Anamnesis

I wrote this text to accompany my current show (Oct 26th - Dec 6th) at Gallery 825 in Los Angeles. The show features a number of new paintings based on my old family photos. 

Anamnesis, or the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence, is a visual reconstitution of memories one may or may not have had.  The title’s definition suggests that certain memories can be made and derived from the lives and memories of others. Using old family photographs as subjects, I investigate the idea of anamnesis by reworking the images into paintings.There is a two-fold interpretation of working this way, the personal interpretation, that touches on memories and events directly related to individual and familial experiences and the interpretation of the collective memory experienced by those unrelated to any of these subjects that are nonetheless experienced as having been borne out of these very same experiences. These can be further interpreted and elaborated.

Anamnesis - Ash, charcoal and oil on burned panel, 32x32 inches

 

First, I draw on my own family history, interpreting and reinterpreting the past through these images.  It is a task that is deeply personal but one that will ultimately result in incomplete results.  Close family members appear in the photographs, but along with them appear strangers and strange places.  In casual conversation with family members, I’m able to find out certain details, but not all of them. Some people and places will be forever shrouded in mystery or will have to fit into a form of reconstituted memory.  By constant contact with the images I am playing not only the role of the private eye, but also the role of the interpreter and story-teller, drawing lines, relationships and conclusions from disparate sources of visual information. Vast amounts of time and space exists between the visual coordinates of each photograph, some taken in the 1960s others a dacade or two later, all in various and often unknown locations. It is not necessarily important to know precisely all the details of a particular image.  Memory itself is highly selective.  What matters is the way the image or event is re-interpreted.  

Second, I draw on my personal and family experience with immigration and integration into a new and alien culture, to draw out possible collective experiences and how they could be interpreted by those unfamiliar with this highly personal subject matter.  We all have families and many have experiences with immigration, either directly or indirectly. This highly personal subject matter can therefore become a universalizing agent for a much larger collective memory. These black and white images lack color in a similar way that the immigrant experience lacks immediate contact with their distant past.  Memories of one's birth culture become increasingly less vivid, they become snapshots rather than full expressions.  In some ways an immigrant may experience memory as a loss resulting in a sense of incompleteness.  The function of memory is significant.  Often the way that people of different cultures attempt to evade loss of collective or personal memory is to hold on to tradition and vestiges of their particular cultures and continue with then in their adoptive culture. Such practices can be ritualized, institutionalized, and personalized, they can be very private or very public. Some people abandon their former cultures entirely. Whatever the outward manifestation of such practices may be, what nonetheless remains, is a sense that a part of one’s experience of the past and of one's culture is irretrievably lost.  But loss and nostalgia aren’t always experienced as negative emotions.  Positive memories constitute nostalgic feelings as much as negative ones, though I understand that in my interpretation of Anamnesis, in the context of the show, tends toward the darker aspects of loss and incompleteness. However, even loss can be positive or have positive outcomes if one's experience of loss, the death of one's child for example, is transmuted into a generative outlook on life. 

A possible third interpretation of the exhibition exists, one that is more contingent on the source material and can be summed up as follows. A new interpretative method of memory exists, one that is being actively developed as a result of the digitization of collective space and memory.  Visual sources until very recently tended toward the tangible - printed photographs, books, VHS tapes, and so on.  Whether within the institutional world of work or the intimate world of the family, tangible repositories of memory were kept.  Many families kept photo albums and slides.  Today the pervasiveness of digital media and the movement toward cloud technology made bulky items like photo albums and slide projectors obsolete, even relatively modern technology like CDs and DVDs are less and less common as people move away from holding onto objects to keep only the ephemera, made up of lines of code.  This presents an interesting subject for investigation and intervention into this space. In the case of photographs, as in the case of many real objects, one is dealing with a different type of memory.  Photographs are documentary objects and tend to provide historical accounts of events. They are themselves an object subject to historical interpretation. The photographs were developed in a particular place, on particular paper and so on.  The paper will degrade with time and the photograph tends to show signs of use, such as creasing, abrasion, writing, etc as well as signs of accident or manipulation.  At a time when photography wasn’t as prevalent or as available to individuals, especially amateurs, one had to rely on chance, proper framing and basic knowledge of photography to actually take photographs.  That’s why lots of older family photos are often out of focus, framed in strange ways, and have color or lighting issues. This ‘amateurishness’ is also what makes them interesting and particularly human. Corrective software may increase the quality of photographic presentation but also erases the possibility of chance and lucky error. 

Compared with modern digital photography the issues of memory are completely different. Because code and digital information does not degrade, the photographs also do not degrade.  Memory becomes harder to distinguish in this world.  There is no yellowing paper or musty smells.  The main indicator of age of a digital photograph is its time stamp, provided the instrument on which the photo was taken was correct. Another, more subtle way, to think about age and memory of digital photography is the age and look of the subjects in the photographs.  Since there is no difference in the quality of the photograph taken twenty years ago to today, another way I can tell time, is by how old I and my family or friends look in them.  Of course there is the general increase in quality of digital images, which means that a photo taken with a digital camera twenty years ago will have a very low resolution compared to today's cameras, but what matters is the overall condition of the image.  That image taken twenty years ago is the same, whether I view it on its original platform or a new one. The digital photograph still has an enemy in time however, though not in the same way that a real printed photograph does.  And the digital photograph has a clear advantage, it can be copied endlessly, provided one keeps the original. What is lost however is something that cannot be placed into real terms. What is lost is a sense of continuity.  If images are the same from one day to the next, how does this square with our personal experience in which we continue to age but our technological selves do not? How is personal memory affected when versions of it are publicly disseminated across various platforms?  Are personal memories personal  anymore? And what can be done or should be done about personal data and information, including photographs, that will continue to exist in perpetuity in the digital realm? 

And lastly, the paintings are painted directly from photographs.  Often the paintings are ‘edits’ of the actual photos, zoomed in, or sections of the originals.  Sometimes people or objects are ‘cut out’ of the originals as well. The paintings are mostly black and white.  This is my attempt to illustrate the incompleteness or loss mentioned above.  The paintings are meticulous but often imprecise renderings of the original source material.  This is a strategy on my part. I usually work with brushes that are larger than what’s needed for the task so that I prevent myself from ‘painting’ the subject too precisely.  I have no need to render a perfect replica of the photograph since my point is to illustrate the change between the original material and the finished product. The painting process usually dictates which way the painting will go. Since I only use white paint in my process, I have to rely on picking out certain sections of the photo to paint first.  With continuous addition of paint to the work it becomes more apparent where to add more and where to leave the painting alone. I begin by using torches to burn the wood panels and then add ash to the surface.  I then use water-mixable white oil paint to paint directly into the ashen substrate. Proceeding with layers upon layers of increasingly viscous oil paint, the image seems to ‘emerge’ from the background as I pick out spots where the image will be brighter and leaving areas that will remain dark.  The combination of ash and oil results in a mixture that is first very dark and is able to be manipulated even after drying.  The end result is a painting that is entirely matte and still shows the surface of the wooden substrate ‘through’ the image.  The quality of the paintings usually tends toward the darker side or darker feelings and emotions, even when the subject matter isn’t necessarily dark. The paintings seem to exude a sense of nostalgia and the past.  

Thank you for reading!

Memories Cabins Tiny Houses

 

'Nostalgia V', Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel. 

If the last post was an indicator of what is to come, I can only assure you that what I see on the horizon is not very pretty.  We are living in interesting, if chaotic times, and not only due to the election of reality star and megalomaniac Donald Trump whose track record is the sucking of money out of the environment and culture that supports him and then making the banks, and us who support the banks with our labor and value, pay for it.  To be absolutely clear, former president Obama’s track record is equally abysmal, with the escalation of the conflict in Afghanistan, the bailout of banks and creditors instead of the people, caving in to the corporations and insurance mafia to produce a dysfunctional system of healthcare, that is neither used for health or for care, rather for the enriching of the few providers who now have a virtual monopoly on healthcare in every state, for the continued and growing debt of the student population, that will only get worse with the installment of Trump in office whose entire modus operandi circles around a ritualized belief in the markets and business as the panacea for all national ills.  Why do I mention this?  Isn’t this the absolutely homogenized narrative of the supposed ‘liberal’ media that want you to believe that their way is the only way, or the opposite of this narrative brought to you via Alex Jones, Infowars and the normalized conspiracy theories that more and more reflect the state of affairs as such? What, if anything are we learning by exposing the lunacy of our supposed leaders? I am always of the opinion that if there was a choice between voting for candidate one or two, the obvious choice for me is always option number three, nobody.  I’d rather not be led anywhere.  The idea of a leader is a sure fire way to be led into disaster or oblivion.  But again, why do I mention Trump or Obama when there are literally hundreds of thousands of hours of media regurgitation devoted to this subject?  The answer is simple, tiny houses.  

Some years ago I was predicting that the tiny house movement is doomed before it even begun.  These days the reality of my prediction is slowly coming true.  Ok, I realize I’m not Nostradamus and when I say ‘predicted’ I really just mean ‘inferred.’  I simply saw the idea and movement of the tiny house as untenable.  What I hoped for was to be pleasantly surprised that such a thing would not happen.  Unfortunately, this turned out not to be the case.  I am not at all surprised by the turn of events, but let’s just go over a few examples of what’s been going on.  As you might know the tiny house movement was started by a few enthusiasts that wanted to simplify their lives in the face of the growing discontent and bloating of capitalism.  The movement stood against the marketization and monetization of particular lifestyles.  Inspired in part by Henry David Thoreau and E. F. Schumacher’s book on economics ‘Small is Beautiful,’ the movement eschews all that is sacred to modern capitalism, desire for money, possessions, growth, domination, and instead focuses on a return to a modest or moderate state of being and living in harmony with the surrounding environment.  There are issues with this type of romanticism, but at its core the movement’s heart is in the right place.  Reduce the footprint, reduce the amount of stuff, downsize, pay less, enjoy more, think more, believe more, that is the formula of the endless numbers of little Thoreaus that attempted to live this kind of life style.  The one particular issue that I tend to pick with the tiny house dwellers is that, like the modern so-called ‘minimalists, they are unfortunately taking the issue to its absolute opposite and unsustainable end, in a very traditional American fashion, and in this very traditional American fashion some are not above attempting to sell their belief to the rest of humanity as not just a way to be, but rather as ‘the’ way to be, engaging in another type of emotional blackmail similar to the greenwashing of globalist corporations some ten years ago.  

Consider this, there are tiny homes for sale for the hefty price of $72,000 at less than 200 square feet, actually making the tiny house more expensive per foot than its larger counterpart.  What you get for this price is a ‘luxury tiny home’ with all modern amenities, wifi enabled lights and appliances, high end materials that will leave you wanting nothing of the civilization that you are supposedly leaving behind.  Two years ago I saw a Craigslist ad for a tiny house for rent in the back of someone’s property in Asheville, North Carolina for $1500/month.  There are dozens in not hundreds of architects and corporations working on mass producing and commodifying tiny houses for simple consumption.  High profile magazines like Dwell regularly print articles on middle to upper-middle class families ‘escaping’ the grind to their tiny houses. If Thoreau was alive today, surely he would puke in his pantaloons.  

The problem I see is that among the countless articles and documentaries on the wonderful world of tiny homes and their occupants, there are virtually no longitudinal studies of the effects of long term habitation of small, foundation-less homes on those that live in them.  There is no clear picture here of what will happen to the children that will be one day born and will live crammed in with their parents.  The lives of the occupants are human after all, and with this type of humanity come interpersonal and emotional issues.  While there is nothing inherently wrong with tiny homes, what exactly is wrong with the idea of just a small house?  I’ve studied cabins and cabin life for some time so I think I have a little to say about this phenomenon.  I grew up in a mountain cabin that was shared by my family, but it was big enough to accommodate something like 10 people at a time if need be, thick walls, wood stove and all.  I am a big proponent of simple living but not at the cost having it sold back to me as a commodity.  

Memory is a tough nut to crack.  We don’t remember what generations before us had to go through or endure and that is why we must endure ourselves. We are the cause of our own anguish and happiness, and even if someone from the future travelled to meet us and tell us exactly what we should change about ourselves and our behavior so as to avoid certain outcomes, we would not be able to do it because we are creatures of habit and purveyors of the now.  There present is all there is and the ramifications of the past or the future hold no sway over the actions of the civilized.  The clouds are closing in and as during the Dust Bowl we are able to see them coming but have absolutely no way of holding them back.  

Clouds of Discontent

'Nostalgie III', Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel

The beginning is always the worst.  How does one start speaking about anything?  This may have to do with the sense that when one starts talking or writing about anything there must be some impetus or a reason for them to do so.  What’s worse is when one has nothing else to speak about but oneself.  Obviously not everybody has this problem, no celebrity I know about has this issue of having to talk about themselves ad nauseum.  It’s a bit different with art.  I’m not necessarily here to write about myself, rather about my work, yet this will somehow have to relate to me in the end.  Why did I make this, or how did I go about doing that?  Further one down the road the inevitability of rational explanations for the existence of the work as such come up, what are the theories, inspirations, drives, motives, who are you looking at, what do you read?  Perhaps to talk about nothing but oneself deflects the uncomfortable questions and more uncomfortable answers one might give when one isn’t quite sure why and how and for what purpose one’s work exists.   

To talk about oneself can be a tactic.  It says this is how I feel and you, as audience, cannot or should not be able to criticize or find fault with what I say. That would be akin to discrimination.  The self is highly vulnerable.  It is the last bastion of freedom in this over-connected confessional culture we find ourselves in.  And I’ve noticed as others have, that ‘freedom’ is rarely talked about and isn’t as much of our vernacular as it used to be some 10-20 years ago.  There may be lots of reasons for this.  We may be freer that we ever were, but are we?  What does our freedom mean, what does it contain, how do we experience it, and above all, what is it?  I deal with nostalgia the way I deal with freedom as a phenomenon of the mind and spirit. Freedom comes from being able to act of free will.  One can be free even if one is locked up in prison, at least in theory.  If Foucault is correct then even the freedom to one’s mind is being deliberately sabotaged through a system of discipline and punishment.  The prison is designed to break one’s spirit, to break one’s mind, when in the past it was designed to break one’s body leaving the mind more or less intact.   

Scientific research today is countering with forays into mind control devices that make it appear as though one is still in control of one’s mind and body, even though one is being manipulated remotely. Will it be possible for the modern prisoner to be simply wired up like an automaton, rendered harmless though 24/7 remote manipulation that the prisoner will not even notice is happening, if anything, the prisoner will remain ‘free’ in his/her own mind while under total control of the manipulator?  How far are we from this reality ourselves on the outside? The clouds of discontent are hanging over the horizon.  The more we believe ourselves to be free the more our culture sees to it that we understand our freedom as something imposed by others.  Maybe nostalgia is a vestige of freedom, a glimpse into the unreality of supposed freedoms, a yearning for a freedom we thought we had.  Nostalgia offers us a replacement for our freedoms, it says ‘see, things used to be much better like this or like that.’  It tries and fails to recuperate the loss of the self in the abyss of the greater good.  That’s why the huge projects of the past strike us as spectacular failures today, the ultimate nostalgic projects of history like Stalinism, the Industrial Revolution, Manifest Destiny, Modernism and countless others.  They brought with their triumphalism and short term victories the horrors of contemporary society running on the debts to the environment and future generations.  Evolution in reverse.

Nostalgia and Werner Herzog

'Nostalgie II', Oil, ashes and charcoal on burned panel

In the course of the posts that will follow I will go down the list of works, paintings, sculptures and others that I’ve made over the years and give what I can only call a commentary without the audio, although this could be interesting in its own way.  These commentaries will hopefully shed some light on the work as well as the inner workings of my own processes.  I’m not sure what is going to come out since I really want to approach this project as a free form, stream of consciousness, with little to no editing if possible.  This might be a good way to get to the core of my thinking on my work as much as it could be a tedium, a surplus thought.  I’m probably going to ham in a bunch of nonsense, but along the way I hope to also make a lot of sense out of a body of work that is somewhat disjointed but one which I believe shows that there is a thread running through all of it.  If I get all the way to the work that I was doing some 10-15 years ago, even I may be surprised by the way I probably think about it today versus how I thought about it back then.  

I believe that most people are always in some way only searching for themselves, none of us really know their true ‘selves,’ and I believe I’m not any different.  I’d like to quote Werner Herzog here who said that ‘only the shallow know themselves.’  He was referring to the question an interviewer posed that basically tried to distill the nature of Herzog himself and to pin down that there is such a person who is Herzog that makes particular films with a Herzogian feel to them.  Herzog himself countered with the above quote because he says that he’s constantly searching for who he is within himself.  After all these years, Herzog is still not sure that what he does is in some way unique or important, he knows he is good at what he does but what does that mean if one cannot prove to oneself that one’s place in the world is at best precarious.  

Without making a direct comparison of myself to Herzog, I believe I know what he’s talking about.  Art for me is a constant search, a seeking of something other, maybe of the self or of god.  It is not as simple as asking questions, what would be the purpose of that? Right now I couldn’t think of anything more tedious than asking purposless questions.  For me the work that I do is similar to staring into a fire or over an abyss.  These things are easy to ‘get’ but I do not ask the viewer to ‘get’ anything, rather to try and see and then apprehend what is there as much as what is not there.  This is my ambivalent approach and relationship to art, whenever I feel that I am close to ‘getting’ it myself I decide to change the approach.  In the struggle to stay relevant I also struggle to keep as obscure as I can, basically a contradiction.  It is the contradiction that I find most interesting however, it is what gives the work its impetus, its power and movement.  It doesn’t stay put because it can’t, as it vacillates between the opposing coordinates.  The Nostalgie paintings are this in their basic framing.  Even though they are dark, black paintings, foreboding, they are nonetheless intimate, soft and inviting.  They are paintings of fires we had in the Santa Barbara area over the last summer and fire has this contradicting element, it is at once a force of primal destruction, but on the other it is the purifying element that gives birth to the new in its wake and this is its main problematic core.  One cannot arrest fire in one place or position, it is terrifying and awe inspiring at the same time. And the above image is more or less the beginning of the series on nostalgia and fire.  More to follow. In the meanwhile you can check out my work at www.tompazderka.com.  I also randomly post on Instagram at @tompazderka.