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08/01/2005: "Creativity: The Baron Conservancy" by Hyacinthe Baron
For The Preservation of Art, Desert and Human Nature: I just spent a couple of hours at The Creativity Making Your Mark(tm) Institute working on an Art work that I believe will be my ultimate act of creativity and the culmination of all the artistic endeavors of my 50 year career. Nothing could have led me to believe that my greatest creativity would be expressed in film and a conceptual Earthwork in Progress. We have dedicated 5.5. acres of a site we own that is surrounded by 1000 Government protected acres and is in the center of a vortex surrounded by four mountain ranges including Joshua Tree National Park's Pinto Mountains.On this pristine arid land, volcanic cratered, dry lake bedded, veined out gold mines, salt deposited, alabaster strewn, I intend to continue to create the clay and fiberglass monumental figurative sculptures featured in my films. It is our intention to create a permanent Sculpture Park to which sculptors will be invited from all over the world to work with earth mediums and to impress and impose their creativity on this land as permanent installations to be shared with the public.
Short film documentaries will be made of these displays and sent to museums and galleries. The short film In Search of Ancient Spirits is in the Mona Museum in Detroit, and a submission to the Whitney Biennial and numerous film festivals. Which creates a totally other venue for exhibiting works of art.
If there is one truth about art it is this: Once it is released Creativity flows like swollen washes in a summer downpour.
Surely this is the explanation for the works I have recently viewed from past Whitney Biennials. Art it seems is no longer about the crafts of drawing and painting and sculpting in marble and clay cast in bronze.Marcel Duchamp, my mentor advised and abetted artists of my generation in Greenwich Village in the 60's. He single handedly made it okay for art to be made of anythingso long as the artist had a hand in changing the perception of found objects.
Duchamp was a master draughtsman, in other words, he could draw, he went through a period of training and self discipline and painting until he found himself disgusted and in my opinion felt it was too much work to make art - and for what?
Duchamp's vision was better realized by obsessive making of glass panels with remote descriptions so that a viewer is hard pressed to comprehend the significance of the statements about the art with the images.
The bottom line? He had a sponsor, a wealthy woman who "believed in him."
Count Panza di Buomo believes in James Turrell and has given what is rumored to be at least 11 million dollars to help him realize his dream of transforming the Roden Crater in N. Arizona into a space wherein the art is about creating with "light." Sketches for this project are issued as combination lithographs and gravure: a suite of 6 18"x6" sells for $11,000.00 Eleven seems to be the magic number here. Perhaps it has more to do with the 11:11 phenom than with creativity?
I can not stretch or paint a canvas that big. I can create an Earthwork in Progress and put all my dreams into the Landscape of The Mind. Is it too big a job for a mere artist trained in the traditional school?
Here is the best part: The point of art was always, has always been, to make visions manifest, to create the corporeal body and life story of mythological figures drawn from the imagination and captured spiritually and to learn craft to accomplish exactly that in traditional mediums.
I am older now and it has been hard work making my art. Now I can sit at my desk and create a map of my site and imagine all the buildings and alternative structures, installations, sculptures, events, exhibitions, crowds that might happen - that could happen - and that might just never come to be, except on paper as drawings and computer images of digitally manipulated landscape photos sold as sets to collectors who are anxiously awaiting the opening of my dream site. These conceptual creations could be shown in major exhibits at galleries and museums. Thousands, millions could share my visions.
But will anything happen? Will anything ever be added to the pristine landscape? Will anything new and creative be added to our stores of knowledge and art? Is this to be the future of art? Remote, distant, projections of what might be, could be, and might never be? Is creativity now in the hands of curators out of the schools of Academic Intellectualistic Art? (As Krishnamurti once said: "There are two things you cannot do at the same time, think and act.")
Are the museum boards and galleries defining creativity as something so different from what an artist feels in their spirit that they now must think with their minds and not create from their hearts?
As a small child my mother often found me playing in the dirt until after dark. Perhaps I was there then, visiting The Landscape of The Mind, waiting, to get somewhere - where creativity resides.
I will be busy filling hand painted bottles with sand from my site and will add gold glitter for the light and sparkle. The only tools I will need to create these metaphoric art works are a shovel and a funnel. These are new tools for me to create with but I feel assured they will sell well as signed limited editions.
Let me know your thoughts. Visit me at www.barongallery.com.
