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10/17/2005: "Jekyll and Hyde and…"
There’s a song by the British rock band Coldplay I sometimes catch my daughters humming on the way to school and I always feel compelled to sing along with them. The opening bit goes ‘when you try your best but you don’t succeed / when you get what you want but not what you need / when you feel so tired but you can’t sleep / stuck in reverse…’ I’m particularly drawn to that second verse. It’s a great song, in uplifting crescendo, contrary to what the opening might suggest. [note: if you’re one of those who tends to read the first paragraph of a blog and proceeds to punish the blogger for his mediocrity and defeatist stance spare yourself the effort, this is not about defeat, this is just an intro.]
What I want is to retreat back into my studio – my hermit’s cave – digest everything I’ve lived through and accomplished in the past five years to extract whatever it may yield and paint, paint, paint, without further care for the outside world and all its wondrous distractions. Dr. Jekyll keeps reminding me I’ve seen enough of it for the time being and I should get on with my art and deserve the respite. I go to sleep listening to Dr. Jekyll, determined to spend the next 6-8 months getting a new set of paintings done. But then I wake up and Mr. Hyde catches a glimpse of all the tools at his disposal and informs me that respite is out of the question at this juncture, that what I need is to get myself out there, promote my Borneo work, make a bundle – he fools me crying out ‘carpe diem’.
Apart from all the paintings I brought back [I told you 3 blogs ago they would be a problem] he sees the 300 catalogues I had made before leaving; one interactive CD-rom I perfected over the past year teaching myself Flash MX; one DVD art-movie of the Brunei Art Forum’s coming about, by a young video-artist who represented the Philippines at the Gwangju Biennale; and, of course, he knows of my site and the occasional blog with absolutearts.com. I know where Mr. Hyde is coming from and quite understand his disappointment. He feels let-down. Thinking very much in tune with him back in Borneo, I had launched a first offensive sending out e-messages with a brief description of my activity over the past five years plus a link to the absolutearts.com site to all major Art institutions in Portugal and galleries I wanted to call attention to my work, informing them that I would soon be back. I wasn’t looking for representation, I only hoped that one or two recipients would open the message, read the name and, perhaps, if I got lucky, take a peek inside – to have expected more, Dr. Jekyll kept whispering from behind, would have been unrealistic.
But that was months ago, I had almost forgotten all about it, I argued with Hyde. Besides, no one answered back and as far as I know only the Orient Foundation in Lisbon and the Fundação D. Luís in Cascais, where I live on the outskirts of Lisbon, actually had the message displayed on their screens – but did they read it? All the others [Casa de Serralves, Gulbenkian Foundation, Culturgeste, Centro Cultural de Belém, Museu do Chiado] deleted their messages without opening them, it’s amazing what computers can let you know these days. All I want to do now is paint, undisturbed. Jekyll is delighted, of course, and uses this as leverage to remind me that I’ve done my fair bit to try to reach out and that I should hurry back to what is most important: producing paintings. People will come by the studio, he whispers, and buy them sooner or later [he’s been right on previous occasions]. He has been very crafty in postponing a second offensive until the local elections are over, and he isn’t altogether wrong, very often the cultural agenda suddenly seems to vanish when somebody new gets elected to the Town Hall. What would have been the point of handing out promotional packages to a bunch of people who could very well soon be the wrong people? You can argue that the more catalogues and CD-roms I dish out the better, but they cost money and I’m not swimming in it. Hyde was mute [but not for long, don’t you worry].
In the pre-election period Jekyll enjoyed the silence and kept me going on his side of the tracks. At a dinner-party last week he had me babbling about how I was enjoying not having to organize anything and just paint, paint, paint until somebody at the other end of the table said it was a shame not to perk up my name in the local scene with a little promo using all the material and experiences I had just told them about. Hyde has of course taken over since then. The elections over and the results known, Hyde has even awoken with newfound hope. It seems that those in power will remain for another four years with an even greater majority. Judging by some of the more positive changes I’ve had a chance to witness, they were culturally-minded and therefore approachable and receptive at the outset. One of the greatest surprises [joys] was to discover that Cascais will be having a new Arts Centre – the hockey stadium and famed rock venue of the 70’s and 80’s where I first saw Genesis perform the fabled ‘The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway’ and other unforgettable gigs has been torn down to make way for it. There’s a few things I definitely want to check out regarding this and I’ll keep you posted: one of the things we artists had been fighting for before I made the move to Berlin was for the local authorities to make spaces available for artists to rent studio space at affordable prices. Could this be it?
Anyway, in my attempts to keep Hyde happy and subdued I’ll be at work on a second campaign as you read this. The plan being to hand a copy of the catalogue and a CD-rom to each of those very same institutions and galleries (and a few more I’ve come across since arriving), regardless of the response (or lack of it) to our first effort. Again, the idea is to force them to be confronted with my name, I’m not pressing for representation or even towards leaving works on consignment unless they suggest it, there are ample opportunities to show Art in interesting settings in and around Lisbon [Roman ruins, 17th century chapels, water reservoirs…] and that’s what I’ll be aiming for primarily. [The DVD? That’s only for the people who ask the right questions. If the Orient Foundation or the Fundação D. Luís do come through I can always propose to give a talk on my experience with the artists of Brunei and how we got together to make a difference, then it would make sense to show the movie. Who knows, perhaps that would lead to an invitation to stage a show… but that’s yet another part of me raving on.]
Once this second assault is over I should have relative calm – 6 to 8 months just painting and writing the odd blog. As long as it’s just those two [Jekyll and Hyde] contending for my attention all is well. It’s when all the other ‘I’s start voicing their wants and needs at the same time or in quick succession that I sometimes fear things might get sticky and difficult to manage. But they exist, they are very real – the married me, the fatherly me, the housekeeper me, the hungry me, the playful me, the traveling me… – and they aspire to some quality time alongside the various facets of the artist me. I acknowledge their existence, accept them and try to accommodate them as best I can lest they get disgruntled and smear the whole picture. Sure, they take up time and energy from painting but without them I’d have very little to put back in. It’s pretty much the balancing act Walter King had told us about.
