Workshop/Salon 17: IN THEORY I COULD BREAK FREE...

IN THEORY
I COULD BREAK FREE...
Art on the Brutal Edge
























"The line between acceptability and unacceptability is an important line to cross - it is an urgent, compelling opening, not a boundary, not a limitation. It is the nature of the art-making process, the art-finding process. Why explore the known?" - Christine Taylor Patten, New Mexico artist (1991)















"What do you want
a poet for?
To save the City of course."
- Aristophanes,
Dionysus in The Frogs






Getting Deeply Personal: The Hurt Series
This workshop features the work of American artist Mark Funk, whose career I have been following since 1979. He has been gracious enough to agree to let me post some of his 2005 work, the "Hurt series", which deals with themes of child abuse, by way of sparking a discussion on some of the darker...or light-seeking...aspects of art.

If I may quote from a recent email discussion with one of our blog participants, Bradford Hansen-Smith: "Much of what we see now days does not go very deep. Art has no value if it is not about the artist. Nobody is really opening to the potential beauty we are, because maybe all are afraid to talk about it because it only becomes tempered in the brutal aspects of life. So we talk about art as if it really matters, instead of the individual life that really matters. Nothing wrong with getting deeply personal, we all are."

My sense, when I first saw these new paintings, was that Funk had wiped off decades of camouflage and was now showing us the real stuff (for perspective, he just turned 60, I've been watching his work and visiting his studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico since he was in his 30s). Oh, previous work was strong, it definitely grabbed your attention! And there were periods, between the more angst-ridden work, of serene landscapes and dreamy abstracts. But...the message seemed often quite intentionally veiled, ambiguous. So I had to ask, what happened to spark this change?

A Burning Party?
Funk explained that the purpose of this series was to illustrate his "bizarre upbringing", and that they were the result of his exploration into his emotions following the deaths of his parents, and dealing with the aftermath of what he describes as "their cruel and unusual child rearing". He says he eventually showed this series to a therapist. In Funk's own words:

"...who happened to be an 'art therapist' - whatever that means. I failed to ask him, but he certainly didn't have to ask me to use stick figures and arrows to reveal the abuse, i.e. 'What do I have to do? Paint you a picture?' Ha!"

Funk says that at one point the therapist told him it was time to have a burning party. Funk started painting over these canvases but our hero, Bradford, visited him and saw what was going on and told him to stop, that this was important work, and, instead, to archive and photograph it! Funk has since had at least one gallery express interest in showing it.

"Shortly before my mother died, who had Never expressed an opinion about my art, she said to me, '...you are something of a Pollyanna and paint the world as you would like it to be, but you should paint the world as it really is. It is time to Tell The Truth.' Of course, I'm sure she didn't have this Hurt series in mind when she said that, but, after both parents had passed away, I felt empowered, or allowed, to tell the real truth about my personal history, my personal 'world'."

I am reminded of one night in my university days when I was watching a late-night talk show in New Orleans featuring Tennessee Williams (one of my heros in theatre literature). Williams said that he had spent time in and out of mental institutions and that one therapist had told him he would be fine if he would just stop writing. Fortunately, he didn't take this advice!

Dare We Show Disturbing Art? (Or Dare We Not?)
Society manifests a complex and ambivalent attitude toward those it identifies as its artists. On the one hand, creative people are held in awe and envied - for the expressive daring and the personal freedom which they display both in their work and often in their lifestyles. On the other hand, artists are viewed with distrust and dismay, for saying and showing what is often held to be unspeakable or taboo by the dominant culture, and for living an "on the edge" or libertine lifestyle. It does seem to be the nature of the artist to move and live in some way against the grain of the dominant cultural viewpoint.

In Reimaging America: The Arts of Social Change (O'Brien & Little, New Society Publishers 1990), artist Ricardo Levins Morales confirms the power of art: "The more a society has to hide, the greater control it must exercise in order to keep artists from doing what comes naturally: exposing its most private dreams to the light of the sun."

In the USA, I followed the Maplethorpe controversy a couple decades ago, and read the transcripts from the 1989-90 congressional hearings on the reauthorization of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA). This is powerful reading material, I consider it to be of immense historical importance. The transcripts are, in effect, a culture talking to itself, a censorship dialogue which is literal, public record and available for posterity. And not just any culture, but one which the whole world is watching - the USA, that great experiment in human freedom of expression.

I have always been taken with writer Larry McMurtry's statement in those transcripts:

An Old Tenacious Fear
"In our view, the animating force is the desire to control what art experiences Americans may have. Underlying this desire for control is an old, tenacious, profoundly anti-intellectual fear of art itself. Art is not feared because it is expensive. It is feared because its strength and its reach are essentially uncontrollable. The fallacy feeding the fear is that art is thereby dangerous to the citizenry and the commonwealth. This fear, born of ignorance, supposes that the force and power of art might provoke anarchy; that it might make us less responsible Americans, less effective citizens. The great voice of history tells us that the reverse is true. Art has been loved by all peoples and treasured by all peoples, not merely for its enchantments and delights, but for the moral and spiritual resources which it lends in support of our uncertain human state. Art is not a choosy lender either. It lends, on occasion, even to those who distrust it." [Hearing on the Reauthorization of the NEA. US 101st Cong., 2nd Sess. H. Rept. Washington: GPO, 1990. 2:59-60]

What Can Be Done About It?
Mark Funk's current series brought forward old concerns of mine, about art and censorship. I wrote a thesis on this subject ("The Artist as Culturally-Authorized Deviant" Thesis, MA Theatre Arts, University of New Mexico 1995), for which I interviewed many American artists and writers. My thesis, and conclusion, was that an incident of censorship never exists in a vacuum or in isolation. Censorship has reverberations which keep the dialogue in motion, between artist, audience and censoring authorities. Primarily, censorship is a mechanism for setting social boundaries and defining cultural identity.

When I discussed that project with my peers, back then, a sense of serious concern regarding the then-climate of political censorship was the usual result. Inevitably I was asked, "What can be done about it?" My response was - and still is - automatic: "Artists have to become more and more courageous." I laid out a set of recommendations then, let's see if they still apply:

Ideally the artist will assume as one of his/her life tasks to become educated about and armed with the following cultural awareness:

1. There are well-documented and pervasive preconceptions about artists that impact your interactions with the culture.

2. There exists a cultural fear of the potentially "uncontrollable" power of your art.

3. Be consciously responsible when you carry those preconceptions and wield that power.

4. When your art is presented, it becomes part of the cultural dialogue through public forum.

5. The dominant culture defines itself in part through "boundary patrol" of its parameters.

6. You and your art may be "used" as a tool of that patrol.

7. You may also "use" that tool of patrol in your own contribution to the dialogue.

Early Warning Systems...
In short, I continue to see artists as the guardians at the edge of culture. I, for one, always want to see what they have to say, because they are often the coal mine canaries. Art has a power that statistics and science do not - the power to engage and impassion a viewer at all levels. That is, intellectually, physically, emotionally, psychically - and, in that engagement, to then perceive, present, translate and interpret our continually changing understanding of the physical and psychic world.

As written by Edward A. Maziarz in Value and Values in Evolution (Gordon & Breach, NY 1979), "Some artists were like distant early warning systems of the human condition today. They read the signs of coming ecological and social disasters early and with full grasp...We were not unwarned..." Maziarz sees hope in the fact that today's artists are not simply questioning the means by which to express themselves, but the very meaning and foundation of their work; they are taking on questions concerning the validity of making or not making art, and "the revitalization of the entire human environment".

What do YOU think?
How does Mark Funk's "Huart Series" strike you? Can you talk about any art (visual, music, written, etc.) that has had a disturbing impact on your life? Or that helped rearrange your attitudes on something which, previously, you didn't care to examine?

And, when the eyebrows of inner and outer censors are raised in your direction...how courageous are you? Do you feel free to...

DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND LOVE WHAT YOU DO?

We invite your thoughts.

Text: Michelle Miller Allen (c) 1995, 2007
Art: Mark Funk (c) 2005

Catalogue of Paintings in order of appearance, top to bottom.
(Unless indicated otherwise, all are 30" x 40" x 1.5" Acrylic on Canvas):

In Theory
Love Spank Baby
Spacey Child (PhotoShop Image, any size)
Lick of Sense
Make Him Love You
Catalpa Sex Dream
Marry Sex Once

About the Artist: New Mexico artist Mark Lee Funk, age 60 ("I was born in Texas, but woke up here.") has been a professional artist in Albuquerque for the past 35 years. Following graduation from the University of New Mexico in 1968, he taught high school in California where he discovered that he was meant to DO rather than teach art. Funk returned to his beloved New Mexico and dove into a lifelong career of creating and selling his art. His work is in international collections. He is also a published author. If you wish to contact him about his work or for a studio visit, email Michelle at stirlingshadow@yahoo.co.uk and she will put you in touch.


PLEASE NOTE: These images may not be copied, distributed or used in any manner without express permission of the artist.

(Please visit the Green Phoenix Productions website, just Google us! -- Dare not provide the link here, I've had trouble with blogspot's linking system!! No telling where it may take you!!)