 | | | | |
Jerry Goins and the Ergosphere
Essay for (the Eventual) Oracle
Part I.
Jerry Goins was born in 1953 on the Floridian side of the Gulf of Mexico, in a town just south of the only network of 'dry' caves in the state. He grew up in Florida, Louisiana and Texas, moving to Houston with his family in 1968. In the mid-1970s he attended Southwest State (now Texas State) University and the University of Texas, both in Central Texas. During the last year of his undergraduate study, the Mexican poet-philosopher Octavio Paz came to teach for a semester, along with his old friend, the Peruvian painter Fernando de Szyslo. Goins kept a copy of The Bow and the Lyre tucked under one arm during Paz's tenure in Austin; and received invaluable attention and instruction from the Peruvian maestro as well. One of their key adventures was the discovery (with the poet Bob Hays) in 1977 of the pink granite yoni-formation on the western side of Enchanted Rock, decades before the site became a pilgrimage for tantrikas and pagans (not to mention pregnant women) from around the world.
After graduating from UT-Austin with highest honors, Jerry traveled to Mexico and Guatamala. His earlier, university-based work revealed a deep technical skillfulness, but the travels to Latin America served to rough-up and brighten his palette. They also brought in elements of texture and pattern, which distracted him for a time from an almost obsessive rehearsal of the human form.
In September of 1979, Goins won a Fulbright fellowship to Colombia, profoundly altering the quality of what could be called "Latin American" in his work. The Colombians in socio-political power have constructed an austere and complicated society, one based on a social repression that is more thorough-going than in any other country in Latin America. The recent rescue of Colombian senator Ingrid Betancourt only played a penlight across Colombia's catastrophic legacy, which has continued virtually uninterrupted since the murder of populist leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan in 1948.
One of the distinguishing features of that repression is the degree to which it has been internalized, coded into a framework that coordinates anger and greed under the color of a national identity which prides itself on "self-control." It is impossible to understand the artistic response to that framework without exploring it here, so now we head into a quick social history of Colombia.
***
The violence that prevails to this day in Colombia seems to have had a clear initiation in the death of Gaitan, but to really comprehend its tenacity, we have to look to the beginning of the 20th century. As the US was having it's Roaring Twenties, Colombia was enjoying (or suffering, depending on what you know about avarice) a version of that same syndrome, fueled by fruit, coffee, rubber and gold exports in an era that came to be known as 'The Dance of the Millions.' There was a chance --during that decade-plus of obscene wealth-- to develop Colombia's infrastructure, and subsequently create a solid middle-to-working-class. But, to put it bluntly, they blew it. The economic crash of 1929 in the US saw the worldwide rise of labor movements, and although most historians describe that struggle in socio-economic terms, the roots went far deeper than fair wages and a reasonable work-week. It was a demand to exist in social space, it was a demand for a distribution of resources that would lead to that oxymoron: working-class leisure. And for a Colombia jostling with newly-minted oligarchs this prospect was at best irritating, at worst, Bolshevism.
Those extremes characterize the responses of the two key political figures that emerged during the 1930s in Colombia. One was the aforementioned J.E. Gaitan, the other was his evil twin Laureano Gomez. The two, like Kerry and Bush in the 2004 election, embodied a psychosocial Venn diagram with a larger space of intersection than opposition. While they differed in how to "deal with" the working class, they both demonstrated the same basic repugnance for the bodily presence of people who labor -- who became sweaty and dirty and sexy. Gaitan passed out soap and toothpaste at his political rallies (which recalls, doesn't it, Ingrid's campaign condoms); Gomez fulminated in the press against the socialist masses, characterizing them as a "terrifying Basilisk, with its insatiable mouth and foul-smelling breasts."
Laureano Gomez conveniently became president of Colombia after Gaitan's murder -- the event which triggered 'el Bogotazo,' the first stage of Colombia's social psychosis.
Meanwhile, Back at the Art. . .
For those of you who have enjoyed my sweeping generalizations so far, back up, because here comes the Motherlode: One of the persistently endearing qualities of Latin Americans is their tendency to take art and poetry seriously. Their enjoyment --thanks to cheap printing and a few waves of tentative socialism-- is a mark of living thoughtfully, irrespective of one's social or economic standing. During 1930s and 40s High Culture had taken an ecumenical turn, meeting up with the folkloric properties of Mexico's muralist movement, for example. While permutations of this development spread enthusiastically throughout most of Latin America, such was not the case in Colombia. Art and literature were vouched to the rich and to the very rich.
It should come as no surprise, then, that part of Gomez' legacy was his patronage of the Academic tradition of painting in Colombia, as well as hostility to trends he characterized --and not only in journalistic diatribes-- as degenerate. Until he fled to Spain in 1953 (Colombian generals found him too vicious and drove him out), art was firmly grounded in the aestheticist and conservative principals espoused by the Circulo de Bellas Artes, which had been founded by the gentle Andreas de Santa Maria in 1910.
Most art historians see the Argentinian critic Marta Traba (1923-83) as the bellweather to a modernist sensibility in Colombia. But Traba's apologetics for non-representational painting in the mid-50s come along at a curious time, one in which the expediency of self-censorship would be a much more convincing explanation than "artistic freedom" when considering the absence of conventional imagery. Non-representational painting had several false starts in Colombia, but eventually found better ground alongside a more depictive modernism which began to take hold in the early sixties.
To the north, the great Mexican ironist Jose Luis Cuevas was being recognized for breakthroughs into what would come to be known as Neo-figuration. It has been argued that Neo-fig first rolled from the English paintbrush of Francis Bacon, but Cuevas' graphic mastications precede Bacon by half-a-decade. Colombian artists who had gone into exile before 1964 would have come into contact with Bacon's work first-hand, but Cuevas was the more immediate and persuasive forerunner within Latin America itself.
Neo-figuration would serve as an expressive platform throughout South America in the sixties and seventies; painters in Argentina and Chile would find it particularly suitable for describing the political and social agonies of their milieux. In Colombia, Neo-figuration came through an Expressionist portal, beautified, but still lending a bleak emotional power to works such as Alejandro Obregon's prize-winning Violencia and Juan Antonio Roda's Cristo series, a tender, ghastly tribute to a Jesuit friend murdered --with extravagant malice-- by the Colombian military.
Desire in the Place of Cholera
Jerry arrived in Bogota in September of 1979, during the Julio Cesar Turbay Ayala administration. By 1978, Colombia's Liberal party was slowly standing up after almost 30 years in a deep, fearful crouch; but Ayala's election was the smackdown, a declaration that Colombia was first and foremost an arms-for-coffee&cocaine society, and don't you forget it.
At the beginning of what is variously called a 16 or 24 or 40-year war (my preference would be to name the Beast for what it is: 60 and counting) artists had responded in various ways, mostly by going into exile. A brief liberalization during the Alfonso Lopez Michelsen presidency (1974-78) had permitted some to return and begin grappling with the notorious carnage that had taken place in their political and social environments. Mexico and Colombia had a particularly active exchange with France -- or, more precisely, with Paris, where the sheer physical beauty of the city can overpower and transform the meaning of suffering.
"Desire" --or more precisely 'desir' -- was an enchanted word during the post-graduate epoch of Jerry's training and the early years of his career. Keystone of Freudian (and Lacanian) post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, it was the principle suspect in all manner of investigation, from linguistics to literature to economics. "Desire" under this aegis was not simply your garden-variety lust, or the magnetized filings of sexuality; it was also theorized as the ancestral, subtle current that hums along beneath the urge to know, and to name what is known (cf. Julia Kristeva's semiotic analyses).
As critical theory swirled around this question, Neo-Figuration's stylistic hold began to loosen, nudged aside by the irreveries of Pop and a curious infusion of Pop and Conceptual art, whose nascent eroticism found fertile ground in a Colombia attempting to dig, pray, fuck its way out of seemingly-endless barbarity. Desire came through as laughter, not entirely without bitterness, but a laughter that released enough tension to allow at least a glimpse of Eros in its more exuberant phase.
(to be continued)
©2008 Humandala Unlimited, all rights reserved
Alana Keres has a Bachelors Degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas, and pursued graduate studies in Colombian and Mexican art & corporeality from 1992-1995. She has collaborated with Jerry Goins since since 1978.
| |
| | | |
