Turning Defeat Into Success
Maine light. Easter Sunday 2022.
All of history is storytelling. I’ve recently been taken by the new book on history as storytelling by Richard Cohen. This past weekend, even as the tragic story in Ukraine continues to unfold has been awash in the religious narratives that have been so pervasive and powerful in our world for so long. This is a good time to remember how devastating or inspirational a story can be as a means to organize data, determined by who gets to tell what story with what outcome.
It is spring in Maine now, and all these stories of spiritual transformation are ancient versions of the epic perennial renewal of hope from the ashes of despair, which spring uniquely and faithfully promises. Spring as hope is a true story. This past year, particularly since January 6, the world has been tortured since the 2020 election by the Big Lie Trump concocted that his election was stolen. Lies can be as compelling as truth.
I often cite Heather Cox Richardson in my writing about politics. Heather is an historian who focuses on and tells stories about how contemporary American politics is grounded in past patterns. Her specialty is the American Civil War so she is well-positioned to comment on today’s radical divisions. She is so successful that she enjoys a wide following and has been named as a woman of the Year by USA Today. Recently on her FB fan page, Monica Borrin Flint posted an inspirational account of ecological restoration. Someone else questioned what that had to do with Heather’s writing. In response I wrote, “I believe the political history and analysis Heather does is the local and human face of a greater environmental war being waged by ecocidalists. They are interdependent dynamics of extraction and resistance. This account of a refugia in the UK is as important as any victory in Ukraine against Putin's zombie army or the work of the Jan. 6 commission daylighting truth.”
In the artworld, like any other world, there’s a rule book for material success. These are the laws I’ve watched my most successful colleagues follow: attach yourself to powerful people who can mentor your career towards financial security and resist arguing with them. Stick to one clear material focus, for example, oil paint on canvas. Since I decided to be a serious artist, what has distinguished my career has been my profound conviction that art can leave a trail of breadcrumbs to truth and sanity, which never included following the laws of success. That is not a recipe for material success in the world of the status quo, artist or not.
In the end, I did follow the rules despite myself but not the way I was supposed to follow them. The people who came closest to exemplifying the kind of ideal successful artist I admired were Allan Kaprow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Kaprow, often referred to as the father of Happenings and Mierle Laderman Ukeles, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles the first artist in residence for the NYC Department of Sanitation. Both were powerful figures and became close friends but especially with Allan, I didn’t follow their advice, for example, get a teaching job out of graduate school. I also didn’t notice that neither of them had a practice that took a significant material form or earned much money. I was willing to learn everything but unwilling to follow rules. Eventually, my very abstract idea about truth and sanity focused on how art could interfere in the familiar patterns of thinking and behaviors that lead to ecocide. That isn’t the same as honing in on a material form. My story was that I just wanted to change the world.
That is a contentious story: can art really change anything? How can you prove the effect? Where does art become something else when it has an agenda? Isn’t it an unfair burden to put on art? In the end, isn’t it just grandiose and pretentious to have these aspirations? These are among the questions I still wrestle with every day. Art never works as a linear process and none of the answers I can think of would ever make my work palatable to any status quo.
Recently and belatedly, it has occurred to me that many people come to my work without any more clarity about the answers to my questions than I have and that all along, it was my responsibility to make the case for my convictions if people are going to experience my work as I want them to experience it. And what do I want them to experience? I want my audience to experience my own urgency to see a changed world, a world where fish and birds and elephants and people and tigers and fire can all co-exist. I imagine that if everyone could feel that same urgency I feel, we might stop doing the things that are killing our planet. We would stop committing ecocide. But there isn’t even any evidence that it would be true. In the end, I always revert to my intuition and let it tell me what to do, what to make. Ultimately, the most sincere work in the world is just a crap shoot for what it might convey to anyone.
Recently, I had a particularly painful defeat that brought home what a gamble my life in art has been. My application for a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship was rejected . A rejection for the Guggenheim is hardly remarkable, but it was my fiftieth rejection from them since 1970. I skipped a couple years. My sense of defeat was cumulative from those 50 tries and many people had thought I would have won it this time. This rejection was coincidental with leaving NYC to cut my living expenses. I felt defeated. I thought of the song, “I fought the law and the law won.” I fought the status quo and the status quo won. I have come to accept that one reason I resist the status quo is how much the dynamics of power in the status quo determine ecocide: a powerful elite is entitled to extract value. Art must support the accoutrements of power. But arguably and irrationally this feels unfair to me.
Art history is as much a form of storytelling as any account of political maneuvers. Until relatively recently the story of art has always been a history of exclusion, including of women, gender conformity, people of color, reflecting the cultural values of European white supremacist power. The conventional canon has also marginalized specific forms of expression, at various times excluding crafts and social practice and then reifying those forms.
I often write publicly about things others don’t say out loud to articulate and vent things that upset me. Often it leaves me vulnerable to the judgements of others. Often people respond with great empathy, which is heart-warming. But I also often learn that I'm articulating, and venting thoughts and feelings others share but have kept to themselves. I have a political, philosophical and aesthetic investment in transparency as much as I have to resisting the status quo. It's not just the adage that truth is the best disinfectant. It's also about the abiding distrust I harbor for the status quo. Tradition, like keeping stiff upper lip, is often a double-edged sword to cover up all kinds of small and large indignities, cruelties and injustices that bolster the status quo.
In many ways, I love tradition, for example, this sacred weekend, holy to several religions, of descent and rebirth, hope and redemption. I hope I never wallow in self-pity or self-centeredness but suspect I often digress. At the heart, my feelings about leaving New York City and being rejected by the Guggenheim are partly about coming to terms with a world for the .00001%. Of course there are answers and solutions. And my own challenges are trivial and luxurious compared to the people of Ukraine and many others. It's just that sometimes a stiff upper lip about the everyday difficulties artists especially struggle with in the service of the status quo serves only the status quo, which serves the privileged. If artists are the vanguard of the culture, then the challenges I experience, and so many other artists, don't bode well for the rest of our society, let alone, an end to ecocide. If I need some redemption, it's the same redemption I suspect everyone else needs, from the illusion that's it's ok to suffer in silence and be handicapped by iron-clad realities that are about keeping things the same, for example, access to services and support, especially when the issues are grounded in ecological survival and cultural change. I know how to transform despair into hope. I just wish for us all that it might be a little easier to make a level playing field level. I wish it were all easier. But, for example, the story of Easter isn’t a story about enjoying a secure place in the status quo and that is a very enduring story for a reason
It took me over a week to notify all my references about my Guggenheim rejection last week. I felt so dispirited and that I'd disappointed them as much as I felt disappointed. I was moved by their responses- not to give up and try again because my work is important.
Being an artist is such a leap of faith and so dependent on the generosity of our collegial communities. All my life I just followed my art nose, with no understanding that being unconventional and defying the status quo was a financial hazard. Silly of me really to be so short-sighted and naive.
I had gotten the rejection letter the day I left NYC, while I was still grieving the move. I do think if I feel exiled from NYC, I have landed in Shangri La. Being on the island is another aspect of the unusual choices I've made as an artist. So maybe I need to be bolder about framing the logic of my choices. My book Divining Chaos made an effort to do that and I will see how people respond when it actually launches and is reviewed.
In the advance praise which will go on my back cover, Julie Reiss, PhD, editor of "Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene," wrote,
"Divining Chaos is a compelling and courageous memoir of historical importance, written by a central figure in the emergence of ecofeminist art. Aviva Rahmani makes clear that the same entrenched systems of power enable the abuse of women and the abuse of nature. Her personal experiences of trauma might well have defeated her. Instead, they seemingly empowered her to become a strong and persistent advocate for ecological issues through her artwork, and to challenge the status quo in innovative and effective ways. The book narrates her prescient interdisciplinary approach to environmental problems and her willingness to avail herself of any field of knowledge that can be wielded as a tool in the fight.”
Perhaps this experience of defeat will be just what I need to succeed at one more challenge to the status quo, despite myself. Maybe the fat lady hasn’t sung yet. Maybe the story isn’t over.