martes, 2 de enero de 2018

Comunicación de Richard Misiano-Genovese

Recibimos esta interesante comunicación de Richard Misiano-Genovese:


Artaud’s Umbrella.
Europe After the Rain…

In the Spring of 1988 there occurred a fatal car crash within yards of my studio loft. This occurred in a non-descript neighborhood we now consider as urban sprawl –being neither urban, nor quite suburban but rather somewhat in-between. The remnants of this tragic event were found scattered everywhere, and amidst oil stains in the pavement, there too were signs of blood. The tokens left behind were bits of glass and metal, a child’s white dress shoe, some scattered flowers from a bouquet, a dog collar, a discarded, broken umbrella, a trampled and damaged sweater, and repugnant as it all was, there was a fascist armband lying amidst the debris… could this all be simply circumstantial, or was this staged?
Let me be perfectly candid here –this neighborhood had a mystical air about it, with many bizarre occurrences over years, that I would eventually come to refer to as “Buñuel’s Alley” reminiscent of the flavor of any one of his film works. The building I occupied was next door to a church which only gave masses in Spanish, with the doors and windows wide open at all times, across the street, a convent where the nuns once managed to drive their car up on top of a row of hedges with this comical results of the car aiming skywards to the “heavens” and them running around trying to figure out how to undo this calamity. Another time I watched an absolutely beautiful young girl, all dressed in her best Sunday clothes, walk by –stop– and spit into the curbside of the road; or that time a man weaving down the road, crashed his car into the lamppost and with the car still running, wheels spinning, stuck at the post, exited the vehicle and calmly walked away from it all, absolving his guilt for his actions.
These were the kind of events that were common, everyday experiences in this odd, but interesting neighborhood. However on the day I returned to discover the accident, I got my Polaroid camera out and began photographing little scenarios reconstituted from the remnants of the day. My mind went in all directions, my imagination running freely, making associations of random detritus I found there on the pavement. The broken, twisted umbrella, with most of the fabric in tatters or removed immediately recalled for me Artaud. The association was incredibly strong for me: the war memorabilia and Artaud’s plea for release from the asylum during the Vichy government occupation. Additionally, the dog collar restraint emphasized the question of the relationship of image and object. How the pairing of elements can suggest a new dialogue by simply coming together to complete a visual phrase, a sentence, a thought.
These images bring together a beginning, middle and end to a storyboard, an idea, which when followed sequentially gives us a statement –not of fact, nor truth, but as an alternative discussion. Are facts any more important than suppositions when in the course of investigation of an image? Does the supplanting of one object over another change the direction of thinking? Do we then reach other conclusions of having brought word and image together, as in a secret, silent language? We know that images can evoke strong emotions as much as, or more than word pairings –still, the random juggling of everyday objects –the familiar and the strange– provide us with fertile ground in the imaginative ways we explore these elements in hopes of reaching other conclusions with what is presented to us. As if we were fitting pieces of a puzzle together, we’re discovering how chance plays a key role in redirecting our attention to imaginative scenarios from out of the mundane beginnings, no matter how horrifying these beginnings may have been…
Richard Misiano-Genovese
2017