......................................................................................................... rap 19 August 2015
The thing about creativity is that as soon as you start to
create anything, take that first step, you become aware that you have no
idea where you will be, or what you’ll be holding when you emerge from that
dark forest into the light.
You make one gesture toward that glimmer of a notion and an idea
starts to unfold. Ideas present and we have to follow them in order to arrive in the place they hold. And
they need us, too. Ideas cannot manifest until we feed them. Creativity
is a symbiotic relationship between us and our ideas. We feed them, they lead
us. They grow, we arrive.
And this takes guts, because as you begin, nothing but that
tiny seed is visible. In order to grow up into an oak that will shade and warm
us, we have to nurture the seed. But until it actually becomes a strong,
beautiful oak, we have no idea what that seed will become. It could become
anything. And so could we.
So, nurturing that seed takes a leap of faith: you make an effort
toward the unknown and expose yourself as you do it. That’s terrifying. And it
means we walk blindly onto an unmarked rope bridge over a deep ravine concealed
in fog. As with love, we may want to fall or fly, but we don’t want to hit the
ground. We struggle against vulnerability, yet creating requires that
we engage with vulnerability.
_____________________________
Ayodamola Okunseinde is an artist. Like all of us, he was
born a seed. But he didn’t grow into the man he is now on luck. He wandered a long and winding journey to arrive as an Afronaut stomping through
Harlem from the future.
Born in New Jersey to a Yoruba father and African American
mother, Ayo was a baby when he returned to Lagos where he was raised until
adolescence. After stints in Oman and Holland his family returned to
the States where he graduated from high school, and studied electrical engineering
and then art and philosophy at Rutgers.
After college, Ayo opened the DC gallery Dissident Display (blackle it, you won’t
be disappointed), made art, worked in performance video, and made films like The Chasers. As he told it to me, he applied to MA programs to prove to himself that he was good. And they weren’t wrong when they
accepted Ayo into the Parsons Design + Technology Master’s in Art (May
2015).
I’ve known Ayo for almost two years and picked up with him
this August just home from an IDEO Fellowship in Boston, to talk about the thesis he just completed. Having noticed the tragic lack of projections of
black human beings in works about the future, he posits that if we include
African descendants in work we make now about the present and the future, we
can change both.
Ayo told me: “to do that I come back as an Afronaut from the
future to the present. The work is a suit, a functional suit that gives me
oxygen. It cools me down. It gives me water; it gives me food; it records
video. It’s a cross between space-aged materials and African fabrics.”
So
that’s where the work of the thesis came from: this idea of projecting my
identity or African identity into the future. And a way of actually both
ritualistically and in a very practical way, creating the future: because when
you have objects or when you have an identity of a future, you can then start
to map your direction or your trajectory to that future.
Here’s where the conversation went:
M: tell me about AFRONAUT…
A: The thesis is about
the projection of identity onto the future. There’s a lack of representation of
Africans or people of Africa in the future and I argue that that dehumanizes
Africans presently. So in an effort to add capacity or humanize those
communities, I propose that by creating a culture in the future where their
representation is present, it’ll add capacity to the present.
In a way it’s akin to
the Engugu of West African masquerades, and by wearing the suit I’m actually
performing a ritualistic rite, or a ritual that’s actually creating the future
itself.
So I go around the
city interacting with people and documenting the experience as an alien from
the future in the present.
M: and then in
January, while working on your thesis, you experienced the police. what were you thinking when the cops
assaulted you?
A: I was thinking,
“Oh, my god, I can’t believe that he’s trying to push me down to the ground
when I’ve done nothing.” And I thought to myself, this was literally right
after one of the shootings, and I thought to myself, “I could be shot right
now.”
I mean, I was, I
really felt- I felt I was gonna get beaten up, I might get arrested, or I might
get shot right there. I was terrified. I was shaking for the rest of the day.
M: how did you feel a
week later?
A:A week later… I
felt a resolve to sort of- it made my thesis more valid, you know. I felt a
resolve to actually… I had already stood outside of the thesis, and worked from
outside. But now I decided that I was gonna go inside the thesis and work from
inside by truly believing, number one, believing that I am the Afronaut from
the future. Before I was this external person that was narrating the story. But
after the experience I became the character.
By becoming the
character, I take on a responsibility. And that’s something that I hadn’t done
before: take responsibility for the thesis. And by believing that I am the
character I took on – and also, not only believing that I am the character, but
believing that the time travel is actually true.
And that only came
about because I realized that truly, that there are some people, that that
situation happens to over and over and over again. And because they don’t have
any political recourse or financial means of getting out of that situation, they
don’t have a way to get out- they don’t have a way to travel beyond that. I
felt that – I have that ability. And that time travel is actually possible.
M: why ART and WHEN?
A: I was in, maybe I
was 13 maybe, and I was making a drawing in class and the teacher saw the
drawing and said it was very good. And I think from there I started trying to
draw even better.
And that’s how I came
to art. For a little time, not a little time, a long time actually, I wanted to
do engineering. So I did my undergrad in visual arts, and then the graduate program
is design and technology, so its engineering and art combined.
I wanted to understand
artificial intelligence, I wanted to understand human behavior, and I knew that
I could get to that with science, but I felt that getting to that through art
was more dynamic, more exciting, and it allowed for more creativity.
M: a year ago you
told me you felt the thesis was something you had been working up to for five
years prior. was that also ideological?
A:It was ideological
because I had been thinking about -a lot of this comes from my interest in
artificial intelligence and the mind and cognition, and sort of trying to
understand that philosophically, and I think I was able to get to some aspects
from painting but I felt that maybe using technology I could get to some
semblance of artificial intelligence, some sort of interaction that would be
closer to human behavior. So I guess it is ideological in the sense that the
work that I’m doing technologically is still trying to answer those questions
of cognition or AI.
Emergence, for example,
getting intelligence or getting some sort of aesthetic output out of a system
that has several nodes where each node is not necessarily smart but the
combination of all the nodes creates some intelligence or some sort of
aesthetic value that it’s either through programming each node really simply
yields, synthesizes something, or the noise within that system creates
something.
It’s [in] an emergent
property of those nodes that an intelligence is formed. In that same sense I
want it to be an emergent property of these cultures that I’m interviewing [for
Prophecy] (below).
M: it’s hard not to
miss from where I sit, your metaphor/ comparison between the way that the brain
works and the way that human society works, which is that no one individual
creates a culture. lots of us together create a culture feeding into one
another. and then that culture comes to define us both as individuals and as a
community, and to pass down whatever wisdom then does lend itself to shaping
our wisdom, our personalities…
A:And objects come
out of that culture that then reinforce certain things, or that create the
future.
M: yeah, yeah, based
on value, based on society, based on all of that…
A:Yeah, yeah.
M: and this
experience of being assaulted in January, in a way, made you one of everyone
else.
A:Yeah, it did…
M: so you’re thinking
to yourself, “well, I’m educated, I shouldn’t be part of this” – but you were.
A:Also, because I’m
Nigerian, right, and the issues that were going on here were with African
Americans and I’m an educated African man, which culturally is different from
African American. So, I never put myself in that, I never really… I don’t
identify with that. So then when I was pushed into that same category, I
realized that that was the way that the world saw me.
M: you became one of
the nodes.
A:Yeah, yeah!
M: and you had never
been a node before.
A:Yeah, yeah, yeah!
M: so tell me about
PROPHECY, the community / interactive project.
A:I didn’t want to do this work. I thought I
should just make work and have it seen in a museum. For me, I felt my work
should be personal.
I didn’t think it was
my purview and then after that incident, I realized that there are some people
that don’t have the ability to get out of that space - that would always be
powerless or that because of lack of education or lack of resources don’t have
an opportunity to see beyond their world.
So they don’t have the
ability to dream beyond tomorrow or to project themselves into the future.
I realized that as a
result of that I’m obligated -if I have the ability to project myself into the
future to see beyond myself- that I’m obligated to make works to at least
elucidate the possibilities that these other people might have that
possibility.
M: who is going to
be involved in PROPHECY?
A:People that are
told, “this is what your future is gonna be.” And in the most positive way, you
know, “this is your future. We’re gonna construct it for you.” I, I don’t like
that. I think the future should be constructed internally, you know.
The dreams of these
people should be constructed internally, not that some outside agent, state or
government or organization, constructs it for them. You know it should be
something that grows from inside out.
That idea of synthesis
I think is present in this work where I’m collecting stories, ideas about
objects in the future, and interviewing the community and trying to synthesize
an object from that, trying to synthesize something that’s aesthetically
pleasing, and interactive, something that’s intelligent.
M: what does
CREATIVITY feel like?
A:For me it comes as
little flashes. I keep a notebook with me all the time. Sometimes I just have
an idea that pops into my head. And it doesn’t even need to be based on art at
all. I just have a scenario that pops into my head, and I draw it or write it.
When I’m addressing problems and I’m trying to solve those problems I find sort
of thinking about the problem yields all these creative ways to approach the
problem.
It’s just, it’s second
natureto me now. It just happens; it happens all the time.
M: so, who are you,
as an ARTIST?
A: I think I’m
becoming an artist that deals with future spaces… with time travel, because I –
honestly- I truly believe that artifacts allow for time travel. That’s the
closest that we’re gonna get to time travel.
I honestly believe
that these artifacts allow for time travel. In the same way that you have
archaeological objects… historical objects that allow you to see into the past,
get an understanding of humanity’s past, these objects I’m gonna create would
allow you to see humanity’s future.
And I want to get an
idea of what the future is for people, not just for me. So that’s why I’m doing
the community interviews.
M: what changed
that? Why EVERYONE ELSE now and not just you? really, the assault in
January?
A:Yeah.
M: what happened?
A:I just have an
obligation. It just struck me that I have an obligation.
I’m in the position
that I can make a change and it’s, it’s an existentialissue. You know, like, it’s so- to- to imagine that that there are
people out there that have the ability, that have the capacity to- to do great
but because of systems or because of lack of resources, they’re being
curtailed, that’s – and to think that I could possibly have something positive
that I can add to that!
It’s –it’s – I’m
obligated to do it, I don’t necessarily want to do it, or like to do it, but
I’m obligated to do it – yeah.
M: ok, so if there’s
one thing I should get right, what is it?
A:That I believe that
these future objects will actually create the future: that they will direct
people to the right future.
The more I think about
this, the more I do work on this, the more I believeit. It’s so clear in my mind that these objects, or this way of
thinking, of-of sort of creating a future in the mind, in your mind, in others
minds, would …
By creating a future …
and creating objects from that future that will actually move people in the
right direction- it’ll actually change the present.
M: did you ever
think, in college or ten years ago that this is what you’d be talking about with
your art?
A: No, No!
I think also that what
makes my work different than other people that do [Afrofuturism] work is that
my work is actually interactivein the sense that these objects are interacting
with the present. They’re collecting data from the future and sending it back
to the present, or from the present and sending it to the future!
I think this technological
interactivity adds another way into it. And then with Prophecy there’s a social
interaction as well, that I think is vital.
M: so if there was
one way to completely misunderstand you, what would it be?
A: That I’m sure about
myself.
Like, I believeit, but believing in it and… Sometimes you
believe this is the right thing to do, but do you do it? You may find a reason
not to do it. You know? But you believe it’s the right thing to do. Yeah, so
I’m insecure in that sense. I’m still struggling with that.
I’m trying hard that,
by the end of this year, I work through those insecurities. I think it’ll make
my work better, or make me a stronger person.
________________________________________
As we wrapped up, Ayo said he was amped up, ready to go to
the art store, buy materials and go make art. I was amped up, too, because we
had a great conversation.
My mind wandered all over the terrain for a few days, a few
weeks. We are always metamorphosising. I think a lot about that: how to change
my life, how to change my work, my relationships: how to grow my heart, my mind
– to meet that source space of my soul. And I found myself remembering something
I have always said about Ayo:
One thing that makes Ayo great is that he is not
limited in what he can imagine by
what he can make. He imagines first
and freely, and then begins in the dark, only a glimmer ahead, to create. He
has told me when he was fearful, when he was afraid and unsure how to begin.
And then- he begins.
Creativity is a process. Like anything we engage in
repeatedly, it can become muscle memory. But you have to engage in it, bit by
bit. And you have to follow it – blind as you may be, the path unmarked and
darkened by heavy foliage. And it’s hard at first and taxing, and fatiguing,
but you just keep doing it. And then a path lays itself out – and if you follow
the ideas you’ll see what they -and you- can become, and they will show you your next step. Steps into the future.
Imagining that future changes you now – because now a future
becomes possible, and you drive at it, and that in itself changes you. That
idea makes possible the future, and the future arrives right now.
Most of the time, the biggest part of our society is neither
watering nor sunning us. We have to do it ourselves. And lots of us have ideas…
but do we start to make them? Because that takes courage and strength and
determination.
The creative process is not only about people who make art,
or write, or play music, or follow the science. It’s all of us – can we create
ourselves, our lives?
Can we imagine ourselves?
Can we imagine?
Faith and strength are intimately tied up in one another.
Just as we need our ideas as much as they need us, faith and strength
symbiotically feed one another making possible the marriage between us and our
possibilities. Take from us these two things and we mortals lose our ability to
become our greatest selves: creators- of our world, ourselves.
The hard world will often try to take from us hope and
power, to maintain the status quo, capitalism, fascism, poverty, control over
what humanity can become – over humanity itself. If it is successful in taking
from us faith and strength then they’ve got us. We will never rise new.
And it works both
ways. If you want to take back power and hope: create. Yourself, a song, a
garden – just create. Start to create and power and hope will grow in
you: creator and creation.
Let's talk about street art for a hot minute. [Yes, I need that minute to get my head around the interview with Ayo Okunseinde (www.ayo.io); bear with me, I'll make it worth your while.] In my last post I talked about living art and why I want to focus this year on art made now by living artists around me who are talking about important ideas and experiences. (You can look forward to visual artists and musicians, b-t-dubs.) So, you're going to get some of my stuff and some of theirs: interviews, their work and where you can see their work. But it may be worthwhile then to remind ourselves why this site is called "themothersnature" (stay with me, we'll get back to street art).
Samba Queen, seen in the Bronx, August 2015
I love this queen. She's black, she's dancing, she's proud. I like it. She's a creator. That's all the mother's nature is: the urge to conceive, create and nurture - art, a new life, a new idea, a new version of self, of the world, of what is possible.
"Mother" only means anyone who conceives of something new, holds it inside, gives birth to it into the world. We are all that, male and female. We are creations and it is our nature to create.
And creators who give consistently like this- of ourselves to the world, we are tender, sensitive creatures. Our ideas need light and air and hands just as babies do; they need us to touch the possibility of finding their potential. So, I'll be not only the creator but the mother of creators, helping their work find the light on this site. How does that relate to street art? Scroll with me...
ig: vballentine99, landscape on Van Buren @ Throop, BedStuy
This is my son, standing in front of a painting we helped just a teensy, inseey bit to create. The artist called it "familiar-unfamiliar-familiar." When you're in Brooklyn, what you see here is the "unfamiliar." Go see the rest.
ig: notart, seen on Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn, August 2015
NotArt makes a lot of "not art." What's he really saying? What was vballentine99 saying when he put up familiar-unfamiliar-familiar? NotArt was not invited, vballentine99 was. One "looks" like art, one does not. One paints itself up as art, the other claims the opposite.
All still art. On our city streets, a donation of consideration, beauty, thought, examination. Why are we here and what do we make of it?
I'm a writer. Words are virtual. They're not real, they are magic that neither you nor I can control. Smash this machine, burn my books, my work is gone, rising to creator in smoke. But I also claim them. I make them, I put them out, I name them, I determine them. Street art is the opposite.
Someone has to crack me open, come to my page to see my work. You have to choose me. I have to market myself to you, make you choose me, sell myself to you. I have to have a certain hubris to make you believe I'm worth your time and effort, the travel it takes for you to find me.
Street artists, they are the most generous of all. They are the ultimate humble creators. They give their work away to the whole world. They don't try to convince you of their value - they just give their gold away like it was so much sand.
You don't have to go find them; they hand themselves to you like a bowl of grits. They don't advertise - they're just there, all around, a gift to consume as you please, or walk on by like they were invisible and worthless, so much urban flotsam and jetsam.
They don't use their own names. They get no credit. They rarely get paid, and they have no control once they leave that wall, that telephone pole, that gate behind. They pour out their hearts and minds onto this ugly-ass concrete jungle all around us, giving away beauty back to a culture that will raze it to the ground, paint it back to black, sand blast it down to rust in a second.
I've always wondered, as a writer, what it feels like to make a painting- spend hours pouring over it, shaping it, massaging it, knowing when to add another gentle stroke, and when to stand down and let it be as it is- and then, to walk away. Your creation is left behind. And each time you want to see your precious creation, you will have to make a voyage back to that spot out in an endless sea that may pull you away in another of life's currents.
As a mother, I find out what that feels like just a teensy-inseey bit every day that I let my son go - to school, to his dad, away for a week.
That, peeps, is the mother's nature: create something so beautiful, so perfect, giving all of yourself to its creation, and then - letting it go out into the world.
That's why street artists are the queens among the mothers.
16 August 2015
Living Art
A year ago I rebirthed my blog as a way to share art and ideas and
poetry. The work is meditations on art, and on life.
After sharing new work, works in progress and the work of artists that
move me, I find myself thinking in new terms. Maria Lassnig, Lee Friedlander,
Romare Bearden, Kehinde Whiley, Robert Davidson. They’re all good, powerful
artists whose work is worth seeing, thinking about, meditating on.
But just as I am a member of a new generation, sharing my point of view
on the works that strike me, I am asking what my generation of artists wants to
say. What do we think? What do we feel? What is important to us? How do we see
that is different from the way generations before us saw?
And why art?
Visual art is communal and it is immediate. We enter galleries and
museums and walk down our city streets and art comes at us, lays itself on,
enters us. We are submerged in art’s wake. It washes over us, like it or
not. And we have reactions – thoughts, feelings, memories, places, spaces,
words come up in us to meet what we see.
When I walk into a museum I am flooded. This is what I want. I want an
immediate experience of something more than my self, a new creation coming from a creator and made from this life, this world, this earth, this experience. I want to see
how someone else sees, experience what they experience. I want to be brought
into a new point of view of this world, and in so doing have a new experience of myself. That’s what happens when I look at art.
And I can do that with you. I can see art with my sister, my son, my brother, my friends. And we
can experience it all together. We can talk about it, we can muse over it, what
it means to you, what it means to me.
Part of what I love about visual art is that because it is visual it is both communal and immediate. What this means is that we can talk about us
now.
Us.
Now.
"nada dura para siempre" (nothing endures forever)
Who are we now? Where have we been? Where are we going? When we see art
together we are in it together, just as we are in this life, this world
together now. So, it’s time to start talking about what we are talking about
now. What we as humanity, as individuals see, what we do, what we make, what we
are living.
There's living art and then there's living art. Any art that is still viewed has a life. But art that is made now, among us, that is living art.
It’s time to listen to my generation.We’re getting older and we're hitting our stride. It’s time to bring us up into the light. That is what you can expect in the new year of this space.
Women carrying
children, carrying incense, carrying
Scent of
themselves,
And the men in
their sacks.
Women, lionesses
all, who work those bales
Like thread, in
and out of economies of loss.
Locusts
collecting where their hair begins
Hovering for the
color, sweat and scent
of women.
Woman, do you
know your worth?
Are you handed a
crown, or did you twist it at the shores
From your magic?
From lotus flower
petals and cattails and your own crazy…
From all those
tears you dropped
the river flooded
the heart paused,
stopped with blood.
What was he to
you,
Cat’s toy, or
true love?
The sphinx rose at
dawn, and lay low under the sun,
Waiting for him
to slip by. She set her net
And caught him…
Lines dropped
from the clouds.
Like fish they
slipped through the water blind to all
But movement.
Put yourself
there, and watch
The current steal
your silver catch.
What was he to
you, but a moment you looked
Finally into the
water.
No Narcissus are
you, rather wakened from blindness
To see the sun…
Hovering always,
a halo of black and dark and twisted
And shining in
that sun,
Yellow as white,
as a night that prays for morning light,
Falling and
laying and lying, and flying
Twisted as man
and woman, and night
Laying down
finally
Where arms are
there, and softness is there,
And she can
breathe.
20 July 2015
an odyssey just here ................ [draft]
Black Odyssey, Romare Bearden
He is at sea.
she is on land.
the irony of her tidepool
feeding on savanna, drawing down seeds
as his horizons grow dark
with stars cast on slack tide
oceans flat and full of mirages
at sea, or at sky?
sand collects at the edges
(his dry kisses)
where young red crabs crawl out
searching under the wide moon
for an easy current
the square-rig of deep ocean
planes, sails slack
and hanging down
waiting to breathe...
(salt on the tongue and in the eyes)
she closes her eyes
reaches out
like a whale she throws her life
against the current
neither the first woman to wait on a man,
nor will she be the last.
cut your tongue and open your eyes,
you are not the first to journey,
albatross slung under your chin,
and longed-for high grasses hallucinated
at your shoulders (her hands, her scent).
swim or hike, traveler,
back to your own bood-bearing chest
(she does not let slip a single drop).
05 July 2015
Works in progress... continue.
"The moon and the stars were the gifts she gave..."
- Johnny Cash
Swoon, Brooklyn Museum 2014
The sun and the moon, bodies of power, both: he warms her heart, her face reflects his fire. She smiles because he watches, though she wait the days to hold his gaze. He shines because it is his to do... creating savanna from stone. She is the reason he lives at night: to come home to her arms. She holds him as none other: he will only warm her, luminous shy rock that she be. In his embrace, she is made a heart-beating stone: a lover finally, a mother firmly, she brings the tide to his warm shores.
23 June 2015
in Progress
Forgiveness was a fire by the road.
It was a fire I made,
and a fire I could extinguish.
It was made of my own skin and smile,
my own voice, the timbre of my ears' echo in my own mind.
The rattle of old bones shaking in my skull
-quivering in pain of the race-
was enough to tear down the house
and wake me from the dead of my sleep.
What was their message?
The die was cast, my own die,
and I looked down into my hands.
The baby I was looked back.
And she could still be saved,
by the fire, by the road.--
Sun is shining:
11 June 2015
Unfinished
Since I've begun writing my own book (Superchampbooks.com! boo-yah!) I haven't gotten out to see much art. There are lots I have wanted to see: Basquiat, the Native exhibit at the Met, Jacob Lawrence... the list goes on.
But I am making my own art.
In the meantime, we are all making works of art of our lives. They are always unfinished. And every step is another possible mistake that may remake us entirely, or destroy something precious, leaving us where we began, only this time... faithless?
Every leap of faith is just this: another possible perfect mistake, or another possible drop into yet a new level of hell.
I've spent the last few weeks in a fog of quiet and withdrawal. I have pulled back from almost everything, dwelling in my book, my past, from whence I came. Not only my past but the present created by my past, brought forward every moment in gestures, in memories, in the reflections we regard in the faces of those we love and strangers alike.
I reflect not only on mistakes, but moments of faith. Moments that allowed me to do what I believed in, when I soldiered in pure will through what seemed like jungles so thick with trouble I had forgotten what horizon felt like.
And it's all still a work in progress. As we speak I continue to make leaps of faith in love, continue to battle with old habits that I know will bring me nothing I want. And I write. As life is ever a work in progress, so are the poems I share this month.
Selection from [artist unkown], Yale Art Gallery, 2014
Sleepy claws
separate the haze,
a lazy gesture from the dream world
of freighters and smoke stacks
and water towers.
Something smells like cooking coal fire,
old things burnt away,
no longer necessary;
better they feed a new life.
The growl from your throat in
my ears, unawake...
the fog lingers at my window
and carries my dreams to cloud people.
Thunder and lemons scent the neighborhood.
Our children sleep well tonight
while we lay, side by side,
watching the savanna for signs.
31 May 2015
My Savanna [draft]
This savanna
Laid out in the
night
Breathing in,
breathing out,
Sand and earth
and dry leaves
That circle
before falling to their places.
In this way, now, I breathe you,
In and out,
making your way; you circle above my mouth.
Earthly things find
their places again.
Just as you will
find your way, back from the hunt
