The size of the private enterprise

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=401_1367264360

To think that a Cold War was waged between two superpowers that used the conquest of the Moon and the cosmos as the mark of their competition. Something that is achieved today by private individuals. Is it the state shrinking or has the private institutions become as big as the state?

The Artist, the Model and the Gun

The Artist: I met Ryan S. Lemke years ago while taking a class at Hunter College. Ryan used to work at the sculpture department until late nights. He used to do and still does these highly crafted sculptures made of paper and other ordinary easily found materials that he assembles in meticulous ways with a high degree of attention to detail and that sometimes resembles Lego structured models that usually have a take on mass culture.

One night, while we were both leaving the studios about 4 am; me the painting studio, he the sculpture studio we ran to each other on the way to the elevators. I was walking some steps ahead of him while all of the sudden I heard a noise, like a contained screaming, coming out from behind. I asked him what happened and he told me that somebody, a hand, just came out from the hole on the wall were the mail is to be dropped and tried to grab his knee. I realized that this guy was working way too much and that he was having some kind of mind blowing episode. i realized that he was a true artist, somebody who lives between the real world and the realm of the usually un-accessible.

The Model: I met Tomie Seo while taking a visual class at Hunter. She presented a video there of a play that she staged using a Chinese kind of puppet scenario with little puppet birds that children use there for their children play. The story that she played and recorded was about a bunch of little girls and an ugly old man. The little girl birds where playing and suddenly the old  man with grab one of them, throw her on the ground and raped her.

The debate: I'm acquiring this piece from Ryan and get into a conversation with a white American woman about the piece. She is like "don't should find that piece disturbing, that Asian girl holding a gun, why are you getting it?" I'm like " I know these guys and they are very nice people and I don't see anything disturbing about this piece which brings old good memories and which I like." Then we start sparring about gun control: Me: "When I see a bikini clad woman  holding a gun or a rifle I see a statement of her vulnerability and her rights to defend herself against male aggression." She is like: " Well, I see it unfair that the law proposed by Obama and that should have been made obligatory on a federal level for gun owners to be registered was voted down." I"m like: I agree but at the same time I think it is a right for people to own guns." A whole discussion ensues that includes the themes of abortion, seat belt measures, etc, all of that thrown by this lady into one basket  in a chaotic and unrelated way forcing me to  find a way to extricate myself from it.

Other girl enters into the fray and she is like: "Well, I think that emphasis should be put into educating males not to rape women." I'm like: "Yeah, go to India for two weeks without a gun and when you come back let me know what happened."

Tobey holding the Ryan S. Lemke piece. C-print on paper.

Ryan S. Lemke. Me: "The guns are pointing at you."

On seeing J.M. Basquiat show at Gagosian

This is what strike me the most of those canvases: that it is not enough today to scratch and express yourself, directly, through writing. The writing, the letters, need to be mediated somehow,  loosing the immediacy of direct representation and expression. Work and instrumentalization, some kind of tooth in society's gear is needed. Which is only achieved by mediated representation.

The times are different, way different of what they were back in the 80"s. Seems to me that Basquiat chose to die young because he was already experiencing the changes in society and culture that were underway. He probably knew that he couldn't cope with was coming over. What artists of today know very well.

In the sense of the mediated writing and mediated representation in general, people like Andy Warhol, Barbara Kruger and Jenny Holzer were ahead of his time. Is this so called Post-Modern paradigm an illustration of our increasing disconnection from ourselves? Is it that as time goes by, decades goes by, our bodies are increasingly been replaced by technologies, making us beyond human, post-human, without moral traits and without old world values such as character, virtue, honor, etc? And the way we represent ourselves in social media, photography and video art is in sync with this new humanity? Painting is of the past and only valid as a re-claiming of the human spirit, the individual, the human being and humanity? Is that the reason there would a following of painting among art lovers? Because painting is an statement of what we are losing, what we are not anymore and we have become, post-human.

If that is the case Basquiat died for the right reasons, because he couldn't be human no more. So died Kelly Inman, her last girlfriend ( you can verify that for me), who showed up in my studio a couple of times with her beautiful, wide open blue eyes.

But do you still want to hear the truth why Jean Michel Basquiat died at such a young age? I'm going to repeat the same that several people who were friends and acquaintances with him told me: they killed him.

Art is about elevating yourself from human misery. He could not. No matter how hard he tried. 

On Cuban Identity

The core of Cuban identity comes from making fun of everything, "chotearlo todo." That's what differentiates us. Laugh it all, we seem to say to ourselves; laugh it all because the only certain thing in life is death. This core of identity that makes us mock at everything in life is also our Achilles heel. We are incapable of taking anything seriously and that's why we cannot project ourselves into the future as a nation and a people. One of the few exceptions to this rule is our national hero Jose Marti, somebody who took his life so seriously that after leaving a superhuman output of literary work and political activism exposed himself to the enemy to get killed at still a young age as if to redeem the lack of spiritual get it together of the Cubans: it is the things that you do in life and the way you die what defines who you were. If Jesus does not have died in the cross it would have never being the Christ. Too loose in our tribalistic separations, distances exacerbated by the figure that must have pull us together, the state, instead of being a nation builder and an aglutinator of people has been for the past 55 years our main force of diremption and dispersion.
But one thing we owe to el choteo: El choteo propitiates de dissolving, through humor, of conflicts that would otherwise escalate into physical violence and harm.