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Things change. That's precisely what makes things interesting. But change is also uncomfortable. Being in a place that is familiar is comfortable. You know it, and you know what to expect. There is one very recognizable time when you can know if what you're doing in the studio is hollow. That's when it feels comfortable. When you're making discoveries, finding something that at least holds a possibility for being original, it is by definition uncomfortable.
I've lived in Brooklyn, Wyoming, Washington, D.C., Chautauqua County, New York, Pittsburgh, Mexico, Oil City, Pennsylvania and the East Village. I spent last year living and working in Umbria in a tiny, thoroughly agrarian hill town fifteen kilometers from Todi. It was a big change for me, although the town itself has changed only minimally over the course of the past five hundred years, give or take a century or two. It's not far from Perugia, Orvieto, Spoleto, Siena, Florence, Assisi. There were several artists living in the area. Perhaps because of the place, we had interesting conversations about notions of time, immortality, change, crisis, the information age, cyberspace, pictorial space and what all of that means to us as artists.
In my own work I don't think about these things directly, although I am interested in what time does to nature and to civilization. I think that time takes everything back. There isn't any immortality, but we all want it anyway, and Italy is a great place to think about space, immortality and the passage of time. You cannot pick up a stone that hasn't already been touched by a dozen human hands, or walk through a forest that hasn't been harvested a hundred times before. I wrote something (on a manual typewriter) about these conversations while I was living there:
"If I take a stick of charcoal and make a deep black mark on a blank white wall, that mark takes on great significance in the context of what happens on that wall. If I take the same piece of charcoal and make a second mark, the impact of the first mark is lessened in the context of the wall. The first mark doesn't change. It remains the same size, has the same weight, character, tone and all of those other formal qualities. But the second mark also demands our attention, and it changes the first mark because of that. If I make ten thousand marks on that wall, the first mark is diminished to the point of having virtually no meaning at all. These marks are like bits of information. So what is the meaning of that most singular of acts - making what we call art, painting on a rectangle (a shape which doesn't exist in nature) - in the world of the information age, with it's billions of bits of information? What is the information superhighway, and where does pictorial space fit in the environs of cyberspace?
Between my studio and my home there are two answering machines, two fax machines, three computers, three televisions, countless radios and six telephones. I am in Italy now. I have not been in my home or studio in nearly a year. Nor have I watched television, listened to a radio broadcast, touched a word processor, heard an answering machine message or sent a fax during that same period of time. I do, every three or four days, buy a copy of the International Herald Tribune, and two or three times a week talk to someone (a human being, not a machine) on the telephone. But overall, the experience of the past year offers me some semblance of being a detached observer. And I must concede that spending a day last December with a dozen local people slaughtering a pig that they had raised for the winter's meat, combined with a few paragraphs on the latest sensationalized trial of the century in a four day old newspaper, makes me at least as 'informed' as I was when hundreds of times as much information was coming at me every day a year ago. Only then I didn't know anything about the pig. Perhaps it is just a question of how much information a human being is actually capable of processing in a meaningful way."
More than was the case before I spent a year in Camerata di Todi, I think about the nature of how we experience space and time in the world as it exists today. We sit on airplanes traveling at speeds in excess of six hundred miles per hour, listening to Beethoven on the headphones while we are reading a newspaper article about last night's political crisis on the other side of the Planet - all at the same time. Certainly, the quality of the experience is diminished, but the truth is that we all experience Beethoven in this, or some other detached fashion far more often than we do sitting in a concert hall. Time and space now exist in a way that would have been impossible for Matisse and Picasso to have imagined only a short few decades ago. Time and space aren't sequential. They are simultaneous.
In the age of information making art requires a greater act of faith than it did for Piero and Giotto. At least they had the Church. We have AOL, the Internet, the World Wide Web, instant and anonymous e-mail, CD ROM, video, C-Span, CNN - a safely sterilized, convenient and instantaneous world on the inside of a television cube. Whether we realize it or not, on a daily basis we all walk around in a suspended state of virtual reality. From Giotto and Piero through Matisse and Pollock, painting was first hand, capable of being touched, original. It does seem out of place in the information age world of cyberspace. However, I am not convinced that this state of affairs is so terrible for painting.
Earlier this year I visited the Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii. The walls, the frescoes, the remnants are magnificent. And while standing in the courtyard of this marvelous two thousand year old house I was reminded that painting is painting. It is incapable of being threatened by the incredible access to technology available to some of us. Whatever has happened since the walls were painted doesn't do anything to diminish the walls. They still talk to us more than two thousand years later. Before the Romans there were the Etruscans. They painted frescoes on the walls of tombs. The Romans came and the Etruscans disappeared. Painting continued. The Romans built the Pompeii that we know, and they painted the frescoes on the walls in the Villa of the Mysteries. Vesuvius erupted and buried Pompeii. The Roman Empire rose and fell. Painting continued. It survived the Dark Ages and industrial revolution, world wars and how many other empires? How far has pictorial space "progressed" since the frescoes on the walls at the Villa of the Mysteries were painted? As I see it, the notion that cyberspace might somehow diminish the meaning of pictorial space represents a kind of simplistic arrogance. It is an arrogance based on either the inability to transcend, or the inability to accept one's own time. Art exists outside of time. Cyberspace is only about time - or the compression of it.
In Camerata I read a book by Milan Kundera. It's called Immortality. Kundera opens the third chapter with a quote from Rimbaud saying "For eight days I had been scraping my shoes on the stones of roads". Then Kundera continues by defining a road as "a strip of ground over which one walks. A highway differs from a road not only because it is solely intended for vehicles, but also because it is merely a line that connects one point to another. It has no meaning in itself, but its meaning derives entirely from the two points that it connects. A road is a tribute to space. Every stretch of road has meaning in itself, and it invites us to stop. A highway is the triumphant devaluation of space, which thanks to it has been reduced to a mere obstacle to human movement and a waste of time."
It's not called the information highway for nothing. Painting belongs to the world of roads. Are roads disappearing from the landscape to be replaced by highways? Of course they are. This happens especially in the post-industrial world where your neighbors don't raise and slaughter their own pigs. But like the mark of charcoal on the wall, the importance of each road is greater in proportion to the fewer roads that there are. It's not that the cyberspace and the information age diminish the relevance of painting or of art. In fact, they may do the opposite. For every new bit of information out there on the highway, there is an increased importance to that most singular of acts.
Don Kimes
Camerata di Todi & Washington, D. C
*Immortality, Milan Kundera, Harper Perennial (Harper Collins), 1992, page 223.
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