Keynote Address by Philip Yenawine: Commencement, Kansas City Art Institute, May 2003. In conjunction with the conferral of an honorary doctorate
Dr. Yenawine was my dad, not me. Receiving this degree takes my breath away. I thought it was an honor just to be asked to give this talk. With the degree, it makes the task daunting indeed. But I am very grateful. Thanks to Raechell Smith for putting this in motion. It means a lot. Thank you very, very much.
We have been talking about art all day, so I will be swift with my introductory thoughts. To get right to the point, I think of art as being like sleep and love: It’s something we need to be wholly human. For well over two thousand years of human history, no people has ever tried to live without art. No people has lived without crafted objects, painting, designed environments. None without music and dance. None without theater and literature.
That is, until now. Today, instead of weaving the arts tightly into the fabric of our lives, we as a culture put art in special preserves we have to visit even to see it. Relatively few of us make the effort in fact, and even fewer understand what we encounter once there. And the result is distance from art, from these necessary expressions of our humanity. The more recently made, ironically, the more art confuses and even offends way too many of us.
We need to recall something we humans once knew. The arts give us a chance to experience the extraordinary, teach us essential things. When you ascend the steps of the Parthenon, just to get to the mountain top, the concept of gods as human-like — and humans as understanding the divine —is inescapable. Something about the steps, the surrounding columns, the simple structures inform your walk, and you feel tall, stately, regal. Walking into a gothic cathedral, on the other hand, the vast vertical space, the resonance and the colored light filtered through stained glass windows stimulate awe and a sense of our smallness in the presence of another kind of distant, mysterious God. Then again, it is all but impossible to visit a Zen garden and not feel the serenity, calm and quiet. To encounter an African power figure, and not realize its authority, magic and elemental force. To find the weary wisdom in the eyes of Rembrandt’s aged self portraits.
Today’s art is no less full of information, ideas, experience and feeling, even though its range reflects the confoundingly fragmented and varied nature of contemporary culture. Still it remains a reflection of us, and it is our teacher. It remains essential. In grappling with the challenges of today’s art, we learn to think critically and creatively, using our senses, emotions and intellect. And we thus feed our spirits.
But art is what you do. It’s what’s on view at Artspace. Whether it is a painting with a repetitive mantra, “I am not afraid.” Or a mosaic of tiles which proves how variable a single pattern can be —and how endless the human imagination. Or a video that animates our foibles. Or a disembodied penis stabbing at the air while it targets and never catches uncaring figures in an endless dance.
Art does things that can make us laugh and cry and think. So why is it that so few people outside this room appreciate this? Why is art so marginalized? Why is it that three days after 9/11, Karen Finley called me wondering if her art was still relevant? Karen is known to the press as the woman who smears chocolate on her nude body — an uninsightful tag line which doesn’t begin to suggest the power of a performance that movingly deals with how it feels to be degraded. To those who bother to think beyond the obvious, Karen is a complicated, serious artist. She cries out in very cutting language and physicality against brutality that women have experienced in way too many contexts for way too long. So why, when she has the courage to engage in art as social action, did she doubt the value of her peaceful assaults on sexism, racism, homophobia and fear of difference? Why did she doubt the validity of speaking out with words and gestures not violence? Why did she not know that her symbolic acts were in fact the antidote to rage that leads to physical violence?
After our conversation I wanted to read some of her work, perhaps to reassure myself that the art she makes still resonates in a world shaken by crumbling towers. And it does, loudly. She writes things I call poems, although I am not sure that’s how she refers to her verbal outpourings. When I read them aloud to others, I feel foolish — a cheap imitation. She is such a powerful presenter of her work. I don’t have the courage to attempt her level of energy and commitment. Nevertheless, here is an excerpt from “Black Sheep Children,” which I chose because it speaks about artists like yourselves.
We are the sheep who take the dangerous pathway through the mountain range to get to the other side of our soul. We always speak our mind, appreciate differences in culture, believe in sexual preferences, believe in no racism, no sexism, no religionism, and we fight for what we believe... Black sheep children look different from their families. It’s the way we look at the world. We’re a quirk of nature. We’re a quirk of fate. Usually our family, our city, our country never understands us. We know this from when we were very young: that we weren’t meant to be understood. That’s right. That’s our job. Usually, we’re not appreciated until the next generation. That’s our life. That’s our story. Usually, we’re outcasts – outsiders in our own family. Don’t worry; get used to it. My sister says, “I don’t understand you!” But I have many sisters with me tonight. My brother says, “I don’t want you!” But I have many brothers with me here tonight. My mother says, “I don’t know how to love someone like you! You’re so different from the rest!” But I have many mamas with me here tonight. My father says, “I don’t know how to hold you!” But I have many, many daddies with me here tonight. We’re related to people we love who can’t say, “I love you, black sheep daughter. I love you, black sheep son. I love you, outcast. I love you, outsider.” But tonight we love each other. That’s why we’re here. To be around others like ourselves so it doesn’t hurt so much. In our world, our temple of difference, I’m at my loneliest when I have to celebrate and try to share it with those I love, but who don’t love me back. There’s always silence at the end of the phone. There’s always silence at the end of the phone.
Art schools provide a shelter from this. I met parents last night who clearly love their kids and listen to them and know why they do what they do. But you’re heading out into a world that’s not so easy. There’s little support for artists, but that ain’t all the bad news. Collectively, we trash our environment. We fight violently in all kinds of contexts — from international to local to highly personal. We don’t take care of the poor or the young or the old or the sick, and we could. We have come to expect political and corporate collusion if not corruption. Things could get you down.
Two weeks ago, the art world lost a very important player and a very dear friend of many. She was Ella King Torrey, former president of the San Francisco Art Institute. After a very bad year — and I cannot fathom all that must have gone on in her heart and unshared thoughts — she hanged herself. In order to cope with my sadness, I turned to another artist, this one David Wojnarowicz , an artist who did performance , and was a painter and photographer, made video. But he was very much a writer. He sorted out his struggles in diary like writing. He wrote this after asking a nun to leave a hospital room in which Peter Hujar, his best friend, mentor, and briefly his lover, had just died. The sister had been going on about how Peter had accepted the church in her mind, thus, ensuring his salvation. As he wrote about that moment later, David’s terse quirky prose cut through what he saw as the tired promises of Christianity. This is David:
So I asked the nun to leave. And after closing the door again, I tried to say something to him staring into that enormous eye. If in death the body’s energy disperses and merges with everything around us, can it immediately know my thoughts? But I tried to speak anyway and try and say something in case he’s afraid or confused by his own death and maybe needs some reassurance or tool to pick up but nothing comes from my mouth. This is the most important event of my life and my mouth can’t form words and maybe I’m the one who needs words, maybe I’m the one who needs reassurance and all I can do is raise my hands from my sides in helplessness and say, “All I want is some sort of grace.” And then the water comes from my eyes.
One day, I visited David himself in a New York hospital. The culture wars were raging, and it seemed that the other side was winning. Artists were willfully misunderstood and under siege, and it felt horrible to be vilified and misrepresented by the media and by religious extremists. David was definitely a target for this awful notoriety. He was also quite ill with AIDS. The epidemic was peaking in New York in 1992; all of us were losing friends regularly, and not just ordinary people, but extraordinary artists, many of them unrecognized because of youth but still producing brilliant work. Work that might never get seen. It was a horrible hospital, as many are, but he could afford no other. His ward was filled with people who had been sent from jail because of how sick they were. The situation was such that if David put his cigarettes in his night-table drawer while he slept, they would be gone when he awoke.
We had spent the afternoon together, most of it in a dreary smoking lounge, where he spent long hours feeding his habit. I lost track of time and left this dreadful circumstance in a rush to make it to a dance performance. I was as down as I had ever been. Simply despairing, I ran to the theater fifteen blocks away. I arrived late, having to stand at the back of the auditorium where a solo performer, Molissa Fenley, was already dancing to disjointed, abstract music. The stage was brightly lit and completely empty except for Molissa. She wore a simple a black leotard, and I think was nude from the waist up; in any case, she was completely exposed. She was in continuous motion executing a series of movements that ranged from very pulled in, tight and minimal to athletic and carefree, from slow and minimal to expansive and exuberant, like a cheerleader. At some points she crouched and hovered near the floor. At other points she almost seemed suspended. Some movements required virtuosity, seemed super-human. Others were pedestrian. Moods shifted from quiet, contemplative and inward to extroverted and attention-getting, from attitudes that suggested rage to others in which you could read evenness and ease. And in my totally depressed, breathless state, I watched mesmerized. As I saw her mutate from introvert to assault weapon and back again, I realized that, yeah, you can be down, but things shift. Just wait a bit. There is also beauty and joy. Experience it all. What is awful does not go away; it can return like a movement motif, but it is not all there is.
Molissa’s art was for me — then, there, ongoing — little short of lifesaving. And this is what art is for, what it can do. It doesn’t have to be political, or message driven to change people. It can be quirky and personal and disjointed and small and still transform its viewers. Another artist, David Carrino, asked at one point if I would come see a bunch of watercolors he had just completed. He was unsure about them. And as I looked from one to the next, I was suddenly caught up in the beauty of the very simple veils of color that flooded the paper. And I started to cry. What David painted was, somehow, what I wanted to know — not logical, not coherent, but beautiful, moving and deep.
That’s why you must make art from your gut. There is a paradox in art making: You do it to communicate with others, but you cannot depend on anyone else appreciating or even seeing it. The world may not be responsive. Being an artist is not a matter of shows and reviews but of producing out of internal compulsion. But still, never forget that dialogue is your goal. You do it for me: So I can find what I need to know.
This is commencement. You are finished with school, at least for a while. Head out into the world with gusto, and aim to hit it below the belt: Make the rest of us laugh and cry, and think with your art. Change the world one inch at a time as you do it. Thanks, and good luck.