Elvia writes again (from the back seat of the car)
So, our trip started out with a streak of unbelievably bad luck. We had some minor hitches over the last week, but nothing compared to our big catastrophe in Baltimore on Monday.
But let me start at the beginning. We spent Saturday night in New York City with three of my good friends who were visiting from Brazil and who I hadn’t seen in a year since my semester abroad in Sao Paulo last year. The six of us spent the night out together, I got to refresh my forgotten Portuguese, and we talked over our plans with them. Two of them are artists I’ve worked with, and explaining our plans and goals to them was exceedingly helpful. In all of our cases, the day helped us transition away from the lives we were putting on hold. We bought the Brazilians bagels in the morning (“Isn’t it just a round bread?”) and, albeit hungover, Alisa, Elena and I headed down to Baltimore in the afternoon. Our Couchsurfing contact completely abandoned us and we ended up in an Econolodge on Sunday night. But, Monday morning we had a private tour of the American Visionary Art Museum scheduled at 11 AM, which was definitely the best place in America for a trip like ours to begin. Right off the bat, we got to speak with the founder, Rebecca Hoffberger, and took a lengthy tour with the director, Pete Hilsee. But more about that in a bit.
At 1pm, we were told by some museum employees that two cars had been broken into in the employee lane directly in front of the museum, where we were parked. We ran outside to find our rear righthand window smashed and, of course, our three laptops gone from where they had been buried in a pile of stuff in the back seat. The next hour was spent with a very kind policeman and the museum staff, desperately filing reports, changing passwords, calling AAA, waiting on hold with the insurance company….Pete and Rebecca were unendingly helpful and kind during this time–many thanks to them.
Our tour of AVAM suddenly cut short, we immediately called our friend Alison who lives an hour away in Arlington, VA, and zoomed as quickly as possible to her family’s house with a trash bag taped over the car window in a thunderstorm. That must have been one of the most miserable drives I’ve made. Alison and her boyfriend, our friend Brooks Ward (link), were waiting for us with stiff drinks, chocolate chip cookies, and a place for us to collect ourselves and figure out the feasibility of the rest of our plans. Brooks happens to work in the conservation department of the Hirschorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and offered us a tour the next day. We were glad to re-direct our course and happily took him up on the offer. We also decided to follow through on our plan to conduct a screenprinting workshop in Baltimore the next afternoon, to give the city another shot, and more importantly, not to let down the community organization that was counting on us. But more on that in a bit as well.
Back to the laptops. Clearly, so much of our trip is based on our ability to record it: in words, in pictures, in sound. The journey is self-reflexive in that sense. Without our computers this is all very hard. Our lives were on those computers (isn’t yours?) and not all of our stuff was backed up. In fact, tons of it wasn’t. So why were we so irresponsible? Suffice it say that the area of Baltimore AVAM is in is decent, that we were parked about ten feet from the main museum entrance, that two different sets of security cameras caught the whole thing on tape, that our computers were hidden in the car…but in the end, we were utterly naïve. It simply did not occur to us that our out-of-state license plates would make our car an obvious target for theft and that you should just never leave your damn laptop in the car. Especially given the fact that everything we need is in the car right now, we had not distinguished between the more replaceable things and the one thing each of us owned both very worth stealing and also extremely vital to our lives and our trip. So we’ve agreed to call it a combination of stupidity and extreme bad luck and leave it at that.
The Catastrophe
The ever-wonderful Alison is lending us her old MacBook, which works pretty well despite being vomited on last year, and Alisa’s mom lent us the money to buy a new MacBook Pro on Tuesday. The two computers should get us through the next month, so we can stay in touch with you and keep working on our projects, which are already underway.
With all of that explained, I’ll talk about our trip to AVAM in brief. There are pages and pages I could include here, but I’ll try to keep it succinct. (Recordings of our interviews and much more writing will be available on our adjunct blog, http://insidersout.wordpress.com, as well as in the final books and CDs we produce.) The American Visionary Art Museum is a completely unique place that is hard to place in the context of the art world. Before arriving, we had read some polarized reviews of the institution and its founder, Rebecca Hoffberger, and we were excited to see the place for ourselves. My main questions were about the simultaneous commodification of “visionary” artwork as such and the insistence upon its non-commodifiability; about the demand for authenticity and problem of “proving” that a visionary artist or artwork is authentic; and about the resulting opposition created between education and authenticity.
Rebecca herself is a well-informed, well-spoken, non-evangelically spiritual woman. The whole museum is imbued with her personality. (She happened to be wearing a giant mirrored brooch that exactly matched the exterior of the main building.) She has a point of view reinforced by many years of categorical placement outside the art world and hostility and judgement on the part of “inside” curators. However, it appears that much of this opposition is self-defined. My second-favorite thing that she said to us was that “visionary art is created when life experience is too big for words, by people who don’t wait for an outside power to grant them opportunity.” My favorite thing she said was: “The difference between a visionary artist and an insider artist is the difference between a lover who knows all the moves and a lover who listens.” I was glad that Rebecca vocalized her position as “not anti-academic at all, but that there are aspects of existence that the system doesn’t allow for,” and liked the way she grappled with the terminology of words like “outsider” or “art brut.” In other times and places, she said, cultural production was not limited to those with the job title “artist.”
AVAM's large sculpture gallery. Beautiful pink poodles and Leonard Knight's original hot air balloon.
I decided that AVAM was faced with the problem inherent in any type of representation of marginalized/underrepresented communities, which is that they must be labeled as marginal in order to be brought to light. It’s always a compromise to have to reinforce one’s position outside the mainstream so that the mainstream can become aware of one’s existence. In this case, the careful positioning of the museum’s collection as “visionary” work allows it a certain authority, and asks that it be considered on its own terms.
The museum did indeed have detailed biographies of every artist next to the work, and we talked at length with our lovely tour guide Pete about this fact. Again, I wanted to know if the stories were there to prove authenticity (e.g. this guy really overcame some tough stuff to make this spit-covered canvas, so we know he’s the real deal). Were the stories meant to hook you into looking at the art, or vice versa? Why couldn’t the objects stand on their own? After feeling frustrated about this question, I began to think about the fact that so many of the art pieces we saw actually contained words in them. I have believed for a long time that the distinction between word and image is an invented one, as contrived as the distinction between art and non-art. If the artists could include words in their work, words were not somehow antithetical to the integrity of the objects. The biographies alongside the work simply served to complete the stories that the work was telling. AVAM wants to tell the stories of the work and of the artists however possible–in words, pictures, sound, whatever. I came up with the conclusion that AVAM is a museum of stories, of lived experience, and of the capacity for human expression, none of which is limited to the display of objects. I am impressed with AVAM’s institutional transparency–as Pete said, “we’re not trying to pretend that this stuff is being presented in a vacuum”– and the presence of affection and enthusiasm in their display of the work.
Here I can draw a comparison with the Yves Klein show we saw on Tuesday at the Hirschorn in D.C. In my opinion, Yves Klein made just about some of the sexiest art on the planet. The show has all of his most amazing works, and I almost felt embarrassed in front of the bigger blue-pigment coated canvases because of how sexy it all is. Then of course there are the actual imprints of naked women’s bodies on half of the pieces, and videos of women rolling themselves around in blue paint… Anyway, the weird part is that you couldn’t get closer than two feet to anything in the exhibit without an alarm going off and a guard yelling at you. Compared with how Rebecca had lovingly caressed the frame of a work by Sermet Aslan the day before at AVAM, I felt like intimacy was sorely lacking from my experience at the Hirschorn.
Interestingly, we did find affection for the art object–in the museum’s basement. Brooks took us down into the conservation department, where we got to talk to the Hirschorn’s head sculpture conservator. No room to write much about it here, but it was fascinating to hear her talk about restoring a work as a mystery to be solved, and to see the conservators fondling and sniffing priceless artworks while only upstairs we couldn’t get even a foot away from anything.
Paul Thek's Fish Man in the Hirschorn Conservation Dept. (& Alison!)
We ended the day in Baltimore again, at a woman named Beth Barbush’s house. She runs a weekly event called Porch Art from the porch of her house in the neighborhood of Remington. Kids and their families come by to learn a new skill or do an art project. The whole thing is powered by donations and Beth’s hard work. We were lucky to get in touch with her and arrange to teach some basic screen-printing to members of her community. Elena took an image that some of the kids had drawn last week and made it into a beautiful screen. We set up a table on the sidewalk in front of Beth’s porch and printed about 35 bags, pillowcases, and T-shirts. We explained the process to everyone and let the older people pull their own prints. It was fun, super engaging, and immediately rewarding, which was exactly what we needed to get our minds off of our own logistical crap and make us feel like our project was still worthwhile. Afterwards, Beth and her friends took us to the corner bar for a pitcher of beer, where we had a great conversation with one of her friends who is running a kids’ science camp at the end of the summer. We talked about how artists and scientists are both essentially problem-solvers and about how there should be more conversation between the two. The rain began to beat down heavily, and it was time for us to drive back to Arlington for the night. Baltimore, it seemed, was not the worst place on earth.
The porch!
All ages at porch art
The design
On Wednesday, we got up at the crack of dawn and headed South. So much has happened in the last three days that has justified and redeemed the trip a million times over, and we’ll post about it this weekend. But one more note about the robbery. Seeing the smashed window of my car was one of the most strangely painful and ashamed moments in my recent memory. The violence in the gesture and the violation of an assumed private space, as well as the theft of an object that contained so much of my private life on it, felt like a real tragedy at the time. Afterwards, I am able to feel thankful that the loss of data is still not equivalent to the loss of life, that I had friends and kind people around to cushion the blow, and that things are just things and that money is just money. We are still young enough that nothing we have created is precious, and in some ways this occurrence reinforces something I have been thinking about a lot lately: letting go, leaving things behind when it is time to move on (no matter how unfinished they may seem), and changing and growing constantly by dropping dead weights. These are the weights of extra possessions, extra guilt, extra resentment, and above all, extra fear. A cheeseball Australian motivational speaker, who the three of us met at a bar in Miami this spring on the day after my 21st birthday, told me that I needed to learn to love myself just as I am. I asked him, “what about change? Can’t I be constantly changing?” His response was the question, “Yes, but, are you changing out of fear?” I had already sucked down several margaritas and had trouble processing this, but I wrote it down in my journal, and the question has been troubling me for quite some time. Perhaps ironically, I wrote a long piece of writing last week about the notion of an unchanging self or “constant” identity, which is now lost on the stolen laptop. I think it would behoove us greatly on this trip to face no experience as a loss or a gain, but as simply a change—change which is always occurring in our lives, whether we see it reflected in our belongings and surroundings or not. As for the question about whether we have a constant, unchanging self in there somewhere, or whether this is constantly changing also…more thoughts to come.
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