"From the Edge...", last entry/"Desde la orilla...", última entrada

Finally we are coming to the end of the almost endless essay "From the Edge, Both Real and Imaginary". Scroll down for the English version and the preceding chapters.

Por fin, el final del larguísmo ensayo, "Desde la orilla, real e imaginaria". Los capítulos previos se pueden encontrar más abajo. Las imágenes de esta entrada consisten en primero, dibujos y grabados de niñas, a petición de Angel de la Rueda, y fragmentos del políptico "America en Extremo".

"Mamá enojada con su pequeña hija"/"Mommy mad at her little girl", 1953

Realmente no me gusta demasiado admitir que he enfrentado circunstancias para las cuales me he sentido poco preparada, que no he enfrentado bien, que me han abrumado, pero ya que lo pienso, sí me ha pasado, y recientemente.
La verdad, la década de los noventa no me fue fácil. En cuanto a mi carrera, es cuando me establecí bien, supongo. Incluso ahora me quedo atónita cuando recuerdo cómo trabajaba. Por ejemplo, cuando iba a exponer en el Museo de Arte Moderno, fui a ver la sala, y me asusté. Se veía enorme; me sentía de tamaño normal, pero mi obra se me hacía... infinitamente chica. Bueno, de tamaño, comparada con el lugar que tenía que llenar. No sé que es que impulsa a los hombres a hacer cuadros de tres por cinco metros, pero en mi obra un cuadro grande es de un metro por un metro. A lo mejor todo empieza por el hecho que los hombres tienden a tener sus talleres en otros lados, donde sus familias no los distraen, talleres que suponemos han de ser enormes y llenos de bocetos y cuadros en proceso y elementos de instalación y tarros medio vacíos de pintura y botellas vacías de vino y cajas de pizza deterioradas, etc. Siempre he tenido mis talleres en mi casa, así puedo trabajar mientras vigilo lo que está en el horno y volver a trabajar cuando los niños están dormidos (antes cuando mis niños no eran los hombres que ahora son.) Esto quiere decir que trabajo en mesas y en paredes no más altas que dos metros y pico. Además, por naturaleza me gusta trabajar dimensiones no muy grandes, es más íntimo.
Entonces para poder llenar aquel espacio me hice un calendario de lo que tenía que terminar y cuándo. Lo que más recuerdo es que decidí que no tendría tiempo para ir al cine en unos ocho meses. Pero sí llené las paredes, y después de eso las de varios museos más.

"En suma, vista como una existencia que aparece en un alma, el mundo entero para cada quien es peculiar y privado a su alma en específico...FM Bradley citado por TS Eliot/"In brief, regarded as an existence which appears in a soul, the world for each is peculiar and private to that soul" FM Bradley quoted by TS Eliot, 1993 (I)

Al mismo tiempo (¿por no ir al cine?) mi vida social era cada vez más deficiente. Los círculos sociales del mundo del arte iban cambiando. En los ochenta, estuve bien dentro de ese circuito. Pero el mundo iba cambiando, y yo también, y poco a poco me encontraba más aislada. Volvía a rondarme el fantasma de ser la marginada. Y ya no tenía una pareja que me ayudara a integrarme. Es más, la mayor parte de la década no tuve pareja, y cuando la tuve, me complicaba más las cosas en vez de solucionármelas. Tenía unos amigos, buenos pero bastante ocupados, no exactamente un buen sistema de apoyo. Luego mis hijos se independizaron. Creo que fue en 1996 que empecé a vivir sola, prácticamente por primera vez en mi vida. Esto es sin contar seis meses en Boston en 1970, antes de meterme a una comuna de mujeres.
Mi hijo Andrés me regaló un gato cuando se fue. Todavía lo tengo, un siamés con mucho carácter y luego compré en Mercado Sonora una gata que nos resultó algo carente de carácter, pero que funge bien como mascota del siamés. (Andrés ya tenían cuatro gatos: Violencia, Crisis, Caos y Sismo. Quería regalarme más, pero me resistí.)

"En suma..."/"In brief ...", (II)

Y me pasó otra cosa. Desde 1994, empecé a tener anemia. Nadie (léase doctores) sabía por qué. Bueno, tenían sus teorías pero no me podían curar. Me había vuelto vegetariana pero volví a comer carne con la esperanza de sanarme. Y volví con una ex-pareja con la esperanza de alegrarme. Ninguna de las dos cosas tuvo el efecto deseado.

En el dos mil hice una buena exposición (es decir, una que me satisfizo) en la galería de Arte Mexicano. Pensé, bueno, no tengo pareja, no tengo energía, pero estoy funcionando. Fui a sacar un certificado médico para tener seguro y el ginecólogo decidió que tenía un tumor en el útero. Estaba equivocado, pero sí tenía un quiste en un ovario. Luego me quiso operar y quitarme el ovario, ¿o eran los dos? y además el útero. “¿Pero por qué el útero?” le pregunté desconcertada. “¿Para que lo quieres?” me contestó.
Me hizo tomar una serie de exámenes caros y desagradables (como una tomografía.) Después de varios meses de estar especulando acerca de cuándo y cómo podría morir, fui a otro doctor. Este decidió tratar el quiste con hormonas (cosa que resultó) pero a pesar de la mejoría estaba yo cada vez más triste y sin energía. Fui a dar una plática a unos niños de preprimaria sobre que es ser “pintora” y la primera pregunta fue, “¿Por qué estás tan amarilla?” Y, mi cara estaba extrañamente hinchada. Así que no me sentía muy bonita que digamos. Además, estaba pasando por la menopausia. No nos gusta hablar de eso porque es como dejar caer el dato de que estamos al punto de dejar de ser “babes”, como dice una amiga, pero el hecho es que me estaba pasando y estaba sola. Pasaba días en el sofá sin ganas de hacer nada, y la idea de vivir treinta años más (suponiendo que llegara a tener ochenta) me llenaba de angustia, porque no se me ocurría nada que hacer con todo ese tiempo. Fue en ese entonces que una amiga, para un proyecto suyo, me hizo una entrevista en la cual cada vez que me preguntaba algo sobre la historia de mi vida, me echaba a llorar.

Otra vuelta/Another whirl, 1985
Finalmente me rendí y fui a un buen internista. Durante los años previos mi concepto de “doctor” había sido limitado a ginecólogos y doctores naturistas, para mi desgracia. Resulta que ya llevaba unos diez años de un hipotiroidismo cada vez más agudo. Se alenta el cuerpo, te engordas o te hinchas, te vuelves anémica, produce depresión...muy fácil de tratar, pero tardas un rato en normalizarte. Lo que me molesta es pensar cuán distinta podría haber sido esa década si no hubiera tenido este asunto bajando mi ánimo y robando mis energías.
De todos modos, aún con la bronca médica bajo control, la interacción del hipotiroidismo con la menopausia me había producido un bajón químico que era difícil de revertir. Seguía sintiéndome con una nube gris alrededor. O con un bloque de cemento encima. Seguía manejando mientras lloraba, y llorando mientras manejaba. Me recetaron un antidepresivo y no me pude parar de la cama. Se lo comenté al doctor y no me quitó el antidepresivo, pero me mandó vitaminas para viejitos. Lo dejé de tomar de todos modos. (Tomé las vitaminas). Ahora me he enterado de que dar antidepresivos es como inventar un cóctel personal para cada quien por prueba y error, con la posibilidad de no pueden dejar el tratamiento después. Entonces, a lo mejor no me perdí de mucho al evitarlos.
También me metí a un club muy acá con vapor y máquinas y personal trainers y lloraba en el yoga. La instructora estaba muy conmovida. Pensó que me había provocado una experiencia espiritual.

El cumpleaños de Sylvia/Sylvia's birthday, 1983
Fui con una terapeuta y salía llorando más fuerte. Como Alicia, corría el riesgo de ahogarme en mis propias lágrimas.
No fui totalmente improductiva. Eché a andar varias cosas que luego me fueron de mucha ayuda. Una fue el aceptar dar una clase de gráfica alternativa en La Esmeralda, escuela de arte. Cuando empecé a dar clases ya había salido de mi bache, pero hoy en día encuentro el trabajo en la escuela una conexión orgánica y vital con el mundo que me hace mucho bien. Finalmente, ¿que podría ser más divertido que convivir con estudiantes de arte?
También empecé una nueva veta en mi producción, piezas que tienen menos que ver con “mujeres en su intimidad”, lo que solía ser mi tema predilecto, y más con la historia, historias personales, quizás, pero historia, al fin. Como que empecé a salir de mí misma, en cuanto a temática. Hice, por ejemplo, una instalación de imágenes trabajadas con transferencia y costura, basadas en fotografías de los pueblos indígenas de los extremos de América: Alaska, Canadá y Patagonia. Es una especie de narración de la época de su encuentro con los europeos, encuentro que resultó particularmente devastador en el sur. Me involucré mucho con las imágenes de esta gente al hacer el proyecto. Estaba tratando de reconstruir algo, de darles presencia y voz a pueblos marginados en su momento por su situación geográfica y su desventaja en cuanto a desarrollo, y finalmente, marginados también en el tiempo.

El cumpleaños de Pati/Pati's birthday, 1983

Paralelamente me encargaron, para el coloquio de artistas mexicanas y chicanas, una ponencia con el tema de “Sobrevivencia como artista.” En un principio me dio pánico, entre otras cosas porque no estaba tan convencida de que había sobrevivido o que sobreviviría. Pero resultó ser un vehículo para articularme, una forma de procesar lo que me estaba pasando.

Y tuve suerte, me enamoré. Esto fue muy útil porque el enamoramiento produce muchas endorfinas, que contrarrestan la deficiencia química. Produces tu propia droga antidepresiva. Además, la suerte fue no tanto enamorarme (ya tenía un buen de experiencia con el fenómeno con resultados regulares), sino enamorarme con alguien con quien tenía la posibilidad de desarrollar una buena relación. ** No sé si podría ser receta médica, pero en mi caso, me encarriló otra vez. Así pude empezar a apreciar lo que nunca había perdido pero no estaba en condiciones de ver --vean, me estoy volviendo insoportablemente cursi, ya sé porque rehuía escribir todo esto. Pero efectivamente “fue triste mi historia, y su final feliz.” Sospecho que no tengo todo bajo control, pero ha vuelto mi optimismo incurable y la ilusión que yo sí puedo con todo...hasta con dos nacionalidades.

--Carla Rippey

*El buen gato Akira duró once años, hasta el verano pasado. Lo extrañamos.
**"Una buena relación" –cinco años más tarde, seguimos sin rendirnos.

Un pastel para dos bastoneras/A Cake for two baton-twirlers, 1984
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OK, you have arived at the English version! The images for this entry are drawn from drawings and prints of little girls (at the request of Angel de la Rueda) and fragments of the polyptych, "The Farthest Reaches of America".

Fragmento/"America en extremo"/Fragment,"The Farthest Reaches of America", 2001-5

I really hate to admit that I’ve come up against situations that I’m not prepared to face, situations that I’ve handled badly, and that have overwhelmed me, but it has happened, and not so long ago.
The fact is that the nineties were difficult for me, although as far as my career is concerned, this was the period in which I really established myself as an artist. Now I’m amazed when I think back on how hard I worked. For example, when I was going to show in the Museum of Modern Art here in Mexico City, I went by to check out the museum spaces destined for my exhibit, and I was terrified. They looked enormous. I mean, I was of a normal size, but my work seemed…infinitely small, compared to the space I had to fill.
I don’t know what motivates men to make pictures nine by fifteen feet (for example), but in my production a big piece is three by three feet. Maybe it all starts with the fact that male artists tend to have their studios away from their homes, where their families can’t distract them, studios which we envision as huge and full of sketches and canvases being worked over and half-empty cans of paint and empty wine bottles and boxes of deteriorated pizzas, etc. On the other hand I have always had my studio in the house, so that as I work I can keep an eye on whatever is in the oven and go back to work when the kids are asleep (back when my children were boys, not the men they are today). This means that I work on tables and on walls no higher than around eight feet. Besides, I like working in smaller dimensions, it’s more intimate.

Anyway, in order to fill that impossible museum space, I made myself a calendar of what I had to finish, and when. And I distinctly remember that I decided that I didn’t have time to go to the movies for eight months (I basically worked from 9 AM until midnight or later). But I did fill the museum halls and those of several other museums after that.

Fragmento,"América en extremo"/Fragment, "The Farthest Reaches of America, 2001-5

At the same time (because I didn’t go to the movies?) my social life was increasing deficient. The circles in the art world were changing. In the eighties, I was quite integrated into the social circuit. But the world was moving and so was I, and little by little I found myself more isolated. The phantom of being the outsider was coming back to haunt me once again, and now I didn’t have a spouse to drag me to exhibits and parties, etc. I actually was alone most of the decade, and when I wasn’t, it made things worse instead of better. I did have friends, good but extremely busy friends, which was not exactly a support system. Then my kids grew up and moved away. I think it was in 1996 that I started to live totally by myself, for the first time in my life (except for six months in Boston in 1970, before I moved into a women’s commune).
My son Andrés gave me a cat when he left. I still have him*, a Siamese with a lot of character, and later I bought a female cat at a local market, who turned out to have not so much character, but she functioned well as a pet for the Siamese. (Andrés had four cats, whose names translate as Violence, Crisis, Chaos, and Earthquake. He wanted to give me more cats but I resisted.)

Something else was happening to me. In 1994 I started becoming anemic. Nobody (that is, no doctor I consulted) knew why. They did have their theories but these led to no effective cure. I had been vegetarian for a while but I started eating meat again, thinking that might make me healthier. And I got back together with one of my exes, thinking that might make me happier. Neither plan had the desired effect.
In 2000 I put up a good show (good, meaning I liked it) in “Arte Mexicano”, Mexico City’s oldest gallery. Well, I thought, no energy, no spouse, but at least I’m functioning.

Fragmento, América en extremo"/Fragment, "The Farthest Reaches of America", 2001-5

Then I went to get a medical certificate for insurance purposes and the gynecologist decided that I had a tumor in my uterus. He was wrong, but I did have a cyst in an ovary. So the doctor decided to operate and take out the ovary (or was it both ovaries?) and remove my uterus as well. “But why the uterus?” I asked, disconcerted. “What do you want it for?” He answered back.
I went through a series of expensive and very disagreeable examinations (like a cat scan, where they got confused and scanned the wrong part of me). After a few months of speculation as to how and when I might die, I changed doctors. The new doctor treated the cyst with hormones (it worked) but in spite of this advance I was progressively more listless and unhappy. I went to give a talk to some preschool kids about what it’s like to be an “artist” and the first question was, “Why are you so yellow?” And my face was like, puffy. So I didn’t feel exactly beautiful. Besides, I was going through menopause. We women hate talking about is because it lets out the fact that we’re about to stop being “babes”, as a friend of mine puts it, but the fact is, it was happening to me, and I was alone. I spent days on the sofa with no desire to do anything, and the idea that I might live thirty more years (supposedly, if I made it to eighty) horrified me, because I couldn’t imagine whatever in the world I would do with all that time. It was around then that a friend interviewed me for a project of hers, and every time she asked me a question about my life history, I started to cry.
Finally I gave in and went to see a good doctor of internal medicine. Up to then my idea of a “doctor” had been limited to gynecologists and naturopaths, unfortunately. And it turned out that I had been suffering from hypothyroidism for at least ten years, each year worse than the preceding. This condition slows down your system, making you retain liquids and thus get fatter or at least puffy, and it can cause anemia, as well as depression…it’s very easy to cure, but returning to normality takes a while.
What annoys me is to think how different those years could have been without this business robbing me of my energy and good spirits.

Fragmento, "America en extremo"/Fragment, "The Farthest Reaches of America", 2001-5
Nevertheless, once the medical problem was under control, the interaction of the hypothyroidism with menopause had produced a chemical downward spiral that was difficult to reverse. I still felt like I was moving in a gray cloud, or trapped under a ton of cement. I kept on driving while I cried, and crying as I drove. I was prescribed an antidepressant which finished the job of destroying my energy. I told the doctor and he didn’t take me off it, he just added vitamins for the elderly to my prescription. I stopped taking it anyway (I did take the vitamins).
Since then I’ve learned that prescribing antidepressants is like inventing a personal cocktail by trial and error, with no guarantee that the treatment will work right away or be temporary. So maybe I didn’t miss much in avoiding the pills.
I also started going to a very posh club with a steam room and exercise machines and personal trainers, and I cried during yoga. The instructor found this very touching. She thought I was having a religious experience.

Viajes a las pirámides, I/Trips to the Pyramids, I, 1985

I went to a therapist and left crying harder. Like Alice, I was in danger of drowning in my own tears.
I wasn’t totally unproductive. I got going on several things that were to prove very useful for me. One was to accept an invitation to give an experimental printmaking class in a university art school. When I finally began to teach, I had already recovered my spirits, but the work provides me with an organic and vital connection with the world which has been very positive for me. Anyway, what could be more fun than hanging out with art students?

I also started exploring a new vein in my own work, doing pieces that were less concerned with “women in their intimacy” (my old specialty) and more with history, personal history, probably, but history, nevertheless. Perhaps I was starting to grow beyond myself, thematically.
I made, for instance, an installation of images, sewing on transfers from photographs of the indigenous peoples of the extremes of America: Alaska, north Canada, and Patagonia. It was a sort of narration about the period of their encounter with the Europeans, an encounter which was particularly devastating for the groups from the southern hemisphere.
I got very involved with the images as I worked on the project. I was trying to reconstruct something, to restore in some measure the presence and voice of these people, excluded and endangered during their lifetime, and now fading from memory, isolated in the past.

Viajes a las pirámides, II/Trips to the pyramids, II, 1985

Around this time I was also asked to participate in a conference of Mexican and Chicana artists, with a paper entitled “Surviving as an Artist”. At first I was panic-stricken, partly because I wasn’t so sure that I had really survived or if I would continue to do so. But the essay turned out to be a vehicle for articulating myself, a way of processing all I had been going through.

And I got lucky, I fell in love. This was very useful because falling in love produces lots of endorphins which counter arrest deficient body chemistry. You produce our own antidepressant drug. Anyway, the lucky part was not only to fall in love (which I’d already done a lot with mixed results) but also to do so with someone with whom I had a chance of building a decent relationship.**
I don’t know if this remedy could be prescribed to the public at large, but it certainly got me back on track. So that I could start appreciating all that I really hadn’t lost, but had lost the ability to perceive—wait, I’m about to get ridiculously maudlin; no wonder I hesitated before writing about all this “personal stuff”. Anyway, the story was sad, but not the ending.
I suspect I don’t have everything exactly under control, but my incurable optimism is back, along with the illusion that I can handle anything…even two nationalities.

--Carla Rippey

*Good old Akira the cat lasted out eleven years, until last summer; we miss him.
**"decent relationship" --five years later we are still hanging in there...

Akira y su mascota La Rata/Akira and his pet cat, The Rat, foto Dennis Callwood, 2001

From the Edge, third entry

This is the third part of an essay published in the book, "Cries and Whispers". Following the chronological logic (the redundacy is warranted) of the blog, scroll down to read the second and first parts. Para leer esta entrada en español, ve abajo.

This drawing is one of seven that the series of prints called "The Use of memory" was based on. The image is drawn from a photograph, particially visible, by Flor Garduño/Este dibujo es uno de siete en los cuales se basó la serie de grabados "El uso de la memoria". Se tomó de una fotografía de Flor Garduño, parcialmente visible aquí. 1993
My oldest son has also gone through the experience of being a foreigner, but in his own country. In 1980 my condition of extreme poverty (well, extreme poverty for somebody from the middle class, a condition provoked by my unfortunate lack of staying power, at least in the context of matrimony) was relieved by an invitation to organize a printmaking department in the University of Veracruz. And so I was able to enter real life as a wage-earner with a modest income.
The school year started two weeks after I made the decision to move to Jalapa, and I had to find a grade school for my son. The only school in Jalapa willing to accept him on such an short-term basis was the Díaz Mirón.
Here I must make a parenthesis to say that Díaz Mirón was a famous poet from the state of Veracruz, and a wall at the entry of the school was adorned with a passage from one of his best-known poems. According to my friend Guillermo Rousset, Mexican poet, revolutionary and translator, Díaz Mirón wrote with a perfect dominion of meter, but this didn’t impress me as much as the fact that the fellow was a murderer (but then so was Rousset and in both their cases, for skirmishes with other men, involving women and politics).

The Warrior/El guerrero, 1993

The poem in question, however, I found most irritating, as it was based on what I considered an imperfect metaphor involving the poet characterized as a brave roving lion and the lady to whom he addressed the poem as a shy dove in her nest. As if there were no lionesses and male doves in the world…anyway, at the time I considered myself much more of a lioness than a dove stowed away in a nest, so the daily walk by the poetic mural was a source of annoyance.

The Dïaz Mirón had only one blond child in its rosters: Luciano, my son. To begin with he was the “gringo” and from then on, the object of fierce discrimination. In addition I had foolishly placed him in second grade, though for his age he should have been in first, “because he already knew how to read”. Hounded and younger than his classmates, Luciano’s instinct for survival kicked in and he teamed up with an eleven-year-old, who was also (and once again) in second grade, and who doubled as best friend and body guard.
This friend’s passage for our house was notable for the sudden disappearance of my scissors and an infestation of lice affecting all the members of our family (and revealed to us by an embarrassed barber, who thus ended our previous state of innocence regarding the possible reasons for an itchy scalp).
As a probable consequence of the Díaz Mirón experience, the youngster (who nowadays is a young man with a family of his own) developed and still conserves the habit of conversing with anyone who comes within range (the cigarette vendor, for example) with an automatic and precise replica of their particular accent (an accent usually determined by social class). My other son, who always speaks with the exact same "Mexican Virgo accent", no matter whom he happens to be speaking to, has no patience with this trait and considers his brother to be “savagely chameleonic”, but then, while Luciano was suffering through the Díaz Mirón, Andrés was enjoying a short reign as the teachers’ pet in his nursery school.

An Inventory/Inventario, 1993
There was a time in which I was seriously considering changing my nationality. I finally desisted, because I couldn’t get used to the idea of not being from where I was born. (Back then being a dual national wasn’t an option). And besides, I found out that in the University of Veracruz, where I worked, that to be in the Academic Council, one had to be “Mexican by birth”.
This confirmed my suspicions: Mexicans are born, not made. So much for that.
But when I was still debating a change in nationality, I mentioned the fact to my father over the telephone, and he was scandalized. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked, “We’re a family of immigrants; we have a tradition of centuries of changing countries, from France to Scotland, from Scotland to Canada, from Canada to America, etc...” “But always before” he answered, “we changed for something better...”
Sometimes it appalls me to be from the States. Thinking about my father’s reaction, for instance, or the treatment that “my” embassy gives to the unfortunate visa “supplicants”. Or about Iraq. Or Bush, “oh-my-god”.

I just had the pleasure of being the surprise gift at my mother’s 75th birthday party. My dear mother-- little did I know when I left at eighteen that I would never again live close to her. (But then again at eighteen I knew so little about everything.)

I think of you, therefore you exist.../Te pienso, luego existes...,1993

Right now the big news is that one of my nieces is getting married-- and that her fiancé is going to Iraq for a year. Of course, the poor thing had joined the Army Reserves years ago, probably thinking more of getting an education and helping the victims of natural disasters than of the latent military-action aspect.
Nobody in the family talks much about the year in Iraq. Actually, the emphasis of the line of planning followed by my niece is basically on who the maids of honor are going to be and how to arrange everything so as to all go to the same hairdresser’s before the ceremony (apparently this is an important part of the ritual) when half of them are white and the other half, black, and the hairdressers who know how to fix “white hair” can’t cope with “black hair” and vice versa. Historically I have avoided these dilemmas, being as part of my typical outsider stance I never go to the hairdresser’s, and only after much resistance, of a not very decorous and absolutely unappreciated sort, do I attend weddings.

The labyrinth/El laberinto, 1993
Anyway, there are several things that attract my attention in this situation. One, the father of the young lady (my brother-in-law) is an anti-war and anti-government activist, plus he and my sister are massage therapists and vegetarians. So my niece grew up in a very “alternative” home. But she doesn’t act like somebody who’s not mainstream. She behaves like a happy, very well-socialized young American. So maybe the trick is having roots. If you have always lived in the same place, like her, you become part of it, in spite of your “alternative” parents.

Me, the daughter, me, the mother, me, the grandmother, me, the sister, me, nothing else, just me, all by myself... /Yo, hija, yo, madre, yo, abuela, yo, hermana, yo, nada más yo sola...,1993

There you have it. Maybe it’s really so, this business of putting down roots. I’ve lived for thirty years now in the same place, Mexico. (“Half of your life!” exclaimed a taxi driver, after dragging this fact out of me. “I’m not sixty!” I replied, indignant.)

Anyway, for more than half my life. And here I am writing this for a book of experiences of “Mexican women”. What’s more, a few years ago I represented Mexico (along with that other Mexican artist of dubious origin, Remedios Varo) in an exhibit in the National Museum of Women in Washington, DC. And not long ago I participated in a gathering of Mexican and “Chicana” women artists, as a Mexican, of course. As a matter of fact, I’ve been a “Mexican artist” for thirty years now. And...I’m even a member of an academic council here, in spite of my birthplace.
It all comes down to this: after all my protests and contradictions, I’ve ended up also being from here, from Mexico. So I’m Mexican, too, and proud of it.

Convention of Mexican and Chicana artists in Oaxaca, 2001/Convención de artistas mexicanas y chicanas en Oaxaca, 2001

Well, that sounds like a good ending for a text, but I have something else I want to talk about… (To be continued).

Juan Diego and the Virgin of Guadalupe/Juan Diego y la Virgen, 1994

From the Edge, Parte 2

This is the second part of the essay "From the Edge". If you haven't read the first part, scroll down. All of the images are photographs by Adolfo Patiño; they are details of a series of drawings entitled "Ghosts", which I produced in 1988. The drawings have to do with women and social rituals, and the title comes from the fact that first, most are dressed in white, and secondly, they are most likely all dead, as I based the images on very old photographs.




And the idea of visions and versions brings us to another great cultural phenomenon: the lie, and the reasons of its existence.
I was raised in the tradition of Abraham Lincoln, who according to legend, on a certain historic occasion arrived home after walking a couple of miles to the store and back, only to discover that he had be given more than the correct change. Of course he immediately turned around and walked back to the store to return what was not rightfully his (an attitude his countrymen haven’t always respected in terms of invaded territories, by the way.)
I don’t know how these stories get handed down, but it impressed me profoundly. It influenced my own behavior to the extent that I have been known to go to the extreme of leaving notes on the windshields of parked cars (yes, plural, it happened more than once) which I had scraped in my adolescent clumsiness while learning to drive, with the legend “I’m sorry, but I think I scratched your car, please call me and I’ll repair the damage.”

I believe that one of the first times I was compelled to see honesty in more subtle, nuanced, terms was when I read the dialogue in an English play, probably by Shaw, in which one character commented to another, “He considers himself honest because he wouldn’t steal money lying on a table.”
Thus I was confronted with the idea that people who think that they are honest could be deceiving themselves and in the process, deceiving others. From there it was just a small leap to understanding a concept which forms part of the trove of popular wisdom in Mexico: a lie can be an act of legitimate self-defense.

So it was that my idea of honesty as a matter of obvious definition as well as a necessary quality of people with integrity crashed into more complex cultural notions. First came the notion that truth can be relative.
I began to realize this with my observation, already commented, of the distinct focuses in American and foreign news reporting.
Then I was confronted with the idea that what some people consider a lie is for others a defense of their personal space, of their possibility of moving freely. The lie becomes a mechanism of survival in a world of arbitrary bosses, suffocating spouses, repressive parents, etc. If one were perfectly transparent, one could be perfectly controlled. The lie becomes a way of exercising power when one has been negated other forms of power. And as the lie creates power, which we all know is additive and corrupts, just imagine all the possibilities of use and abuse that arise…

What seems curious to me (and serves as an indication that I still don’t really understand this business) is that certain people (including on occasion my own descendents) use the lie as a creative exercise. “Let’s see, what can I invent and how long I can keep them believing me…”
As a result the world stops being a prison constructed of undeniable facts and circumstances, and becomes a fascinating place where everything changes according to how one constructs the story. Like art, right? So nobody is limited by crude reality.

Although I begin to understand the usefulness of lying and the justifications for doing so, I still haven’t developed the custom of making use of it. I would, say, lie if someone asks me how much I paid for something when I consider it’s none of their business (and don’t want to deal with their recriminations).
I might add that I am not very good at recognizing when I am being lied to, another indication of my ongoing condition as a cultural outsider.

I also have been unable to suppress a marked American accent. At times people tell me (to be nice) that I sound European, which obviously means more cultured than American. Curiously, it’s Argentines who are most apt to comment on my accent (in their own ridiculous Argentine accent, of course). Mexicans tend to be more discrete.
Actually it embarrasses me to have such a strong accent. Not enough to go to Berlitz and try to correct it, but enough to be disconcerted every time someone says, “All these years in Mexico and you still speak so badly?”
Sometimes I’m told I speak really well, it depends on to whom they’re comparing me, I guess. Of course, when my children were young they didn’t realize that there was something strange about how their mother talked. Not until their friends started asking “Hey, why does your mom talk so funny?”

My oldest son played football from when he was eight until he was twenty, a sport which is neither practiced nor understood nor enjoyed by either of his parents or other relatives, with the notable exception of his maternal grandparents who after all, are from Nebraska, which has a fantastic university football team. Anyway, playing football he met his best friend, a friendship which still endures. His friend is the descendent of a Chinese-Mexican father (who speaks “normal” Mexican Spanish) and an Australian mother (who speaks Spanish like an Australian) and just as in our family, his parents suffer from a certain addiction to feminism and politics.

So the kids understood each other, they knew what it’s like to grow up thinking that orange vegetable is a zanoria (Mexicans consider carrots to be zanahorias, not quite the same thing) and laughing at mothers who talk about astronautos (The word looks like it should end in a good masculine o, but it actually ends in an a, I’ve since learned. ) But the ongoing great debate between the two boys, in which to this day they continue to hold the opinion that the other is vastly mistaken, was: whose mother speaks worse Spanish. Of course the accent one grows up with always sounds better.
At home we didn’t speak much English. At first this was due to the fact that when the children were very young and enjoying the brief period of having their two parents together, both of these parents were intent on being very Latin. I, as a newly-arrived gringa, wanted to incorporate myself as much as possible into my new life. And he, having spent too many years outside the country, needed to reaffirm his shakey Mexican identity. He wanted to avoid the pattern of his own parents, who had established English as the family language, with the result of having Mexican children raised elsewhere and sounding like it.

My children finally learned English in middle school, with the help of the computer, lots of American movies and visits to their Omaha grandparents. Before this turning point in their lives, their experience of their supposed mother tongue was tightly linked to their mother`s rages, since she always scolded them in English, as when she was upset her Spanish descended to deplorable new lows more prone to provoke laughter than the fear and repentance intended. Do you want a spanking?
(To be continued…)

From the Edge, both Real and Imaginary (Part I)

This text was originally published in Spanish in the book "Cries and Whispers, Private Experiences of Public Women", edited by Denise Dresser and published by Grijalbo (Mexico, 2004). The images are from the 2001 exhibit "Garden of echoes, Echoes from the garden" at the gallery Arte Mexicano (Mexico City).

Rizoma/Rhizome
I’ve been asked to discuss what has taken me by surprise…well, one fact that never stops surprising me, and indeed, astonishes me almost daily, is that I’m really not as prepared to deal with life as I think I am. I suffer from an incurable and potentially fatal optimism, aggravated by a limited capacity for (or a lack of interest in) evaluating the risks of the situations I get myself into.
As a result my last half century has been quite a bit more, shall we say, “eventful” than it need have been.
This reckless attitude toward life has gotten me into two types of situations. The first would be situations which could have ended disastrously, but from which I miraculously emerged in perfect condition (something which must have required the intervention of all my angels). And the second, situations which frankly I didn’t survive undamaged and which were quite disastrous for me, at least in the short run, with the possible positive aspect of having provided me with opportunities to strengthen my character by means of adversity. I say “possibly”, because my mother reports that from quite a young age, when something went wrong for me, I would go around muttering “I refuse to learn anything from this goddamn experience”.

So it was that I survived without a scratch years of hitchhiking as my preferred mode of transport, in that America of the sixties and seventies, an era slightly less dangerous than the present, when it was politically correct to be a sort of vagabond. I managed to emerge intact from midnight trips through Ohio flanked by libidinous truck drivers, and in spite of being dumped at midnight on a country road in the middle of Vermont, I arrived at my destination unharmed by bulls and farmers.
Something bad should have happened to me in Allende’s Chile, where I ended up in the street after curfew the first day of the coup, but I suffered nothing worse that a good kick in the ass from a policeman. Something should have happened to me the times in the early eighties when I drove from Mexico City to Xalapa, Veracruz, at times after midnight, in my Volkswagen bug with one crooked headlight and my two little kids in the back seat, and nevertheless, I always arrived safely.

Aunque no nos escribas, siempre pensamos en ti/Even though you don't write, we're always thinking of you
But where I always have gotten stuck and have collected a good number of scars in the course of all these years, is in the management (or mismanagement?) of my emotional involvements.
I really can’t get into this subject, partly because it involves people who are still out there, somewhere, and partly because I don’t have quite yet a convincing theory of why most of my relationships turned out so badly. This might be where the “tempestuous experiences” that we’ve been asked to discuss come in, but this is also where I feel a curious, and for me, somewhat unusual, reticence. What I will say is that in my work, my drawings and prints, this is a fundamental theme, and although it often has not been my conscious intention, there the matter has indeed been examined in depth.

Regarding the above, there is one thing I have quite clear. A factor which has caused me to make a lot of mistakes, or a fair number of dubious decisions, is that I’m a foreigner, someone who grew up with expectations and patterns of conduct that could not always be successfully applied in the culture in which I find myself immersed.

Here we enter into another matter: the request of the editor that we write about things that we have always wanted discuss. Well, for a long time I’ve felt the urge to talk about this strange business of living most of one’s life as a foreigner, or an outsider, somebody who’s “not from here”.

La guardiana/The guardian

This is a condition which I often forget about, until I am rudely reminded. And it’s also a condition which has accompanied me since my childhood in the American Midwest, in those small cities cut down the middle first by the railroads and later by Interstate highways, in the prairies of Kansas and Nebraska, where that which prevailed above all things was, and still is, a love for football, beefsteak, and old-fashioned values (for example, voting Republican). In this general environment my parents stuck out as a little too intellectual. My father was a newspaper reporter and photographer, charming, quick-tempered, and a bit restless (my first tempestuous experience?)—so we followed him about in his journey from one small-town newspaper to the next. As a result I was the “new girl” in school for an infinity of occasions and when I turned eighteen, I had already lived in twelve different houses. Moving around had become such a habit that by the time I was thirty-four, I had lived in thirty-four different houses. In my “maturity” I calmed down: I just recently moved for the first time in eleven years.

La escoba/the broom

What I mean to say is, perhaps quite early on I started to feel like “myself” being “different”, “the new girl”, “that weird kid who reads poetry”. Maybe the view from the edge, a real or imaginary marginal place, began to be the only point of view from which I could focus.

I don’t know if the view from the edge is a point of view which distorts or which permits one to see things clearly. I do know that I’ve seen and learned about a lot of things here in Mexico that I never suspected in Nebraska.

Intensidad de sol/intensidad de sombra

In English, for example, there is no one word for “matizar”, which in Spanish is a verb meaning to explore the nuances in something. I might add that there also exist in Spanish one-word versions of “take-advantage-of” and “bureaucratic-procedure”, perhaps indicating the frequent occurrence of these matters in daily life.
But the point is, that perhaps “exploring the nuances of something” is not such a frequent occurrence in American as in Mexican life. I have always thought that living in my country is like living inside a big, fat pillow. It’s comfortable, but one doesn’t hear the outside world very well. I realized very quickly, being in Latin America, that one suddenly perceived more dimensions—I could see the world the way the “gringos” see it, because that version arrived in every broadcast of CNN (well, back then, in ABC, CBS, and NBC, let’s say). But I also had another vision, another version—the one from here, the non-official one, the view from the periphery.

And the idea of visions and versions brings us to another great cultural phenomenon: the lie, and the reasons of its existence.
(to be continued…)

El perrito/The little dog

Carla Rippey : Life and Times

The following essay is reprinted from the book "Artists in Mexico:Carla Rippey" published by Taller Gráfica Bordes (2007). More information about this series of books about contemporary Mexican artists can be obtained from Pilar Bordes, bordes2000@prodigy.net.mx.

Una de las casas en Kansas donde vivió la familia de mi madre /One of the houses my mother's family lived in, Kansas1950-1968

I was born on Sunday, May 21, in Kansas City, Kansas. Five years later, with the birth of my only brother, our family was completed and my mother, at 26, found herself in charge of four children aged six and younger. As a result she postponed dedicating herself to her other true vocation: literary matters (she later went on to receive her PhD in English Literature as a grandmother). My father was a newspaperman and a photojournalist. Due to his creative and volatile nature, we moved around a lot: twelve times in seven different Midwestern cities before I left home.

One of the photos my father took for Christmas cards/Una de las fotos tomadas por mi papá como tarjeta de Navidad

the photographer JC Rippey at lunch/el almuerzo del fótografo JC Rippey

1968-1980

At eighteen I set off for Paris (a Paris still recovering from May of 68) with the money I had saved while working as a telephone operator during high school. At nineteen, I entered college, a branch of the State University of New York which offered an experimental program allowing the students to design their own study plans. I managed to graduate 2½ years later and moved to Boston to live in a women’s commune. I made my first graphic works for the feminists: posters in very primitive silkscreen. I also worked in an alternative publishing house “The New England Free Press, and I was arrested in Washington for trying to stop the government (because it wouldn’t stop the war in Vietnam). I tried to make a living as a professional offset printer but failed miserably (partly because I was suffering from hyperthyroidism). I went home to Nebraska to be cured, and from there hitchhiked to NYC, took a bus to Miami, and flew to Santiago de Chile, where Ricardo Pascoe, whom I knew from the university, was studying for his Master’s degree. In what was probably a rather unfeminist act, I married him (excuse: “to get my visa”) and I became like him a militant in the Chilean left (once again making posters). When Allende fell, our fellow militants went clandestine and as foreigners, there was no way for us to remain. And that is when we came to Mexico, Ricardo’s native country. Within three years we had two children, Luciano and Andrés. Meanwhile, in my scarce free time, I began to work in a collective printmaking studio and to collaborate with the experimental art group (“Peyote and the Company”). Ricardo continued to work in politics. We were separated in 1978.

CR, 1978, photo by Adolfo Patiño/CR en 1978, foto de Adolfo Patiño
1980 to 1990

In my new role as single mother, and after a period of financial unsteadiness in Mexico City, I left for Jalapa, Veracruz, to work teaching printmaking in the Veracruz State University. From 1979 until 2000, our family included Adolfo Patiño, artist and photographer. Besides continuing with printmaking, I collaborated with Adolfo in “Peyote” and in his work (installation and object art). I began to make drawings (graphite on paper) based on photographic collage and to exhibit my work in Mexico City. My first important exhibit was in 1985 in the Carrillo Gil Museum, and that same year we returned to Mexico City. At last I was an independent artist. We were living in a very effervescent cultural period. These were the years of “neo-mexicanism”, of the extensive exhibit “Mexico, Thirty Centuries of Splendor” in the Metropolitan Museum of NYC; many new artist-run galleries emerged, as well as the alternative magazine “La Regla Rota” and of course these were the days (or nights) of the bar “9”, frequented by our whole generation (many Mexican rock groups got their start there).

Los jóvenes Pascoe dibujados por su madre, 1993/the Pascoe teenagers drawn by their mother, 1993
1990 to 2001

The decade encompasses a long period of hard work and several tribulations. I exhibited prints and drawings in one-person shows in the National Printing Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City, and in the Museum of Monterrey. I participated in endless group shows. I did an exhibit of object-art (something I’d always wanted to do) in the “Museo Universitario del Chopo”. I showed drawings in the “Galería de Arte Mexicana”. My children grew up and became independent. And I became ill with hyperthyroidism; the worst is that it took me years to realize the cause of my deteriorating health. I ended the century in a clinical depression provoked partly by my thyroid condition.

2001-

I got well, thanks to the intervention of a good doctor and of Ramón Sanchez Lira. “Mongo”, my new partner, a former member of the “Peyote” group and editor of the “Regla Rota”, is a sculptor and makes stage sets for rock groups. I began to rethink many aspects of my work, and to produce ceramics, alternative graphics, and some installation.

Since 2001 I teach alternative graphics and last-year tutorials in “La Esmeralda”, the Mexican government’s university-level art school. My grandchildren (Amadeo and Nicolás) live next to my house and studio. So I’m surrounded by young people, a fact I hope to reflect in my way of approaching life and art.

Amadeo and Nicolás, my grandchildren/mis nietos, 2007

Endangered Species/Especies en vías de extinctión

I am always disconcerted when I hear the observation –and I hear it frequently- that my work is nostalgic. Perhaps I react like this because I associate nostalgia with that which is sentimental and reactionary, and as an artist I feel a commitment to the present and the future, and thus an urge to be up-to-date, break new terrain, and to create something forceful. But at the same time I must admit that I am irremediably entwined with the past. There are old images that provoke in me an intensely pleasurable sensation mixed up with a bitter one, perhaps because they evoke a lost (and enticing) world and convey concurrently the impossibility of real access to it.

It’s as if these images- primarily photographs, were windows through which one looks out onto something half-seen, something disappeared, something so ephemeral that all that remains of it is a document of how the light fell in that place, at that moment, and what was left in shadow. I can copy this scheme of light and shadow, but what emerges from my testimonial efforts is an imaginary event. These images enter into my world, whose population consists of characters encountered who become my sisters, my grandparents, myself. This is a world where geography exists but without its immutable distances, where time is circular (as it must be, really), where everything can be recuperated, or where geography and time fold back in upon themselves (like a telescope, Lewis Carroll said, in the voice of Alice), and an old woman can reunite with herself as a child in a land of volcanoes, pyramids, and seas.

A few months ago I visited, in the Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, an exhibit dedicated to an indigenous culture in the extreme south of the Americas, a culture which is about to disappear. I went home and contemplated a scene of two young women from this almost extinct people, nearly eighty years before, together with another photograph of an Easter morning forty years ago, depicting two young women of the American Midwest, one of them my mother. And I was invaded with the certainty that either we are all in danger of extinction (which is the most probable), or (and this is what we must imagine as long as we are still alive) somehow in some magical way we shall all be saved.

C Rippey March, 1987 for Akira the cat, 1996-2007

Siempre me ha causado consternación la observación –bastante frecuente—de que mi obra es nostálgica. Será porque asocio la idea de la nostalgia con lo sentimental y lo reaccionario, mientras siento como artista un compromiso con el presente, el futuro, y con la necesidad de ser vigente, de proponer, de hacer una obra fuerte. Pero confieso que al mismo tiempo estoy irremediablemente enredada con el pasado. Hay imágenes viejas que me provocan tanto una sensación de dulzura como de amargura, quizás por el mundo perdido que evocan y la imposibilidad de llegar a ello.
Digamos que estas imágenes –más que nada fotografías- son ventanas por las cuales se asoma uno a algo medio-visto, algo desaparecido, algo tan efímero que queda de ello solamente un documento de cómo cayó la luz en ese lugar en ese momento en el tiempo, y qué quedó en sombra. Puedo copiar ese esquema de luz y sombra, pero lo que emerge de mi esfuerzo testimonial es un evento imaginario. Las imágenes entran a mi mundo, cuya población son personajes encontrados que se vuelven mis hermanas, mis abuelos, yo misma. Es un mundo donde la geografía existe pero sin sus distancias inmutables, donde el tiempo se vuelve circular (como realmente ha de ser), donde todo se puede recuperar, o donde la geografía y el tiempo se repliegan (como un telescopio, decía Lewis Carroll con la voz de Alicia), y una anciana puede encontrarse de niña en un país de volcanes, pirámides, y mares.

Hace unos meses visité, en el Museo de Antropología de la ciudad de México, una exposición dedicada a una cultura indígena del extremo sur de América, que está a punto de desaparecer. Volví a casa y me quedé viendo una fotografía de hace más de ochenta años de dos jóvenes mujeres de esta raza casi extinta, junto con otra fotografía de un domingo de Pascuas de hace cuarenta años, donde aparecen dos jóvenes del medio oeste de los Estados Unidos, una de ellas mi madre. Y así me invadió la certeza de que o todos estamos en vías de extinción (que es lo más probable) o (y esto es lo que tenemos que imaginar mientras todavía estamos vivos) todos de alguna forma mágica nos salvamos.

C Rippey, marzo de 1987 para el gato Akira, 1996-2007

CINCO HISTORIAS / FIVE STORIES

5 imágenes, grafito/papel, c/u 50 x 50 cm, con 5 pensamientos o historias intercambiables, 1993. Los junté pensando en el concepto de la nostalgia, o pérdida.

5 images, graphite on paper, each 50 x 50 cm, with 5 interchangeable thoughts or stories. 1993 . I put them together thinking about the concept of nostalgia, or loss. -C. Rippey

¿Quién es el verdugo; quien es la víctima? Dime./ Who is the slayer, who the victim? Tell me.

--Sófocles/Sophocles

Antinoo, obsesionado con la idea de que su amante, el emperador Adriano podría olvidarse de él, se ahoga. Adriano, obsesionado con el recuerdo de Antinoo, llena el imperio con su imagen petrificada.

Contado por M. Yourcenar

Antinous, obsessed by the idea that his lover, the emperor Hadrian, might forget him, drowns himself. Hadrian, obsessed with the memory of Antinous, fills the empire with his graven image.

As told by M. Yourcenar

Habrá tiempo, tiempo habrá...tiempo para matar, y tiempo para crear...
There will be time, there will be time…time to murder and create…..

--T.S. Eliot

Todos matamos a lo que amamos. /All men kill the thing they love. Oscar Wilde

Nostos: Regreso - Algía: Dolor / Nostos: Return - Algía: Pain

Fixed Images (Move in Memory)

This essay is reprinted from the book "Artistas en México:Carla Rippey", an editorial project of Taller Gráfica Bordes. The collection currently includes volumes on Leonora Carrington,, Gilberto Aceves Navarro, Boris Viskin, Paul Nevin, Germán Venegas, Magali Lara, and Francisco Castro Leñero, and plans to expand to include around 60 contemporary artists, Mexican or working in Mexico. For more information, contact Pilar Bordes at bordes00@prodigy.com.mx.

Girl from Huetamo (Niña de Huetamo), 1986

I. Dirty Images

Whatever our senses pick up is carried to the brain by two pathways, one conscious and rational, and another unconscious and innate. While these perceptions travel toward the cortex, where they will be integrated with other data captured from the environment and with previous associations, they are also traveling toward the amygdala, a much more primitive part of the brain. Sending something to the amygdala is like sending a digital image in low resolution: it arrives right away, but it’s blurry. In no way is it a precise and well-processed image like the one that is formulated in the cortex. It is, we might say, a dirty image. It’s these dirty images that make us confuse, just for an instant, a garden hose with a snake.*
I have the idea that whenever an image attracts me, whenever I happen upon a photograph with which I feel some sort of connection, for example, it’s because the image resonates in me at a subconscious level: it generates the same “dirty image” as something I have already stored in my brain.

As a result, the archives of possible material for my work are made up by images that have already triggered a reaction in me. Examining them dispassionately, now ensconced in the “high road” of clear perceptions and conscious associations, my job is to pinpoint the disturbing element and highlight it by means of cropping, the juxtaposition of images, or the construction of a collage. The interpretation is then refined through its translation to drawing, printmaking or painting. In a sort of morphing, I must retransmit it with my own energy.
I like the term “dirty images”. They are dirty because their reading is ambivalent, but dirtiness is also associated with the erotic, the perverse, the disturbing, and that which is repressed and feared-- all elements which pertain to the interpretation of my work. After all, one could postulate that I traffic in stolen images: it’s a dirty business.

Siamese (Las Siamesas), 1998

II. Pattern

Fortunately English has provided me with the word pattern. In Spanish I struggle with terms like motif, print, design, system, repeated element, all because the language lacks that vital word which sums them all up. If we could discern the pattern of our lives it might permit us to have sufficient vision of our routines, customs, and habits, particularly in contrast with those of other people and the larger rhythms of nations, seasons, and a myriad of other matters, so as to glide through life with a certain grace and ease. All of this fits within the Oriental (and Jungian) concept of synchronicity: the supposition of underlying relationships among all people and events, as if we formed part of a vast dance. (The reading of the I Ching could be seen as an attempt to adjust personal timing to cosmic timing, within this system.)**

In the analysis of any phenomenon, including that of the body of work contained in these pages, we look for similiarities, repetitions, and shared motifs: patterns. And there are patterns that unfold throughout my work. Take the presence of plants, for instance. A rhizome underlies the gardens, at times explicit, at times implicit, gardens which in their insidiousness can become almost sinister. The plants invade faces, they spread through clothing, and they make the garden into an unknown territory or even an abyss. In a similar vein we find repeated deserts, pyramids and volcanoes, a series of pictures centered on the gesture of a hand, an endless number of unmade beds, a variety of erotized little girls (and women), bones that seem like wings, wings that are rather boney, and tanks that end up buried in a bedspread. It’s a narrative in fragments; the public domain is entangled with the private, and intimacy is confused with history.

In the obsessive work of Adolf Woffli, who spent his time as an inmate in a mental asylum elaborating his own private world, we find notebook after notebook of illegible calligraphy punctuated by images cut out of contemporary magazines. The clippings allowed him to give substance to his invented world; torn out of exterior reality, they helped him complete the construction of an alternative reality.

Unlike Woffli, I have no intention of abandoning the exterior world. When I relocate images from the “outside” inside my territory, I’m trying to bridge a gap. I try to locate myself “out there” by means of the orchestration of elements within my work. I imagine that the deciphering of the design, system—pattern—that flows through my work, could allow me to resolve the mystery of the relationship between myself and the world. And even if it isn’t all decipherable, meanwhile, what I can figure out provides me with a map of certain regions of my subconscious, a map which gives me an clue of how to travel about in it. And at times I suspect, when observing this “map” that perhaps it’s not a bridge I’m laying out, but a trap, an attempt at seduction...

From the finite to the infinite (Del finito al infinito), 1998

III. Fixed Images (Move in Memory)

For years, twenty years perhaps, photographs of vanishing points have been accumulating in my files. Finally I invented an order for them, I made them into prints by means of transfer (a trick involving solvents and photocopies), and I constructed a polyptych of 49 vanishing points called “From the finite to the infinite”. I considered it a sort of “mid-life piece”—the product of having arrived at a certain point in my life from which I could make out a faraway future, or even an end, but curiously enough, every time I peered into it, the future changed (vanished?). Or I might also say, that from wherever each of us happens to be situated, a different horizon appears. I could have made a thousand different vanishing points.
The piece doesn’t fit into this book. First of all, it doesn’t fit because when 49 images are greatly reduced they become illegible. But it also doesn’t fit because I realized that it doesn’t form part of the system, the pattern, of the work in this book. And so I came to the conclusion that in order to put together a coherent body of work, I had to choose work that belonged to a cycle already completed.

I have an old newspaper clipping with a few words by Pasolini where he defines life, as we are living it, as “a chaos of possibilities, an investigation of relationships and of meanings without a cohesive solution…” For him, death supplied the “fulminating montage of our lives”. Nevertheless, I feel like I am always looking for “cohesive solutions”: the pattern. I am always trying out “montages”. But the elements that attract me now are not the same as those from a few years back, the years covered in this book. Now empty landscapes appear, and the scenes that are peopled, have a different sort of population, with a different dynamic. I suspect that one fundamental difference could be that I no longer focus on the deciphering of my own relationship to the world. I no longer dedicate myself to the mapping of my own interior. My perception is (and we shall see if this is so) that I now focus more on the intricacies of relationships between third parties, among other people, and even the relationships of historical forces. And at the same time I find myself contemplating empty panoramas, landscapes bereft of people, the phenomenon of absence. So I am immersed in a new “chaos of possibilities”. “Sea of possibilities”, Patti Smith used to sing, and I like that phrase even better. Anyway, whatever comes out of this sea, or chaos, will make up another book.

--------------------------------------------------

* Steven Johnson’s book “Mind Wide Open” chronicles the research of Joseph LeDoux which I cite in this text.

**The controversial on-line encyclopedia “Widipedia” defines “synchronicity” as a word coined by Carl Jung to describe the “temporally coincident occurrences of acausal events”. The text goes on comment that the concept of “correlation” is similar to this first phenomenon, and explains: “Though correlation does not necessarily imply causation, correlation may in fact be a physical property shared by events without there being a classical cause-effect relationship, as shown in quantum physics, where widely separated events can be correlated without being linked by a direct physical cause-effect.” (For me, this has all the intriguing qualities of science

fiction.)

--Carla Rippey