Art from Life
Martha L. Deed
Sometimes there occurs a moment so gripping, it demands more than the memory of a single person.
A phone call announces the sudden death of a parent in a car accident.
She was on her way to visit,
her favorite ice cream already installed in the freezer.
Her body at a distant morgue,
near the hospital where survivors lay.
Next day, we are mugged in our own elevator,
on our way to Homicide,
goldfish in a plastic bag for the survivor.
We chase the mugger into the park. Pacifists,
we assault him, not caring whether he carries
the gun he claims, but does not show.
God can do no more to us, we shout as we attack.
That was 1970. But I couldn't write about it until 2003.
So, it is clear that successful transformation requires both inspiration and distance. Hopefully, not thirty years or more, but at least sufficient space in which to create a piece.
Whether text or visual, I want to create work that evokes
similar effects in the detached observer to those experienced by the artist.
Reception is not sufficient, however, because, for me, art moves beyond
the image or the text to transformation within the observer: assumptions
shaken loose, vision expanded, a tipping over within one's consciousness.
That is why pure anecdote: My mother-in-law was killed in an automobile accident while riding in a rental car driven by my uncle-in-law's incompetent driver, a fact well-known to the uncle -- may be of passing interest to a listener, but no more.
That is where the artist's distance comes into play.
I am gripped by the ripple effect of a murder in western New York. Social scientist by training, laced with journalistic experience, I research the who, what, where, when, and how.
The moment of acquittal becomes my focal point. Within a month, I publish an account of that moment, a newspaper story. I hint at luminosity, but cannot yet move beyond the facts. I can experiment with open pieces, but even open pieces must have content, not emptiness.
A year passes. I struggle, write, destroy. There must be a way to convey the twists and ripples in people's lives, the rejection of careers by people who thought their choices were certain (even God-given vocations), the damage to cherished structures we thought functioned: churches, courts.
The lessons of acquittal fail me. I cannot get them. But multimedia web art begins to suggest a path analogous to the lessons I learned as a young therapist:
Do not take a sledge hammer to your client when his memory fails, or try to seduce a silent person into disclosures he is not ready to make. Instead, examine the process. What is the texture of this failed memory? the refusal? What came before it -- and what does he think will follow its revelation?
Repeatedly, I have returned to the visual: the faces, the places. The look of the gun, handled so gingerly by the prosecutors (signifying danger) and with disdain by the defense attorney (signifying indifference). I see the photograph of the gunstock, the victim's bloodstains in the wood. I recall the proof: the DNA analysis. And I hear the juror tell me, "We couldn't understand the DNA evidence, so we discounted it. I thought he killed John Montstream but there was no proof."
Sometimes the structure of an assignment, even one taken on voluntarily, can open a wedge into solving the problem. That is one of the beauties of collaboration. The imposition of constraints on the work by the rules of the collaboration creates the necessary distance for the work.
In this case, the initial breakthrough came via erasures.net where artists were invited to take a text, then through a process of removing words, to make a different piece.
Yes. I could not yet -- still cannot -- render multimedia art without collaboration, but I could take a single page of an unambiguous murder confession and transform it into:
1. Statement
I say
Mike told me
give him a ride
I talked with Mike Northrup
I have been wanting to tell someone what happened to me
that I John was dead
2. Statement
I have the right to do anything I want
anything I say will be given to me
I have been wanting John dead
I knew where he was
I am sorry
this truth is a crime
the facts are true
I have been told that swearing
can make me guilty
3. Statement
Lawyer
to state this body is John
is a false statement
The concept of erasures provided the beginning for a work in progress: erased justice, erased family, erased faith in secular and religious truths.
The challenge continues in the form of pieces I intuit as parts of an -- as yet unseen -- whole. The square I created for the Screenburn collaboration "Sitting" (forthcoming in Beehive ) marked more progress in blending research with the visual and verbal. For the first time, I find a way to present central figures without distortion, but also (essential to the truthtelling) without incurring legal complications myself. The haunting bagpipe playing "Amazing Grace" escapes cliché by being from John Montstream's memorial service, the permission to use it granted by his family.
And raising yet another essential constraint and challenge. When working on a piece that may affect the living, there is the duty (I think) to leave them with privacy intact. This is not only a humane imperative, but an artistic one as well: for the art itself must be created for the world at large. It is important, of course, to send sympathy cards to the bereaved, but the public work must move beyond the personal specifics to embrace larger truths.
I still wonder if I can do this.