Theater to begin. The lights go down on Frankie G. and our conversation. The actors jump into the spirits of Juan Shamsul Alam’s characters on stage. This time, Frank Gonzales, a new star with new hope, will just sit back and watch.

 

Dave Hickey is a noted art critic, author of “Air Guitar,” and is Professor of Art History at the University of Nevada Las Vegas

 

(Phone Rings)

 

 

Hello

 

 

 

 

 

Hello, Mr. Hickey. I just got my act together here, the phone is on record now

 

 

 

 

Ok. Just a second…got to check the phones here

 

 

 

 

 

Hopefully this will work

 

 

 

 

Well, we’ll hope it does.

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, I just tested it out on the blind guy.

 

 

 

 

Allright

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, so I’ll just start, this interview is with Dave Hickey for issue #9 of “A Gathering of the Tribes. So I am going to ask the questions and you can answer what you want to.

 

 

 

 

Sure

 

 

 

 

 

Ok, In your writing on Las Vegas you appreciate it’s authenticity or lack therof in a camp syntax not unlike Susan Sontag…Is this how you see it?

 

 

 

 

Not Really. Vegas is a complex American city where people are a little bit more gregarious and are a little bit smarter than in other places. The city itself is more multicultural and a lot less class ridden than other places. It has the virtues of a gambling culture.

 

 

 

 

 

Ok. Umm… The multicultural aspect…which culture do you see as predominant besides the Mormons and the Jews…Mexicans ? Probably ?

 

 

 

 

Only in the last five years, the Hispanic community in Vegas is principally centered around Cubans who came here after Castro closed the casinos

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh wow!

 

 

 

 

There is no indigenous Latino community here. The building trades began bringing them here in the last ten years. So we finally have decent Mexican restaraunts. The Asian community as best I can figure out is centered around a number of old families whose roots go back to Macao. Which again is a gambling culture.

 

 

 

 

 

Portugese.

 

 

 

Some, but the community is Chinese.

 

 

 

 

question

 

Right … Right

 

 

 

 

So

 

 

 

 

 

My father lives in Puerto Rico and sometimes it seems that every Chinese person there was in a casino

 

 

 

 

Exactly, but again, but again this has changed over the years but the center of Vegas is the Jews and the Italians from upstate New York , Cubans from Havana, Chinese from Macao, Mormons from…

 

 

 

 

 

(Laughs) From Elmira, New York

 

 

 

 

No from ninety miles away…that’s why Vegas is here ||Not Salt Lake City

 

 

 

No the Utah border is ninety miles…an hour and ten minute drive. That’s why Vegas is here. It was originally a safety valve for Brigham Young’s kingdom

 

 

 

 

 

So what state was it (Vegas) in when Bugsy Siegel opened his casino

 

 

 

 

What

 

 

 

 

 

What state… Was there a population there (Las Vegas) when Bugsy opened the Flamingo ?

 

 

 

 

Yes, there was already mining, the Hoover dam complex, but mostly the gaming and the whoring were again a safety valve for the Mormons and then again also for the miners

 

 

 

 

 

But there are Mormons who own casinos…Right.

 

 

 

 

No there are Mormons who own banks which finance casinos

 

 

 

 

 

Isn’t Steve Wynn a Mormon

 

 

 

 

No Steve’s a Jew. Steve Weinberg

 

 

 

 

 

It seems as though in my questioning of you (Mr. Hickey) that you are obviously more educated on these matters than I so please excuse me if I am naive in my questioning

 

 

 

 

It’s okay…That’s cool.

 

 

 

 

 

It seems to me Vegas is a vortex where things go out, go in, then come back out, an argument between the authentic and the inauthentic, nature and the ersatz, is that true ?

 

 

 

 

Well I don’t know, I;m not sure what authenticity means.

 

 

 

 

 

Ok I’ll skip that question.

 

 

 

 

Ok

 

 

 

 

 

How has Vegas changed since you first arrived and as with the gambling venues and then the mixed usage with family oriented entertainment ?

 

 

 

 

Well, the family oriented entertainment business here was mostly an idea of a bunch of east coast M.B.A’s who came in when the corporations began to take over the casinos during the Reagan years. it was one of those peculiarly Reaganesque projects that didn’t prove to be nearly as profitable or desirable as they thought it would be. Most of the major moves in the casino industry in the past ten years have been back towards the adult clientele.

 

 

 

 

 

How about dropping the theme of family entertainment and gambling. How has it (Las Vegas) changed just in general since you came ?

 

 

 

 

Vegas in general. Well it’s a lot bigger. When I came here it felt like the edge of something and now it’s the center of something. For the worse. It’s gotten overcrowded. We’re building twenty one grammar schools a year. I would say the political center because of all the white flight of people from California has shifted Las Vegas let’s say marginally to the right. Vegas traditionally is a labor liberal city. It’s like Brooklyn, it’s not like a liberal, liberal city, like Cambridge (Mass), but a labor liberal city. It’s probably the biggest labor town left in the country. The culinary workers and the Teamsters are an important presence in the culture.

 

 

 

 

 

So am I allowed to ask you questions about the Bellagio ?

 

 

 

 

Sure, If I feel like I can answer them.

 

 

 

 

 

Okay with the Bellagio not only does Las Vegas change but art changes in general with the museum or art gallery as sales mechanism. From a populist perspective: How do you see this development with your own views on democracy ?

 

 

 

 

Well in a sense first of all, the interesting thing about having the paintings here in Vegas is that they make Vegas more like itself. In other words they make it more of a Mediterrenean culture and Vegas already is a Mediterrenean inasmuch as it is a culture of incarnation and spectacle. It makes the art more like it was when human beings owned it. Before paintings of fruit became beacons of civic virtues in Pittsburgh or Boston.

 

 

 

 

 

Right…right

 

 

 

 

For me it’s really exciting. It really restores the sense of the object in the social world. For Vegas, it really just reinforces the general Mediterrenean temper of the place.

 

 

 

 

 

The Mediterrean is not a similar climate though ?

 

 

 

 

No, I mean… Spanish culture, Italian culture, Greek culture, Jewish culture, I mean the cultures that surround the Mediterrenean sea are the dominant forces in town here. Uh. With the possible exception of the Mormons who make the trains run on time of course (laughs)

 

 

 

 

 

(Laughs)

 

 

 

This means it’s not a text culture. It’s an oral culture…meaning my freind who runs the collections at the university…his big problem is that he has lots of objects and lots of tapes. He has almost no text because things aren’t written down, here. Things take place in conversation.

 

 

 

 

 

Wow, ok, the Bellagio is making personal interviews with some people right? You know hybrid exit polls that are somewhat determining what they are buying and selling. How do you see that?

 

 

 

 

What do you mean buy and sell?

 

 

 

 

 

You know like Steve Wynn sold his Jaspar Johns and his Rauschenbergs

 

 

 

 

Oh no, Oh no (laughs)

 

 

 

 

 

And the Brancusi

 

 

 

Steve Wynn is an art collector. Let’s be very clear about this.

 

 

 

 

 

Ok

 

 

 

 

He’s an art collector. I know what an art collector is. Steve Wynn is an art collector. He made a strategic decision. He sold one Jaspar Johns. He still has “Highway” which is a beautiful painting. He made a decision that the sort of schism, the sort of phase shift that America undergoes after the Abstract Expressionists does not make for a very good gallery hanging. In other words it’s hard to hang Lichtenstein’s “Torpedos Los!” in a room with a De Kooning. And so he decided to deaccession a lot of pop things and began acquiring painterly pictures from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries that would make the collection more coherent. Because it is easier to get from Reubens to De Kooning than it is from De Kooning to Warhol.

 

 

 

 

 

What about the Brancusis and the Giacometti, and the Franz Kline ?

 

 

 

 

Well to be honest. Steve doesn’t much like sculpture. You know what I mean

 

 

 

 

 

Sure, I don’t know him

 

 

 

 

It’s just not his thing. He’s basically a painting collector. And the Giacometti was stunning. The Brancusi, was sort of, I don’t know, B plus. It was ok. The Giacometti was a great fucking sculpture and I miss it a great deal. But I’ve spent my life around the art world and there is one thing you have to tell yourself every day, “It’s his collection”. You know regardless of who you are working for: it’s their collection.

 

 

 

 

 

The artist I thought in my own mind to be appropriate for Vegas was Giambattista Piranesi; For if I was watching Venice or Paris going up I would almost think

 

 

 

 

Well, Vegas hads done for architecture what easel painting did for art, it has rendered it mobile. (laughs)

 

 

 

 

 

What about the upcoming artists in the Vegas area. I was over there at U.N.L.V and I wrote my name and address in the guestbook and that guy who did the fiberglass gila monsters sent me some pictures in the mail. How are the upcoming artists…..I mean the artists who live in the Las Vegas area rather than the visitors responding to the new influx of art.

 

 

 

 

Well let me put it like this. Now that there is better art to look at here, There is better art made here. The real thing is the real thing. It’s an enormous boon.

 

 

 

 

 

What about the Rio hotel/casino showing the collection from the Peterhoff in a shopping mall in the middle of a casino?

 

 

 

 

I think it’s ok. It’s not something I’m particularly intrested in. There was an intresting Van Loos over theren and one average Faberge egg. I am not particularly intrested in 18th century European decorative art, although I know it very well. As far as exhibiting it, I thought it was fine. I believe works of art can survive their context. You either believe in context, you believe in superstructure you believe that everything within something is totally driven by context or you believe things and people can overcome their context. I tend to think things can over come their context.

 

 

 

 

 

I just wrote an essay on an artist where I dealt with those very issues. So I greatly appreciate that.

 

 

 

 

Huh? Right, I don’t think that if I put a great painting in my living room, it worse because I live in Vegas or my living room is not up to snuff.

 

 

 

 

 

Right.

 

 

 

 

Dh: It’s(the art) an enormous boon to this culture, I mean in a sense if you look at history of European and American art, art follows the money. We didn’t have German art in the eighties for nothing, but because the Deustche Mark was dominant.

 

 

 

 

 

But, sometimes though like when I was sittting under the Dale Chiluhly glass ceiling in the lobby of the Bellagio Las Vegas feels more like outer space than America.

 

 

 

 

Well since I live here I’m a sunshine boy, most of American doesn’t feel American to me. Vegas feels like America to me. LA and Houston aand New orleans and Mobile and Miami feel like America to me. Pittsburgh feels like Bosnia.

 

 

 

 

 

Right, right

 

 

 

 

Vegas has it’s own tones. it’s not outer space at all. Everybody gets up here and goes to work.

 

 

 

 

 

Well at the The Bellagio I felt like I was in outer space. I felt like I was on the holodeck of the starship enterprise.

 

 

 

 

Well if you felt that way maybe you shouldn’t go back. I spend alot of time in Italy. I fly from here to Rome I haven’t gone very far. I fly from here to Minnieapolis I have crossed vast genetic rifts and cultural barricades.

 

 

This interview was conducted in the spring of 1999. Since that date the Bellagio hotel has been sold by Mirage resorts under it’s chairman Steve Wynn to the MGM corporation. MGM has chosen to divest itself of the part of the Bellagio collection owned by Mirage while Mr. Wynn has kept his works. Further Mr. Wynn has chosen to purchase some of the hotel’s works as provided for in contractual agreements between the concerned parties.

 

Thanks to Hillary Maslon and Susan Yung for their help in facilitating this interview.

 

Looking Behind the Vision Festival:
A Conversation with Patricia Nicholson

By Kurt Gottschalk

 

On June 13, when the doors of the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts open for Vision Festival XI, Arts for Art — the organization that organizes and presents the annual jazz fest — will also be opening the door to the adoration and criticism they’ve faced every year for a decade. The praise and complaints are largely for the same thing, namely for hosting hours and hours of high energy jazz. Horns blaring, basses booming and drums being beaten, it’s a tradition carried on for some forty years, in the wake of the great John Coltrane.

 

Say it’s about time there’s an American festival dedicated to presenting free jazz, or say that Patricia Nicholson and her collective of artists suffer from a bad case of tunnel vision, but either way Arts for Art has created a brand for itself. It’s what Steven Joerg — whose label AUM Fidelity has released albums by Vision regulars William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Daniel Carter, Mat Maneri, Joe Morris, Roy Campbell, and David S. Ware, as well as a two-disc set of recordings from the festival — calls “ecstatic jazz,” a sort of secular Baptist tent meeting.

 

“The festival is about a lot of things,” according to Nicholson. “The practical thing isn’t just a paid gig, it’s a world-class festival. It’s a place for musicians to play music that they were discouraged from playing for years — a certain kind of intensity. I call it ’soul music.’

 

“It doesn’t mean you can’t play Euro or whatever,” she continued. “It’s all valid — there aren’t any constraints. But one festival can’t do it all — you don’t have a vision then. We don’t make everyone happy, and that’s fine.”

 

Within its mission, arguably the most important thing Art for Arts has done is to champion the elders of the music. Septugenarian saxophonists Fred Anderson (from Chicago) and Kidd Jordan (New Orleans) have regularly appeared on the program, where in past years they were all but unknown in New York. Tributes have been paid to legends lost (this year to Raphe Malik while past years honored Jimmy Lyons, Denis Charles, Julius Hemphill, Don Cherry, Jeanne Lee, Peter Kowald and Wilber Morris) and living. In 2005, Art for Arts introduced a Lifetime Achievement award and honored Anderson. This year, the distinction will go to Sam Rivers, who’s living in Florida now but when he was in New York ran Studio Rivbea, a legendary part of the 1970s Loft Scene.

Patricia Nicholson

Photo by Peter Gannushkin

 

“Sam is a wonderful person,” Nicholson said. “I even had my little gig at Studio RivBea, and that’s where I met William [Parker, her husband]. And he’s kept his music alive. Besides a great musician, he’s important in the sense of community.

 

But despite the brand identity, there is some diversity to be found within the festival’s programming, including performers from Europe and Japan and an afternoon of sets by younger musicians. Along with the usual suspects, this year will feature performances by trombonist Paul Rutherford and pianist Veryan Weston, both from England, Dutch saxophonist Klaas Hekman and the Swiss trio Day & Taxi. Drummer Dylan van der Schyffe and cellist Peggy Lee will also appear, making the trip down from Vancouver. Still, most of the names in the schedule are familiar from the past decade of festivals. Nicholson pointed out, however, that Parker and Matthew Shipp aren’t leading groups this year, and Chicago percussionist Hamid Drake is for the first time.

 

The list of invited performers each year is made by a seven-person “music committee,” which makes suggestions and narrows it down based on such factors as age, gender, stage of career and whether or not they’ve played the festival before. There aren’t, however, strict rules, Nicholson said. Last year had a number of women on the bill, for example, whereas this year Matana Roberts is the only female bandleader, and her set is during the “New Generation” matinee.

 

“We had lots [of women last year],” Nicholson said. “This year it just didn’t happen. And the festival will always be dominated by blacks because no other festival I know of is, and that’s just plain wrong.”

 

The afternoon focus on younger players was new last year, and featured Tyshawn Sorey, Guillermo Brown, Todd Nicholson and the trio of Tatsuya Nakatani, Vic Rawlings and Ricardo Arias. But like everything Vision takes on, Nicholson said, the matinee has brought some criticism.

 

“Sometimes the younger players don’t like it, but I think it works better for them,” she said. “It’s going to be different when they’re 40 or 50, when their music matures. I think it focuses on them — they don’t get as big an audience, but there’s more focus.”

 

She remembered a recent evening out seeing two concerts, one by a younger group and the other by older players.

 

“The difference wasn’t the individual talent,” she said. “It was that the older musicians knew how to breathe together, and that’s when the magic happens. They become like one person.

 

“The way our general marketplace society works is there’s all this focus on young people,” she explained. “But generally people don’t come into their prime until they’re in their 40s. It’s not that they aren’t talented, but it’s different.”

 

The organization also made the decision to set the younger players apart to draw the attention of potential funders — a perpetual concern. With a staff of “three administrative, underpaid positions,” she said, they not only organize the summer festival, but also regular weekend afternoon shows and the annual “Vision Collaborations” music and dance weekend. And they are looking to have their own performance space by September, 2007.

 

“We’re getting more money but we’re trying to spread it out over the year.,” she said. “We’re trying to get our own space. Having your own space is everything. Without it, longevity is not going to happen, and we don’t have a home. You’re just at the mercy of whoever owns the venue.”

 

With a space to hold regular, smaller shows — they don’t expect to get something big enough to house the festival — Art for Arts would be one step closer to keeping alive a tradition that’s fallen to the periphery of jazz. But even now, eleven years into promoting ecstatic jazz, the profile has been raised and a community built. The work now, she said, is developing something that can be carried on by the new generation and generations after.

 

“It’s not about legitimizing because we don’t have to do that anymore,” Nicholson said. “It’s about passing it on.”

 

A Talk with Amiri Baraka

by Jon Rachmani

Photo: Lynda Koolish

Source: (http://www.amiribaraka.com”)

In your recently revived play, Dutchman, Clay connects the brilliance of musicians like Charlie Parker with repressed rage. Do you see this, and similar rage, as being the wellspring of most significant art?

 

 

Well, I think that art for a lot of people is a means of expressing emotions that otherwise would be suppressed. I know that when you listen to blues and jazz that the dynamic of that comes from a kind of repression. People express their lives in whatever they’re doing, wherever their heart is, and for slaves and for people held under discrimination and segregation that’s going to be expressed, one way or another. I was saying that I know that the kind of rude focus of a lot of that activity, if it were directed towards, say, insurrectionary kinds of activities, it wouldn’t have necessarily made it less possible to be so focused on the arts — jazz and blues. Remember that that was one of the only expressions that black people had, was the music, to a limited extent, and so their whole culture and lives was put into that music. And I guess now in the United States that’s still true to a certain extent, although, obviously, there are more outlets in society. But still you can tell from the most important of the rappers that a great deal of focus in the society comes out from them. Or for that matter plays, films. But then it’s not free, you’re not allowed to be free — even white artists are not allowed to be free, although some of them think they’re free — but what they’re allowed to do is within the scope of commercial society that allows only certain things to be said. Censorship in America is subtle in some ways, but it’s obvious, too. So, any sensitive person is going to try to find one way or another to express how they feel, and art is probably the most sophisticated way.

 

 

Would you imagine that post-revolutionary art, after an expression of the people’s political will, would be different in content and style from what people are trying to get across now?

 

 

It would be different. But it would still reflect fundamental concerns. There will always be contradictions in society, but they won’t be as brutal and primitive. There’s always going to be the distinction between what you desire and what is, no matter how much more sophisticated and developed it is than what exists today. Mao said, “In three hundred years what we say today will sound like children,” but still there will be contradictions in society. There will be problems that we can’t even conceive of. Like the problem, thousands of years ago, when they were struggling over whether they should cook food or not. So they got that one down, then: should they put on clothes or not — so, it always raises us, but what we’re doing now is still pretty primitive, I think. Let’s hope we can get to the next level, minus billions of tons of blood. But it’s always doubtful, there’re always contradictions.

 

 

Could you talk about poetic truth versus political truth. Is there a difference between the two? And if there isn’t, then does that mean that all beautiful art is working toward a political end?

 

 

Politics is more limited, in the sense that truth is always partial, first because we don’t know it wholly. It’s knowable, but we don’t always know it. So it’s always partial. And in politics you need to take the context of that society into account: is this a fascist state, a neo-fascist state, a bourgeois state, a democratic state? A political truth, like stating who are the people, the people at one point might include the national bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, workers — that might be the people. At another point the people might be fighting against the national bourgeoisie, and so the definition of the people has shrunk. So political truth is much more subject to change and there are always contexts because of the state of society at a given time. But aesthetic truth, when you think about art as an ideological reflection of the mind of the artist, even then what we might think is beautiful or what someone else might think is beautiful will differ. God knows, if we had to go in the Whitney or the Museum of Modern Art a lot of that stuff wouldn’t make it in terms of what I think is beautiful. But on the other hand, the question of beauty, that which enhances the mind, the spirit, and also the lives of the people, is something that ultimately can be judged by wide groups of people, but maybe not initially. Truth is never in the hands of the majority at the beginning, because truth sometimes is a difficult entity to arrive at. Beauty sometimes is hidden like that. It might take people different lengths of time to appreciate what is beautiful. Although I still uphold Keats’s and DuBois’s idea of truth and beauty being the ultimate arbiters of what is of value. But, the political reality often obscures both truth and beauty and makes it dangerous to subscribe to either one. So there’s always got to be the context of the arena of life itself: what is going on? Somebody could look out a plane and see an atomic bomb blow up a whole city and say: that’s beautiful. But to hear that you would be appalled, you’d ask, “What are you talking about?” and the person would say, “I’m talking about the colors, the smoke, and all that stuff,” but that’s a maniacal view of sensation, irrelevant of its social connotation, just sensation. And you have to reject that, because what is beautiful and what is true will organize themselves in relationship to each other. Everything that you think is beautiful might not be beautiful if you knew the source of it, and the truth would not be truth if you found out its source was a lie. People can tell you things that are true, but tell you for negative reasons, they can tell you partial truth. Truth is always mitigated by the context, source, its reasons, and beauty is mitigated too as to what it means, what it represents.

 

Do you think that a lot of traditional European art that’s highly esteemed will ultimately, if the source is revealed, be less celebrated.

 

 

I think so. Because, remember, even looking at theatrical art, there were no workers on the stage until the 20th century. There were gods, then kings, then the bourgeoisie, and by the time the worker gets on the stage, O’Neill and Brecht and them, we’re almost at the present. So are we then to cast away all those other things? Not necessarily, but you have to look at them critically, see what they are, what they say, and see finally that they are pertaining to one particular class of people, one nationality, and their effect will be limited, since most people on the planet are neither gods nor kings nor the bourgeoisie, nor are they Europeans. But I think that when you talk about somebody like Shakespeare, what’s interesting, because he was an advanced kind of cultural worker, is that he talked about things that still effect capitalist society. Most of the stuff that he talked about — women’s oppression in The Taming of the Shrew, antisemitism in The Merchant of Venice, the relationship between the rulers and the people in Julius Cesar: all of those things are still going on. Plus his language was unlimited because he had no dictionaries, so he could use Latin terms, Anglo-Saxon terms, do anything, make nouns verbs, verbs nouns, anything he wanted was completely open to him. But certainly as the world becomes more rational there will be a more rational view of what constitutes beauty. If Duchamps wants to put a toiletbowl up and say, “Dig this,” we have to see this as exposing a particular society and class, but that doesn’t mean that toiletbowl will forever be great. So, it depends on how the world shakes out. I believe the world will be ruled by the majority of the people if it is to survive. Global warming, wars, all these madmen, there’s no guarantee that we’ll even be here. They might even destroy the planet. There are deadly asteroids zooming around and there’s not even the budget to shoot them down. That’s bizarre. If they hit the planet it’s going to destroy it. That’s like somebody being attacked by wild beasts but not taking it seriously.

 

 

Perhaps people are really too busy killing each other to achieve a common aim.

 

 

That does take up a lot of time. That’s right. They can waste their time killing each other.

 

 

George Orwell states in his essay, England Your England, that “At this moment, after a year of war, newspapers and pamphlets abusing the Government, praising the enemy and clamouring for surrender are being sold on the streets, almost without interference. And this is less from a respect for freedom of speech than from a simple perception that these things don’t matter. It is safe to let a paper like Peace News be sold, because it is certain that 95 per cent of the nation will never want to read it.” This information glut in the absence of wide curiosity sounds familiar. And yet Somebody Blew Up America pinched a lot of normally reactionless peoples’ nerves. In these terms, do you consider the poem’s reception a success?

 

 

Well, like I said, truth is the context. There’s nothing universally objectionable in that poem. What do you object to: asking who has made slaves, who has assassinated people, who has created wars. But in terms of my intention: you could see the World Trade Center from the third floor of this house. You could see the fire from upstairs. So we were frightened, by then a month later, after listening to Bush, all that bullshit about terror, it occurred to me that the only reason I’m over here is because of terrorism, slavery. The Middle Passage. All these dark skinned people are here because of terrorism. We’re even not in the South anymore because of terrorism: the Klan, lynchings and all of that. And then I thought: so let me talk about that terror. I started asking who the terrorists are. Bush? Trent Lott? The people who lynch people? Those are terrorists. And we’ve never addressed ourselves to those terrorists or the continuing terrorism of poverty, homelessness, lack of healthcare. And then it occurred to me that all these things around the world that actually, to me, had something to do with the terrorizing not only of African American people, but people all over the world were being ignored. People who’d been murdered or killed. Che Guevara, Patrice Lumumba, or Princess Di, you know? They’re murdering people everywhere.  

 

 

So who do you think was behind this attack?

 

 

I think it was the United States of America. I think it was Bush. I think it was a sector of the bourgeoisie. The same people that you saw wrote the article about needing a new Pearl Harbor. Wolfowitz wrote his PhD paper on this at the University of Chicago. But the real thing is that White Americans don’t see with that clarity. I believe, to be frank, that they knew about this and decided to let it go forward. The people who had the put stocks in United and American Airlines withdrew. This indicates that a broad section of the bourgeoisie knew about this.

 

 

Moving on, by what means would the post-revolutionary proletariat in America prevent the dictatorship of the workers from being co-opted into a dictatorship of charismatic leaders who often scramble for power in times of rapid social change and use the rhetoric of the revolution divisively?

 

 

Well, we have that now. This is supposed to be a democracy. It’s been co-opted by charismatic leaders, Bush, etc. There is no way to stop that besides the consciousness of the people. There’s no automatic way. We’ve seen in our time the Soviet Union overthrown and replaced by the Russian Federation, just another form of imperialism. We’ve seen the Chinese compromise. Not to the same extent. I think because of the national question, the Chinese are more wary about integrating with World Imperialism. The revisionism that set in in the Soviet Union never set in in China. The only two nations to actually challenge Western Capitalist domination are China and Russia. Whatever you can say about those nations is that they’ve gone from groveling at the feet of Western Imperialism to being some of the most powerful nations in the world. You had a socialist country that was overthrown, you had a country that was sorely compromised — the Chinese — and yet those two countries, especially the Chinese, have economies that are the envy of the world. One thing about taking power is that you must have a cultural revolution functioning all the time, otherwise, even if you take power with a gun, they’ll re-seize it. All the things the Black Liberation Movement in the 60s and 70s was working for sunk. It never goes down as low as it was before, but in terms of the aspirations that came, that went down. We just had our last hope for a minute wiped out when this guy Cory Booker was elected here in Newark. The idea of a locally controlled, people’s development in this town has been thwarted for a while.

 

 

There is a wide consensus in the West that under the Soviet Union and in Chinese Communism there was a suppression of the arts to the extent that they challenged accepted party lines. How accurate is this perception?

 

 

It depends. There is no modern Western cinema without Russian cinema. What about Russian drama? This is the reverse of what they say about Socialist Realism stopping artistic development. Without Stanislavsky and without Eisenstein there’s no drama or cinema. And the whole expressionism that informed Western drama in the early 20th Century that you can see readily in O’Neill and Langston Hughes or Williams: that comes directly from Russia. Now, the thing about China is that that’s a different culture all together. The difference is between state-imposed Socialist Realism, which even the Russians were opposed to, and Mao Tsetung’s line, “Let a thousand flowers bloom: the people will decide.” And I think that’s still the best. The people will decide. The problem is that our perception is based on American propaganda, so we don’t really know. Recently we’ve been seeing Chinese art for the first time, bit by bit. I’ve got books of the art that came back in the Communist Period, and while you can see emphasis on State and Party participation, it all depends on what it is that you want to see. As far as I’m concerned  my work has been censored. I don’t think it’s because it’s not experimental. They don’t like what you’re talking about. And I’m sure under Communism they did the same thing to some extent. But I still would uphold Mao’s line, “Let a hundred flowers, a hundred schools of thought, bloom.” Because that is the most progressive line. Let all the art and the thinkers contend. Let the people decide what’s of value. But they would rather just crush you. Fill Broadway with garbage, fill television with sub-garbage. Look at the Times Bestseller List and tell me what will last until even next year. Maybe what some bureaucrats did with the Proletcult was awful, but that was put down again by the Duma. They said, “There is a working class art and this is it.” That was put down by Lenin then. But it takes a lot of strength to say “A Hundred Flowers.” I wish that were done here, I wish that we had the same opportunity to contend with these famous bourgeois artists on stage, screen, in books, but that will never happen. Because as long as it’s privately owned then they’ll decide what gets published, produced, shown. They’re even trying to do away with public art, any public control.

 

 

Are there any active measures that young artists can take to keep their art from being co-opted by consumerism?

 

Produce, produce! The only active thing you can do. Cooperate. Create cooperatives. And produce. Even if it’s Kinkos and you have to hand it out. For fifteen years we had theater downstairs in this house. I fight with this city every day. They’ve let the city-owned theatre languish, perhaps the most beautiful theatre in the state. And they support NJPAC which is just a rental theatre without attachment. No city development, no youth being trained, no companies being created. And I’ve fought with them for 37 years. And still I fight. But it’s the nature of the kind of politics that we have that they don’t have to care what’s of value for the people. But when it’s election time they spend a lot of money and smile. Our son Ras was elected, a council member, but the Booker election swept him out. They spent 6.5 million dollars. It was our plan to municipalize these entities, set up repertory theatre. We’re building a museum of African American music that should be finished by 08-09, but a lot more can be done. Right now we’re just getting reoriented after this terrible defeat. Because if you’ve got 6.5 million dollars you can buy mayorship.

 

 

How do you respond to Noam Chomsky’s notion of holding radical ideals and working at the same time for practical change within the system?

 

 

You have to do that. You have to work for reforms, but they must be revolutionary. A reform should allow the people to be more advance than they were, even though it’s only partial and it doesn’t solve long-range problems. But you have to accept these reforms. You would not turn down unemployment insurance simply because you know that that won’t be the end of capitalism. And you have to adjust to it. But you have to keep telling the people the next step. Roosavelt seized on a lot of the methods of the Communist Party so as to save capitalism. But you couldn’t talk against those terms when dealing with the quality of the peoples’ life. What constitutes a revolutionary reform? We’ve been trying to get a police review board in this town since 1967. We’ve been trying to build the African American museum of music since 1982. So they are protracted struggles. But you always have to accept reforms. Unless it’s a reform that goes backwards, a slick change that takes you back.

 

What do you think of Barak Obama?

 

 

I think he’s the best candidate, but that’s not saying much. I think he’s better than McCain or Edwards or Hillary. But will they allow Obama to go past the nomination? My feeling is that they’ll nominate Clinton. Then maybe they’ll be slick enough to say, “Let’s put Hillary and Obama on the same ticket. That might be slick!” And then even were he to get the nomination, what would that mean to him or the rest of us? Because entering into this system is a formidable thing. But still, the nomination is key. And one of the first things the Clintons did was to declare that they didn’t need any public funds. That’s very reactionary. I don’t believe there should be any private funds in elections. You put private funds in an election and you get a privately owned candidate. And it allows them to go over the top financially. There should be no elections like that. But if there’s enough noise and support for Obama, they might decide to make a daring choice. But I doubt that. Democrats are not known for being courageous, that I’ve ever seen. Their record is for voting for the war and backing that pitiful Kerry campaign. How Bush could do what he did for all those years and then for Kerry to come in so appologetic. I don’t understand it. But the media had some photographs, even in the  Times, of Bush looking like the real soldier and Kerry looking like a beatnik.

 

 

Looking back on your career, do you have any regrets, any major movement that you would have wanted to go about differently?

 

 

The thing that is most daunting is that the cultural organizations that we initiated we should have maintained. The Black Arts Reperatory Theatre, the Spirit House, Kimako’s Blues People. Although, we’re going to try to get Kimako’s back up. But those are the most important cultural entities. And they should be maintained. No matter what I was doing politically, those entities should have been maintained. Because you can’t do anything politically without a cultural arm, That’s why Mao insisted on the Cultural Revolution. You have to. Without that the old power will unexplain to the people what you’ve already explained. All the things that seemed obvious in the 60s, by 07 are in the mist. It’s the cultural organization that’s important to maintain any political struggle. We need to rebuild both right now.

Interview with Ayana V. Jackson and Marco Villalobos

by John Farris

 

      Ayana V. Jackson has exhibited her work in galleries and nontraditional spaces worldwide, including shows curated by the National Council de La Raza in Washington, D.C., Peter Hermann Gallery in Berlin, Germany, and Tribes Gallery in New York City. Selections from the “African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth” series have been included in Columbia University’s Soul Magazine, while the World Bank has acquire a selection from her Hip Hop series, “Full Circle,” for its permanent collection.

      Marco Villalobos’s writing has appeared in publications such as Step into a World: a Global Anthology of the New Black Literature (John Wiley and Sons, 2000), Geography of Rage: The Los Angeles Riots of 1992 (Really Great Books, 2002). Villalobos has presented his work on stage and radio for more than a decade. He is author of the limited edition chapbook, Barrio Gold (Unilan Publishing, 2002). He is also a 2003-2004 Unesco-Aschberg Laureate and a 1998 Hispanic Scholarship Recipient.

      This interview was conducted at the Caribbean Cultural Center in the context of an exhibition of films and photographs by Jackson and Villalobos, running from January 9 to May 12, 2006.

 

So Marco and Ayana, we’re here at the Caribbean Culture Center, where you are exhibiting your photographs and your film — Mexican by Birth, African by Legacy. Ayana or Marco, whichever of you that wants to answer this, how did you come to this — to make this show?}

 

Jackson:    Actually, it started out with a different title,{El Negro mas Chulo} — African by Legacy, Mexican by Birth. And we started it in 2003. But actually the discussion comes back to the day that Marco and I met, when, in a conversation, we started talking about Afro-Mexico. I  had studied race relation in Latin America and the Caribbean, and that’s where I learned about the African presence in Mexico, and the fact that there were still communities.

 

{Where’d you study?}

 

Jackson:    That was at Spelling College. I studied sociology, with a concentration in Latin American, Caribbean culture and society.

 

{What interested you in that?}

 

Jackson:    My father was a musician, and most of the music that he his group played had to do with the Diaspora. Brazilian music, and British-Caribbean music, all different kinds of musical manifestations of Africans in other parts of the hemisphere. Knowing that I had many cousins out there, that spoke languages that I didn’t speak, from cultures that I wasn’t familiar with, so it just became a natural curiosity as I went into my academic years. When I did my study abroad in the Dominican Republic and Argentina, I really focused on how different the culture is between more African-based cultures like Dominican Republic, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and — as opposed to a place like Argentina, that has very little African presence.

 

{But some?}

 

Jackson:    But some. There’s less than one percent in the city, the capital, Buenos Aires.

 

{When did they arrive there?}

 

Jackson:    Buenos Aires was also one of the larger ports for the transport of Africans into Latin America. Many would stay within the port area, doing work and working on the docks and things like that. But also, many of the ships were later disseminated to other parts of the region, like Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay. And in the late 1800s to the end of the 19th century, about 30 percent of Buenos Aires was still African descended. But they went to a process of blancoefficion, which was a whitening of the race. The president of that time wrote into the constitution that for the progress of the nation it was necessary to purify the blood lines, and that by mixing the indigenous and African communities with Europeans that they were bringing from Italy, or, from Spain, particularly Italy — until the time of the World War when they started bringing in Germans.

 

{So they encouraged race mixing?}

 

Jackson:    Encouraged race mixing.

 

Villalobos: Encouraging whitening.

 

Jackson:    Yes, encouraging whitening.

 

Villalobos: Not darkening.

 

Jackson:    Yes, definitely not darkening.

 

{That could backfire on them.}

 

Jackson:    It didn’t actually, because, to back up, they, as many countries did, offered freedom to the Africans were enslaved that went and worked in the frontlines of the army. Most of the male population, the African male population was completely obliterated, massacred in the war with Paraguay. That left the women who were very publicly celebrated if they mixed with these Europeans. Well, one of the stories that I always found fascinating, I read an article about this woman who gave birth to twins. One was very light, one was very dark, and they congratulated her in the newspaper for having bettered the race, for having done a good job for the patria by having this one white child.

 

{[Laughing]}

 

Jackson:    So it was serious, it was in their constitution. So that was so different from the experience that I had in the Dominican Republic, which also has a problem in understanding its African population, but it’s undeniable that it’s there. Why I didn’t have much information on was the Africans in more indigenous communities, like Mexico.

 

{Marco, what was your investment in this? How did you get involved? }

 

Villalobos:       The typical story is because of family history, right? But I’m sort of rethinking that, I’m wondering if that really true. I think basically as a Chicano, as a Mexican-American in California, there is a really internal racism that gets played out intra-ethnically among Mexicans in California, and that internal racism is directed not only at outsiders, such as whites or Asians or blacks, it also involves the different types of Mexicans in California, There you have different degrees or different sections of those types. One section would be recent arrivals to California, wetbacks, to use that term. Fresh from Mexico. Another one is people that have been there longer. They have these different hierarchies according to the amount of time you’ve been there, to hierarchies that revolve around how you got there. Someone, an academic from Mexico City that came legally, obviously has some sort of upper hand against someone who came from the countryside illegally, right? So you have this intra-ethnic racism, and then you have the friction between Mexicans — and this is also intra-ethnic — of different complexions, from darker to lighter, from real European to Indian, and then African, which is never spoken. And I think that what drew me to the project is that fact that the African contingent of the Mexican, or Californian, or anywhere in the states is never spoken out loud. And this is when I say that the real tradition response is that my family brought me into it. There are different shades of people in my family. It made me curious about how we never spoke about a specific aunt or her dark complexion unless it was about how she married someone lighter. We never questioned where that dark complexion came from. She has a broad nose, she has a full mouth, she has woolly hair. She has all of these features, these characteristic that would suggest African ancestry.

 

{Did she come from the Pacific coast of Mexico, around Acapulco?}

 

Villalobos:       I don’t know. That’s thing I don’t know. I don’t know where my father’s from. I don’t where anyone’s from in my family. I don’t know where my grandmother’s from. All they ever say is they’re Mexican. Much like the African Americans in the United States, a lot of times there’s not generational knowledge of where people are from. Maybe Ayana would know that her Grandfather’s from Georgia, or that their folks are from Florida. Beyond that there was a plantation maybe somewhere. Right now people are really only getting into discovering or questioning where they are from before the plantation.

 

{So how did you prepare for this show?}

 

Jackson:    We went on what we knew and what was inspiring to us. Prior to leaving, we did a few Internet searches, and we found out about Yanga, which was the African leader who lead a group of fifty self-liberated Africans into the mountains to start their own town. And they started negotiations with Spain where they paid taxes to the Crown in 1609.  Marco can tell more about that. It’s in Vera Cruz. A friends father mentioned that there was a museum in Juahaca, and that if we really wanted to see and rub shoulders with Africans, with people who looked like me, then that would be a good place to start.

 

{When you got to Yanga, how did you make contact with people?}

 

Villalobos: Well, we didn’t know which way to go, because we found that there were different traditions. In the traditions of self-liberated people on the Pacific side and those on the Gulf side, the cultural retention is different. Because those on the Atlantic side were more surrounded by European townships. They were isolated on the Pacific side, and now see the results of that isolation after three or four hundred years.  The Pacific is underrepresented in terms of education and political representation. While on the Atlantic side, there was more miscegenation and cultural absorption.

 

{Yeah, I was in Acapulco once. The people there didn’t believe I was from anywhere else. They thought I was from Acapulco, and I was speaking English to try to impress the gringos. I couldn’t make these people believe me. }

 

Jackson:    Yeah, these communities are 70 miles below Acapulco. They’re fishing communities.

 

{Yeah, I was involved in one, Puerto Marquesa. That’s only about two miles outside of Acapulco. I had a fight with my buddy. I thought I had killed him. I was hallucinating from all of that you know what, and I ended up sleeping in a canoe there. The next morning, I was woken by the fishing crew. I went out and fished with them for a couple of hours, during which time they would not believe I was from New York. I had thought I was in paradise and wanted to stay there forever, until they took me to this big white house, at the end of the beach, where this German lived. And they asked him if I was telling the truth. He told them yes after talking to me. And I didn’t want to stay there anymore, if they couldn’t believe me on my own. Later on I was sitting in the local, very expensive tourist joint, having hamburgers and malteds with my buddy, whom it turns out I hadn’t killed after all, and when I saw some of them walking by, I waved to them. They believed me after that, for real. }

 

Jackson:    Yeah, most people we met were very happily identifying with me based on the fact that I was black. They’d say you look like my niece, you look like my grandmother. Which I found very interesting, because if I asked most people what are you, they would say Mexican. You have to really pry to get to the fact that they’re black Mexican.

 

There’s one trait that Mexicans and, at least, Nigerians seem to share, that I notice, and that’s one of concealment, that is, they don’t want to give too much information away about where they’re from. They’re not too willing to tell you stuff.

 

Jackson:    Yeah, it took a while to get to the topic of blackness. It seems to me that we never really got to it.

 

Were they very available when sitting for portraits? They’re quite wonderful portraits.

 

Jackson:    The blessing for me was that we traveled together. Marco would do the interviews. We’d go to a house. We’d tell them who we are and what we were doing. Some would laugh and say, “We’re not black. You’ve got to go closer to the water to get to the black people.” And we found that was true, the closer we got to the water, the blacker the people got. Like you go to Llano Grande, which is really close to the water, and the people were very black there. And while Marco was doing the interviews, I was able to take these photographs.  

 

{Good luck with your show.}

 

 

Interview with Samia Halaby

 

Samia Halaby was born in Jerusalem in the West Bank of Palestine in 1936, twelve years before the creation of the state of Israel. Ms. Halaby is the curator of Made in Palestine, a group show of Palestinian artists, from both inside Palestine and in the Diaspora. The exhibition  is being shown at the Bridge, 521 West 26th St., 3rd Floor, through April 22, 2006.

 

      Samia, when I was on my way here, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought of the obvious question, in coming here, makes those questions I had obsolete. I was going to ask you, stuff I can still ask you, like, what are the ages of these people?

 

 

 

The ages of some are as young as, say, their late 20s –

 

      Like who?

 

 

Like this artist Rana Bishara –

 

      Who did art out of chocolate.

 

 

Yes. She made photographic plates of images with chocolate as the medium because of how much chocolate resembles dried blood. And also very young is Nida Sinnokrot, the creator of the rubber coated stones, and also Emily Jacir, all in their 20s, early 30s. There are middle of life people like John Halaka, who looks like he’s about early 40s, and myself, I’m nearly 70. And this man who did the huge running piece, Mustafa al-Hallaj, he died the day we were taking the airplane back from Palestine. He would have been my age as well. I think we’re the oldest in the show, so it ranges two generations.

 

      Are you the only one in the Diaspora?

 

 

No, I would say a little less than half are in the Diaspora. Rana lives in northern Palestine, in Galilee. Abdel Rahmen al-Muzaylen lives in Gaza. Mary Tuma lives in the south. The woman of the photographs, Rula Halawani lives in Jerusalem. I live in New York. John Halaka lives in California.

 

      And he is how old?

 

 

He’s in his early 40s, or mid 40s, I would say. Mustafa lives in Syria, Mansour in Jerusalem. Ashraf Fawakhry, who did the donkey piece, “I Am a Donkey,” lives in Haifa under the Israeli government. Rula Halawani lives in Ramalla. There’s one who lives in Germany, and one in Damascus. A little more than half live right there in ancient Palestine or under the modern Israeli government, under occupation.

 

      Now, the reason I asked you ages, is I wanted to know how history is reprised here. I know for example you have Mahmoud Darwish in the show, and I know that Darwish, when he asked questions when he went to school in a town that was occupied, he was punished again and again for asking questions which pertained to indigenous Palestinian culture, as it interfaced with the occupation.

 

 

The people who are in the show have suffered in different ways. For example, the prisoner artists, there are two — their pieces are the brightly colored ones in the back — those two artists spent years — one 15, one 14 — in an Israeli prison. Both suffered extreme torture at the beginning and both had life sentences and both were exchanged  in a prisoner exchange  program in 1984 and both of them live in Damascus right now. There are artists here, for example, Rula Halawani, the only reason she’s able to get around and do her work as a photographer at close range is she has international press credentials, so the Israeli government can’t stop her. If they wanted to, they really would. And Rana Bishara, and all those who live under the Israeli government, have had a very hard time relating to the rest of the Arab world. In other words, if they were invited to be in a show in Syria or Iraq they would be put in jail because they’re not supposed to have interaction. They live in isolation as Arabs under the Israeli government until 1967, under horrendous conditions. They could not move, their lives are very similar to what African Americans suffer here in the USA.

 

      My thoughts exactly. That’s what you get for being Hagar’s child.

 

 

Then in 1967 it opened up a little bit more and I know I took a small group of young Palestinian kids from a village under the Israeli government to the West Bank and they couldn’t believe it, they were asking questions like, ‘Palestinians run this organization?’ They had never seen Palestinians in charge of anything.

 

      Young people?

 

 

Children. Eight or nine or ten years old that I have taken to visit Ramalla from a Palestinian village.  They had no idea that Arabs were anything but slaves of the Jews.

 

      So you were about twelve or thirteen years old in 1948?

 

 

Yes. These children I took recently.  In 1948, I was almost twelve, eleven really, and we were forced out.

 

      So you remember a lot of what life was like prior to the creation of Israel?

 

 

Absolutely, yes. It was Palestine, it was an all Arab society, I did not notice that the British had pretty much completed their disgusting plan to turn over the country to the Jews. They were Jews, they weren’t Israeli yet, they were Zionist Jews. And the British had organized their government, organized their military, had trained them and given them all of the contracts for building infrastructure, helped them with all kinds of laws against the economic development of the Palestinians. They really throttled the Palestinian development and encouraged Jewish development so by 1936 the Palestinians were really fed up with it and had a huge uprising. But the Palestinians were only 1.5 million people in 1930 and the British Empire was huge and they had 25 percent of their military in Palestine at that time to quash the uprising and in 1948, exhausted from the uprising and the British turned over the land to the Zionist Jews and it became Israel, but the Palestinians still put up a big fight in 1948.

 

      Did the creation of the United Nations have anything to do with that?

 

 

The United Nations was under American rule basically, so yes, it helped, because nobody wanted to mention –

 

      The United States was the first to recognize Israel.

 

 

The British and the U.S. Where this show in history is very important is, we’re showing our history from our point of view, our experiences, here in this show. And every piece here has to do with Palestine and the history of Palestine. Like Rana Bishara’s piece here is called “Blindfolded History.” There are 52 glass pieces, and there are photographs silk-screened onto glass, painted with chocolate, because chocolate resembles dried blood. And they are each for one year of the tragedy, since the tragedy, which was in 1948 but continues year in and year out. There is killing of Palestinians by Israelis all the time.

 

      Samia, which is your piece?

 

 

Mine is this colored piece. When I was making it for this show, I realized I had never titled one of my major pieces after Palestine.

 

      Has your art changed since living in Palestine?

 

 

I was a child when I lived in Palestine and I wasn’t making art. So when I made this piece I titled it “Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River,” and because the center section was very much above the mountains of Palestine and the extreme right was above the coast, I decided to make it a map of Palestine in textures. So the extreme right is the sea coast of Palestine, and the plain by the seacoast there is a lot of flora, wildflowers, gardens and stuff like that. And my memory of them, especially from the town of Yaffa, which was a famous port city. It’s abstract of course, and as an abstraction it describes different things at the same time. So there are stones, the feeling of the distribution of stones, the roughness of the fig tree, the shape of olive trees, and on the extreme left there are hints of the towns and cities,  towards the desert, and then the desert. So it’s a map of Palestine, so I called it a very political title, indicating that I don’t think Israel should exist as a fascist, undemocratic, patriarchal state because it does not believe in equality, and it does not have a separation of church and state. So I believe in a Palestine that is democratic with equality for everybody, which is why I called it “Palestine, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River,” which includes all occupied territories, old and new occupations.

 

      What does being Muslim have to do with this show?

 

 

Israel is all based on a very backwards concept of the state being one religion. We are in the 21st century and that idea is so ridiculous, but that is how the ruling class in America is able to entice Jews to become involved and commit themselves to this Zionist idea. And they keep talking of Muslims as being terrorists, and they keep talking about us as being backward and involved with religion, and when you look at the show, the show gives the lie to the Western media, completely, without wanting to or even trying. Many of the artists are Muslim, but they are not so hypnotized by their religion that all they can think about is their religion.

 

      I was struck by the fact that some Jewish people didn’t want to move out of the West Bank because they had been there for 30 years and felt that it was theirs. And I want to know how they squared that with the fact that the Palestinians had lived there since it was Canaan.

 

 

They can only square it with the fact that they have all the guns. That is not the truth talking, that is not their brain talking, that is their firepower talking. They have the guns to our head and they can say “We’ve been here 30 years, get out, even though you’ve been here 2,000 years.”

 

      I was struck by the piece “A Time to Cast Stones,” by Rajie Cook (a military ammunition box filled with stones). The idea of calling people that throw stones at occupiers with tanks and whatnot, or even the idea of suicide bombers, terrorists, seems a bit absurd on the face of it.

 

 

The fact that you, as a person here in America who has experienced what Palestinians experienced, can see through the rhetoric tells me a whole volume, whereas those people who are comfortable cannot see beyond what the media tells them. It tells me that somewhere, instinctively, they understand that it is to their benefit to keep supporting Israel.

 

      The very first question I wanted to ask you — and then when I got here, the art threw me off — was, is “Made in Palestine” a metaphor for the conditions under which the Palestinians live or is it the art?

 

 

Both. One of the things about the “Made in Palestine” title that is deceptive is that people think it is a products show. They don’t think it’s art. The subject of Palestine permeates every Palestinians’ thoughts, the artists, the poets, it’s such a huge tragedy and nobody wants to talk about it.

 

      If I said “Made in America,” I was “made in America,”  what would that mean to you?

 

 

That you’ve been oppressed by America and that oppression has shaped you.

 

      That’s what I wanted to know.

 

 

It’s the same for Palestinians. They’re made by the Palestinians. The art and the subject matter, even the guy behind you, he’s referred back to the goddess of the Canaanites because he wants to remind the world that the Palestinians have their ancestry in the Canaanites. And many of our towns and people’s names are ancient Canaanite names that they have carried forward. And he’s dressed her in a modern Palestinian village dress because he’s noticed that this village dress also has its ancestry in the ancient Canaanite art. And because he believes that we should show children everything about our history, but we shouldn’t scare them, and we shouldn’t be scared to tell them about massacre, but we shouldn’t do it in a way to frighten them. And he’s shown the massacre in Janin as an image in her dress.

 

      Can you see the disadvantage you’re at?  You’re talking about people who have a massive propaganda campaign that has gone 6,000 years. It’s in the Old Testament, talking about what to do with Canaanites. Israel is predicated on that. What dangers do you face in mounting a show like this, I mean, considering the Patriot Act and all that?

 

 

There is nothing here that contradicts the Patriot Act, so we’re not in danger from that. But certainly they don’t like us, and if they find an excuse to close us down, they might. Another danger is from crazies who want to throw paint or break the glass or destroy the artwork. We face that danger, and we also could get inundated from the conservative Jewish press, and they start making phone calls against the exhibition, and lose us our lease, or make the police demand that people be searched before they come in the show. These are dangers we face that we do not want to happen. Other than that we have huge support from people. People love this show.

 

 

      How often do you go to Palestine?

 

 

This year I’ve gone once, and I’ll be going soon again, but usually in the past ten years it’s been two or three times a year.

 

      Is it difficult to do that?

 

 

It’s difficult to travel, yes. Always looking at Israelis with guns, and settlers with guns, and you never know when they’re going to aim one at you. And there are a million checkpoints, and with an American passport I can get through okay, but the Palestinians have a nightmare condition to deal with.

 

 

      One thinks of art as a tool for communication. For example, I just saw a group of people walk in and look around. Do you think a dialogue was opened by this presentation?

 

 

Many people will come in here with different reactions. Some are coming here to look at the space they rented, and they don’t care what the art is. You never know how people are going to react. Some come and spend many hours and then forget, art is a silent thing, you don’t know how it’s working.

 

      What gave you the idea for the show?

 

 

This show started with a museum in Texas called the Station Museum, and they’re the ones who spent a bundle to organize it. And it opened in their museum for six months, and it went to San Francisco and Vermont, and we are the third group to travel the show. And I had a hand in it from the very beginning, they wanted to do a show about Palestine, and I said “How about a show of Palestinian artists instead?” And we talked about it, and I agreed.

 

      Thank you, Samia.

 

Phil Freeman, a freelance music critic since 1995 has appeared in newspapers and magazines such as The Aquarian Weekly, Alternative Press, Magnet, Jazzis, Down Beat, Juggernaut, and Metal Hammer. While he has a passion for avant-garde jazz, he loves hard core rock and death metal as well, writing about all of them with understanding and affection. Profiles of David Ware and Matthew Shipp that appeared in Juggernaut magazine were among the first articles to bridge the gap between free jazz and extreme metal. A thirty one year old New Jerseyite, New York Is Now is his first book as well as one of the few to date profiling what might be called the post-Wildflowers generation of the avant garde in jazz. Published by The Telegraph Company, it will be available September 10th, 2001. This interview was conducted on July 21st, 2001 and was joined by pianist and composer Matthew Shipp, who is profiled throughout the book. Interviewed himself for the 9th issue of A Gathering of the Tribes, Matthew has since been appointed producer of the jazz division of Thirsty Ear Records, formerly an all indie rock label.

 

Phil Freeman! How are you doing?

 

 

PF: I’m fine. How are you?

 

(Indicating Matt Shipp): I took the liberty of inviting Matt Shipp. Hope you don’t mind.

 

 

PF: Not at all. How are you Matt?

 

MS: Good, good.

 

I’m glad you both could make it. Well, Phil, let’s start with the obvious and begin at the beginning, as they say. How did New York is Now come about?

 

 

PF: Well, in May of 1998 I went to the Visions Festival in New York. I had heard Tao by David Ware’s quartet and I’d heard Prism by Matt’s trio. Having written about Prism for this heavy metal magazine Juggernaut being published down in Florida, I said to them “Look, there’s going to be this festival, I’ll do a live review for you,” so they sent me down and I wrote a live review which was expanded and eventually incorporated into what became the first chapter of the book after pitching my proposal to Telegraph, but I walked in and just started hanging out with people. I met Matt and you and Steve Dollar and a whole bunch of people.

 

I have to make a correction here — you refer to me in that chapter as a “jazz critic,” which I am not. I’m a poet and I guess if I’m any good that makes me something of an anthropologist, and as such, I might be more of an intimate than a “critic.” You know, a fellow traveler. (Laughter)

 

 

PF: So I met people and I started hanging out and realized it was very different from what I was used to — you know, the rock scene, where you just go in and buy some beers and watch the show, after which you buy a tee shirt and leave. There was more going on than that. And there was more going on than in a jazz club where you walk in, pay $25.00, buy some beers, sit for forty-five minutes and then they throw you out. The music was great but it was even beyond that — it was people coming together at the end of a year and sort of updating everybody on what was going on, you know, musically and–

 

How was that different from the underground rock scene?

 

 

PF: That’s about playing a show, making some quick money, and moving on to the next show. If some people happen to show up every time you play, great — but it is not a community, per se.

 

Could it be that there is just a larger audience for that scene?

 

 

PF: That might be, but the nature of the audience is different, because rock fulfils a specific social function.

 

Which is?

 

 

PF: The release of testosterone  –  masculine aggression; and providing a soundtrack to the mating game. You go, you watch the band, you see the girl at the bar, you talk, you try to pick her up.

 

 

How did that differ from the festival?

 

 

PF: It’s more about the music. You’re not going to get laid at a free jazz show.

 

Well — that depends. You might get laid afterwards.

 

 

PF: If you’re in the band you might.

 

I had an experience just recently where I ran into a woman who’d been stalking one of the musicians mentioned in your book for fourteen years. I’m not kissing and telling, but I can tell you the case you just made is pure conjecture. Music has always been part of the mating game. Not necessarily from the musician’s point of view, but music has always been part of it. Grapes too. That’s just part of the social construct. It’s the same with birds when they sing, so I don’t know what you mean.

 

 

PF: I mean the music plays a more central role.

 

I think you’re talking about aesthetics. Maturity. You …

 

 

PF: You can see that the way people dress at a rock concert …

 

I think we can lay this to rest. It’s just a matter of aesthetics. You know — “Shake, Rattle and Roll” — “Elvis the Pelvis.” The appeal in free jazz might be a different part of the body. It’s just a matter of procedure, so to speak.

 

 

PF: Well, I have no training in semantics.

 

Well, we’ll have to leave your area of expertise open to conjecture. In the book you say free jazz needs to me more accessible — in a marketing sense — to today’s youth if it is to survive as a commercially viable art form. Along that same line critic Ann Powers of the New York Times wrote an article about the festival in that paper saying she went expecting fusion and was surprised to find what she heard was more. In other words, she had no idea what it was she was supposed to critique. How can the music attract new audiences in the face of such ignorance?

 

 

PF: On its own aesthetic merit. People just have to know it’s out there. To a large extent people don’t even know that it’s out there. They need to be informed. It’s not that people say ” Oh, I’d like it better if they did this or that,” and the music would have to go in some particular direction. I think it has enough strength that when it’s heard people will say, ” Oh, yeah, I like that,” and stick around. It’s not going to be incumbent on the musicians to change to meet an audience’s expectations. The audience will have to follow the music because there is such sufficient variety. They’ll catch something. Everybody doesn’t sound the same. You’re not going to get the same thing from the Ware Quartet that you get from Charles Gayle or Test. You’ll hear very different things. These musicians are not there to cater to an audience.

 

MS: As far as that goes, a guy stopped me in a bar once and said, “Oh, I heard an album of yours on the radio and I really, really liked it but I’ve only been listening to rock and figured if I was going to start buying jazz I should buy Miles Davis or John Coltrane,” and I said “Why? Those guys are dead and I need the money! Their estates are already bulging with money from royalties. Why would you feel you had to buy theirs before mine?” and he said, “Yeah, you’re right. Why would I?” So you hear it and you’re attracted, what else do you need? You see, John, You’re from a different generation, when there was more of a cultural affinity for the music.

 

Which addresses my question.

 

 

MS: which meant in your generation you moved to the neighborhood and you heard the music, but now everything is more corporate, you know, MTV and all.

 

So how do you widen your base? Nothing happens in a vacuum. Maybe that guy wanted a comparison — to be able to hear what it was you freed yourself from, so to speak — Phil mentioned that his knowledge — coincidentally — only goes back to Miles and Trane …

 

 

MS: Well, what does that mean in terms of aesthetic appreciation? Howard Mandel thinks he knows everything about this music and he thinks I suck — so what does that mean? That I suck? What is all his information telling him? On the other hand, here is Phil, a lot of people have more information than he does, but he listens and likes what he’s hearing. What does that tell you? It should tell you that Mandel cares more about history than his own ears. When it comes to a critic like him and one like Phil who doesn’t profess to know anything other than what he is hearing, and emoting to, I prefer Phil. Definitely.

 

PF: Well, I have to say I apply the same ahistorical approach to rock that I apply to jazz. Most jazz critics are like lawyers or Talmudic scholars. There is all this arcane information you’re supposed to have — I don’t buy into that and I’m not afraid of my stance — to face someone who says I haven’t studied. Critics usually like to set precedence, but that’s not always important.

 

Well that may be so, but I’m predicting you’re going to need some pretty thick skin in response to what most critics will have to say about that. I mean, there is obviously a dialectic in spite of what Matt says. No Bud Powell — I’ll even throw in Boulez — no Matt Shipp.

 

 

PF: But he exists now and he deserves to be written about on his own merits.

 

That’s true. I like your book. I told you, I’m glad you wrote it. I’m glad when anybody writes about jazz. The thing is to make sure you’re right. I don’t mean you have to be afraid of making a mistake, but given certain information, that that has a chance of happening. That’s why I’m a poet. I have a license to make mistakes.

 

 

PF: All I mean is the key to a record is ultimately not in the liner notes, it’s in the artist’s work. If I say something wrong, let the reader correct me. Let him write his own book. I’m just opening a dialogue here. Those guys need to be written about and I did it. I mean, most of that book is a diatribe, you know, a polemic …

 

I admire your sentiment.

 

 

PF: Album releases and stuff. Let me tell you a story: before the book came out I pitched a story regarding a David Ware recording to Down Beat, the Bible of American Jazz criticism. It was a thousand words. It was accepted but chopped down to 350 words. Now you’d think since it was chopped, the third left would contain the good stuff, but no, it was the worst piece of negative editing I’ve ever experienced. All the coherence was sucked out. When they read the lukewarm commentary I gave Down Beat in the book, I got a furious e-mail saying I’d just burned that bridge. Generally their position is this music does not stack up against history. I find that unreasonable. My intent is to respond to what I like.

 

MS: In terms of history sometimes I wish I’d just dropped down from Mars.

 

But you didn’t and I’m not sure I’d understand you if I had. I just think that as a critic it’s important to have some information. You might think something you’re hearing now originates with this or that person, or you might think Charlie Parker invented a phrase and you might find Louis Armstrong had done that and it was just a reference. You might find an Ornette only restated something Bird did. That’s what gives the music its genre, don’t you think?

 

 

PF: But does knowing or not knowing diminish the pleasure of the moment?

 

In you case you’re not merely listening. You’re writing about it, so you should know what it is you’re listening to.

 

 

MS: Wait, wait — Phil has definitely done his homework. Even if there is a mistake it doesn’t mean he hasn’t done that.

 

Then who was his editor? Did he have one down there? Is an editor supposed to know what his writer’s doing? What I mean is, hey Phil — you love the music you’re listening to, right? You love Matthew, right? And rightly so. He is an icon, a beacon. There will be musicians in the future guided by what he has done one hopes, and people will be guided as well by what you have said …

 

 

PF: Well, I can’t help that. That’ll be their own fault. I mean, if you believe everything you read in a book — most of the book is just an opinion. Like I said, if I say something wrong, let the reader correct me. Let him write his own book.

 

Well, why were you all over Baraka and Kofsky? And Shepp — hey, a progenitor!

 

 

PF: Baraka — when I read his stuff, I can always hear him working out his own shit. I think that’s the worst kind of criticism, when it’s not about the art, but the critic. And as for Frank Kofsky, like I said in the book, he is just a suckerfish attached to a Marxist shark. He may believe that stuff — I don’t know — I don’t. I think he is one of the most patronizing writers that ever walked the earth, who attached himself to the music because it was something he could pin his theories on. I say musicians who include politics in their music do so at their peril. It’s bad for the music.

 

Politics–music often has everything to do with politics. This music had its genesis in politics. I found out from Phil Schaap, of all people, that Andy Kirk was taught music by Wilburforce Whiteman, the father of Paul Whiteman. The politics of the situation were so bad that Paul Whiteman ended up trying to play jazz while Andy Kirk had to play it. Gothic rock had its roots in something and it ain’t Chuck Berry–or is it?

 

 

PF: I don’t know Andy Kirk.

 

The Clouds of Joy? Very important band in jazz. May Lou Williams came out of that band. No Mary Lou, no Matthew.

 

 

(Matthew laughs)

 

MS: More Errol Garner, no Errol Garner, no me.

 

When I first met Matt shortly after he’d come to New York, I used to tell him he couldn’t play because he didn’t fit my idea of what a jazz musician was. I figured he could play anything but that. Then he told me that the late great Chicagoan drummer Steve McCall and cellist Abdul Wadoud were in one of his quartets and that he was working with Roscoe Mitchell, so I figured I’d better go hear him. That was fifteen years ago and I’ve been a fan ever since.

 

 

PF: That sounds like you went on celebrity endorsement. While the result was positive, it’s like you just followed the hype.

 

No — I didn’t follow the hype, I just followed the music and liked where it led me. It didn’t happen in a vacuum. But as I have said I liked your book. I like the musicians you profiled and expect more people will respond to the music because of it. What is your project?

 

 

PF: A novel about the porn industry and a book about heavy metal.

 

 

Good luck with everything. I’m not Oprah but I want everybody to read your book, go hear your music, buy records, and respond to it. You are a great advocate for some great music! Forget about Down Beat! Buy Phil Freeman and www.tribes.com!

MARINA ABRAMOVIC: “THE HOUSE WITH THE OCEAN VIEW”
November 15–December 21, 2002.
SEAN KELLY GALLERY, NYC

interviewed by Alicia Chillida and Steve Cannon

Steve Cannon, Poet and Tribes Director

Alicia Chillida, Art Historian and Free-lance Curator. NYC

Nov-Dec 2002- Madrid, Spain, April 30th 2003

Steve Cannon asked me to make an interview with Marina Abramovic for Tribes magazine. I proposed to him to do it together. I was in NYC at this time and we overlapped our presence at the performance and at the public dialogue afterwards. During January and February we were exchanging questions via email. I met Marina in Madrid, Spain, last April 2003 and we made this interview.

DAY 1st: Momento O, 11 a.m.:

For 12 days and nights the artist will not be having any food, no talking, no reading, no writing, limited pure water and showers three times per day. The scenario of the performance is theatrical: three white designed boxes elevated from the floor and protected by three ladders with knives as steps. (It) includes three domestic spaces: interconected: bedroom, living room and bathroom. The silence invades the stage, only the sound of the metronome in the air. Marina Abramovic is dressed in a white cotton suit (three different suits folded on a shelf: white, green,and orange. There are seven outfits in all, one for each day of the week). She wears the same boots with which she crossed the Chinese Wall some years ago. There is a telescope which allows you to observe her closer. Marina looks as (if she were) a wax statue, her gaze is loosed, like she was looking outside, faraway.

DAY 8TH

She pisses in the toilet and goes to the next room where she takes off her boots and leaves them with the socks, with perfect ritual movements. She sings old songs in Yugoslavian; they seem to be from her childhood. She looks herself as a child. She sits down on the border of the stage, her legs suspended, looking to the emptiness, sometimes to the viewers’ faces. The public comes and sits down on the floor. It is a charged ambiance, created by the intimacy between the artist and the audience. In the next room there is a bed, the Dream Bed: the visitor is welcome to sleep for exactly an hour. This open-performance is stated in a document on the wall, a contract between the artist and the participant.

DAY 12TH

She is dressed in orange, the table and the chair are turned out from their position. She looks fragile, her gesture is sad. A man from the public is showing a piece of paper to her. She cries, she smiles with tenderness. She stands up, she drinks and she blows her nose. She walks calmly from one room to the other. The act of undressing is always made with the movements of a ceremony. She changes her suit by a white bathrobe. She does not inspire any pity. She stares at the crowd that stands up. Marina smiles and she detaches her arms from the hips like a bird that would start flying, a similar gesture of the Madonnas in the paintings of the Italian Quatroccentro. She turns up her head and looks at the public filling up the space, and with a gesture gives thank you for the energy she has been receiving from the people during these days. Her gaze is tender and sweet, her hands static like they were holding a mantle (virginal) Marina Madonna in a mystic almond. There is a big ladder waiting for her, from which she goes down and, on a small podium, she starts a speech devoted to New York City and its people.”I never made an speech after a performance but this work is as much you as it is me,” she says to the audience, who answers her with a big clapping.

DAY 13TH

The performance is over. Only three visitors in the gallery, including myself. The stage is intact as it was when Marina left yesterday, an empty glass on the fallen table. But the sound of the metronome stays mute, substituted by the sound of the sea that fills up the space. The film was on during the performance but today takes its protagonism. Placed at the entrance of the hall, it shows Marina’s head laid with her eyes wide shut, on the water’s edge. The sound of the waves gives calm to the spirit after the tension of the latest days and the energy is distended.

Abramovic produces this new work that continues with themes of her thirty-year career, her aim is as she stated:”…to cross the boundary of the pain, looking to run out for a different reserve of energy, the energy on the other side of the pain that transforms the way that you see. Pain as an obstacle, pain as a bridge, as a way of growing.” Marina Abramovic Boat Emptying, Stream Entering

Q: Alicia Chillida: Which is the link between the performance and the title, between the action and the image of the video which was projected at the gallery? Is the image as in Nightsea Crossing the detonant, the starting point of the performance? How was it for you, the connection with the action next door, in which you invite the public to lay on a bed and they receive an agreement for it?

A: It is a kind of combination. The video is called Stromboli. I went during summer there to a very specific part of the island where the lava is coming down to the beach. I just wanted to lay and have the waves on my head as they come and nothing else is happening. It is a black and white video tape, really focused on the action and not so much on the beauty of life or so on. What it is important is that very shortly, two months later after the video was made, the entire place actually stops existing because the volcano exploded, and from the three craters they were unified in just one crater, and one part of the island falls down and creates this huge wave that destroyed houses and was a big disaster. It is like choosing a certain space of energy that just disappears. I felt that I wanted to show this video in relation with this piece quietly in the back side of the space. But at The House of the Ocean View, the title came directly (and) deals with the performance. The ocean refers to the people’s smiles, to the public, so from the spot I could see all of them. To me it was an ocean’s mind, it was a metaphor, a poetical title. Before, working with Ulay, it was another title related to the sea Nightsea Crossing, it was crossing the obscurity of the unconscious. In a way this piece has relation with the actual piece. Ulay and me were watching each other creating an energy field without witnesses. He was removed and I am the focus today, the public is him, so it is pushing the Nightsea Crossing performance into a much further point.

The piece next door is part of a piece I made in Japan called Dream Hotel, where the public can go there and dream. If I made this experiment, it is because I want the public to have a more direct experience as a performer. I always divide my work in two parts, the artist’s body and the public’s body, so I was thinking it was appropriate after watching The House with the Ocean View, they could go to the space and in silence concentrate on themselves and experience the Dream Bed. I have this space at the gallery and I wanted to create this triangle of energy which was these three works which relate with each other.

Q: AC: You are using the theater as a way of presenting an event as a” tableau vivant” in which the public lives in the center of the painted action. You mentioned at the forum after your performance that you felt energized by your audience and it was a new total dependency on this energy. Could you explain this?
A: This performance it is right now one of the best performances I made because it is the latest, but also it is one of the most important I have done in my life because I’ve said before that the art of the XXI century will be the art where it will be no object between artist and public, it will be just artist and public, looking each other, and it will be transformation of energy that’s it. Then, now I really try to make that, I take the whole performance as a real experiment. It was for me to see if my vision of the new century art could work if I really removed the object, and just a gaze between me and the audience and nothing else. What was new about this performance was to create a total dependency. Actually if there is no public there is no piece. During the performance I discovered that I made a huge mistake, that I really did not notice when I had the idea, so it will be part of the next piece I will make. For me when I decided to create this three elements high, I created them because it was the idea that the public could see the entire units and also they can use the telescope to have a macroscope view of me. But at the moment when the public starts looking at me, I start realizing that I actually create a kind of alter situation where I am higher and the public lower and that was very disturbing to me because, you know, if you come from the art context you make things as a tableau vivant. If you come from a religious context, you inmediately think of something else that became a kind of martyr or sacrifice, that absolutely has not a meaning in my work. Because I want this idea of big equality between the public and I, I have created a hierarchy and that was really not the meaning. So I understood this after three days, it was a flash to me. So now what I am thinking is to have the same units on the wall same height but to have on the other side of the room a platform which the public will have to take the steps up to the same level with me. The ones who really want to experiment, they have to come on the platform. This is one level, the other idea is how far I can go with the public. I want to create a situation (where) they have the same fasting period like me, so really everyone will be a possible equal and will see what is happening. This is how far I can go. I have created a lot of situations where the public has to take an active role. I never ask the public to make them in danger but now these kind of conditions, it is to go further in this–not talking or network preparations, this is what I am thinking for the public, that it will be interesting. So, the understanding of the performance will be much deeper.

Q: Steve Cannon: The gaze, the glance: to you, what did it mean and what did it communicate to you and your audience?

A: I had during this period of time of the performance the most profound relation with the public I had in my life. When you cut the communication, the eyes, the gaze, become the opening of something else. Because I was so sensitive with being purified, I could feel the energy of every person of the public in such a strong way. I cry with this piece so many times. I could feel the energy of the people, it is strange to say, and they did too. It was amazing–people were coming before start(ing) at their office at nine o’clock just to spend time with me before going to work. This need of intimacy, it was incredible, you never can establish in other situations because we have so many obstacles. I put myself in a completely vulnerable situation which actually gained the trust of the public. This was very important. My situation was absolutely the most vulnerable I could have. And this hundred per cent of being opened that really made this possible.

Q: SC: How did you feel when there was no one else in the gallery but yourself?.

A: You start feeling everything: the body, the tiredness, the hunger–everything comes down, the false putting down, but the moment the public are there I always try to be in the present moment. Chris Burden slept in the gallery but he never confronted the public; also other artists who slept in the gallery, it was no confrontation. I never slept when the public was there, I did not consider this idea. I was working when the public was there and slept when nobody was there. I wanted to come on the edge as much as they could. My favorite position was actually on the edge, where the ladder was, because even (when) I was busy, I can count on the ladder that keeps me awake,-keeps you here and now. And this here and now was essential for me, so the moment somebody left, this here and now was not there. I immediately start thinking it was really difficult, so this is why this piece depends on the public so much. I was very grateful that there were not too many moments without public. But of course at six o’clock the gallery was closed, on Friday (it) was at midnight, so basically (it was) nine hours everyday and one day was fifteen–this was the most difficult day I had. The guards switch the light off and the alarm system everywhere except on the wall.. I had a battery lamp and it was amazing, I just literally fall exhausted on my wooden bed and my magnet clothes ( Ms. Abramovic’s clothing was equipped with twelve pockets in which magnets were inserted) and I just closed my eyes.

Q: SC: Did you have any dreams during this period?

A: Yes, I have many dreams, a lot of them were dealing with the pain of the family, problems and so on, like madness. But towards the end I started having more and more some beautiful metaphorical dreams that I really liked. But one my favorite: I was in the beach in the front of the ocean, of course, but I was a little bit higher, so I look down and it was this beautiful water, turquoise-blue, absolutely fantastic, and came from nowhere this enormous snake looking like an anaconda and an enormous turtle and they were making love. It was so unusual because I never imagined this turtle and snake, they were going around kissing each other, moving, it was beautiful and a very erotic story between these two impossible animals. And then, in one point I was into this kind of pleasure looking at all this unexpected scene, I wake up and I start thinking about the meaning of the dream. Of course the snake is the ancient Chinese symbol of universe and the turtle it is time, so the universe eat time, so it is no time, so I was happy with the interpretation and I think the piece it is about time stopped.

Q: AC: You state that the main task of art it is to serve society, artist as instructor.

SC: When the performance was done with, what did you feel had been accomplished? In terms of transformation, what had changed?

A: I feel that I have really done something because the idea of the performance was this experiment: if I can change my energy I can change the energy (of) the audience. When I finished the piece, especially this moment that I gave a talk at the end, the reaction of the people. I came back home with these enormous boxes full of things given to me by people, I cannot explain, Susan Sontag, Salman Rushdie, people that I have never met, normal people that never go to a gallery, I moved something in the emotional and usually this is not happening in a gallery. The piece it was so much designed to be in NY, because in Europe the artists seem very much concerned with the quality of the market, so you make something which is a long process performance and something that you cannot sell and that sacrifices the point. It is impossible for them to understand what is happening and then to be so vulnerable and create this emotional reaction of the public, which was so strong, and I get so much feed back that I really felt that I succeeded to make an island of no time in the space, and I really succeeded in giving the moment of awareness and reflection to the people, something that normally they do not have. Probably after September 11, (they) are more vulnerable than it would be in other situations. I dedicated the piece to NYC. I never in my life give an speech, ever, after a performance. People never see an ending (to) my piece, I always like the piece starts and the piece stops away from the audience, so they only have this continous image in their minds. But I had to talk to the people, for me it was important. I really feel that I accomplish something. There was a kind of emotional impact you cannot talk (about) in an intellectual or rational level. People stop me in the street. It is incredible how much we need to be intimate, close, and this piece opens that.

Q: AC: You have been referring to political facts in previous performances such as Balkan Baroque and The Hero.

SC: With the US threats of next invading Syria and maybe Iran in the aftermath of the massacres in Iraq, how do you feel now and what purpose do you feel you have served or you will serve in future projects?

A: After this piece, the New York Times asked me several questions. What I said about it basically is that we always look to the small picture. The Americans look (at it as though) they have been attacked by terrorists, but they do not see the big picture. They do not see why is this happening to them, what provoked that kind of situation. They do not see how agressive politics they have. Susan Sontag said a beautiful thing on TV. She said:”Why (are) American people’s lives are more important that any other lives?” That is the question. They are killing and murdering all the time. If you are here to attack another nation, you just provoke more aggression, and only if we learn to forgive we will stop killing. This is a very important sentence. This is the only way it can happen. I am competely disgusted, this is my deep feeling, because it is so much to do with the benefits, and the oil, the money, the corruption. Who is actually rebuilding Afghanistan after being destroyed? Are the hospitals to be rebuilt? Are the schools working? What is happening? What right do you have to come and destroy one country and then go on to the next one? In Iraq, they are talking on TV, are proud: oil fields already working but nobody talked about 35 hospitals in Bagdad that are not working. Is the oil field important and the rest is not? Those are the questions and what can we do? What can I do as an artist? I can only make a work that can kind of put these situations to reflect and beware of certain things, but I cannot change the world. We can at least ask the right questions.

Q: SC: After you hit on the idea of doing a performance piece here in NYC as a form of meditation for those who lost their loved ones in the tragedy of 9/11, psychologically, how have you prepared yourself to perform? Did your familiarization with Eastern forms of meditation, religion, or philosophy help?

A: It is very strange my situation. I come from a family in which my mother is the major of the army, my father is a national hero, in general, my grandmother was completely fanatical religiously. I am the mixture of all these structures. So people ask me how long I have to prepare my body for the performance. Before the performance, I have a dinner with a chocolate mousse! I learned a lot of techniques in doing the retreats and going to the Eastern countries, that is true. But one thing it is very important for me, it’s your own statement, will power. For me it is the sacred ground of the performance,so the previous moment I do not have any kind of discipline or any kind of rules of behavior and then I enter into the performance and then I respect the truth fanatically. I do not have any kind of long preparations. Being vegetarian and drinking a lot of water, I come from one extreme to another extreme. My entire work in life is about extremes and breaking habits all the times.

Q: AC:. Since Dragon Heads, your stroll along the Great Wall of China, you use minerals ( Shoes for Departure) to balance and empower the energy. Did they have any influence on your body since you were using your mineral pillow in the stage?
A: I really believed in this, I believe in materials I am using (such) as copper,clay, quartz, amethyst, iron–they have certain properties. In the past our human body was much more sensitive to these kinds of properties than now, because we are completely isolated with the carpets, concrete floors. We do not feel this anymore. For me, they really help, there are certain energies and especially if you are in a fasting period you are so sensitive, to the light, to the sound and to these minerals that give you strength.

Q: AC: The time that you spent in Brazil Waiting for an Idea, in which you lay in front of a quartz wall….

A: I was always waiting (for) the material (to) tell me what to do and not me telling the material. I really felt that it was a very important period in my life and then making these minerals objects ( Transitory Objects) to open to the public the possibility to perform and enter to this performative space by using these objects to trigger the experience. I used to sleep with rocks and crystals: one day tourmaline, next day amethyst. I really experiment with myself and each time I do the objects, I first experiment with my own body. When I am sure that really works, then I can propose to the public. I will never would ask to the public if I did not go through.

Q: SC: What sort of thoughts and images went through your head during those twelve days? In the silence of the gallery, did you hear any voices? If so, what did they say?
A: Each time I was looking (at) certain persons, the entire concentration was hundred per cent on that person, so I was really in relation to the people, I was seeing things, the images, events of their lives. I understand completely what it means to have clairvoyant abilities, because if you put yourself in a very vulnerable and sensitive situation like that, every person can see. I saw the auras of every single person, so it was so much to do. Actually, I didn’t think on my own except in the night, I was always busy with this.

Q: SC: Have you heard any music?

A: No, the metronome, just the metronome. Some people had the cell phones and talking. I was not focused on that. Many people said to me if I was disturbed with child screams, voices. I was not. I really felt that I try to make myself in a certain way like a hole, everything comes in and goes out, just taking and taking away, coming in and going away, that is actually the processing,. I did not hold anything.

Q: AC: Like light’s circulation?

A: Yes, that was very important. You could hold other people’s pain, you can become angry, frustrated or restless. But you take the moment as it is, whatever could happen in that moment, let it happen. If people come up or shut me, or whatever, I am open to the best thing and to the last moral consequence, but you do not even take it, you are not irritating, you do not create angry or negative feelings, just comes and goes. It was very interesting moments when I was concentrated with a person and you are looking at entire space fields of energies, and at the same moment you have to piss. Which is a very banal kind of activity. At the beginning I have a huge problem, I was really suffering because I did not how to deal with it. But then, I come more and more with this attitude of let it go. So I go from that very intense moment to a very intense moment of pissing, and I ritualize this pissing as the most important moment, then I go to the shower. So when I take every activity, any was more important than other, and this was a big teaching. I only learned this in performance.

Q: SC: Since we all find ourselves to be voyeurs at one time or another and reality TV has become so pervasive, it has invaded film, movies, some may criticize your work as narcissistic and banal–how do you respond to this?

A: Before that, I think this is a great question. Now I do not have these questions. This is really refreshing. Why, what you are doing is art? (Laughing) It is banal, narcissistic, but also you can say masochistic, self injuring, all these kinds of things I have. But if people can say that, somehow after seeing (the) video material, installations, photographic works, etc. But very rarely people have this opinion after really seeing a performance, that is the difference. One thing I make sure that whatever I do, I do so hundred per cent, there is nothing left, I just put everything in. If you do that, of course I have some works there are not good too, there is another thing. Another question it is to do bullshit completely, go for it and whatever happens happens, but you have to do it, so then I understand. But otherwise, if (you) really do the maximum you can, then I never had this kind of critics, because the performance works in so many emotional levels that if you really understand that it is not just that I like to present myself naked in the space, it is much more than that. Superficially (it) can’t be really seen if you are not having life confrontation, if you are really there and take the time to see the piece, that changes, I think.

Q: AC: You state that in the art of the future, it will be immaterial without objects. Your performance coincides in NYC with David Hammon’s Concerto Blue and Black. The art review in The New York Times made a parallel between the two shows:”Where Seeing is Not Only Believing, But Also Creating.” Is it for you a connection between both presentations?

A: It was very interesting, I did not have the idea he had the opening the day before my show. We met in Canal Street, in a hardware store. I was buying a lamp and he was buying the batteries. I said, “David, where are you going?” He said,”In twenty minutes I have my show, I have to buy some batteries.” First of all, I like very much David Hammons’ work. After my show I went to see his show. We met years before in the Dokumenta by Jan Hoet, 1992. I was installing my crystal cinema piece, it was three days before the opening. Some people were still working in the space. It was eleven o’clock at night, it was no labels. I went around to see other artists’ works. I was seeing things and I came to one room and I saw this piece with the black hair and my skin become like chicken skin, and a strange feeling in the stomach. I always believe that a piece of art you feel it in the stomach, there is some kind of an unbelieveble impact you receive before the energy enters. The day of the opening I asked about this artist and this is how I met him. He has an almost aboriginal power of a shaman in his work. The piece was very beautiful here, especially the space, this enormous kunsthalle space with almost nothing in it with this black emptiness.

Q: AC: This refers to your idea of the immaterial?
A: Everything is so fast that we do not have time for the objects, to make, to transform, become such a heavy obstacle. I really think everything is electronic, electronic image. To me the 21st century really starts with this strange computer sect in America, who committed suicide in order to join the spaceship behind the comet. This idea that the body is too heavy to join the space, to this computer sect is extreme, of course, but light can travel so fast, and the body can’t, that is the lighting. There is someone who knew about this before anybody, at the beginning of the 20th century, the great scientist Nicolai Tesla. So the future is more the non-body level to be developed.

Acknowledgements:

Thank you to Sean Kelly Gallery, Sean Kelly, Cecile Panzieri and especially to Amy Gotler, Associate Director, for their generous collaboration.

Thank you to Marina Abramovic for her time and energy.

Thank you to Mireia Sentis”parlez vous” to be again part of the story.

Photographs courtesy of Sean Kelly Gallery, New York

Canada is a big country, a very big country. It would be easy for a small girl to get lost in it. Vancouver’s Hu Yen Li has been finding a way through the redwoods with her salty verses.

Her poetry weaves her neighbourhood, experiences, and history into a slinky dress that she sets of with a bulky pair of Nikes. The presence and rub of the old and new, punk rock and traditional Chinese values are the label of a Yen Li poem. Her works, such as ‘Why I Won’t Eat Chinese Food in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan’ and ‘Slapshot’ are vibrant, piquant slices of a live lived in a jumble of who you are mixing it with who you want to be.

Q: How did you start to write Poetry?

A: I work in a mah jong school. It’s my uncle’s place. I deal tiles all day to old folks and gamblers. It’s pretty boring to be honest. I read a lot and some of the old people started to bring in things for me to read to them. Li Po is always popular. From there I started to write myself.

Q: Being Chinese is often at the heart of your writing …

A: Wherever I am, I am Chinese. My heart, thoughts, and the forms of those thoughts are all inside me. Culture is inherited; we carry it inside of ourselves. There’ve been Chinese families in Canada for a long, long now. Vancouver is 50% Chinese even. The world changes for everyone, that’s constant. I am lucky that I can go to see punk rock bands, ice hockey, get drunk in the Marble Arch, and still have a 5000 year culture to embrace me.

Q: Some of your work, like ‘Moose Jaw’, seems to be about the tensions …

A: Ha ha, that’s just a true story. I went to the bathroom and on the way back some Joe Diddley wanted me to get him noodles.
The only people I feel weird about being Chinese with are poetry people really. People in bars, everyday people, they either like you or they don’t. No big deal. In poetry I get annoyed at being ‘the cute Chinese girl’. That’s not me, it’s like boys who hit on you. It’s not you they see; it’s what they want you to be in their own heads. You know, that China doll thing. My poem ‘Heavenly’ is about that. White people get drawn to my ‘otherness’ then it freaks them out when I’m not like them.
Q: One of the best known Chinese poets in English is Evelyn Lau, also from Vancouver. Do you get compared to her?

A: Poor Evelyn. I love her work, ‘You Are Not Who You Claim’ I waited weeks for that book. Of course, most Canadian kids see ‘Runaway’ too, it was televised. She’s always moaning though. She’s had a much harder life than I have.
Evelyn uses English much better than me. I write in English because I’m trying to make sense of the culture but most of my writing has all of Li Po’s drinking behind it!

Q: Which writers float your boat?

A: Li Po, “Peach petals float their streams away in secret, To other skies and earths than those of mortals.” I love that, that’s from a poem celebrating imagination. Imagination, an internal thing, you see?
I love Wu Ch’eng-En, ‘Monkey’ has all of humanity in it. Shen Fu I like, and Lao Tzu of course. Lots of classical works.
I love Frances Chung. She wrote in English, and in Spanish too. She was a writer from New York City’s Chinatown. That ’same but different’ thing again. Beth Lisick is always fun to read, and I can’t get enough of Cheryl B. I’m in Rising magazine lots and I always enjoy her writing. There’s a lot of love there. Annie Proulx is a real treasure too; she writes with a pen dipped in heart blood.

Q: Punk rears its head in several of your poems, and you’ve read at several festivals, yet seem quite disparaging of it.

A: Punk rock’s so funny. You’ve got all these molly-coddled kids spitting in the faces of their parents. Grenville Street (in Vancouver) is full of these losers. You can only get something like punk from an affluent liberal society. Can you imagine something like punk rock during the Cultural Revolution in China? I imagine the Red Guards would have had something to say to all these layabout punk rockers.
Punks claim to be ‘alternative’ but it’s a joke. They’re nothing without ‘daddy’ society holding their hand. I like some of the music, it’s loud and offensive, that’s a good thing for young people. But these punk rockers! They’re obsessed with advertising! They whine on and on about anti-capitalism but they’re like walking billboards advertising their fag bands and lame brain politics. I don’t need to have the name of some dick weed band slapped across my chest to establish my personality. I am Yen Li, I’m happy with that. Really it’s just music for well to do kids whose parents spoilt them.

Q: You do dress too kind of sassy to be a punk.

A: You’re damn tooting. Working people, they like to look good. It’s always well off kids who dress down, you know, like students. I wear a cheongsam most times at work, they’re pretty cool, they drive men crazy. I like that whole Anna May Wong style. I couldn’t look like one of those scruffs, oh the shame of it!

Q: So how’d you get to do these punk shows?

A: I’ve not done any for a while, and probably won’t get asked again after this! It’s just that punk rockers are so desperate to be liberal. They think ‘cos I’m a Chinese girl I’ll agree with them. I’m a clean girl; I’ve got more in common with someone who works for a living and washes. I did a few shows in BC and around Seattle. They were fun. I have a strange fascination with the whole thing to be honest. I like the Beltones, the Reducers SF, and some of those tougher bands, the 4 Skins from England, that kind of thing. It’s the ‘otherness’, you see?

Q: So how does your poetry go down at these events?

A: Well, ‘Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan’ always goes down well. People like that poem, I don’t know why. Apparently it says something ‘about changing relations in Canada today’ but really it’s just a throwaway poem.
It’s funny, the punk rock guys in my poems, they’re losers. I get guys after shows identifying with me! “Oh yeah, that guy was a jerk”, “Let me show you a real punk guy” blah bla blah, but every punk guy I’ve met is the same loser with the same Flogging Molly asswipe.

Q: Is there much girl on girl action in poetry?

A: I don’t wear that stripe of pyjama. Lots of the teen slammers hear some lesbian record and get into that whole thing. But like their poetry it’s essentially dishonest. There wear their sexuality like a t-shirt. Their ’sexuality’ becomes something to cause a rumpus rather than part of who they are. There’re a lot of unnecessarily hirsute girls in the coffee shops. There’re really good lesbian writers, like all good writers they’re the human ones, ones with a real personality.

Q: What’s next for you?

A: I’m currently putting a collection of my poetry together, tentatively called ‘Chinese Rocks’. But a date with Chow Yun Fat would be nice …

APE Magazine, London.

Tishie: How did you first come to writing?

Leticia: Things got too big inside and it was the only way to get at the bigness … I was explodin’. Always it was like that — not a poem or a story but a thought — maybe one thing too for my insides to carry … kid stuff … journal stuff … not worth mentioning. So the writing came from a need to get at the stuff inside … if I had more nerve it would’ve been a knife carved through my skin … you know like the folks do let out some of the pain inside?

Tishie: No I don’t. I don’t believe in self-mutilation … I don’t believe in solving problems through any kind of violence — in fact I don’t believe in violence.

Leticia: Exactly. That’s you and thank you.

Tishie: When did you consider yourself to be a poet?

Leticia: I prefer to be said I am a writer.

Tishie: Well I don’t see why you don’t want to be said you are a poet — you’ve always wanted to be part of the in crowd and now it’s very popular to be a poet.

Leticia: No that’s you … wantin’ to be in the “in crowd.” I don’t give a fuck about the “in crowd.”

Long pause as they both stare at each other

Tishie: Ok — writer … when did you consider yourself a writer?

Leticia: Well — a long time ago MTV had this show — poetry unplugged or something like that and it didn’t make me feel any kind of way until I heard that one of the people on it met Prince cause he saw her on it and flew her to his castle. And I remember that day: I was sittin at this burrito joint in the east village and this friend of mine had offered me a cigarette — that was when I smoked sometimes and that was when if you did smoke you could light up wherever you wanted to … anyway I declined the cigarette and we were talkin about such ‘n such … still tryin to figure out my purpose … I think the sun was out … our food came and right when I was about to chow down … I mean I had sliced into that bean cheese lettuce guacamole thing … my fork had taken up the first bite — almost to my lips and then she told me that this girl had been on MTV and Prince had called her and now they were workin together … I put my fork down, asked her for a cigarette — waved the waiter/waitress back over — asked them to wrap up my food — ordered a mountainous margarita …

Tishie: So let me get this straight — you declared yourself a writer because you heard a poet had met Prince based on her poem?

Leticia: Benny’s Burrito — it’s in the village. At the time they made real good margaritas. At the time I really liked Prince. To hear somebody had met Prince cause she claimed her self when I was tryin’ to figure out my purpose …

Long pause as they both stare at each other

Leticia: You know for somebody that supposed to be me — you really don’t act like me or at least you don’t understand like me …

Tishie: Based on what you said earlier — I would think that would influence you to not declare yourself a poet — I mean writer.

Leticia: See you didn’t hear me — the fact that people were on MTV didn’t sway me — I wasn’t interested in that. See that’s part of the in crowd … somebody writing something so that they could be on MTV … that’s not being an artist … it was the fact that something somebody wrote had the power to influence Prince like that … somebody who didn’t have music behind the words … no song … just words … I’m interested in power … that’s interesting to me …

Tishie: But the in crowd is the popular crowd …

Leticia: Well yes — there is an in crowd that has power but there also is power that is not part of the in crowd — quiet power … the power in writing something personal and it ends up being the universe.

Tishie: Can we take a break — I must take some aspirin … or go lay down a bit …

Leticia: Ya know my momma says the same thang … but that’s when she calls me Tishie … she says: Ooo Tishie — you just gave me a bad headache I gotta go lay down some …

from Wild Like That Good Stuff Smellin Strong

Interview with Samira Abbassy on January 24, 2006 in her studio at the Elizabeth Foundation, New York, NY by Ana-Maurine Lara

 

“Infertility,” 1999-2000

 Samira Abbassy and I met in her studio at the Elizabeth Foundation on one unusually warm day in January. I first met Samira through another visual artist who introduced me to her and subsequently her work. After attending the Open Studios in October 2005, I requested an interview with Samira.

Samira was born in Ahwaz, south-western Iran in 1965 and identifies herself as being Arabic as well as Persian. In 1967, her family moved to Britain where she was educated from primary school onwards. She studied painting, first at Birmingham Polytechnic and then at Canterbury College of Art. Abbassy’s career was centered on London for most of the 1980s and 1990s. She established a successful gallery career, showing with Mercury Gallery in Cork Street, the Royal Academy, where she won a painting award in 1997, and numerous other galleries in the UK and Europe. In 1998 she moved to New York where she now lives and works. She has had solo and group shows in New York and in London, where she exhibits with England & Co. Her work was acquired by the British Government Art Collection in 2002.

Samira’s paintings are simultaneously ephemeral and visceral. They are embodiments of multiple mythologies and contemporary dilemmas; they are deeply feminine and humanistic. In addition to visiting her studio on several occasions, I also had the opportunity to see over 30 pieces, including sculptures, exhibited at Vernacular Press in October 2005. The sum total of her work at this time seems to counteract not only the shattering processes of globalization, but also the unnerving side effects of war, that above all are marked by the erasure of biblical and historical artifacts and artwork throughout Southwest and Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. She is, as she says in her own words, a bridge between history and time.

I’d like to begin by asking you to describe your work.

Lately I’ve been saying that they are small scale oil paintings. I also describe my work as being vaguely of Middle Eastern influence, and autobiographical as well as mythological. I don’t consciously use mythological subject matter; it just seems to arrive in figures that I can’t always explain. There is a strong element of self-portraiture in my work that illuminates how my life is unfolding in terms of psychological states rather than regarding actual events.

Can you give an example?

My work used to be more narrative based and as it’s developed the narrative has given way to something that is more about the internal dynamics of the figure rather than the interactions between two or three figures. The states of the figures are sometimes depicted with the color that’s used — a specific red for example — because of the way that color can carry emotion. More literally I’ve done a recent series of drawings where I focus on the anatomy — where there’s an x-ray look to the figure that enables you to see inside it. I want that to depict how the figure feels rather than what it’s doing. That’s become the aim of what the figures are now.

Tell me about the materials with which you work.

In the past 3-4 years I used collage as a basis for building up composition and then painting on top of it. Now I’d like to get rid of that because I’ve decided I don’t like the edges of the paper. Now it’s more to do with imagining the process and then approaching the work and then doing the work directly with color. For example, with “Hereditary Bonds”, the blanket red is almost done like a collage. The large triangle of red is almost sticking down like a piece of paper, but I want the quality of paint to speak for itself. Another example is the recent triptych, “Inflammatory Speech” which was done with no collage but with gesso. Over the one and half years it took to make that piece, I discovered ways of dealing with the gesso by allowing its light to come through by scratching back into it. I’ve also noticed that every time I’ve discovered something works, I want to move onto the next thing. There’s a sense of “I’ve discovered that - now what else can I do with my new obsession”, whatever that might be.

What is your current obsession?

The gesso is one of them. But I’m also working on a series of drawings done via projection. This is again following the idea of collage, but instead of sticking collage directly onto a surface, I am projecting something I have made or photos of other references I’ve been using over the years, and allowing for changes in scale. I like that it can be moved and is infinitely adaptable.

How did you stumble on to collage?

The surrealists used it, like the exquisite corpses. When I first came to NYC and was going to bars and stuff, we used to play exquisite corpses. I would take some of them and they would be really interesting so I would photocopy them or scan them or sometimes use them directly. The collage came out of using a direct drawing. But throughout art history, people have used collage, either as a thing in itself to draw attention to the object, or as a structuring device. For example Max Ernst; I saw a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002 he took photos and re-collaged them into a piece which he then photographed so that the final piece was seamless. That was a direct feed in to my own use of collage though I saw that show after I started using collage in my own work. It consolidated my ideas.

Can you speak to that dynamic between the contemporary and timelessness of your work?

I’ve always seen myself as a medievalist because of the scale of the work, but also because I’m painting and using paint on canvas it’s a very sort of archaic way of making anything. I draw a lot of my references from pre-Renaissance imagery. When I see a timeless thing, whether it’s a Cycladic sculpture or an Egyptian painting or sculpture, there’s something that happens where I recognize myself in it and I recognize that I feel like that body and that body was made so long ago. I have to wonder what it is about that that is still speaking to me. I find that recognition to be miraculous. I do identify with some contemporary work, sometimes through the use of material, but it’s the older stuff that I feel has a mystical amazing-ness. You know it’s been judged and kept, and that these things were made very well, and were made to last. Just to be able to do those kinds of things with those materials was very hard, whether it was marble or bronze, so the craftsmanship element is really important to me as well.

I’ll go back to the first part about the timelessness and the images that speak to you, but can you address the contemporary aspects of your work?

I feel people consider me contemporary because I work across ethnic lines and ethnicity is one of my subjects. Moving from the third world into the first world at a very young age and still being judged as representing that world, I had to learn to explain myself - not really knowing an explanation but inventing one. That’s a contemporary issue of people working in the West, but still being seen as coming from elsewhere. We’re crossing cultural and historical boundaries. There are writers dealing with themes I’m choosing to paint about. Salman Rushdie addresses this theme of standing in two worlds at the same time. For example, when I’ve gone to contemporary art museums in the Middle East, there’s a missing link in the sense that many artists are using western iconography which doesn’t wholly belong there - yet. And, it’s like we’re on a bridge. They’re coming over and I’m going back. I don’t feel like I’m going back as in “I’m regressing” or trying to turn the clock back. I feel like I’m trying to distill or explain the gap in the bridge. I look at Babylonian imagery or early Syrian art and Persian paintings because I feel that there are nuggets there that have been left behind and I want to disseminate those. And I feel like I’m in the ideal position because I’m here, even though I was once from there. I’ve noticed that something is working out on that level in me. It’s almost what my heart needs to see.

Let’s turn more specifically to the archetypes and images that you use. Could you speak to that piece up there, “When We Were Birds”

Process wise it’s re-using some elements from previous works in a more condensed fashion. I scanned some of the bird women figures and scaled them up and down. It was initially a collage piece and then it was painted and one or two elements were completely wiped out. It’s about leaving the ground and not being able to, as well. Before that I did another one called “Waiting” which was a group of birds, a lot of them were grounded a few of them weren’t. So I wanted to follow that theme [in order] to discover what it was about that set of problems. These figures are states of being, they’re not actual representations. It’s about waiting and being able to leave the ground and do as you please. I want a fantastic element in the work that speaks of spirit, but I also like playing with space and making space function as a metaphor. I want the painting/composition to have the unreality of looking into a mirror.

So in that sense that piece is a composite of different emotional states that you the painter are trying to capture in symbolic entities of the birds and the metaphorical space of the canvas. I love that piece because you capture the quality of light as it actually exists

Yes — the golden iridescence. Even though that’s not actually gold. It’s a flat yellow. But you make those decisions about color. I wanted something that is almost unsavory. I wanted it to be acidic and luminous and void-like as well. It was also done as an angry elimination of what went underneath, which was too much brownness. There was way too much brown and coziness there. Sometimes you do things to dare yourself out of a habit.

Why the birds?

Well, I got asked this a lot. The bird is a symbol (and I hate that word symbol because it’s too specific) of the flight of the imagination and the infinity of the soul. It’s what we can’t do but our minds can do. What I’m trying to describe in my work are mental and emotional processes and states. So the birds seem to be, at the moment, one of the most successful vehicles of trying to express that. Because it’s not always about actual things. It’s about how to make a painting work and it has to do with breaking the rules and being able to leave the ground. So there’s that, too.

Another timeless archetype/image that you use quite frequently is the king. Speak to that a little bit.

The king is from the Qajar and 19th century court paintings from Iran. I’ve had a love affair with this king figure for a very long time, even before I attempted to paint him. What’s exceptional about him, apart from his ravishing beauty, is that there’s a hermaphroditic quality to him - he’s beautiful both as a man and a woman. He has delicate shoes and a dress with a very pointy waistline and a full skirt and everything is embroidered to the t. It’s just beautiful. I know who he is, he’s Fath Ali-Shah [Qajar] (1771-1834) and he’s been depicted many times. Each time he looks slightly different, but if I saw an actual photo of him, I would recognize him. These old paintings of him cross the line between actual person and mythological figure, and I want those qualities in my figures. What’s also interesting to me about these paintings of him is the fact that this was the first time court painters went from miniatures to full blown portraits of a specific person. Before that the shahnamas, or historical illuminated manuscripts, were small scale and they were gouache or water color, but these were oil paintings on canvas and board. The kings commissioned them because they knew how kings and queens in the West were being depicted at the time and they were like, “we want that”. So it was a way for this form of painting to be brought into modernism, into the new contemporary west. You can see in them that there’s flattened space, there’s not a total understanding of perspective or three-dimensionality. They were making western paintings and I’m, in a way, trying to imitate their imitation of Western art.

Ultimately, I’m painting because I haven’t worked out yet what intrigues me. It’s like I’m still looking to explain the process, the materials, and the world. I’m still looking to find out if there is another level here of explanation. There’s something about the process that feeds me and my work.

Are you looking for another level to the images and materials, the excavation of these?

Yes — the overall meaning. I’m still looking for why, what is it, what does it describe to me. I’m looking to describe things to myself in a new way. That’s why I have to push back the boundaries of my own language. I can’t keep describing things to myself in a familiar way. I have to find different devices or ways of doing it.