No Artist Left Outside: Autobiography of a Gallery
Introduction:
It begins with Haiti. My first conception of the real world begins with Haiti. It begins with hearing about Haiti from the first time I could hear about anything. It began in my father’s stories. Haiti as a place where the water was turquoise, where a hungan put a raw egg in my father’s hand in the 1940s and it burned his palm. He showed me the scar many times as proof. It was where the two paintings by Hector Hyppolite on our wall came from and later because of those Hyppolites I read about Haiti. Those paintings that, even though they were only covertly Vodou; a landscape of his village, St Marc and a Vodou offering of a bowl of flowers sacred to Ezili, drew my attention in and soothed me as a child and later when things went badly..
And subsequently Africa and Australia. No one called it politically incorrect exoticism then. The Blue and White Nile books by Alan Moorehead. My first porn was the Kama Sutra and The Perfumed Garden, Tropic of Cancer…My role models back then Henry Miller and Sir Richard Burton. Living was about art and sex was a major part of that along with food and travel and music and magic. What else after all could matter more in this erratic poem of a planet. The world was unknown and erotic. Haiti came at a perfect time. It came when I was just beginning to understand that I believed in magic. I wasn’t blind to world politics and the poverty of these places the art came from. But I needed to see it.
When I was small my father took me to all the museums in New York until at the age of ten or eleven I was allowed to take the sub ways to go by myself and he stopped accompanying me. He also introduced me to the vari-colored fairy tale books and to T.H. Whites Once and Future King. He secreted me out when I was ten to a place on sixth avenue where a man dressed in Gnostic clothing and a horned helmet recognized his footsteps from 20 feet away, said hi Sam to my father and introduced himself to me as Moondog. Do you see the birth of a schizophrenic world view here? I was handed Seabrook’s horrid racist book The Magic Island at the same time as Dialectical Materialism. I had to sort it out for myself. I didn’t know that I was being judged parentally by my parents. It’s like giving a kid a gun to see if he will shoot someone. He took me to the magic shops to feed my love of magic but it was always to show me that behind this magic was sleight of hand and carny language. That no matter how many times I made the coin disappear and said in a medicine show voice “It will amaaaaaaaaaaze you.” It was always a trick.
Except to me. Even if I was the one doing it.
I saw magic differently. Then. And now. Willing suspension of disbelief was a way of life, not a prelude to skepticism. The apprenticeship of young Arthur to Merlin sank in so deeply deep. It wasn’t about sleight of hand. It was a full on embrace of mystery. It was science taken to its most primal level. When you get to the cells, to the DNA, to the nucleus, you are still ultimately left with a mystery. It made the willing suspension of disbelief an art. Science did not exclude magic. Life itself is occult!! I found it everywhere.
I was going to be a marine biologist because that would make me a traveler between worlds. Cousteau for me was a spiritual advisor with his films and a warner of what is happening now. But how vividly do I remember the satisfaction of knowing science would transform and heal the world.
And the biospheres I loved most were in those countries that had intrigued me most early on. I found magic everywhere. I found it in collecting rocks, in my chemistry set. I found it in the wounded pigeons and cats I brought home to heal. I found it in the garter snakes who never ate and the burbling through the night of the wonderful swampy scent of my fish tanks. I didn’t want to own occult power. I wanted to observe it, to know about it and recognize it. I wasn’t interested in being alpha. It wasn’t about power as much as it was to find a key to something that had the potential to always eternally renew itself. I wanted to be the ideal holder of arcane information from the way mycelium spread through the earth to the way a soul greets and regreets its ancestors before rebirth.
I grew up in mixed and changing streets. Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Irish and African Americans were my every day. Mixtures ebbed and flowed. It was Irish beating us up later on during the Nam demonstrations. Jews and Italians were the next wave, then African-Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, and Haitians. Our building was like that on Riverside Drive in Washington Heights till it leaned too much in one way for my parents and we were the only ‘white’ people left in the building and my father moved us up to Fort Tryon Park. But I was just 15 and the problems had already begun because my girlfriend was black. I was a street nerd. That’s different than a geek nerd. Street nerds read books and couldn’t play ball too well but they got girls. They got music. They survived by making bullies laugh.
I went to sleep at night to the sound of rumbas on Riverside Drive. The polyrhythmic sensuality of summer nights in Washington Heights will stay with me forever. I was second-generation American, my parents were not religious. I wandered way beyond past the classic Jewish parameters of neighborhood and culture. I went to synagogue for the pure joy of ritual when I went. I was stoned for my barmitzvah and the reception was in a Chinese restaurant. I didn’t reject those roots I just saw them as intertwined with everyone else’s. Outside my windows lived the rest of the world and all I had to do was walk out of my apartment to get there and follow the ethnic mix of savory food scents, all garlic based, to get to the steamy dance of the sidewalks.
You have to understand the power of drums, the influence of them on me subliminally all my life from the guaguanco of those streets to the purr of ceremonial drums in the hills of Kenscoff in Haiti. Even now, seeing the sun set hovering on the next river over I hear the drums. I am back there, they played most of the night till random cops shut them down. Those passionate tone poems only silent in the dead of Winter. The mambo line of generations imprinting on me. Those sounds striping the night in zig zag patterns so deadly tight in their syncopated precisionism. I listened to Mongo Santamaria and Cal Tjader’s Soul Sauce along with Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Tim Buckley, topped by Lightning Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, the mighty Temptations, Aretha and James Brown. Coltrane, Miles and Monk. Of course. Of course, of course.
It begins with Haiti. It was never in question that I was going to go to Haiti. It was only a question of when. It was delayed by events though. By the complete meltdown and dysfunction of our family when I was fourteen, by the fullon onslaught of the sixties and acid and mescaline and music and the dislocation of any sense of home and continuity. The Vietnam War destroyed my linear education as college hit us with pass or fail instead of grades. Life was out on the picket line, demonstrating and participating in the sanctuaries for AWOL soldiers and in the addictive beds of hippie lifestyle. I left home when I was 15 basically. I left the Hyppolites and the paintings my father had bought in 1947. I left the bullying and the intellectual abuse, not realizing the art was already deep in my head. Deep in my blood. I wanted to go to Haiti. I had to see what people without my privilege did when their only company was the Muse and art becomes a way of survival on all levels.
My father is an ancestor now. I do owe my art initiation to him. Time forgives all the rest..
I went back to school at the University of California at Santa Barbara while trying to support myself playing jazz and Latin music along with bellydance gigs. I was immersed in the Beats and the literature of decadence. Hausmann, Poe, Whalen, Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg, Bowles. I played flute behind the poet Kenneth Rexroth and it was in his seminars and workshops that I saw, due to his teachings, how there was a thread joining the way art was made on this planet beyond the mainstream. A way that the extreme diversity had its own kind of cohesiveness. He had us read Pound with Mbuti pygmy chants, Snyder with Li Po, Native American chants as the great American literature etc. He broke down the mainstream hegemonies, kicked the standard literary hierarchies in their asses and later it was really not so big a leap to see how this was also true in the visual arts for me.