$8 N o 9 Enrique Martínez Celaya Robert Brady works+ Mary Rakow Richard Berger CONVERSATIONS Erik d’Azevedo

The Veil

Reprint from works + conversations, No. 9, October 2004 including the following articles: “From the Editor” and “Self and Beyond Self,” Richard Whittaker; “Looking for a Context for Martínez Celaya’s Work,” Mary Rakow “UNBROKEN POETRY (HERMAN MELVILLE)” 1999 OIL, TAR, AND FABRIC ON LINEN 96” X 96” FROM THE EDITOR claim be made that there is a difference between the The title of the painting on the cover The Veil authentic and the inauthentic. We are placed in the suggests a possible theme for issue #9. Exile was realm of being, which is where the work of Martínez considered because both Enrique Martínez Celaya Celaya is located. This is not the being of Aristotle, of and Erik d’Azevedo have experienced cultural eternal substance, but the realm of man’s being, the dislocation. But “exile” and “the veil” both imply ontological space of experience. separation; one of loss, home left behind, the other of If contemporary relativism is, as Martínez Celaya something covered over. Both provide points of puts it in Guide, “a drain through which all of the departure for many levels of consideration. possibilities of art eventually will vanish” - then what Martínez Celaya, born in Cuba, emigrated to , could the antidote be? As I understand Martínez then to and then to the United States. Celaya, it will not lie in religious dogma, metaphysics, In his own words, “Whether I’m in the United States science or pseudo-science. What is left? or in a Spanish country, I’m always two people, one The perennial questions have been with us for happy to be there and one who’s a foreigner.” thousands of years and there is a wisdom tradition d’Azevedo, as a child, was taken to live in Liberia. which speaks to these questions. It tells us that the Although his family returned to the United States, ontological realm of individual life is something like an the experience, he says, “changed [me] irreversibly unexplored forest, one that cannot be explored by from that point on... I’ve felt ever since then that I proxy. Each of us in this forest is something of an exile. never quite fit into American culture.” Yet there are myths, fairy tales and the teachings of the These facts serve as a starting point for reflections great religious traditions which shed some light in this about the condition of dislocation, separation and darkness. And what about art? Didn’t it once aspire to estrangement. The heading “Self & Beyond Self” which find its way to the edge of clearings in this realm? I’ve used for the Martínez Celaya interview suggests In our issue, we have two additional articles on another way to frame these themes. From this point of Martínez Celaya and his work. Mary Rakow’s meditation view, the work of Martínez Celaya is rooted in the is a revelation about the level which writing on art can perennial question implicit in the Socratic call to know reach. As Patrice Wagner told me, “I gave Enrique his one’s self. This is a knowledge that opens upon unimagined first one-man exhibit,” and she has contributed a little depths and bears relationship to the great religious recollection of her own. traditions. Our estrangement from this knowledge goes Richard Berger’s meditation, “To All Artists Known beyond the specifics of cultural dislocation. Who am I? and Unknown,” can be seen as an example of the veil Each of us is grounded in mystery. of how little we know of each other; of lives lived in As Martínez Celaya writes in Guide, a book-length isolation. Sometimes that veil is pulled back a little to self-interview, “I have continued considering the ideas profound effect. My own account of meeting artist of Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgen- Prentiss Cole is a happier story, of a veil passed stein.” Martínez Celaya’s reading in Western philosophy through, that of my own automatic reactions. Kathleen is considerable, and helps provide some context for his Cramer’s “Gold Diggers of 2004” is what? Well, it’s statement in Guide, that most current art is about finding gold. Where to find it? Deep. Or maybe disappointing because its aims are too shallow and too sometimes it’s hidden in plain view. Anyway, while the self-conscious. “How,” Martínez Celaya asks, “can I digging is going on, Cramer reminds us that it’s find a way of living... where freedom and duty are not important to remember to have a good lunch. contradictions.” The problem is not one that science The three portfolios speak for themselves. The night can solve for us. If it could, perhaps the artist would photography of Walter Kennedy and the photogravures have continued his career in quantum electronics. of Unai San Martin are both powerfully evocative of the What can ground an ethics today? Not particle poetic face of the world always so much in eclipse physics. What can guide my own ethical choices? For beneath our day-to-day concerns. The birds and angels Martínez Celaya, art is an exploration which is never of Robert Brady give a small peek into the work of this far from such basic questions. major Bay Area artist whose extensive body of work is The veil is what stands between the false and the often described as opening upon the archetypal. And, of true, what deflects our attention, and if we can no course, we have the next episode in Rue Harrison’s longer use capital letters for our terms, at least let the adventures of Indigo Animal. Welcome to issue #9 - RW It was four or five years ago when I first heard of the wants both. “To make an artwork requires measurable artist Enrique Martínez Celaya, John Evans, poet-book things like discipline, ideas and some skill but also dealer [Diesel Books], mentioned him as someone I requires other things that come from the inside as well would find worth looking up. He’d moved to Los as from mid-air,” he says. Angeles, John told me. Over two years were to pass Most of us would claim to find things out for before we met. I had learned that Martínez Celaya was ourselves. It is not enough to be the recipient of the teaching at and, one afternoon, visiting opinions and claims of others, especially in relation to my mother in Claremont, I thought I’d try to catch him on one’s own life, but how many follow that principle? campus. It happened he was in class and, by the time I’d Required is personal verification. As Martínez Celaya located the building and room, his class was just ending; puts it in Guide, “Biographical facts are neither a the timing was perfect. guarantee nor a requirement for authenticity... It turned out, to my surprise, that Martínez Celaya Whatever I have to offer can’t be recollected in the word, was familiar with works + conversations. We talked for ‘Cuban’ or even ‘Hispanic’ or even ‘Westerner’.” he perhaps thirty minutes. Remembered most clearly was adds further, “to find oneself in a collective set of traits his quiet directness and a quality of dignity and depth. I’d is a delusion.” Moreover, “some things are not signs to yet to see his work and knew little about him otherwise. be decoded by a specific culture. Take the heart- We agreed our conversation should continue. wrenching image of a mother with a dead child in a Not long after I returned to the Bay Area, I received Kollwitz drawing. This suffering will always be true. If two books in the mail, an impressive hardback in art is centered in these types of fundamental German and English published by the Contemporary experiences, then it will always have meaning. If it is Museum in Honolulu, Enrique Martínez Celaya 1992 about fashion or culture, then it’s unlikely that it will to 2000, and a small paperback entitled Guide, the survive... But basic human emotions and desires, and artist’s fictitious account of a drive up the coast to things like trees, animals, landscapes, the sun, the Santa Cruz with a trusted friend, a framework in which moon, and so on, will still matter and will still define Martínez Celaya articulates his thinking and the human experience.” questions which form the background of his work. Carl Jung writes that we are, each of us, embedded This little book made a singular impression on me. in nature. The statement seems self-evident, but to what I couldn’t remember encountering anything else extent is it possible to feel this truth today? The meat I written on art which spoke so directly to my own eat has lost its connection with actual animals, for experience and interests. I could hardly contain my instance. And what is someone plugged into an I-Pod excitement and emailed my enthusiastic response. The embedded in? Baudrillard describes us as being so conversation which had begun, continued. disconnected as to be in orbit, embedded in dreams, Martínez Celaya’s credentials are unusual. On the fantasies, spectacles. As Heidegger says, being is always very brink of taking his doctorate in quantum falling away from us. electronics at the University of at Berkeley, An investigation into this hidden realm is an essential he switched directions and turned toward a career as possibility of artmaking. It is one way of thinking about an artist. the work of Martínez Celaya. “To clarify, to find a As a boy of eleven, Martínez Celaya had apprenticed path.” Ultimately this is fundamental for ethics. With to an academic painter in Puerto Rico. From his high Martínez Celaya, the connection is explicit. What can school years, art and science developed side by side. serve as a guide for actions in my life? This search for Science promised to set the world in order. Art provided a clarification is not abstract. One might say, the real is place to wrestle with all that resisted order. that which must be inhabited. In Guide, he writes, “as a student, I was never interested The place of the artist today is in a confused state. in finding a style. I was looking for art that revealed In the past much lip service has been paid to the idea something about the structure and meaning of things.” of the artist as the hero or visionary, a discredited The impulse of a scientist. notion in the postmodern view. The more up-to-date What do you want?” asks his friend in Guide. “To version is business-like, artist as expert, a cultural clarify, to find a path,” Martínez Celaya responds. “To worker, certified technician [MFA], someone who can you or to the world?” One might say this is the use tropes, texts, who can “appropriate” and so on. distinction that divides art and science. Martínez Celaya Martínez Celaya also has his MFA, but would not, “To discover one’s self is also to discover one’s connection to the world. As one recognizes these connections, a prison sometimes becomes apparent; the prison of what we’ve established or imagined ourselves to be.”

I’m sure, ask to be thought of as such an expert. He calls Richard Whittaker: I can’t help feeling you’ve us to re-examine issues which have been summarily come an amazingly long way having left science not banished in certain circles, deeper human questions that long ago, but I don’t really know your history. I which even fifty years ago were taken seriously. His know you were living in Spain as a child. work constitutes a challenge to many fashionable assumptions of the artworld’s postmodern intellectual Enrique Martínez Celaya: Yes, my family emigrated atmosphere. The work belongs to a new direction, one from Cuba to in 1972, and then to Puerto Rico a which is appearing in the wake of the shortcomings of few years later. Spain, back then, was not an easy place for certain postmodern ideas now becoming apparent. foreigners, but the difficulties and the lack of distractions helped strengthen my relationship to drawing, so when we Last year one day in May, as I threaded my way up La moved to Puerto Rico I became an apprentice for a painter Brea Avenue toward the artist’s studio, such thoughts and took courses at the academy there. preoccupied me. I found the address next to an inconspicuous door opening to an ascending stairway. RW: What academy was that? His large studio occupies the top floor of a two-story building. Enrique showed me around, showed me a EMC: La Liga del Arte de San Juan. Most artists number of books he’s published under his colophon from the island, at one point or another, have been “Whale and Star” and described some publishing ideas. associated with it. By the time we sat down to talk to the machine, I knew there’d be a lot of material we wouldn’t get to. I posed RW: So when you were apprenticing to a painter, the following as a place to begin... how old were you?

LEFT: “REMINDER” 2001 [DETAIL] C PRINT 30” X 30”

“Being ethical away from the world is easier than when we are involved ourselves. I think some people see the path of abstraction as pure, uncompromised, but it’s a purity of avoidance instead of distillation of what’s essential. And that goes for art too, artists who insist on removing their work from human struggles take an easier path, an easier path that seems particularly wasteful when we know that many live themselves in turmoil and confusion.”

EMC: I was around ten or eleven.

RW: Would you talk a little about your apprenticeship?

EMC: At first I did many still-life drawings, pastel portraits and copies of Leonardo’s paintings—not very well. As I got older that interest in academic drawing continued, but it took the form of narrative paintings—allegories of what was happening around me. I still have a few of those paintings, and I really like some of them. By my mid-teens expressing my feelings didn’t seem good enough anymore, so I devoted more time to physics, which was appealing, partly because it gave me access to an emotionally simpler world. Physics held the promise of an orderly life. The summer I turned sixteen, I worked for the U.S. Department of Energy and built a laser in my spare time. But I continued to paint and read and was fortunate that at my high school everyone was encouraged to explore all disciplines.

RW: What was this school you’re describing now?

EMC: It was a school founded in the nineteen-twenties by the University of Puerto Rico as an extension of the College of Pedagogy. By the time I was there, it had evolved into one of the best schools on the island.

RW: What a great stroke of luck!

EMC: Yes. It was. My life would not be the same had it not been for that school, especially its bully and its principal. Back when I enrolled, it was a custom for the upperclassmen to grab new students by the arms and legs, like pigs, and humiliate them by forcing their butts onto a pipe located in the middle of the courtyard. I got the treatment three times, so I modified a kitchen knife to stab the “The summer I turned sixteen, ring leader, a bully named Chelo, next time he tried to bother me. I worked for the U.S. Luckily I laid the knife on the desk of my high school principal before I could use it. And that Department of Energy and exchange, which could have gone many ways, started a relationship that lasted the whole time I was there. built a laser in my spare time. But I continued to paint RW: With these gifts, sometimes one feels the wish to give something back. and read...”

EMC: Yes, when I started teaching, one of my motivations was to give back some of what I had benefited from; to put myself out there, to be honest EMC: I think this separation you are referring to and to be interested. began with the Enlightenment. When Kant proposed that art must be disinterested, he erected a barrier that RW: You’re teaching art at Ponoma College right we should now tear down. Only art for life’s sake now, although you’ve tendered your resignation, makes sense to me. And by that I mean art as something I’d like to ask you about later; but a basic ethics—a guide clarifying one’s choices and life. question arises; you must have thought about this: what is of value—potential value—in the pursuit of art RW: You’ve made a connection there between and art making? I don’t see our culture as particularly ethics and the process of clarifying for yourself, your supportive of the fine arts, and yet you are teaching own life. I’ve never heard it put that way before. that; and that is what you yourself are deeply involved Ethics and coming to a clearer understanding of in. A big question. oneself. Can you say anything more about that connection? EMC: Many people want to change the world in a big way, but that’s difficult to do in art, or in teaching. EMC: I don’t see any useful distinction between Broad political work is better done in the streets. In understanding of oneself and understanding of one’s the classroom, or with an artwork, the transformations duty. I think that much of what we are shows up in are one at a time. And if in ten years you touch twenty how we view what’s right and wrong and how students, that’s great. Maybe some of them will push consistently we live by that view. forward and make something out of it. RW: “What is the Good?” In a way, that’s the RW: Driving out, I was thinking about this thing we foundational question, as I hear you. And it’s not an call “art.” We say “art” and have an idea, vague, but abstract question, right? It cannot be an abstract an idea of what that means. Art is something, right? question. When the question becomes abstract, when But the concept of it we have today is not old, people speak of “the good” and there’s no connection historically. What? Four or five hundred years old? with a real person, it becomes dangerous, it seems to me.

EMC: About that, maybe less. EMC: Being ethical away from the world is easier than when we are involved ourselves. I think some RW: So we read that whatever we now look at and people see the path of abstraction as pure, call “art” was totally integrated with some societal, uncompromised, but it’s a purity of avoidance instead institutional form in the past. Then, at some point, the of distillation of what’s essential. And that goes for art phrase appears, “art for art’s sake” which, in a way, too; artists who insist on removing their work from defines this separation; that stands alone. Can art human struggles take an easier path, an easier path that really have some kind of meaning without an seems particularly wasteful when we know that many integration in some other structure? live themselves in turmoil and confusion. “FRANKNESS (WORK OF MERCY)” 2000 ACRYLIC ON SILVER GELATIN PRINT 60” X 30” ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA RW: Oh, yes. Now the students at Pomona College are a pretty high-level group, and I don’t know if they’re “To find one’s self in a gesture representative of this, but I get the impression that among young people today, and in the culture at large— or in an artwork, even if do you find that “deep questions” are thought to be unacceptable? They’re cornball, or something. Do you vaguely, becomes a hint of our know what I’m getting at?

possibilities, which invigorates EMC: Yes, big questions can be exposing and life with the sense of purpose. ungraceful and many students stay away from risks like that, and if a student is not willing or capable of Of course, these discoveries taking risks, there’s not much one can do as a teacher. Nothing that matters can be solved with “put more don’t happen everyday...” paint on the canvas” or “let’s talk semiotics.” But it’s not just them. I think we are evolving into a society afraid to pose certain questions because we’re too embarrassed about the implications.

RW: Intuitively, it seems to me that among artists there’s RW: I was reading a post on an email list where some form of the wish—if not always consciously —to discussions often got pretty interesting. In a philosophical find what truly comes from one’s self. The need to find my exchange, one fellow wrote, “Courageously—grin, grin, own thought, my own step, my own perception. It’s a face burning with shame—I’ll admit that I’m interested in profoundly difficult thing to do, really to come to “my meaning.” It’s a curious thing, this cultural milieu where own step.” But when one has that experience does that one would feel this sort of apology is necessary. not, in itself, give meaning to one’s life? EMC: The average person still says, “I’m interested in EMC: To find one’s self in a gesture or in an artwork, meaning.” It’s only among the intellectual elite that the even if vaguely, becomes a hint of our possibilities, need for meaning has become a sign of weakness. I which invigorates life with the sense of purpose. Of think many contemporary intellectuals consider course, these discoveries don’t happen everyday, but “claims of meaning” to be in inverse proportion to struggling against one’s limitations is often good enough mental refinement. to give meaning to one’s life. RW: Sometimes it seems there’s almost an attitude of RW: There’s always our egoism—I don’t mean that pride among the most rigorous reductionists. “I’m strong pejoratively, it’s just a fact; but intuitively, one enough and smart enough to take it.” knows that’s not the whole story of “who I am.” So isn’t it confusing to say, “What the artist can EMC: In my experience, many of these people are discover is him or herself?” Maybe that’s not so enamored with science’s authority and want to make clear. Would you agree? themselves into scientists of the arts and humanities, which leads to nothing but fancy terminology, EMC: Much confusion comes with the “am” in “who I detachment and those attitudes you mentioned. Of am.” There’s much in oneself that has little to do with course, there are works, or thoughts, that are too soft individuality, per se, but which instead is part of a much because they have no emotional tautness or intelligence. larger continuum. To discover one’s self is also to But there are also works and attitudes that are “hard” in discover one’s connection to the world. As one a very facile, predictable way. The look of objectivity— recognizes these connections, a prison sometimes the arcane language, the pseudo-science journals, the becomes apparent; the prison of what we’ve established hard expression in the eyes—only points to what science or imagined ourselves to be. For instance, wouldn’t it be is not. nice if something were to come out of my mouth that I do not expect? Of course. But it’s unlikely. RW: Yes. Clearly, one sees this. That’s well put. EMC: I remember the first time I saw works + conversations. I was curious, but not very hopeful. As I began reading I was surprised by your courage, surprised that somebody intelligent was willing to take “I don’t think the last century risks. I think you’re going exactly where people need to go if they want to change things. But doing that requires will be remembered as the a certain willingness to not wear the badge of the “cutting-edge” intellectual. age of computing or nuclear

RW: That makes me think a little about the avant power, but the age when garde. In the artworld, being identified as avant-garde entertainment finally took allows the artist to feel located in the place of highest respect. Now I know that for quite a while the whole over our consciousness.” concept of an avant garde has come under question. But there’s still this tendency to aim for shock value, an old avant garde strategy. Look at Damien Hirst, for instance, just to take one example, and maybe over- simplifying it a bit. This has long since become a convention of the academy. I think what you’re saying without the built-in cameras and microphones, but with has some relationship to this. family programming and by cultivating interest in all superficial things. And unlike 1984, it’s hard to see a way EMC: The idea of the avant garde has become a fanciful to rebel, because dissent is now part of the rules. convention of the ruling class it once disrupted. Now, the bourgeois collectors, institutions and galleries are out RW: Dissent - I wonder if there are other words which there looking for the new, the different and the shocking. would also be worth thinking about? That’s a word Hirst is not challenging the bourgeoisie or its values, that points you in a certain direction just like the word but rather catering to its expectations of hyper-fluff, subversive does. But to become more present, to find amusing theatrics and restaurants, without ever something more real. The system doesn’t care, one annoying them where it hurts. I think the reactionary way or the other, I’d say. Language is problematic. work of Thomas Kinkade poses more of a threat to the art elite than the work of Damien Hirst. EMC: I understand what you’re saying. It’s uncomfortable to speak this way, but it’s a battle against RW: That’s amusing, but it’s a very good point. I’ve loneliness, against the dissolution of the idea— said before that what would be radical and shocking problematic as it is—of quality. nowadays would be something that’s quiet, and that But I do agree with you that language gets us in doesn’t call attention to itself, something that requires trouble. Every time I give a talk there’s someone in the your time and attention. That’d be shocking. Do you crowd who says, “Yes, I know exactly what you’re know what I’m saying? saying.” And as they continue to speak, I realize that they misunderstand me. EMC: Yes, I think you’re right. Anything that demands serious and sustained engagement is RW: Well, yes. I have to say I struggle with this myself revolutionary today. We are in the age of in pretty much the exact way you describe it; this entertainment. I don’t think the last century will be problem with language. In so many areas the available remembered as the age of computing or nuclear power, words are essentially dead. One searches for but the age when entertainment finally took over our alternatives, mostly without much success. “The middle consciousness. Now, most other fields—art, politics, ground” for instance; it’s not as dead as a lot of phrases, war—are defined through, and in relationship to, their but still, it’s burdened with dismissive associations... entertainment appeal. Not even Orwell could have imagined that in our EMC: ...and it’s always heard as some sort of time, control and uniformity would be accomplished compromise between the two sides. “SECOND WAR” 1998 OIL AND ROSE PETALS ON PAPER 38.5” X 26.5”

RW: Exactly. And you know, there should be some pretty good associations with “the middle.” The center. Balance. If you’re off-center, eccentric, which in the art world, I suppose is thought to be a virtue, it means you’ll fly off in some direction. A high level of energy combined with a lack of balance isn’t so good.

EMC: “The middle” is difficult. It usually rubs against the edge of language, which leads to confusion and misunderstandings. “MAN AND DOG (LONELINESS)” 2000 ACRYLIC ON PAPER 18” X 18” RW: It comes to me that there is a word that bears a RW: That certainly does remind me that you’ve deep relationship with some of the things we’re talking tendered your resignation—of a tenured position, about. Being. Now that’s a term we don’t hear used too too—at one of the best colleges on the West Coast. I much. One thinks of Heidegger here. It occurs to me that wonder if you want to say anything about that? when one is connecting ethics with the pursuit of art, as you described earlier, as a search for clarity, clarity of EMC: It was a hard thing to do. I thought about it for one’s self first, would you not also be willing to say that three years before I did it. My approach ultimately it’s also a search for being, for one’s own being? failed and that is, partly, why I quit. I couldn’t teach in the environment of the institution as it existed and EMC: Yes, I think you’re right; many of Heidegger’s ideas are be happy about it. helpful in thinking about the connections between self and world. To give up a tenured position in the fickleness of the art world is a huge decision and, possibly, a stupid RW: Yes. Anyone who loves so much of Heidegger’s one. But I felt I was moving in the wrong direction by thinking, as I do, is dismayed by the Nazi connections, staying there. and yet I cannot reject the quality of his thought—so much of it. Do you ever feel hamstrung about that? RW: This is not the first time you’ve made a big change like that. You were on the verge of taking your EMC: Not really. Our lives, unlike fairy tales, have doctorate in physics and you made a big turn there, contradictions that resist resolution, and to insist that didn’t you? these shouldn’t exist is to invite falseness. Heidegger’s mistakes and weaknesses don’t cancel his contributions, EMC: Yes, and that decision was especially even if some people try to argue that his Nazism was difficult, because I knew I was going to hurt my already brewing in his philosophy. I hope that the value parents. Despite my fellowships, they had made of my own work is not measured by my human frailties. many sacrifices to put me through school and Even more challenging than Heidegger, in this dreamed of me being a great scientist. When I told regard, is Wittgenstein. He wasn’t a Nazi, but he was them “I want to be an artist,” I couldn’t offer any both saintly and cruel. And I don’t think that the assurances of success. I definitely felt foolish, similarities between them are just lives with careless, leaving the promises of my research at contradictions; their philosophies have a great deal of Berkeley. But I still did it. connection, even if not always apparent. RW: Maybe it’s the only way. It brings me back to RW: Well, Wittgenstein pretty much reduced what we your concern with ethics; a life in which one can say to language games, right? No deep questions embodies what one represents. Wouldn’t you say that need apply, I guess. But with Wittgenstein, there’s this we face these questions, and that we don’t know the category of “that of which we can not speak.” And he answers? It’s necessary to take a step sometimes in also said, “that which can not be said, sometimes can be order to find out. shown.” That is pretty interesting, don’t you think? EMC: Yes. And also it’s an added motivation when EMC: Yes. And life, like art, is one way to show. the one direction has shown it has no answers. I might Wittgenstein wrote about logic, mathematics, language, not know where the answer is, but I know where it color, but the concerns that seemed most important to isn’t. To realize that there’s no answer in something is him—ethics, belief, spirit—he lived. And as a moral an important breakthrough. Then, it’s just a matter of man facing the contradictions that I spoke about, he coming to terms with the personal sacrifices one has struggled with himself and judged his actions by to make. There’s nothing unclear in that. There may standards that he often failed. be pain. But that’s different. Maybe this goes back to the beginning of our conversation. To talk about ethics, to talk about what is good or bad is interesting, but somewhat useless and academic. To live life with integrity is the thing. Martínez Celaya is represented by Griffin Contemporary And the purpose of art is to support and clarify in and by the Berggruen Gallery in that endeavor. San Francisco. works LOOKING FOR A CONTEXT FOR MARTÍNEZ CELAYA’S WORK by MARY RAKOW ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA “CONSTELLATION (WOODROOMS)” 2002 COLOR SPITBITE, AQUATINT W/ DRYPOINT 46” X 36.5” I SEE THE HEAD of St. Catherine of Alexandria and think of that young woman in the 4th century, each inch. I feel lifted out of myself. Transported into a educated and wealthy, who was tied to a wheel, greater, into an other order. I feel something like joy. tortured and beheaded because she protested the I finally turn away and exit in haste. I realize how, persecution of Christians by Maxentius. I see The in all parts of my life, my consciousness is opaque, King’s Shelter. I look down on these works made by tunneled. Outside it is dark. I sit on the museum Enrique Martínez Celaya and think—whole body, steps. I begin to slip out of the experience. I am whole person, historical and transhistorical. Here trying to understand it, searching for words. I realize now: integrity, uprightness, valor. this is what the mystics talk about. This is ecstasy. I read what people say about Martínez Celaya’s By the time the cab comes, even though I avoid work, about the arm, the heads, as dismemberment small talk, hoping to hold onto the feeling like a flame and I feel stupid and alone. in a lantern, not wanting the cab driver to intrude, not wanting to see him, not everything, my ecstatic It is summer and I have flown to Philadelphia for the experience dwindles. I pledge to not keep wasting my Cezanne retrospective. I don’t know exactly why I’ve life as if my fingertips were bandaged, my ears come. I have never looked at art made after the plugged, my eyes seeing things under a gray drape. I Renaissance, never at modern art, never at contemporary do not sleep. I return to the museum in the morning art, but I am here just the same. In the long line of visitors thinking, I will be alive. Because, after all, aren’t I I enter the gallery. I see the first painting hanging on the alive in any case? Isn’t this constant opacity illusion? right. It is small, no larger than a sheet of notebook paper This time I move through the galleries with the turned on its side. It is seven apples. That is all. I lose my crowd. Entrance to the show is timed in fifteen minute breath. I am completely startled. intervals. I turn my eyes away from the apples but I am I stare at it for an hour, the crowd shuffling at my back. thinking only of them. I pass the mountains in Anchored in sense, I look at it and look at it, each corner Provence, Mont Sainte Victoire, the blue vase, Madame ENRIQUE MARTÍNEZ CELAYA “COMING HOME” 2000 TAR, FEATHERS, METAL, WOOD AND MIRROR 96” X 96” X 160”

“The boy stands softly and stand before one canvas then the second, back and forth and back and forth. The sun sets. Here nudity and alert, exactly at that boundary proximity tremble at the edge of some possibility, at between awareness and the edge, perhaps of comfort, again. I make up excuses so I can exit the gallery and decision ... exactly at that return. I tell the guards, “I’m a psychiatrist from Los seam where what is known Angeles. I have a patient in crisis. I must make a call. I’ll be back.” I leave and sit in the cafeteria. I tell myself; touches what is not-known...” these canvases are about memory. No. Not just that. These canvases enact the process of remembering in Cézanne, but I am looking at my shoes. Then I turn a me. I return to the Large Bathers. For three days I go corner. On the walls of a new large room, on the pure in and out. I stay only with them. white, hang the two Large Bathers canvases. I cannot I cannot not wonder the source. Perhaps Cézanne saw believe my eyes. I know I can return to the apples but something as a child, adults in such a configuration, to I don’t. I can return, perhaps, even to ecstasy. But here have glimpsed this, say, on an outing with his nurse, or is something different, something just as compelling. perhaps in a dream. A moment when all that one can feel The Bathers stand above me, larger, higher, so that in oneself to be as a human is, in an instant, felt as ordered, comparison I shrink to the size of a child, my perspective at peace, so that the course of one’s life subsequent that of a young and very alert child. The woman with long to that moment is experienced as loss, as a dividing brown hair lunges in from the left, another reclines—I of consciousness, a dividing of the self into intellect, feeling, bodily sense, the stubborn will. This is not The boy, caught up in his own awareness of this ecstasy. This is attempted retrieval of a deep-seated possibility of self-reflection, of self-knowledge, might be thing obsessively pursued even to the last years of saying, If I raise my head to you, I will see myself as I one’s life; the choice to throw oneself up against truly am. And I will have no end. something larger than oneself, that image, that The boy stands softly and alert, exactly at that memory, against which one’s life can be measured in its boundary between awareness and decision. He holds entirety. The struggle to find it. Rules are broken. From himself, or we could say he lets himself be held, exactly the canvas left unpainted, a flagrant white. at that seam where what is known touches what is not- known, where what is seen touches what is not yet seen, that moment where, should he look up, time would fall away. And he knows this. He stands in an annunciatory moment. He stands knowing ecstasy is near. I come to see the boy and the elk on rainy days, on sunny days. I read some photocopied articles on the counter in the gallery where, during the opening, wine was served. I read about Enrique Martínez Celaya being born in Cuba, raised in Spain. I read a lot about “exile” The first time I see the work of Enrique Martínez Celaya and “displacement” but I don’t feel any of these things. it is the exhibit “Coming Home” that inaugurates the I decide I do not care what other people see in his opening of Griffin Contemporary in Venice, California. work. I sit with the boy and the elk. I think the boy is I go at the insistence of a friend. This is my first saying, I am here, aware of my own breath, aware of look at contemporary art. This is my first art opening. the hunger of my own consciousness, of my The place is thronged, limousines on the curb. I learn restlessness. I am at this seam where transcendence that it is impossible to look at art at an opening. I becomes possible. I am not lost. I am not in exile. I am wedge myself between the crowds and the walls trying not alone. Here, now, in this awareness, I am home. to see. A man compliments me on my shoes then drifts away. I am relieved because, between the bodies, I Today I am in Marfa, Texas. I feed the horse in the field have glimpsed the boy and the elk. I go home moved across the street. I ride my bike along the farm road and frustrated. I go back the next day. I go back the and some days see the gentle antelope, their tawny day after that and the day after that. I go to the gallery hides. I am here for a writing residency and my new every day until the show closes. It is 4 o’clock on the novel is going horribly. I throw four years of work away. last day. I am told that all of the work has been sold to I read my way through Augustine’s City of God. I think a collector in Berlin. I will never see the boy and the elk about Enrique’s work. I try to find words for why I again. I sit in my car and cry. respond so deeply to it. I cannot do it. I am not an art I think of Buber. The boy knows himself to be in the person. I have nothing smart to say. presence of something larger than himself, this animal Discouraged, I walk to Maiya’s restaurant. I eat the that is not just larger in bulk, but larger in meaning, the arugula and walnut salad. I scribble notes on the white boy standing with both feet squarely on the ground, his paper tablecloth. This feels like a beginning. I put posture soft but attentive, listening. As if what the Enrique on a line that runs between Cézanne’s apples beast offers is a chance at transcendence and the boy and his bathers: realizes this to some extent and it stills him, and he does not turn away and run. He lowers his head, while all of his body inclines toward this intuited possibility. I think of da Vinci’s Annunciation in Florence where Angel Gabriel brings, as if attached to the very feathers of his wings, an entirely new order. The boy knows this too. It is an elk and not an angel. And the good news is there, inchoate, in the mirror that is not only stuck between the elk’s antlers, but placed there, aimed at the boy, as if placed there not by the artist but by the beast himself. In a notebook of Enrique Martinez Celaya’s, on a page why isn’t it possible for me? Why is touch difficult? Why listing two columns of opposites, what is given as the do I scream at my wife if she accidentally brushes my opposite of “Beauty” —ugliness? No, not ugliness, but sleeve? The opposite of beauty is not, for Martínez “Terror.” To save oneself by making a painting, a clay Celaya, for Celan, for Cézanne, ugliness, but terror, to pot, a photograph, a poem, a symphony. To make stand against which, one makes. One makes some because one looks too often into the abyss, shuddering. thing of beauty. One makes what is truthful. Behind the resting object, what? If it is beautiful, what? How do I touch this child and not wound him? not terror. One of course thinks also of Celan. What made wound her? How do we touch at all? Cézanne’s speech almost impossible for him? Terror that results question. We bleed into each other and across. Our from the actual. Terror that is a response to human wounds. Our histories. Mark (two figures). And, in cruelty lived through. Human cruelty which arises in spite of this, can’t we say that love is possible? the same place where speech resides—between Who is the boy who stands before the elk? persons. Both in the same arena. This is the problem. My boy (self). What links Martínez Celaya to Celan, to Cézanne? We Martínez Celaya’s work asks the question, again, could say terror that lies behind the act of making. again, again, Who am I? How did I get here, here? I am Where does terror begin? Of course, I do not know. on this line between terror and ecstasy. How do I But certain of Martínez Celaya’s works present stand (stehen, Celan)? And what is the field in themselves as possible answers, particularly these which I find myself now, newly, again? This field three: The Garden of Forgetfulness, The Secrets, and that, now, is with others? Where is the answer? A Boy In His Room. River (Todo el campo es nuestro). How do I find it? Terrifying, also, the possibility that both speech and Fir (the path). Who will take me there? The gesture will not work, as in: Pena (Sorrow), and The Shepherd. And why does he have no wings? Empty Garden. Again, Celan: Who will come to solve this mystery of relatedness, To stand in the shadow of being with my daughter? my son? And where will I of a scar in the air. find this one? Is he draped above, in the branches of the tree? El que ellega (the one who arrives)? Stand-for-no-one-and-nothing....1 I leave Maiya’s restaurant carrying the white paper Let us imagine Cézanne, come back to life. The Large tablecloth covered with words. Bathers are resident in the world in their permanent At home I watch two things simultaneously on t.v.: state of incompleteness, of un-resolve, embodying a Lannan Foundation videotape of Jorie Graham both the movement of memory and the grating on the reading her poems followed by her conversation skin. We imagine Cézanne looking at all of Martínez Michael Silverblatt recorded in Santa Fe in 1999, and a Celaya’s work. Wouldn’t he stop in front of Acceptance night-long homage to Elvis in the movies. I flip back of Longing? So fleshy, the surrendered animal, so and forth between Graham and “Jailhouse Rock.” scored and tense the pedestal on which he lies. This Graham speaks of the border between the audible tension, this grid. Wouldn’t Cézanne say, “Yes, Enrique, and the inaudible, the visible and invisible, a topic it is precisely this.” which interests her keenly. She believes there are Celan’s most important verb, it seems to me, is certain kinds of “entry points” into the invisible which “stehen,” to stand. To stand upright against what had are found on the “threshold of sense” where the happened and continued to happen, the European material world is diminished. Her poem “Phase After disaster that took both of his parents. On Martínez History” which she has just read, begins with two birds Celaya’s canvas, Sebastían, the young son’s name is caught in a house, their wing sounds barely audible. written slowly, carefully, on top of what? on top of trees “Things that are on the threshold of sense give you that stand against the black ground. Is this terror? That an entry point into the invisible, the inaudible...” she what is carried inside might hurt the child I have just tells Michael Silverblatt. “They are always like angelic made? This vortex? In the three Large Bathers what presentations. They tell you by their annunciatory is delineated? The vision of a choice—as if Cézanne quality and by their diminishment of the material were saying, If this tentative harmony was once world...that there might be another world beyond. possible between adults I glimpsed at the river’s edge, They tell you there is another world behind it.” I stop flipping to Elvis. an effort to be moved. I am as aware of this act of “You have to rehearse your instrument of description tossing out, this reduction, as I am of the art in front of on the visible world,” she says, “the manifest, on the me. I will end in some hour of some day. My hour of flesh via sense, to train your instrument on this in order death will be shared by every other existing thing to approach the act of description, which is possible, of (microbe, satellite, leaf, newspaper, parliament, two orders of the invisible—the invisible orders that are fountain pen, glacier, rat). It will be an hour in the external to us (spiritual) and the invisible order that is history of each of these things but, for me, it will be the internal to us (psychological).” hour of my coming to an end. I look at what hangs on Graham cites Gerard Manley Hopkins as her guide the wall. How have I lived? Will anything follow? in saying that she feels these dimensions are all of I stand longer before it. I am trying to be satisfied. one piece, one fabric: the carnate, the manifest, the Again, I funnel my consciousness down from its natural spiritual, the psychological. I am thinking of the boy restlessness to an even narrower tip. I aim this at the standing before the elk, the visible world in which work, inches from it, so that it is the tip of a knife both invisible orders are approached, spiritual and entering a wound. I say to myself or to my companions, psychological. This entry-point reached via sense, “This is very thought provoking. I realize only now that paint, tar, feathers, glass. I haven’t really seen this thing before. Or the energy “If we rehearse our own capacity for transcription that occurs here.” I leave the gallery holding onto a little of the visible,” she says, “we can arrive at places lesson in the act of seeing. By the time I am in my car that open to the spiritual realm.” I think she is right. the work has already become something very small, On a new blank sheet I draw a triangle: something didactic, and, (dare I say this?) little more. It is something I can put in the pocket of my coat. It is something I will forget about after three days. What has not occurred in me with such work? What has not been set in motion? The problem, in this degraded experience, isn’t the absence of religious subject matter to which I was for so long accustomed. Nor is it the absence of figure. Nor is it abstraction or leanness or unfamiliarity. In fact the problem is not with the subject matter at all. It is with the thinking and feeling that lie behind what I see. I don’t feel the art is driven by big enough questions. I don’t feel it is driven by deep feeling. The problem is that behind the work I don’t feel the artist and I suffer But not all artists are like Martínez Celaya, not all poets like the same things. Graham. This is what concerns me as I go to bed. What is Even if the artist and I do suffer similarly, desire the worst version of that other level of experience, that similarly, wonder similarly, the problem is that I will awful level that does not satisfy? It goes something like never know this because the art that I am looking at this: I prepare to go to an opening. I have gone to many doesn’t involve these things. It is as if the artist has of them since that first one at Griffin Contemporary. I dress agreed to what seems to be a commonplace now, that in black, I wear great heels. But most important to my art cannot and should not address itself to what will preparation, I change my thinking. I bring my intellect, remain, always, unsolvable. That art shouldn’t lean my restlessness to consider and to feel the whole of things, itself into this. As a consequence, art, in this degraded to a quiet place. I do not want to suffer disappointment so experience, bears the unfortunate distinction of being I adopt a complacency. I pretend I am not profoundly able to fulfill its ambition because that ambition is kept yearning. I remind myself I must not say, I hunger to so small. This is the opposite of Cézanne in the Large see God. I remind myself not to think of ecstasy. Bathers. This is the opposite of modesty, the opposite I enter the gallery. I have narrowed down all of my of valor, the opposite of a willingness to fail. other concerns: my aging body, my husband, my I consider Jorie Graham’s comment that a good daughter and two sons, the inevitability of my poem presents me with the opportunity to have death. I have left these things outside the gallery in complex, simultaneous, and even (cont. page 61) Rakow/Searching for a Context... cont. from p. 18 Augustine’s journey to his final conversion to Christianity as an adult is well documented in his more contradictory feelings and thoughts. This is one of the famous work The Confessions. As in The City of God, things that makes poetry intensely pleasurable, that it we see here a person who demands of himself and of matches the complexity of my own interior. It is even his world that all of his appetites be considered, more pleasurable when it exceeds that complexity. accounted for, satisfied, honored, in the search for A good poem is also hospitable to paradox. From meaning—including his concupiscence. To aim at a noble family a young woman of exceptional nothing less. I consider, then, Landscape (Breadth). learning takes a public moral position for which she Augustine’s knowledge is encyclopedic but he is is tortured on a spiked wheel and put to death. She not writing an encyclopedia. He is giving the widest is canonized. She is made the patron saint of young and most complex view he can of the world itself, of women, scholars, attorneys and wheelwrights. what it means to be here, to be alive and I come out of the gallery into traffic, a phone call questioning and curious and demanding. People from my daughter, a woman on the sidewalk who write about Martínez Celaya often mention, rearranging flattened boxes on her shopping cart. admiringly, that his output includes poetry, She grips the cardboard tower with her white gloved photography, painting, invention. But, so what? hand. What is her history? What is her name? These could be the footprints of a dilettante. But they aren’t. The issue is the level of the questions that reside On my night table is Augustine’s The City of God. I don’t behind the work, the level of inquiry one can feel here. know exactly why I brought it to Marfa but I find myself The choice is an Augustinian choice, a Cézanne choice, agreeing with those who say Augustine is the greatest a Graham choice, a Celan choice. To place oneself over intellect in the Western tradition, the greatest thinker. against the largest questions and therefore inevitably Three years after Rome collapsed, after Alaric fail. Light and Figure (almonds). Again, Celan: and the Goths sacked the city in A.D. 410, this In the almond—what dwells in the almond? Bishop of Hippo began his great work as a defense Nothing. 2 against the charge that Christians were responsible for the fall of Rome. From this apologetic opening What is the line between Martínez Celaya and Augustine? he spreads his immense net. What besides a voraciousness of appetite and the refusal I try to imagine standing, as Augustine did, in the to reduce human experience? What else? ashes of Rome and still to be able to see so far in all I think of Thing and Deception. The huge rabbit directions. His treatise extends from the beginning of is not childish. It is serious. Veiled but seen through the the world (which he calculated to have occurred less red it is not a metaphor for death (crucifixion) and than 3,000 years prior) to its prophetic end. He reviews resurrection (Easter bunny) because it is not a philosophical opinions regarding the Supreme Good, metaphor at all. It works like a good poem. And what discusses the philosopher Varro’s delineation of 288 opens up? Not just an idea (death/resurrection). Not different sects of philosophy, argues against the Stoics, just a thing seen with the eyes and then transferred to the Cynics, the Old Academy, the New Academy. His an already existing idea. What shocks is the figure itself. love of Plato and Virgil is undisguised and everywhere This is unquestioned, making impossible all lesser evident. His knowledge of Scripture is inexhaustible. meanings, all metaphoric loops. The paradox which He is encyclopedic. gives that pleasure Graham describes is that Being itself The question is: Why can I go from The City of is the subject and this high-mindedness would seem to God to Martínez Celaya’s work and not feel a contradict the ordinariness of the object but it doesn’t. jarring? His work isn’t, to my sense of it, explicitly We hold both at the same time. We see and think and religious, Augustinian, Christian, Platonic or feel both at the same time. That is the pleasure. And, Catholic. But if I free the word soul from its religious then, too, what lies under the white? and ecclesial connotations, if soul can mean that force that wrestles most profoundly and desiringly Augustine asks whether or not the bodies of the damned for meaning, that resists reduction of the self, then will be consumed by the eternal fire in which they will I can say in Martínez Celaya’s work the soul suffer. This is how his mind works: in the same breath he becomes more than a rumored thing. considers the arguments of the Platonists and he considers the salamander, which was then thought to, amazingly, are real. The landscape here, in daylight and in night, live in fire without being consumed. He feels both are makes it obvious that I am living in something larger than necessary to get at the question. It becomes a question myself. And it is overpowering. I come back inside. of the body. The salamander is material, corporeal, What can stand up to this complexity? The boy visceral and his argument moves, as Graham describes with his lowered head, his stillness before the elk, a good poem, from the material to an entry point into before the mirror the elk holds. St. Catherine with the non-material (the psychological, the spiritual). The her wheel. To be alive requires these. Humility. salamander is like the rabbit in Thing and Deception. Modesty. Attentiveness. Valor. The rabbit is not presented because it is cute. It is not In another Lannan interview conducted by Helen presented because it is sentimental. And, most Vendler, the Nobel prizewinning poet Csezlaw Milosz important I think, it is not presented ironically. We can says, “Of course,” because he is thinking of what his draw a line between Martínez Celaya and Augustine poems are not, “Of course,” his thick black brows because the ironic posture, so easy, so acceptable, is lifting, “Of course I would like all of my poems to be refused. Irony masks sorrow. Irony marks the giving up about ecstasy.” of a dream of a unified field of meaning. It masks despair. What connects Martínez Celaya and Augustine Black tar, feather, plaster, glass, rabbit, veil, darkened is irony’s opposite. Hope. What kind of thinking? arm. Where does it say these cannot be entry points? Couldn’t these words of Augustine’s also be Enrique’s: Where does it say a painting can’t be about “That nature has some cause, science some method, life something? Where does it say I must not hunger? some end and aim” (Book XI, 25)? What is it that the Where does it say ecstasy is no longer allowed? human person looks out on? What is visceral and In the kitchen I find blank paper and a pen. I draw intelligible and has no end? Man and Sky. another figure:

But this is also the problem. Knowing all for which one hungers, voracious, unending, partial, temporarily stayed—to then produce another like oneself, another human being, this sets in motion the precise intersection of all that one fears with all that one hopes to be true. The Future. To bring into the vast unsettledness of oneself, The Transpierced (Morning), to stand here, in the world where meaning is believed possible, to bring into this tangible, visceral seam of knowing and not- knowing, a person of one’s own making, a child, this surely this is a radical step, Gabriela (First). But the child takes nine months to appear. Who is The Visitor? As Mary might drop her prayerbook to the floor at the sight of the Angel Gabriel come through the walls to her room, unexpected, troubling, what does this visitor bring? News of a new order, of Near the close of his conversation with Jorie a new way to be one’s self. Graham, Michael Silverblatt mentions that literary How does one build a structure to house the possibility critics often say “of course Jorie Graham knows that of such good news? Seated Figure. Who arrives, in the in this secular age the belief in God is only dripping boat, to aid? The Helper (Abruptness). What “notional,” after which they proceed to speak of her voice is it that comes to me, The Wanderer? What voice poems as if they are “hypothetical enactments of a comes through my walls? Gabriela’s Laughter. not-held belief.” Graham responds by saying that she has never been able to understand, though she I step out of bed into the Marfa night. It is the season for can admire, people who are absolutely certain of a meteor showers. The sky is covered with stars in a secular rendering of reality. “We don’t know enough manner impossible for me to detect in Los Angeles. I wish to know,” she says, smiling. Pointing to the books they were pinholes in a velvet vault, but they are not. They of her poetry that lie on the table between them she confesses that she writes poems in order to constantly inquire into the nature of reality, that if she had answered, the poems would not be necessary.

The second time I see Martínez Celaya ‘s work I have driven south on the 405 freeway for about an hour to see the retrospective that originatd at The Contemporary Museum, Hawaii, and is now at the Orange County Museum of Art. It is evening. The rooms are filled with people. A video is playing which I think is of Enrique talking about his work, his process of making art, but I do not slow down for it because on a far wall I see what I will come to know as Unbroken Poetry (Herman Melville). I walk toward it as quickly as I can without drawing attention to myself. The hummingbird holds his place on the wall above me, larger than life, larger than me. I feel a terrible shock, a startling recognition. But of what? Recognition of what? The hummingbird hovers on pink that is almost gaudy. I wipe my eyes on my sweater sleeve. I remind myself: I am a grouchy unbeliever. I do not go to church. I don’t read the Bible anymore. I don’t believe in religion. I don’t remember Melville. So why am I shaking?

Once I heard him, he was washing the world, “EL QUE LLEGA (THE ONE WHO ARRIVES)” 2003 unseen, nightlong, OIL AND TAR ON CANVAS 77” X 60” real. 3

I leave the painting and come back. Leave and come back. What am I seeing here? Tar. Elk. Feather. Arm. Child. Rabbit. Snow. Pines. Bird. Lace. Wing. Had speech been possible to me then I would have said, There are entry points. I am in one now.

1. , Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, translated by John Felstiner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001) “Stehen, im Schatten,” p.23. 2. Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger (New York: Persea Books, 1995) “Mandoria,” p.193. 3. Ibid., “Einmal,” p.279.

Mary Rakow is the author of The Memory Room (Counterpoint Press, 2002), named one of the 10 Best Books in the West, , and finalist in Fiction by PEN/West. She lives in Southern California.