Full Documentation Project
Peter Erik Lopez
MFA
Transart Institute for Creative Research
May 11, 2020
Michael Bowdidge/David Antonio Cruz: advisors
Autonomy and the Archive in America
October 27, 2019
Currently, I have found my way into a project. The project is still in development. I did not quite understand what I was doing (I am using old family photos in the project). I was given an article to read titled “Autonomy and the Archive in America” by Lauri Firstenberg and some ideas from that article are helping me contextualize what it is I am doing. These are the lines I pulled from that article that best express my current project.
The idea of “unearthing narratives in historical archives” (313).
The idea of “min[ing the archives] for visual material and conceptual strategies” (313).
The concept that the photograph is an “unmediated and objective recording process” coupled with the idea that, in this project, I am looking to mediate the recording process of the photograph and make it subjective (313).
“The photograph functions as a sociological text, as evidence” (of what?) (313).
The archive as an “instrument of engineered spectacle” (314).
The concept of my creating a re-reading of the archive by “self-framing, reobjectification, self-staging, refetishization, and reversal” (314).
November 3, 2019
What are paintings supposed to do in 2019? How do they function? How does work on a canvas compete with installation art that moves and transmits, performance art that has at its center a moving or a screeching or a silent body?
I think we look to visual (painting on canvas) art to give us the same sensations as installation and performance and I think very few painters have come as close to doing this is Francis Bacon.
In Deleuze’s meditation on Bacon’s work titled, The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze explores many facets of Bacon’s paintings that prove Bacon is tapping into sensation. One only has to see a Bacon (the distorted figure, the semi-circular grounding of flat color—often orange or pink—the screaming pope encased, the meat and the bones on the crucifix) to recognize this.
I feel that I do not have this capacity (to tap into sensation) or, at least, it is not inherent in the portrait work that I do. Or, if it is, I am unaware of it. My work, I feel, is directly related to stories. When someone looks at one of my portraits, I believe the physicality of the subject (the dress, the skin, the pose, the furniture) should tell the subject’s story or the story of the sitting—which, itself, is often ripe with psychological Easter eggs.
But I have no clue what the reception of my portraits is to the viewer. Do they touch sensation and I am unaware of this? Do they, in some way convey the story of the person or the session?
The tricky part also, for me, can be expressed in a quote from Deleuze that suggests these two things are counter intuitive: “Sensation is that which is transmitted directly and avoids the detour and boredom of conveying a story” (32).
This art of avoiding boring people with the work is part of the work I think we are all doing as artists: how do we create work that speaks to people without shouting at them?
For instance, I had conceptualized an idea of painting the portraits of white people living in Harlem (gentrifiers) in their homes and titling the work with their addresses. When I was talking to a friend who is not an artist, he suggested the same message (or sensation) could be better accomplished with painting a white person standing below the Apollo theater. I tried to convey to my interlocutor that this sounded boring: the message was being shouted at the viewer and it loses the opportunity for sensation. But my friend insisted that this was the better way to go.
I am starting to understand that sensation (and story) are best conveyed through a trusting of one’s instincts and through a spirit of experimentation and balancing one’s work between the story and the sensation.
Currently, I am appropriating the archives of my family album and working strictly with sensation to tell stories or to tell truth. I do not want to speak to much about he project because i do not want to fall into the trap of producing work that is flat and boring. The work speaks to family, family roles, inheritance, history, memory, truth, and mythology.
November 9, 2019
The process for this latest set of paintings is difficult but I am enjoying the challenge. The genesis was the goat painting: the painting I did of myself as a child on the beach: the painting where I could not get myself to paint my own face as a child so I painted the face of a goat (when thinking about the significance of the goat I must admit that there is no symbolism behind it. What happened that day that I was painting myself as a child was pretty much the same thing that happened in the origin story of the Hindu, elephant-headed god, Ganesha: One day the goddess Durga was bathing. She did not want to be disturbed so she created a guard for the door out of flakes of her skin. Durga’s husband arrived and, having been stopped at the door by this guard, the god of the Himalaya, Shiva, blasted the guard’s head off. Durga was distraught—the guard was like a son to her, created by her. In a panic, Shiva ran out to replace the head of the guard. The first creature he came across was a baby elephant and that is how the elephant-headed god of India was created…and that is how my goat-child was created. Unable to paint my own face as a child because of trauma, I looked around and the first thing I saw was a painting I had done of a goat’s head while in India).
I had decided that if I was going to explore the trauma, and the idea of memory, the best place to begin was an old family photo album. I chose some old family photos (many with myself as a baby or a child) to use, to change, to reconstitute. Sometimes i could clearly see how I would alter the photographs in an oil painting rendering of them. Sometimes I would have to lay the photographs out and stare at them, walk away from them. I always tried not to go with my first impulse in how I would alter the work. I had to think about it, walk around with the idea, let it percolate to measure if it felt honest or contrived.
The memory and the truth I am exploring revolve around many themes: sin, inheritance, Aryan culture, sex, race, parenthood, marriage, abuse.
Gerhard Richter
November 24, 2019
The image here by Gerhard Richter reminds me a lot of how I am working with photographs in my project about memory. Richter’s process makes his photographs have a blurry quality to them. There seems to be a statement here of time or permanence. I am also attempting to discuss time and permanence but through image and memory and symbolism (perhaps a touch of surrealism). I am also very attracted to Richter’s sense of composition. His figurative works are neatly composed. But the neat composition combined with the blurring effect give his work dark undertones.
The blurriness is in full effect in this piece and the monochromatic quality to it is reminding me of how I am working with paint for my memory-project; before I begin each composition, I am laying down a foundation of gray and painting over it while the paint is still wet. I have to work a bit harder to work up the colors, the blacks and the whites in the pieces I am doing but it is giving those pieces the same monochromatic effect I am loving here in Richter’s work. Looking at this particular piece, it occurs to me that these works are about ghosts or about hauntings and I believe that the photographs from an old family album that I am choosing to treat in my paintings (or maybe, the photos that are choosing me) are about the things that haunt me: The specters that wander my subconscious.
This Black and white Richter image has me thinking about going deeper and further back into the family albums. Particularly the albums of my German mother and begin meditating on the images of her life before I was born to see what ghosts emerge.
Marlene Dumas
November 16, 2019
After seeing the direction of my latest group of paintings, my adviser, David Cruz, requested that I look at two artists who he said he sees similarities with in my work. They are Marlene Dumas from South Africa and German artist, Gerhard Richter. I took a look at the work of both artists online and chose three works for each that both caught my attention and works where I could also see a connection to my current work. Here I will present the three from Dumas that I studied. Next week I will address my Richter choices.
I was immediately attracted to this piece primarily, I believe, because it is a portrait. But the style is also very much like the style in which I am using paint for this series. The paint is applied thinly and there is also aspects of the composition (the hands, the collar) that are outlined. Elderly women also play a heavy role in my work right now because I am mining old photographs from an album and many of the pictures record the older German women from my childhood. In both my work and Dumas’ above portrait, the women have a witchy-quality to them which I find interesting because when my mother began telling me the story of her life one day, she began at the Bavarian mountains where she reported that it was rumored witches lived.
This work by Dumas attracts me because of the pairing of a human portrait with an animal’s head. Of late, I have been playing with self-portraits and goat heads and while I have abandoned that path, the new work does include a child with goat eyes, animals, and I am planning to replace the head of a subject with an animal’s head for one of the final pieces. Even before my work with goat heads, I have always been attracted to art that combines animal imagery with human anatomy. I believe this may have sparked from my childhood fascination with Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons.
This Dumas portrait has a dark quality. There seems to be something strange or off about the person presented here. There is also a strangeness and oddity to the vignettes that I am painting. There is something off about each scene that seeks to touch the sensibility of the viewer in a way that disturbs but holds them. I see this quality in the above Dumas portrait. Again the quality of the paint is thin and outlines are prevalent.
What's In a Number?
December 1, 2019
I have seven pieces.
Seven pieces that deal with memory.
Memory recast.
Reshaped.
Reconstituted.
An exploration of truth through symbols, through juxtaposition, through totems, through surrealism.
Seven is not enough, I feel.
There is more to be mined. More to be said. More truth to be explored.
But I am stuck.
The images are yielding no more than seven.
I will stare at the photographs some more tomorrow.
And then put them away.
And then stare some more.
Something will come.
And I will have eight.
Personal Mythology
December 15, 2019
In my current project wherein I am reconstituting old childhood images (that project the memories of my mother, my sister, my step father, step brother, aunt, grandmother, and father) I am attempting to assign these images meaning as symbols of personal mythology.
According to Joseph Campbell, “myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life. Myth is the experience of life and they teach you that you can turn inward” and there you begin to “get the message of the symbols”.
Campbell in The Power of Myth bemoans that we seem to have lost the importance of the old myths (the Greek myths, the Biblical myths, Native American stories, etc). He claims that kids today make their own myths as a result and “this is why we have graffiti all over the city”. While I am attracted to the idea of these marks as evidence of personal mythologies (like today’s Facebook pages where kids are creating their own mythologies through curated images and videos), I am more interested in the societal aspect of mythology that is lost; Campbell asserts that mythologies teach us how to “behave in a civilized world” and I contend that they also teach us about the world.
As such, it is my contention that popular and ancient mythologies pale in this job next to the mythologies of our childhood.
There is no substitute for learning about woman than your mother.
King Priam can not teach you the pain of loss the way a stepbrother may.
A serpent in the garden cannot teach you the concept of deception the way a boy who is trying to fuck your sister can.
In this vein, with this project, I am attempting to imagine my own childhood mythologies and the stories, the traumas, the lived lives, of those around me and how all of their ways of navigating the world impacted and shaped the way I live in the world.
As writer or recorder of my own mythology, I identify as the shaman versus the priest (as distinguished by Campbell).
“The difference between a priest and a shaman is that the priest is a functionary and the shaman is someone who has had an experience”. Further, “the person who has had a mystical experience knows that all the symbolic expressions of it are faulty”. This concept is important to my work. As I sit over the images and meditate, it is only when a symbol appears that blurs the experience that I begin working. It is very important that my mythology is not spelled out. “The symbols [should not] render the experience [but] suggest it”, according to Campbell.
If you haven’t had the experience, Campbell asserts, how can you know what it is?
Mexico City and Beyond
January 20, 2020
It was unfortunate that I couldn’t but I feel that I had visited that city 11 year ago and was able to see and study a lot of art. Though I could only stay with the program briefly this year, it was a very positive experience.
One of the highlights was a your of the Anthropological Museum with artist, Eduardo Abaroa. Eduardo’s in depth knowledge of Mexican history made the visit to the museum all the more special and inspired me to think about some of the mythology we discussed as fuel for future works.
But the greater moment for me was my presentation and the reaction to the work I brought with me.
When I came to Transart, I did not know where and how I would fit in with the program and with the art world at large. I “just” did portraits in a world that seemed to reject any work that was not political or performative. “Make a video” was the Transart motto if all else failed and I even struggled with that.
By the Winter Residency of last year, however, the program found artist David Antonio Cruz as an adviser for me and that began to turn things around. In one studio visit, David inspired me to explore materials, size, juxtapositions (without ever asking me to stop painting portraits).
Then, in Berlin, Michael Bowdidge’s “Becoming Animal” classes inspired me to reveal a nine-year old self portrait I had done—exchanging my little-boy face with a goat face in order to subvert trauma I had experienced as a child. Additionally, Michael’s class inspire me to act out that trauma with fellow classmate Kate Hilliard that unlocked something I was afriad to look at.
As a result of David opening my mind, and Michael opening up my past, I was able to do work I had never thought capable of and the apex (so far) is the work I brought to Mexico City which are the reworked family photos I have been blogging about for the past few months.
The reaction in Mexico City to the presentation of the work and the work itself was overwhelmingly positive and it felt wonderful that my work was connecting in some subtle, haunting way with an audience of artists and curators. I felt like I had arrived at where I was supposed to with the program.
As we wrap up this final year of the program (with a process paper and a grad dialogue) I am beginning to think of what happens after Transart.
What’s next?
How do I continue?
How do I take what Transart gave me and keep that momentum going?
How do I continue to be, to become an artist?
Working on it
February 16, 2020
Since coming back from Mexico City in early January, it has been difficult to get moving but I am still making slow progress towards the process paper and cleaning up the pieces I showed in Mexico City.
For the paper, I have been studying the work of Gerhard Richter with whom my family-photo project has a lot on common. The descriptions of his work and process are giving me a new language through which to describe my process and aims.
My studio advisor, David Cruz, has persuaded me to think about the presentation of the pieces which I will re-present in Berlin. My original presentation was just tacking the pieces on a wall and allowing them to be shown with their rough border and the canvas’ roughly shorn edges. But in conversations with David, I have come to understand that if I am working from photos and conceptually, riffing off photos, the presentation should resemble photos.
Because of the busy nature of teaching and because I am the union representative this year of a school wherein the principal enjoys breaking the contract, it has been difficult getting all of the above accomplished but little by little I am getting there.
Framework for Grad Dialogue
February 29, 2020
Framework for Grad Dialogue
Peter Lopez and Syowia Kyamb
In her article, “Autonomy and the Archive in America”, director and curator, Lauri Firstenberg, discusses ways in which the contemporary artist works with archives. Firstenberg describes the process of many artists working with archives as the artists attempting to “unearth narratives” and “min[ing the archives] for visual material and conceptual strategies” (313). This is the work that I am attempting with the project I have titled, “Her Family Album”.
“Her Family Album” is a body of work that consists of eleven paintings that use the family-album-as-archive and using that archive as its source material. In this work my goal is to restage photographs from a photo album gifted to me by my mother (and carefully curated by my mother) when I was eighteen years old before she would leave me in New York so that she could live in Florida. The visual material I am lifting from the album are images of myself as a child, my sister, my mother and my grandmother. In each of the eleven renderings of the visual material I have selected, I am inserting symbols (demons, animals, bodies) that seek to recalibrate the image of the happy family photo in order to represent something closer to the true experience of my childhood memories: memories steeped in sexual abuse and tinged with the weight of being the direct descendant of a Nazi soldier.
The concept for the work is how the individual memory can establish dominance over the power of the public archive.
Thematically, in the performance titled, “Kaspale’s Playground”, Syowia Kyambi is similarly working through the concept of how archives serve to domesticate the past and how memory can serve to thwart that domestication.
Syowia has created a trickster-specter called Kaspale who haunts archives (sometimes physically, sometimes from great distances) in order to establish the dominance of memory in places where archival interpretation serves to define those spaces in fairer, more benign terms than individual memory would have them defined.
Her latest work tackles the memory of an era and a facility; it is the memory of the twenty-four year rule of recently deceased President Daniel arap Moi of Kenya and the facility he used to torture dissidents in his attempts to consolidate power called Nyayo House. According German news organization, Deutsche Welle, the former president’s official funeral leaflet described Moi as "an icon, a legend and a philosopher.” This power of the archive to calcify impressions is what Syowia is speaking to and, through her performance with both a Kaspale mask and a Kaspale puppet, is attempting to surface and for lack of a better term (but one appropriate for the title of the work) to “play” with—or to play through.
In “Autonomy and the Archive”, Firestenberg lists a number of terms that one can use to name what it is that the contemporary artist is doing with archives; some of those terms are “self-framing, reobjectification, self-staging, refetishization, and reversal” (314).
Both “Her Family Album” and “Kapale’s Playground” seek to self-frame and reverse the archive in the cause of the struggle for the independent memory to not be drowned out by the archive’s attempt at creating a shared public memory whether that attempt be through the (re)writers of Kenyan history or through a parent struggling with a troubling past and a complex vision of motherhood.