Robert Cremean: STUDIO SECTION 2002-2005, Marsyas/Myself

MARSYAS/MYSELF

MYSELF Diptych detail

 

 

 

Below is a transcription of the handwritten text on the detail pictured above:

 

Culture

Ambition—Recognition—Legacy

 

"And if I am forgotten? To be forgotten as my parents and their parents and their parents’ parents are forgotten—to be released—is this not freedom? The slow exhalation of definition—is this not charity? The blurring of possibility into the final erasure of regret—is this not tranquility? Though I cling still to stifled hope, the pain of the ultimate demise is anesthetized. I shall die as they have died but unlike those who preceded me, I confer no linearity. I am a segment...nothing more...a messy smear of obtuse angles and contradictions, recognized always for what I am not rather than for what I am. What others see is not what I seek. I seek the weakness of my enemy. Only that. To define that which seeks my erasure. I am not a victim. Having lived too long outside the safety of other artists’ possibilities, it is I who am the predator. I feed on the blood of ignorance. It is I who scoff at the rules and rituals of continuance...the dogma of immortality. I am a segment. I have accepted this and its freedom, self-imposed. I blame no one and nothing for this disconnection. My acceptance is freely given and from this detachment I have framed my life. I am suspect, bipolar and homosexual. I roam the periphery, prodding and probing all aspects of myself that affect the core. Hypocrisy is my prey. I can smell it like dead meat. The world reeks of it. I have sought to eliminate its stench from my life and to search out the rot of deceit. To this I have dedicated my life. Am I an artist? Is this the significance of Art? Is this the significance of Art now?...to speak from the core? Recently, I was asked if I thought I would, as an artist, leave a legacy. My answer was and is: “What do you think?” Legacies are not my concern. If I am to enjoy the freedom of segmentation, then I must accept the melancholy of endings...and the responsibility of beginnings. As I stumble toward the end of my life leaving bits and pieces of self-evidence, I sense no desperation. Whether I should or should not, did or did not have lost their intensity. They exist still, horizontal in fragmentation, but their edges are dulled. There is diminished regret. Still, to not have entered into collective memory stretches back into personal memory and touches a tear in the fabric of self that has never mended. That rent which became the festering wound of ambition has fed and bled the who and the what of me throughout all of remembered life. As a child, as an adult, the ugly stigmata has tormented and goaded. Without it, I could not have become—or at least not have become as I am—or produced so much or driven myself so far. Because of it, satisfaction and peace have eluded me. When madness arrives, I am recognized by others as its host. My guest is reflected in their eyes. I have no evidence of his presence. We are tenants of the same house and live as strangers in a shared space. There are only periods of exaggeration during which I am absent. As I review my life, I know it has always been so...unexplained moments which I view in retrospect with puzzled objectivity...he wears my face and commands my body. From here, too, have been produced great surges of energy and epiphany. How can I resent his tenancy? To have pursued this amalgam as the subject matter for the majority of my studio life has produced a multi-faceted documentation of selfness. I have used that which I know best and each new involvement has been a test of courage to delve further and objectify subjectivity. I require no audience for this process other than myself. Only I know if the truth is being told. This is my journey and I expect no other to accompany me or criticize my direction. I feel no conscious responsibility to history or to my time. I am a part of both whether I choose to be or not. I do not believe that this focus on myself is obsessive or narcissistic. Neither do I feel that it is a neurotic self-absorption or psychological confession in search of an audience. Rather, what I know it to be is a total commitment to transparency. To rid myself of obscurities, obfuscations and self-deception has been a brutalizing and invigorating process. It has also been isolating. I seem to exist in a vacuum, my work, blank pages in a book of cultural artifacts. In search of transparency, I have achieved transparency. I do not exist. Is this freedom? Am I rationalizing a position in which no artist would or should find himself? Limbo. Has been. Oblivion. What then should an artist want? Fame? Fortune? Visibility? Acknowledgement?...Respect?...Immortality? I think at this point I can, without reservation, say: I want not to want. To release myself from all of the fetters of audience... I remain needful of its ear and its eye. The most difficult opacity for me to overcome in terms of the audience (otherness) has been my sexuality. It has taken all of my life to accept intellectually and emotionally its power as a positive force in my work. Intellectually, I can support homosexuality’s evolutionary transcendency and emotionally I embrace my role in its evolution. To be of the most threatened and threatening elemental minority in the history of civilization has been a transcendent spiritual journey as well. To move beyond acculturated self-hatred into the rarified work-space of self-creation has been a limping, erratic, painful acceptance of responsibility for my survival as a person and an artist. Self-respect is a process rather than a possession. A verb rather than a noun. A never ending process of becoming. I have never forgiven my parents their instillation of bigotry. The poisoning of children is the greatest of generational crimes and the paradox, of course, is that without the crippling of children, there cannot exist linear continuity. History is a catalogue of repetition giving the illusion of change. Because homosexuality is the breaking of linearity, its nature is one of insurgency, a threat to the paradigm of illusion. Reality is a birth to death paradigm of individuation. The conflict and the reality of indivuation is the paradox of the human condition. This paradox is documented in what we call Art. That all Art is contemporary is the core of individuation. As homosexuality can appear at anytime, at any place, to anyone, under any condition, so, too, can Art. It is a capricious and serendipitous separating and segmenting of the illusions of linearity. It, too, is an insurgency. To accept its reality is to deny cultural linearity and enter into the finite space of self-creation. Misconceptions and impositions that promote the bigotry and illusions of linearity cannot be tolerated in the work-space of self-creation. The acceptance of the gestalt of segmentation changes all metaphors. Be it Art or homosexuality, both are the enemies of illusion. Rather than accept the negative discrimination of orthodoxy with its punishing verdict of exclusion, I have struggled to convert my personal indoctrination of self-hatred into a positive resource for a broader intellectual expansion of observation of the human condition. By not accepting the values of the linearity of repeat and confirmation which would paralyze, exile, and terminate my existence as a person and an artist, I have chosen to confront dogma which is my enemy. For me to equate Art with homosexuality in terms of segmentation is parallel to the culture-maker’s belief in art history. For me, Art and art are two entities diametrically opposed. Both depend on a belief system supported by emotional necessity. Segmentation and linearity are gestalts composed of metaphors and similies that seldom communicate. I have come to see that my sexuality is the source of my warrioring. The enemy of my Being is the gestalt of linearity...the illusions of infinite time. Though the sovereignty of my Being was established before birth, my acceptance of the responsibilities inherent in this sovereignty has been a process of triumphs and defeats worthy of any battlefield. My only arsenal has been a battery of questions. For me, the pursuit of the frontiers of Being has run parallel to the establishment of the borders of self. The process of making art has been the same process as creating self. Within the reality of segmentation, this is human life’s purpose, the attack of questions and the destruction of answers. Linearity sustains itself on the defense of answers. Its state is entropy. Selfness and Being, the Who and the What of me are not static entities; rather, they exist always as suppositions. If my sexuality has freed me from the linearity of repeat, then I must suppose that this freedom is for the viability of segmentation. This implies justification and responsibility, a moral and ethical code, the basis of which is honesty. Because my natural inclination has from the beginning been the representation of human imagery as my sole expression, my sexuality, in terms of the audience, has been problematic. Integrity is requisite to the process of making. Therefore, in terms of audience, I was faced with several dilemmas. My response to the female body has been clinical, intellectual, and objective in its representation. Except for the most nudaphobic of audiences, the exploitation of the naked female body has been acceptable and a viable resource for artists within the linear tradition of art history. Not so, the naked male. For the heterosexual male, the naked female form is an object of sexual desire whether presented in the guise of Marilyn Monroe or Mary Magdalene. Response, even on the level of prurience, is considered natural, normal, acceptable, and above all, unthreatening to traditional masculine values. Representational imagery for the male artist who is homosexual is a virtual minefield of reaction and response. If he deals with the male subject as the heterosexual male deals with the female, he is automatically involved in social, political, and religious polemics. Whether or not he chooses to leave the accepted frame of art, the sensuality evoked by the homosexual artist’s referencing of his love object will be found disturbing to the traditional audience. In contrast to the female body which shows no visual signs of sexual arousal, the male body exhibits its anatomical sexual function with the erected penis. In many cultures, the phallus or lingam is a symbol of fertility, a removal of the penis from its identification with sexuality and licentiousness into the realm of procreation and fecundity, an object of religious and social veneration for the worship of well-being and abundance. This has not been my choice. As I review my sexuality through the evolving imagery of my work, there is an acceptance of responsibility for its actuality. From a blurred avoidance of identification bordering on androgyny to explicit social, religious, and historical perspective, I now proclaim its viability. It has been an arduous and epiphanic journey. Accepted and acceptable reality is based on the lingam, a symbol of primitive necessity. Homosexuality is its greatest threat because it presents a constant and consistent alternative to its imperatives. Generation after generation after generation, its existence is indelible. It is in us and of us presenting ever and always the task of choice. As organs and structures become vestigial, so, too, symbols. The lingam is no longer a functional or honest icon of masculinity regardless of its pretense and insistence. Tribal mores and survival of the fittest theocracies have become toxic to the human experiment, relics of past realities. I have come to view my work as an act of defiance. I do not accept the structures and strictures of masculine deception. What once was is no more. Reality lies elsewhere. Because I objectify maleness in terms of sexual metaphor, there is effected a cosmic shift of gestalt within my frame of art. By replacing the traditional nudity of female passivity with naked male aggression, I am able to confront within my frame issues that my homosexuality would, traditionally, separate and place outside. Dealing directly with naked masculinity rather than feminine nudity in terms of subjective desire affords me great freedom of expression. Male homosexuality threatens the very foundation of masculinity from invention of god through its hierarchy of metaphors. By replacing the lingam with the penis in terms of symbolic representation, I have created a suppositional battlefield where-on the metaphorical masks of masculine gestalt are stripped away to reveal the stark nakedness of masculine reality: aggression, penetration, insemination, domination, and repression. Because I, too, am male by biological definition, my homosexuality affords me power over my object of desire. He fears me. I turn his verbs to nouns. As I move across the workbench of myself, adjusting and focussing the lens of my life, the audience has fallen into dissonance and distance. As I reflect, I sense a sweet sadness of loss as of the death of a love or the naivete of childhood. There is an inevitability about my course that is often startling and puzzling, like a blemish or a wrinkle caught unaware in my mirror. My penis is the measure of myself. It is average as I am average and is represented in biological proportionality in all of my presentations of masculine imagery. What a problem this bit of meat has been throughout the centuries of representation of the human body. My decision to represent it as it represents me is an intellectual resolution to emotional problems that the naked male presents to his viewer. By being biologically honest without pretense or prudery, the penis is permitted all of the prerogatives of nudity without undue consideration for the audience. In other words, the problem of the penis is delivered directly to the audience to be dealt with exactly as any other aspect of myself is dealt with within the context of Making. As I move into my eighth decade of living and my sixth decade of Making, I am confronted with the paradox of aging. Who I am and what I have become are a single reflection within the mirror of self. In spite of an accumulation of experiences and vast production of artifacts, my weight of being has remained unchanged, my dogged pursuit of the horizon static. Sitting in the theater of self watching the actor who is myself on a stage on which only the scenery changes with its cast of supporting characters places me constantly in the now. There is no past for the living, only the recurring present, only a constant changing of costume in the shifting light. How comfortable we are, each and every one of us wrapped tightly within the turgid repetition of a predetermined life. Our roles are set and their re-enactment establishes the illusion of the passage of time. We are each the main character in our own drama and a supporting actor locked into the scenery of everyone else. Only a total dismantling of the gestaltic stage, metaphor by metaphor, will permit the birth of a new reality...and if we do not dismantle the gestaltic stage, our drama of repetition will destroy us all in a final tragic act of mechanistic repeat. Inching forward in this self-portrait, I sense within me a desire to complete my Self in this final act of complexity. By will or by circumstance, I have positioned myself or been positioned outside the mainstream of linear flow. Fervidly atheistic, my religiosity favors objectivity. This I know: I am an artist. This, too, I know: no authority could have altered my course whether physical or metaphysical, pragmatic or philosophical. I serve no one exterior to myself and have been so rewarded. I am of no significance to the illusions of linearity or the consequences of repeat. No lessons can be learned from my journey for there has been no journey, no progression. I can only be viewed from the inside out and only I am positioned for this objectivity. I trust my honesty. Without audience, I have no temptation to illustrate myself other than as I am. Christopher Whitby persists. Of all the images that have wandered in and out of my production throughout the past fifty years, the child on his hobbyhorse has been the most insistently recurrent. It is the most commanding presence in this final self-portrait as well. Here, however, Christopher has progressed to his final disappearance. As I have aged, Christopher’s progression has been reductive. Oddly, we seem to be arriving at the same point on the horizon. We are both verging on absence."

 

Subsequent to the completion of STUDIO SECTION 2002-2005, Marsyas/Myself, the artist created another studio section, STUDIO SECTION 2005-2007, The Seven Deadly Sins and Three Diptychs from The Winter Notebooks. On Pages 7 and 8 of The Winter Notebooks he reprised MARSYAS/MYSELF in retrospect visual and verbal consideration and wrote the following excerpt about it:

 

"Marsyas/Myself was completed in 2005 and entered into the permanent collection of the Crocker Art Museum in November of that same year. My three year involvement with this studio section was epiphanic and liberating, the separation nearly complete. However, the song of the artist, the skin of Marsyas, hangs heavy and will not be silenced. It lingers still, as Myself lingers still, and will not be silenced. As long as artists create artifacts and as long as viewers persist in creating Art from these artifacts, the myth of Marsyas is the truth of the artist; his life, his pain, his ecstasy, and his fate. By subjection of myself as a particular artist in equation with the corpus of Marsyas, an attempt was made to recast the drama of art into an anti-fascisttic and non-authoritarian process; a complete reassignment of roles wherein the viewer becomes the sole creator of Art and all else is cultural rhetoric. It was also an attempt by this artist at total honesty. As we know virtually nothing about Marsyas, it was my intention to reveal everything about Myself even to the extent of confessional boredom. All information has been made available to the viewer. Setting the plight of Marsyas in his challenge of Apollo within the context of a contemporary sculptor’s studio establishes the parallel of the cautionary myth with all artists who would gamble their lives on a rigged contest. There is no drama greater than the artist’s struggle with his own mortality. The transmutation of mortal desire into material artifact into immortal response is the distinguishing principal of humanity and it is the artist who personifies this principal in its sublime purity. No challenge is greater, no reality more intense. Marsyas is the artist’s myth and it is to this myth all artists conform…."

 

 

STUDIO SECTION 2002-2005, Marsyas/Myself is a multi-part installation work that requires a space approximately 40' x 40' for exhibition in its entirety. It consists of free-standing sculptures, and large panels hanging on the walls and a combination of these and evenly divided into two metaphorical dimensions: "Marsyas" and "Myself."

 

Collection:

Crocker Art Museum

Sacramento, California

Done