Art as Respiration,
Reparation and Revenge
The Three R's for Artists
by Jacqui Taylor Basker
If we are artists, do we need art to breathe? Are we punished as a form of reparation for the crime of choosing to be creative in a conformist society? Does this experience turn our art into a form of revenge upon society because of this dilemma?
Reflecting upon my life as an artist, teacher, and creative subversive, I offer some insights into the mysterious and indefinable process that makes us become artists, and keeps us making art, despite an unsympathetic or even hostile milieu.
Art is a necessary form of respiration for an artist. The artist has no choice but to be an artist, as he has no choice but to breathe in order to live. Breath in Hebrew is called Ruah (which I named my daughter). It is the concept of wind, spirit, and the divine creative cosmic force that generated the universe. Its life force is irreversible; once begun, there is no turning back. Once an artist has experienced this type of creativity, it is a transcendent force that propels us away from the mundane, secure world of the "normal".
Rather than rest in settled employment, most artists float from job to job as a form of temporary incarceration. Working as a "temp" frequently in the hostile corporate environment, I discovered other "temps" who also had secret and subversive lives after 5PM singing opera, acting, dancing, writing poetry, painting and other suspect activities. We would have fleeting, clandestine conversations about these activities with each other. We would sometimes share our work, our dreams, our frustrations - guardedly.
The thrill of writing a fragment of poetry, a quick sketch, or photocopying a chapter of a novel under the noses of our corporate jailers was exquisite. Most of the people we worked with thought we were crazy; most of us thought they were the walking dead.
Teaching was a more acceptable activity for a creative person. Unless you were destroyed by the horrors of teaching with the Board of Education in NYC, there could be moments of genuine joy working with students. Students are naturally creative, and could be an endless source of inspiration to an artist, if you survived.
Despite any employment related distractions, everything could become a source of creativity. I dreamed of giant murals or paper mache sculptures composed of fragments of Board of Education forms.
On Wall Street, I used discarded financial data reports as background for abstract paintings or collage material for biting social satire. I collected from an architect's office endless discarded drawings and architectural plans as material for interesting graphic designs.
No matter what the world did to me as I tried to make a living and survive, to its dismay, I turned it into an art form. Parking tickets, sheriff's levy notices, credit rejections, eviction notices, levies, pink slips and the like were used to create my successful installation "Artist's Wheel of Misfortune" constructed from the wheel left from my stolen bicycle and the tail lights left from my stolen car. You spun the wheel and won your misfortune!
Teaching as an adjunct in college is another common gig for artists with degrees and modest credentials. I may hold the world's record in having the most part-time college teaching jobs at once, and lived to tell the tale. Running from 5 different campuses from class to class, earning less than minimum wage if you counted planning, paper grading, travel and research time was the price I paid for the prestige of being known as "Professor" (while my students generally were better fed, dressed and had valid credit cards and working automobiles). And, you got tossed in the adjunct incinerator if you crossed any of the well-fed full timers.
Yet, could it be different? An artist has no choice. To not do art would be to stop breathing. Despite the periods of inactivity due to family responsibility, life crisis, sickness or whatever, I still made art, even if it were only in my head.
I had always wanted to be an artist, but never believed I could until after a two year stint in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, where I had to be the substitute art teacher in a male Muslim Teacher Training College in the bush. Perched on the edge of the Sahara dessert, I began to draw life around me. I learned African crafts in order to teach my students, including throwing a pot with my foot. I studied printmaking at the University in Zaria, and was very encouraged by both the Nigerian students and the expatriate faculty I left West Africa transformed into an artist, and went to L'Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Eventually I flew back and forth across America and landed unwillingly in New York. I had developed a passion for skies: memories of nights in the desert, skies of the American west, skies from airplanes. I began to obsessively paint clouds and actually sold paintings. I had dreams of clouds. Once, I dreamed of an egg coming out of a cloud which I painted. I discovered shortly afterwards that I was pregnant. I also discovered from the term paper one of my students wrote on symbolism in Egyptian art that I had an archetypal dream: an egg (the Orphic egg) and cloud occurred in an ancient Egyptian myth of creation and fertility.
Subsequent research for my doctorate in art history revealed that my clouds were part of a universal archetype used in all religions. Clouds were symbolic of a theophany, or the mystical experience of the divine. I felt I connected to ultimate realities when I painted clouds, close to the source of being. I named my daughter Ruah to celebrate this dream and discovery. Recently, I painted a layered cloudscape based upon the imageries of the seven layers of heaven from the biblical ascension narratives in ancient documents discovered with the Dead Sea Scrolls in Qumram. I finished the painting around 4AM, went to bed and woke to see a what looked like a photo of my painting on the front page of the Science section of the New York Times the next day. There an article described newly found lightning clouds that occur in the upper stratosphere which correspond to storms on earth; the Times' description of the color and shape of these matched my painting.
My artistic intuition along with ancient literature, was somehow finely tuned into the cosmos. Yet, to choose to live in transcendence, to choose art, has its price. What was the cost I had to pay? Reparation is the concept of paying for your crimes, your offenses. Art is an act of crime in this society. To be indifferent to pensions, medical insurance, IRA's, mortgages, money market accounts and gold credit cards is to live on the fringes of society. Your punishment is that even though you work 20 hours a day, you watch your children with a fever and know you can't pay a doctor. Your kids wear used clothes handed down. Your apartment is furnished with what you can find in the halls or the street. You struggle to buy art supplies and learn that artists who "make it" have rich relatives to pay for the ads, the announcements, and introduce you to the right people.
You realize with horror that being a straight female is an enormous handicap, especially if you don't hang out with the drugs, kinky sex and celebrity circuit. If you admit to have any kind of value system you are in deep trouble and can lose a job (as I did when I made the politically incorrect mistake of delivering a lecture to graduate students on the aesthetics in the poetry of a dead, white male...Michelangelo which received a standing ovation). How could it happen? My fiancé is black, I began the Committee to Impeach Nixon and helped to end the Vietnam war. I worked in the trenches in the South Bronx and Harlem for years. How did I become Anita Bryant?
Gradually, my art has taken a turn towards revenge. Although I still paint cloudscapes I find I now make art that has a biting edge. My "Artists Wheel of Misfortune" followed a number of installation constructions that dealt with issues of violence, race and sexual oppression. I constructed an "art aviary" with a painting of a rainforest in Puerto Rico as backdrop inside of a handsome wood and plexiglass cage for my 19 Australian tiger finches entitled "Art and Nature: Endangered Species."
But, despite my anger, I can't contain my sense of humor (my son is named Isaac - he who laughs). My most recent construction satirically celebrated the world of technology and the Internet invasion , "A Contemporary Ziggurat: the Tower of Babel", was constructed from broken telephones, answering machines, discarded computers, cd players, tape recorders etc. based upon the bent axis design of Mesopotamian Ziggurats. Yet, I can never become as jaded as Keinholz. Although I admire his art, I had nightmares after his opening at the Whitney.
I cannot believe humanity is completely depraved. Perhaps my greatest form of revenge has been going to the Garden behind St. Luke's-in-the-Fields Church on Hudson Street and spending hours painting flowers, leaves, branches, grass, talking to worms and writing poetry. I will not give up. I believe in the transformative power of art and the mission of artists.
I cheerfully direct the Westbeth Gallery for the residents and friends of the Westbeth Artists Residents community for free, a thankless, stressful, 24 hour a day job. I still lovingly teach my School of Visual Arts students who tell me that my art history class is awesome.
I will not be silenced.
