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12/25/2008: "Mexico"
I hadn't been in Greece long before I started planning the next venture. Someone had contacted me over the internet about doing a statue for them. I didn't know what it was all about, but during the summer we exchanged a lot of e-mails and gradually I got the picture. An angel for the tomb of a friend. I thought about how cool it would be to do this piece at a small prep school with a nice art center, the Wooster School in Danbury, CT, sharing the technical creation of a statue with some students. I worked up a proposal, asking for work space and offering what I thought would interest students.
I had an in there, one of my old clients from NYC knew someone on the school's board of directors, and since I was an alumnus, the two things seemed likely to give me a good chance of success. I started researching pre-schools for my two kids, and tried to figure out how much transplanting my family from Italy would cost. The last piece of the puzzle was the school's art teacher. I had spoken to a few people there, and had only to propose the idea to her. I did, and received no response whatsoever.
Now you can speculate all you want about why she closed the door, but in any case I'd talked about doing this statue in the US and that had been the attraction for the client. I knew its eventual destination was Mexico. With my plans derailed, I had to come up with something even more attractive, without raising the costs.
Somehow, the idea of doing it in Mexico came out of the woodwork. I talked to my wife about moving the family there, but when I read the State Department travel warnings, it got me thinking, well, this one is not for the family. I wasn't going to be in Juarez or Nuevo Laredo, or Monterey or Chihuahua, the hottest trouble spots, and although little Delicias was right smack in the middle of all of them, it wasn't really on a through road. So all I'd have to do was sculpt away, not drink the water, and stay off the streets after dark for four months. At first I was going to drive, but in the end I parked my Honda with its flashy NY plates in Houston, and flew to Chihuahua. TSA confiscated 3 out of four of my bags, you know, marble tools packed in suitcases with socks, underwear and t shirts padded around it doesn't look good on an x ray screen, but after a few days I got it all back. And how is an interesting sidelight.
There's a big difference between the conduct of officials in the US and those of other countries. Now just imagine, you're entering customs, and you want to know if what you're doing is considered work or not. You want to know if tax is due on the tools, many of them brand new because Mexico is 120 volts and all my Italian tools were 230. The customs guys and the baggage guy filling out the lost luggage report start talking about sculpture and what I'm going to be doing there. They actually get excited! So the question of tax doesn't even come up, they give me 180 days instead of the sixty I asked for, 'just in case...' and lo and behold, when the bags finally show up the baggage guy actually drives them himself from Chihuahua all the way to Delicias, with friends. And promises to come back every so often to see how the work is progressing. I'm beginning to like Mexico. Try to imagine this happening with any official, anywhere, in the US. I think our priorities here are round the bend, and that this is the main reason why so many people in the US have gone postal.
I do see a few Hummers with all black windows around this town, and wonder who owns them. But I know they won't have anything to do with me, if I don't with them. My setup is a marble studio just like the ones I used to work in back in Italy, except that this time, my room is behind the front office. It's true I can't go outside after the workmen leave for the day, because they release four junkyard dogs into the gated enclosure I'm living in, but then again, I'm not here for the nightlife, and they pretty much guarantee there won't be any unexpected visitors.
My client and I drove from the airport in Chihuahua to Delicias and checked into the Casa Grande, a four star place. We went to see the brother and sister of the deceased, visited the cemetery where the statue would go, and stayed for four days more in the hotel. Then he flew back to Houston, and I was on my own. The block didn't come right away, so I passed the time carving little things, some of which are here.
The day after he left, I glanced at the headlines in the local paper, and they were about seven kids at a high school in Juarez, who'd had their hands tied behind their backs, been executed, and left alongside the school's soccer field for the other kids to see. Of course the drug world exists for all teens, but in Mexico it has far worse consequences. Each day there was another story, sometimes two or three, about people found dead here, there, and everywhere, always shot with more than one kind of weapon. Thankfully, not in Delicias. This becomes a part of the culture an artist has to absorb, and in doing so, enter into the mentality of the people around you. Beauty is in fact, an escape, which is why in so many oppressed places and times, beautiful art was produced and desired. In the sterile world of country clubs, of keeping up with the Joneses and their flat screen TVs, of getting that new Prius or better, there really isn't any need for art. What amazes me about Mexico is that I know I can sell every piece I make here. It hasn't ever been like that for me in the places I went chasing after the money. Yes, there were buyers, and of big pieces, but how many thousands would pass by something I spent months making, without even glancing at it? Not here. The red carpet is rolled out for artists more than for anyone else.
By my third day working, a family comes in and sees a bas relief of a girl's face I did in a couple of hours placed on a shelf in the office. They ask if I could do a portrait of a deceased member of their family, in the same way I'd done that one, and hand me a postage stamp size photograph to work from. I have no idea what to charge, and no one seems to want to tell me. But by night time, during a ride around town I didn't think I'd be taking, the son of the owner tells me a hundred dollars is too cheap. I'm a bit surprised, because everyone around here drives thirty year old pick up trucks with broken windshields, and you can get three Coronas for a dollar. I didn't imagine you could make more than a hundred dollars a day this easily here, however, in Delicias, art and the dead are highly honored, and both worth spending money on.
Not so in someplace like Mexico City. An artist will have the same problems exhibiting there and selling their work as in any cosmopolitan setting anywhere in the world. I start to wonder if perhaps the best places to produce art are the remote ones, where you won't be contaminated by anything except what moves you to create in the first place, and perhaps a desire to serve someone else's needs. Wanting to show in a 'major' venue, is pretty much the same as wanting that big flat screen, so you can tell everyone you have one. It's pretty far removed from what art is supposed to be all about, and if it becomes the driving force in what you produce, you can count on it corrupting, in one way or another, what might have been beautiful and pure.
You can see art corruption in another form if you visit the Menil collection in Houston. While the taste of the Menils is worthy of being called great, subsequent curators who made acquisitions after their deaths brought down the level of the whole significantly. When you consider that all curators of all museums are beholden to numerous corrupt entities, it should surprise no one that their choices of what to acquire are often suspect. No works are ever bought just because they're good. The main corrupting influence comes from the largest donors to those museums, who have the leverage to see that what they want gets bought, because it serves no one, particularly the curators themselves, to refuse their requests.
One of the greatest, and purist, collections in the United States is in the Frick museum in NYC. Before donating his property as a museum, Charles Frick insisted that no artworks be added, nor any moved from their assigned spots within the building. These masterpieces remain a testament to the clear vision of one man, as he did so well to foresee, and their placement within what used to be his home is nothing short of divine.
Ah, Mexico! These four months have just begun, and all I'd ever believed about this country has proved to be baseless and unfounded.
Except for what I found out in the days that followed. It started with a report that there'd been a shooting right here in Delicias. It seemed that at midnight, right next to a huge statue I'd been to look at that afternoon, three men were sprayed in their car with machine gun fire from another car. Well, I told myself, it was on the outskirts of town, not anywhere near where I was living and working. And the hour was one where all good people ought to be in bed. My block still hadn't arrived, and that was making me a bit nervous anyway, not the best time to start reasoning what's safe and what isn't. I'd spoken to the Mexican expediter, Armando Carrillo, many times and he'd seemed friendly and eager to please. But ever since I'd paid him, he'd been on vacation in Cabo San Luca, and I'd only been able to talk to his stand in, who was neither friendly nor helpful. I'd called many times, and although I was assured I'd get a call back, I never did. I'd been here more than a week, having been told my two ton block of pure white Carrara would be here before I was, and was not anxious to be here if I couldn't work on what I came to do.
The next day, two people were executed on the street where my studio is. The local police chief was killed the same day, at two in the afternoon, in a separate incident. A lot of these killings are done with 'cuerno di chivos', or AK-47 assault rifles, by killers arriving in groups of brand new, buffed out and loaded pick up trucks. I see these trucks all over the place, but none are owned by anyone I know, since anyone who's working isn't making enough to buy one.
They say that every day in Mexico, ten people are killed this way. In Delicias, in the last three days, there have been nine. It's time to cut and run. I can do this statue back in Italy, and besides, I miss my family. Get me to the airport!
