I have not published this lecture since it was given. It is the 4th in a series of articles on Martin Ramirez, 2 in Folk Art Magazine and one featured in the Vernacular Visionaries Catalog curated by Annie Carlano. I thought it most interesting in conjunction with and in the context of the current article on Martin Ramirez in Folk Art Magazine:
Greetings!
I offer this presentation as a libation to a great and important artist of the Western Hemisphere. I place words as a 'comida del alma' on his grave in respectful awe of what he was able to do and in appreciation of how our perception of how his fate changed over time and place. '
On the Day of the Dead what we give is as much about being alive and surviving as it is about the pathways after life. In Martin Ramirez' work we have been given all kinds of paths to follow. I celebrate also the genius and courage of an exhibition like Annie Carlano's because of her insistent and appreciative recognition of that fact that to get to our walls the work of an artist passes through a process of creation unlike any we can imagine; that it stems from the compression of folklore and genius in consummate spasms of outrageous creativity and it expands the big culture itself. This art straddles many worlds. The art you see is the end result of extremely complex process. We suffer from not being there the day the art was pulled and shaped from the ethers but that magical engagement; that tremendous feat of health, strength and life was poured into the work by an artist for reasons rarely if ever consistent with the demands of the academy.
On this auspicious day also I ask you not to be killers. I ask you not to fall into the idiocy of believing this work was made as a result of insanity, of the death of a human intention or by a simple or naïve person. Do not fall for the glib inanity of that word ‘outsider’. We have been taught to point a finger at a Martin Ramirez or Zemankova etc. and say "You are no longer one of us, you are insane. You are an Outsider, or your work is vernacular so it must be funky." but I ask you to stop and wonder aggressively what this might mean to you if you are black, brown yellow or beige. If you are Native-American or Asian. If your spirituality is not Western or if you are from a culture that operates within the reality of visionary experience the way Western Culture once did before it killed and maimed to eradicate any culture counter to it. Think instead of how hard you fight on a daily basis to defend your very humanity with some kind of dignity because the world makes assumptions about where you come from or how you shape your spiritual life. For years, and actually still in the present, people have made these assumptions about Martin Ramirez. It was and is easier to call him and his work American and 'insane' and ‘outsider’ than to say it is the work of a poor Mexican. Try to see what this implies. If you accept any of those views you are killing Ramirez.
Look into your own lives and find the ones you love who have been hit by drugs, alcohol, depression or schizophrenia, diabetes, cancer, AIDS, senility or the haunting fogs of old age. Did you push them away? Did you shove them beyond the range of your hearts and call them Outsiders or Marginal? Perhaps it is easier to do that with someone else about whom little is known and whose life began somewhere else. Out there. Not here.
No artist in this exhibition was so far away from the mortal coil that he or she lost her humanity. Since 9/11 we have sought heroes and I wonder who is more heroic than those who overcome obstacles physical and spiritual to make art that teaches, reaches out and heals. Art that carries the meaning of folkways and cultures and protects that culture at the same time that it pushes the edges further and helps that culture mutate and change. To make positive energies in a negative situation defines heroism well enough for me.
These artists stand between some pretty difficult rowboats. Like magnets they seem to attract every art theoretical shortcoming in the last fifty years or more of folklore and art history. But now the vast machine has come to a complete halt and can't go on in any kind of accurate fashion till all this gets sorted out. Until the folklorists can see the importance of these Gatekeepers of Culture they will never fully understand the natural progressions of syncretism, hybridity and Creolization. Until the minority of the Western Artworld joins the rest of the world no history of art will ever be complete. The closed door is being kicked down for them by the Asians, the Latin Americans, the Africans, et al. We have stepped through the Looking Glass and found all our information is hollow. If we don't embrace the complexity of the truth we will be forever vulnerable in wondering why fundamentalism suddenly rears its head in places we thought were quaint and picturesque. Mainstream art in this country is more often than not prey to severe tunnel vision. When exotic has come to be a bad word we need to look beyond political correctness and get a reality check from the art itself. Vernacular Visionaries is just such a reality check.
This art starts with a homeground. Homeground is the oral culture that makes available a matrix of intentionality that introduces mythmaking, worship of ancestors, magic, music, food, adornment etc. as a utilitarian vehicle for a double process of transformation: Self and the people in the space around you. A cultural homeground provides a language the artist will speak. With very few exceptions, by studying this homeground the language will be revealed by which our understanding of the ‘oral aesthetic’ can be increased. In the best of worlds the the homeground will reveal whether the artist has made the work as an ancestral repository, an amulet, a memorial, a site of self or cultural location etc. The most basic example of this with Ramirez is that if you are not told that he was Mexican then you are just going to be moving unknown objects around on an imaginary plane with none of the imagery seen from the obvious advantage of its native context. Of course by native here I am not referring to ethnicity. In this field we seem to take for granted anglo and European homegrounds because they form the alleged basis of the alleged mother culture. But when it comes to non first world cultures the ivory tower fiercely resists the idea of a different perspective. The bottom line is that if we do not view the work from the perspective we will never meet that work on its own terms.
Examining the drawings of Martin Ramirez from the Euro-view of pure formalism or by the fact that he was in a mental insititution in the United States is to deny him his homeground. For Martin Ramirez this began with a mostly non-Indian enclave of folk Catholicism in the Los Altos region of Jalisco to the North-East of Guadalajara. There is a similar situation in the small Spanish Christian towns in Northern New Mexico. While little can ever be empirically proven it is a fairly safe assumption to make that at least some of this folk Catholic iconography will be present in the drawings. But it doesnt stop there.
Those looking for cultural purity in the work of non-western self-taught artists are nearly always going to be disappointed. This is part of the key to whom these people are because quite often they are the ones who are pushing the creative envelopes of the cultures and because that creativity is an organic part of the culture they are visually advancing and changing the culture itself. The Navajo artist/healer Hosteen Klah, out of cultural necessity, made previously taboo sand paintings public, Charles Willeto expanded the vocabulary of Navajo healing dolls and fetishes, and George Liautaud and Hector Hyppolite of Haiti have materialized the Lwa of Vodou in ways that had never been seen within the culture before. Whether cultural or personal, always running on the grid of homeground, there will be second or third function to the pieces made by self-taught artists. In a wholistic way the work is more often than not utilitarian in some way. By studying enough of these artists in this light we are able to finally put together certain cautious universals. We just have to remember over and over again that utilitarian does not have to be a purely material concept.
In the visionary space of the homeground art is seldom made for arts' sake. It rarely if ever takes part in the ongoing art-historical dialogue. It may stand in that place formally and influentially but its concerns are wider and less specifically temporal. The hospitals that Ramirez found himself in the middle of the 20th Century when shock treatment was a common panacea were by nobody's definition paradise. Conversations with one of the men who took care of him builds a picture of tremendous depersonalization. He was in the belly of the beast in as unmetaphorical sense as possible.
I think something needs to be understood here. In the earlier days before we knew that Ramirez was from this atypical enclave of non-Indian population we sought to understand some of Ramirez' imagery through the filter of Mexican Native American/Catholic symbolism. This satisfied some of the images but by no means gave a complete lexicon. One could almost hear the sighs of relief go up when it was found that more than likely Ramirez work had as its basis a folk Christian cosmology. I think it is just as important to consider the ramifications of a folk Christianity. In our mass culture where oral aesthetics have all but been pushed into megabytes and mass consumerism the fundamentalism of basic religions is but a shadow concept to most people. It isn't going to work five days a week and then Church as a feelgood experience on Sunday.
Whether there was Indian influence on Ramirez or not there were still certain basic cultural signs that can be tied to an oral culture, As Chiji Akoma has said in a recent issue of Caribbean Review: " I locate myth within an aesthetic of orality that celebrates the deployment of mask idioms, the coevality of material and immaterial worlds as constituents of reality, and the resistance to individual authorship in cultural production." The artists we call self-taught or 'vernacular' to me are the ones who are able to live the double role of cultural gatekeepers and individuals at the same time howbeit within a homeground context. The issue of the art world and the role the artist might play there does not factor into this until later when a third force takes that work and displays it as art.
Folk Catholicism potentially blends "the coevality of material and immaterial worlds as constituents of reality" as deeply as any Indio-Christian syncretic viewpoint might. The drawings of Martin Ramirez blend his own visionary power with the iconography and the mythology of the vernacular church. The similarity with some of the Native American imagery comes from Place, from the actual interaction with the oral cultures' force of mythologizing and the local reality of barrancas, witchcraft, ghosts, ancestral memories and the Church input of ancestors, saints with suprahuman powers of healing, miracles and the constant dualities of home/wilderness, and the day by day, minute by minute struggle of good versus evil.
One of the other differences between this kind of art and the art engendered by the academy is its role as a visual manifestation of oral culture. Many times its functionality serves the same purpose as storytelling.....In much of the work we can see some kind of narrative at play. In the work of institutionalized artists this often is mixed with the homeground imperative of location. The artist is attempting to record or define himself in both a local and personal sense. Anyone can look at Martin Ramirez' drawings and see that we are witnessing some kind of narrative. It is the likeliness of this narrative that makes me think these are not just odd postcards of the disintegration of a mind, that these are not just ‘what you see is what there is’ picture sof local animals. It is the nature of the peasant homeground to make all things active parts of binary natures. The desert is never an empty desert; it roils with energies hidden beneath its visible surfaces. Beginning with what each place recalls; its songlines if you will. Even today along the roads of southwestern America a place where a loved one has died becomes a shrine, becomes a piece of earth imbued with a public and private memory of the tragedy that has taken place there. There are recurring characters, imagery, buildings , animals and most of all landscape in Ramirez’ drawings. He had made a list of markers that are never truly solipsistic because they belong to his culture as well as to him. If he was alienated from Los Altos in terms of distance he never lost its Place in the recall of his drawings. In most instances this is the landscape of Los Altos. But remember now that this landscape even if it is specifically Los Altos has a presence both material and immaterial. It is this landscape that Ramirez has made the matrix of his dreamlike imagery
It will be forever almost impossible to explain the exact intentionality of Ramirez' work. But this does not leave us without any recourse. We have the overall corpus of the work and we have enough other artists who have worked this way to finally be able to put together some greater universalities to the work in general. It brings us to the toughest and perhaps most controversial arena of looking at his artwork. Why did he make it? Why did he hide under a table, mix his colors in a small pot he made from hardened oatmeal, and make these epic drawings? Were they messages to others? Were they like a last will and testament? Were they an explanation to others of how he lost the battle against Evil and wound up in the earth-monsters belly? Were they drawn for himself or as an apology to his family? To manifest the constant noise of death and evil and the twisted life in his souless prison.? Some of these things will never be answered but it is my contention that a reading of the drawings in a mythological and/or folk narrative sense is possible even necessary. The irony is that this work which seems to trace the epic journey of a soul into the underworld is ultimately and posthumously successful. Were they an admission of guilt in the face of evil or were they his last chance to protest and claim his innocence in a traditional war of good and evil that began in his town in Jalisco?
To the Catholic in Mexico the kind of death you have will reflect on the kind of life you lived. The successful death is within the bounds of Good and of family. A bad death is a death of transgression; one in which you abandoned the symbols of Good: Family, Home, God for the world of the Other: strangers, the Wilderness or the (nothome). There even appears to be a conflict with the types of women Ramirez depicts in his drawings. She is either the Virgin Inmaculada or she is a more Westernized woman who in a couple of drawings has a rope around the waist of a small man. In the Mexican catholic homeground women are either Mothers and wives or else whores and city women who move on the points of evil. The morality is clear. The Church may declare the proper path for a lifestyle but it is the will of the individual that will dictate the bounds of that path. For this reason it is possible to carry ones death inside oneself. One can be dead while still alive carrying it like a dark cloud through ones life.
Why are we so moved by the drawings? It is because of the ambiguity of their outcome. We are attracted like moths to their questioning of the moral landscape. Is the drawing of Ramirez in his death mantle and a smile on his face a happy ending? There is a sense of afterworld, of a place where the familiar can loom up and suddenly become unfamiliar. Was Ramirez still fighting the battle by the time he got to the hospital or has he accepted that his failure had given him over to the evil that hovers over the poor peasant most of his life. So easy to transgress. If these drawings are the maps of relocation then we might want to decide which world Ramirez has self-located in…memory of the moral part of homeground; family, church, work, the Saints, the virgin or has he accepted the fact already that given the hospital and the lost wild souls in his ward, among them murderers and brutes, he was in hell and if not hell at least purgatory, abandoned and forlorn in a place so distant from what he had grown up with that even the language was untouchable.
To me these drawings represent his fight to answer these questions. Whether they succeeded in giving him in a sense of self-resurrection will never be known to me but they certainly leave evidence of a heroic battle to raise those questions. All in all these are humble drawings in content although conceptually they are huge; they are not violent or undignified. Sometimes they seem to me to be the visual equivalent of a Saint’s musing in a cave in the desert. They are not made by a man who is intentionally bad. Self effacing, perhaps. The only victims who show up in the imagery are the small everyman figure who is possibly Ramirez himself. The drawings might be self questioning in terms of moral weakness, perhaps, but it is interesting to note that even Traylor portrayed his demons of drink repeatedly so that we know some kind of drama was being played out in pictorial memory. Though larger, though more populated by beings, though seemingly more detailed the heart of Ramirez drama is more veiled than Traylor’s. This is true to its peasant Mexican character the way Traylor’s poetic mode of depiction is directly tied to his experience of the South. Though both are to some degree tragic, Ramirez’ picaresque journey is more existential. He watches a lot and records a lot without necessarily revealing his ultimate opinions. We can only guess as to the degree of his enigma. He is moving through his drawings with the deliberate speed of a wanderer who wishes to see all. His autobiography has become folktale and myth in its incorporation of the immaterial aspects of his cosmos. Traylor remains more of a pragmatist…his mysteries are those of abstraction and the many complex layers of social and temporal space hidden in the seeming distance of his drawings.
There are visual clues to Ramirez’ sense of desire for resurrection however. To me the images he cut out of newspapers of vehicles and women and buildings hint of some kind of hope. If one was completely dead inside chances are that first there might not be any drawings at all and second that these activated images of a different world would hold little fascination to someone who had given up in their incarceration. Depression will deflate excitement. Vehicles, women, buildings….all symbols of an inner restlessness, a restlessness that manifests in the drawings as well which leads to yet another theory. That perhaps the evil in Ramirez life was this very restlessness. That his need to move, his need to head North, to find the sources of those things he cut out from the magazines and newspapers, are also what his drawings are about. That they represent epic journeys is not hard for anyone to see.
The utilitarian aspect of this art, for example, when a Santero like Nick Herrera makes a saint, is only part of the process that began with vision and manifested in the life of the icon-maker….the artwork becomes a flag in the ground of the great moral battle that began long before the piece was conceived yet is linked directly to it. The physical aspect is only the end result of a long metaphysical process combined with an intense life.
We tend to forget in this field that the piece and the life are inextricably joined but that this is only of value to the observer when the details of the life relate directly to the making of the artwork. In folk art we are used to speaking of the material utilitarianism of the work. In our field I have just begun to try and deal with the process of immaterial utilitarianism. This is bound to be controversial in a society that has made material culture its ballast. I can best exemplify this by saying that there are some collectors who collect art for the object itself and others who collect for not only the object but the powers and forces it represents as well. The great majority of work by self-taught artists, though by no means all, was not made for museum walls or indeed even the walls of collectors. It had always had a different functionality. This does not place any judgment however on the art that was….we are led to ask each time: If this is not art for art’s sake than for what’s sake is it art?
The great question then becomes ; did a live man or a dead man make these drawings? Did a man who hoped to rise above present circumstances and continue a long journey render these drawings as a shout of self-sustaining hope? Or was he someone who realized his life was over? If he didn’t realize it was over, if he hadn't already passed the border into the afterworld is it then possible that he was making these drawings as a map to help himself understand the complex way through purgatory and out of the underworld into heaven?
