At the end of Part One, I asked a question referring to Nicholas Mukomberanwa’s sculpture Sleeping Woman. “How does this inanimate object, a stony lump shaped by someone so different from me, feel so imbued with feelings and emotions that it reaches out to me despite all that separates us?”
Is it simply a matter of skill? Is the ability to chip away at a piece of stone the sole determinant of the end product? Is the sculptor’s imagination the significant ingredient? Was the woman buried within the stone, waiting for Mukomberanwa’s chisel and intuition to uncover her? One might just as well ask the same of, say, Van Gogh, Henry Moore, Picasso, or even Andy Warhol. Or, say, Faulkner, Hemingway, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, Eliot, or even that other Dylan, Bob? Is skill and imagination the only things that matter?
A couple of months ago, at a gallery opening at the Art School of Columbia County, a group of abstract painters spoke about their individual “process.” Their descriptions were all different, which is hardly surprising, but interesting. However, no one asked them if they had anything in common (other than their devotion to abstraction) when making a painting.
I’m not a painter. I’m a writer, and I think that somewhere buried within me is something of an artist. Writers are artists, as are composers, choreographers, dancers, actors - you get the idea. Is there a common denominator that all these disparate artists and their mediums have in common, something beyond skill with which they each imbue their work, intentionally or not?
A few years ago, I was talking to a writer who’d been a friend and colleague for many years. I told her I was trying to write a short story and was having a problem because it seemed so cliched. She said that what makes a story unique is what you bring of yourself to it. You bring everything that you’ve learned, everything you’ve read, everything you’ve experienced, the entire life that you have lived. That the more you bring of yourself to your work, the more your story becomes unique no matter how familiar the basic outline of the story is because you are unique.
Or, if I can speak in more abstract or metaphysical terms, what you have to bring to your work, what makes your work unique, is your beingness, your soul.
I took that to heart and wrote two stories imbued with as much of myself as I could muster. How good they are is an entirely different question, something more dependent on skill. The more skillful I am, the better I can manifest that beingness in my art, whatever its form.
Looking back over the things I have created over a long life, I can see how that has manifested itself. Going way back, I wrote a story when I was 19 that now seems as much about my feeling out of place in my world as the boy I was writing about felt about his.
“Adam.” A poem I wrote when I was 22 and trying to understand boys and girls together, or maybe just girls. My wife tells me I still romanticize them (girls, that is). True, all too true.
As an aside (but not entirely), the year before I wrote “Adam,” I gave several of my poems to a classmate, the editor of the NYU literary magazine. He rejected them, saying they were “too personal.” I could accept his rejection (I expected nothing else), but too personal? Why write a poem if it’s not personal? Or anything else, for that matter. Also, by the way, no one ever read “Adam” until I wrote The Winding Road. But secretly (not so secretly since the cat’s now out of the bag), I think “Adam” may be the best thing I’ve ever written. And, yes, the poem is entirely personal. And no, I’ve never written another poem.
A video I made in 1990 about genocide in the 20th century that was commissioned by the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance. A baker’s rack proudly displays decapitated heads on multiple tiers while their decapitators stand by. A massive pyramid of bare skulls in Cambodia. Swirling bodies in a pool of water below a waterfall in Rwanda. And Willie de Ville’s mournful dirge in the background.
Another video made for the NewsHour in the wake of 9/11. The opening image was of a mother and her baby on the rooftop of a building in Brooklyn, with the smoke from the fallen World Trade Center in the background. The closing image was of a destroyed car with a lily on its hood. I was trying to say something about life and death and how they are in constant tension in their opposition, yet inextricably bound to each other.
You can read about all these and more in my memoir, The Winding Road.
My ex-wife started life as a dancer. The first time I saw her perform was her self-choreographed solo dance for her master’s degree. What a performance! It was also the last time I recall seeing her perform. But that evening, it seemed that she had become the dance, that the dance had become her, that they fused into one thing. And maybe that’s when I really fell in love with her, or at least with that girl, that dancer. We were together for thirteen more years, but it’s only recently occurred to me that I never quite saw that girl again.
When my amazingly talented granddaughter was in high school (I have three extraordinary granddaughters and one awesome grandson), she attended a summer program at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her professor said that her skill and talent weren’t in question, but she had to learn to dig deeper into herself. And my granddaughter did just that and her work has never been the same. (Thank you, Professor Liu.)
A few months ago, I wrote a piece about art that has yet to be published (I’m sure you’ll get to see it before winter sets in). I showed it to a long-time friend of mine, someone who has spent her life thinking about and writing about art and artists. In it, I talked about the earliest cave paintings that date back over 50,000 years and wondered what story they were trying to tell with their red-outlined handprints. Her only comment was that I had omitted the possibility that, first and foremost, was the simple declaration, “I am here.”
Are you old enough to remember “Kilroy was here?” I’m sure you know what tagging is. I am here. Here I am. See me. Remember me. That’s what we all—we human beings—want. To be seen. And remembered. But maybe it is only artists who make it their life’s work, whose need is so powerful that they will risk total rejection by putting themselves on display for the universe to see. The better they are at their chosen craft, the more skillful they become, the more of themselves, of their beingness, their work can contain.
The making of art is a process of both self-discovery and self-creation. The better able we are to make what we imagine, to make manifest in the physical universe what we are in our internal universes, the more we are what we create, even if we are the only ones to see it.
Somehow, by some alchemy, the self we embed into our work becomes forever attached to that work. In doing so, it doesn’t diminish us. Rather, it enlarges us.
So, Nicholas Mukomberanwa, I look at your Sleeping Woman and know that aside from anything else, I am seeing you, feeling you, or at least that part of you that you are knowingly or unknowingly willing to show me. Not your skill (although that, too), but you. However much we are separated by distance, by time, by culture, by language, by tradition, by history, I can truly say,
“I see you now.”
Lovely Michael!
Paula S