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| INTRODUCTION: LETTER TO THE ARTIST ON THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RWANDAN GENOCIDE |
We’ve never worked together in the conventional artist-curator way, on an exhibition, but we’ve often crossed paths and shared related, sometimes parallel, thoughts. Writing now is another such occasion for an exchange. As you know so well, art is a personal matter. The political and social realities present in the subjects you take on, coupled with your desire for art to be more than representation—for art to have a real effect and be more than the consumption of images—have led you (as me) out of the museum because it was too often out of touch, with too much artifice. “Life is more important than art, that's what makes art important,” wrote James Baldwin. You knew art had to find a way to be in life, outside of gallery spaces. At the same time, with an ambivalence I share, you know how important these spaces can be for presentation, for contemplation, and as refuge. With a temporary, one-day museum in Skoghall and a prototypical exhibition space in Niigata you offered models for the meaningful experience of art, creating empty boxes filled with potentiality. And even now, with all you have done in settings outside art’s institutions, you continue to try to engage them so that whether your work is shown inside and out, you always demonstrate the force of art, giving us experiences that hit our eyes, our mind, our gut. You came of age as an artist when it was a time to think and make differently. Many of the most conscientious artists of the 1980s, like you, were investing in the postcolonial discourse of the day, confronting longstanding cultural claims, and embracing the complexities and interconnections of cultures. In this milieu the need arose to break the frame that confined art to the art world. Public art took on a new importance and quality, a new power and seriousness. While many debated the dichotomy of the private and the public—theoretically, artistically—you knew these realms were interdependent. You always find the personal in the work you offer to the public: the story of one person…Nguyen Thi Thuy, Gutete Emerita…becomes as big as the story of a whole people. The story of a people…Vietnamese detainees in Hong Kong, Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, migrants in Tijuana, homeless in Montréal…is told without losing of sight of individuals. You lead us now back to one of our own stories by asking us to reconsider Baldwin as he writes to his fourteen-year-old nephew James in 1962…the age of Emmett Till when he died just seven years before…the age of your son Nikki now…the age of mine.1 Facing your work in public, I find myself seeking another word for it—not public art—maybe communal. These interventions speak to all of us, reminding us of what we have in common and what are our common responsibilities. They are an expression of our interdependence, the need for us to take in public issues, ingest them, and bring personal integrity back to public situations. Your work is more than a means of getting a message out to the public. You aim for meaning that goes deep…beyond one place, one point in time….yet all the while you respect the particularities of a given situation. Communal: your work embodies a deeper communication. You ask us to reconsider our perception of things and urge us to question the way things are. You find fragments of life that echo eternally; not media’s fragmentary sound bites but images that are deeply resonant and which become keystones in our psyche going straight to the heart of the matter. Your own media image—A Logo for America—forever changes our language (“This is not America”), while everyone of the thirty-six individuals in Waiting are known to us at once intimately and epically. I think what I admire most, where I find solace, is your belief in the necessity of art. In recent decades, many have tried to diminish and trivialize art. But if it is so unimportant, then why did the Culture Wars’ assault on our whole social network begin with an attack on art? Throughout this time you have maintained a faith in art, not as a personal but a communal expression. And you believe that art can have an impact, and you are determined to try to make it succeed and for art to provide a wider frame, a view beyond ourselves. Maybe we can find faith in art when we can’t find it in people, largely because today it is lacking in nations, in their governments, and in their economic and political leaders. Art can expose ways of being that are at odds with human decency and ask why these human violations— so destructive and wrong—remain constant, defining human existence: why can’t they be dislodged and the world be different? Is this the state to which we have evolved, devolved; have we never evolved at all. Is our desire for power, valuing our own superiority over others’ equality, so immovable? Has humanity “lost [its] conscience,” as Baldwin puts it?2 Does this book take its place, along with your art, as a plea to change that condition? You have an agenda. You want to change the world, and your art challenges us to do so. Among your peers in the art world, you stood alone, committedly, projecting Rwanda into our consciousness, living it in real time—not as an art subject but as a lived experience. Now ten (ten!) years later, on the anniversary of this vast genocide, the press asks why did no one respond to this crisis. You asked this question many times—in 1994 and many times since. You help us see. Baldwin wrote of race in the U.S.: “But in order to change a situation one has first to see it for what it is….the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.”3 We work in related universes, encountering people who tell the story of human tragedies and human dignity. As I sit here writing you, I have just returned from Charleston, South Carolina, a place to which I return frequently to work; you joined me there once. This time I met with Fred Lincoln, an African American activist (not unimportantly named) who lives in a community called Jack Promise, originally a freeman settlement established after the Civil War. His ancestors were slaves there and he told me that his land was part of his history: “This is the first property our family owned because before that they were property.”4 Lincoln accepts—embraces—his past and, so, understands the present, and he uses this past to envision the future for his family and others. One of my favorite thinkers these days is John Dewey, especially in his writing about art as experience.5 I am reminded of his thoughts when I read Baldwin writing to his nephew, “Take no one’s word for anything, including mine—but trust your experience.”6 For Dewey, “Works of art are means by which we enter, through imagination and the emotions they evoke, into other forms of relationship and participation than our own.…”7 That’s what happens with your work. You offer us an experience that gives us entrée to that of others. This experience breeds empathy, allowing us to stand in another’s shoes. Even though we are not there in Rwanda, we have direct experience of the pain of this tragedy. The Rwanda Project is not a document or commentary but an experience—an experience of another order that is nonetheless real. “To some degree we become artists ourselves,” wrote Dewey, “as we undertake this integration, and, by bringing it to pass, our own experience is re-oriented….This insensible melting is far more efficacious than the change effected by reasoning, because it enters directly into attitude.”8 We feel the story of others in your art in our own way, even if it is different than the way you felt it…they felt it. And in this actual engagement art enables us to begin to know. What other means do we have today that can elicit such deep reactions and deep reflections? How critically we need art to fulfill this function and for you to maintain your motivation to change attitudes and actions in spite of the seemingly impossibility, the seemingly inevitability for it to be otherwise rather than as it has always been. Baldwin believed, too, that “people can be better than that.”9 Keep believing art can do that. Yours, Mary Jane Notes: |