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