[Updated 7/3/05; scroll down]
by Jerome du Bois
We received an email yesterday from local artist Hector Ruiz, whose anti-American politics, as expressed in his art (but not his art show itself) was the subject of my previous post. His response was prompt, I'll say that much, though its ad hominems did nothing to advance any conversation. But I'm glad of the opportunity to look closer at both the man and his art (from reproductions and descriptions only). Like some other local artists, he may regret attracting the sustained attention of this tar baby, but he asked for it. He wrote:
Oh Jerome --what a great article from an aging over 50 angry white guy afraid of pretty much every new thing he sees or hears. Thanks for taking so much of your time to write an article on my show (WHICH OBVIOUSLY YOU DIDN'T SEE). Your description is so far off that I wonder if your [sic] even talking about the same show. Another critique [sic:he means critic] who can criticize an exhibition without ever going to see it (nice integrity). You are welcome to bring your work to the Chocolate Factory, in fact, I would love you to come and say what you have to say to my face ------------------- But word is on the street that your [sic] a big p*ssy, a failed artist, a hack writer, and a kept man.
come on by 1105 Grand Ave. ----Hector (come to the opening tonight and see what the public thinks of the work--it's up for 8 months)
Let's go fisking now.
Oh Jerome --what a great article from an aging over 50
ageist!
angry
emotionist!
white
racist!
guy
sexist!
afraid of pretty much every new thing he sees or hears.
Name one. Waiting, waiting. I'll tell you: I'm afraid of the next 9/11. Everything else new --no problem. Bring it on. Your stuff is not new; it's old, and dry, and dead. Red Grooms and Ruckus did your big paper people long ago, and Abel Barosso, the castro-sucking Cuban artist, carves far better than you do, and on superior wood. (The fat, clunky, useless hands you carve ring a tell like a bell. Also the fact that they dwarf the head, the source of reason.) Your carvings look like the sidewalk fare of every faux-primitive Santa Fe Indian that's been shucking the tourists there for the last fifty years. Kickapoo, watcha gonna do but what they all do? Now it becomes clearer why the neo-colonialist Heard Museum drew you in for such a long gig: tourist trade is their stock-in-trade. (Catherine asks, "Will your work be remaindered to the gift shop after the show closes?" Ouch! You can see why I love that woman.)
Thanks for taking so much of your time to write an article on my show (WHICH OBVIOUSLY YOU DIDN'T SEE). Your description is so far off that I wonder if your [sic] even talking about the same show. Another critique [sic:he means critic] who can criticize an exhibition without ever going to see it (nice integrity).
Maybe I should have said I didn't see the show --as if the Heard would give me a sneak preview --but people who read our reviews --of Mel Roman, Lesley/Leslie Dill, HairStories, Arizona Biennial '03-- know that we never do general, thematic surveys or short squibs; we linger over piece after piece after piece. We prize detailed description. It should have been obvious that I was riffing solely on the short notice in the Phoenix New Times, which had plenty enough information for me; but people are slow nowadays. My piece was about his attitude, not his art, which is unexceptional and without imagination.
Ruiz does not correct my description; it's just so far off . . . far off what? You mean you are pro-American? Or that your position is, like, excruciatingly ambivalent? I'd like to hear about that, but . . . No explanation, no clarification. No examples. No quotes of my actual words. And if I had seen the show, would I have come away with a different view? No: not based on the descriptions of the sculptures.
Another critique [sic:he means critic] who can criticize an exhibition without ever going to see it (nice integrity).
I saw the ad for his "Artist's Wall" in the new Java yesterday. I really don't critique art anymore, but consider this wandering doodling --the repeated stencils of the goose-stepping man, the dumb stacks of one-stroke red-paint circles, black profiles with hands stuck on their heads, weeping black sweat and tears --all done in the clunkiest schoolboy brushstroking, like lousy Guston or Basquiat, who were pretty lousy themselves. The last wall work we saw, by Brad Kahlhamer at SMoCA, exuded the same smug sense that everything this artist extrudes, no matter how silly or crude, is worthy of the wall. It ain't. (Reader, I now say something I thought I'd never say: go pick up a copy of Java and see for yourself. Read the review of Ruiz, too, which I'll refer to below.)
You are welcome to bring your work to the Chocolate Factory, in fact, I would love you to come and say what you have to say to my face . . .
One of the last sentences in my piece said that I would never take anything from him. So he just wants me to come down there so he can try to provoke something physical. What would that solve? I'm pro-American, he's anti-American. Spilling blood won't change anthing. I don't care to change his mind anyway; he's a grown-up, after all, and I say he's an ungrateful, spoiled American and a political idiot. I point it out and support my argument with his words and my reasons. If he wants to call me out on my politics or anything else, the email pipeline is open. But stop with the macho posturing and the nyah-nyah and get specific or get out of the conversation.
Oops, too late about the nyah-nyah:
But word is on the street that your [sic] a big p*ssy, a failed artist, a hack writer, and a kept man.
There are scads of words on the street where you live. It's zombie-tweaker talk. That's what they do --that's all they do-- and they will not stop --ever-- until you are a zombie-tweaker too!
Seriously, though . . . a big p*ssy? More false bravado; should I fire back that he's nothing but a metrosexual? or is that too strong? A kept man: hey, honey, did you know you're rich? If only. A failed artist? Who knows? We're working on an online gallery right now, which, when it debuts, will be really new.
A hack writer.
No. No way I let that one get by. I'm one of the best writers around. I am a master of sentences, including multileveled rhythm, submerged rhyme, and consciousness of subvocal breathing. I take a back seat to no writer on the internet, and not many in print.
I'll give you a couple of examples, Ruiz. Recently I wrote, in a fantasy conversation with Ward Churchill, "They drummed for you, skin!"
Well, I laughed anyway. The pun with drum and skin, you know . . . forget it.
Second, in my piece on comic-book knitwit Mark Newport, I wrote, "His knitting is kryptonite for us all." Modestly, I claim this sentence contains, in masterful poetic compression, the several levels of my argument, using a material from the comics. Kryptonite saps strength silently, making the strong weak and pliable and safe as leche. Also, more subtly, the silent soft k of knitting becoming vocalized in the hard k of kryptonite. (For more on the letter K, see here.)
My review of Lesley/Leslie Dill's show was an extended prose poem on hands, attachment, and the juice of life. (More on hands below.) There's not a wasted word in the piece.
Finally, in my piece "The Burning One In The Broken World," a paragraph I am most proud of. Put it on my tombstone:
Maybe we humans got smart and visionary real early, in the morning of our selves, and we created a common dream. [Harold] Bloom says, “Our dreams are less individual than we are.” So now, yes, I see it now, by the light of the Burning Man -- we shall form an Unfalling Angel from an uncanny incorporation, a constitution of souls, but without giving up our I-ness. And this Angel’s scintillating outline may be the fractally fertile Web/Net, the world’s infant Body Electric with its seething hive mind -- which, in the fullness of time, we shall awaken and use to clothe ourselves in glory as the nine billion blinding stars of the Garment of Light!
That's how I look at the world, Hector Ruiz. You just caught a glimpse of my heart. Does that sound pinched, angry, astringent, or aging to you? If so, you're deaf. Catherine and I have a firm, shoulders-back, wide-eyed hold on an inexhaustible rocket to the future; you're still bent over resentfully picking little red stones out of pinto beans.
So enough about me, let's get back to you. That Java article contained some mind-blowing facts and statements about you, at least to me. (They went in and out of Scott Andrews's ears without ruffling a cilia.)
First (and I wish I could hot-link it but, after at least eight years, Robert Sentinery still stubbornly refuses to join the 21st Century):
Hector Ruiz has lived his entire life near the border. He grew up in Eagle Pass, Texas, then Piedras Negras, Mexico, then again in Austin, Texas. Ruiz continues to make border country his home --he currently lives and works in Phoenix, Arizona. Ruiz is Mexican-Indian (Kickapoo) and American, and has lived with three identities in two countries.
Does this mean, then, that the "two years abroad" mentioned in the earlier article meant he was living in Mexico? And he dares to criticize the US? I hope I'm wrong, or this guy is thicker than I thought.
Pat Conroy wrote a novel about someone born and raised on a South Carolina island. It begins: "My wound is geography." I was born and raised on an island, too --Oahu-- and it marked me in ways I can never change, reaching down to the rhythm of the tides in my veins. Most of my friends were not Caucasian. But I wonder about Hector Ruiz, who seems to have learned nothing about the subtleties of multiple identities. Instead, once the Mexicans and Mexican-Indians cross the border, according to his sculpture MIA (Mexican In America),
the tiny figures that top the huge hand's fingers represent, to the artist, the states of attaining more (or less) English by Mexican immigrants. Less English results in the figure of the Dead, The Laborer or The Incarcerated. More English is represented by the figure with the briefcase --The Assimilated Hispanic.
How can he think so little of the range of talent of his own people? Is that another tell about himself? And where do you think he fits in this lineup? Duh. Briefcase dude! Cock gun, pull trigger, shoot foot.
Oh, Hector, what the hector you doin'? How can you walk into these logic traps so easily?
It gets worse:
. . . his personal reality of fluid identity has impacted the artist's work strongly, influencing his choice of media and method. "Everything I do is hecho a mano (made by hand). Every cut, every hole, every print is done entirely by hand . . ."
Done, but not well done. What's the big deal about saying it in Spanish? It doesn't help. After so many years of woodcarving, his work should be continually refined. Clunky-funky, hokey-folky --they're getting old; doesn't he want to get better? Of course, maybe he can't; maybe he literally doesn't have the chops.
You want to talk about hands? Ruiz depicts useless, sausage-bound, cartoony, clubby hands. As far as I know, he has the use of both of his. (And you can shove your stigmata, Hector.) When my wife, Catherine King, was twenty-three years old, her right hand, her main hand, got smashed in a Heidelberg press. It was late, she was alone, working overtime. She couldn't look at her hand, which resembled something the butcher throws in the trash after all the good meat has been trimmed off.
The hand healed --it never really got professionally fixed-- and she went on to a steady 25-year career as a graphic artist, with one-and-a-half-hands. Her right hand hurts her every day. But she would have done it all anyway, one-handed, or drawing with her feet, or her mouth, if she had to. So when she sees the hands he makes, it makes her own hands shake --with anger. I suggest, before you carve another hand, Hector Ruiz, that you read Frank R. Wilson's The Hand: How Its Use Shapes The Brain, Language, And Human Culture. You might just learn something about what you take for granted. You also might want to look at what Catherine wrote about the hand in her narrative on one of my artworks (scroll down).
And while you're doing all this great stuff by hand, Catherine wants to know why you have a corporate-type, off-the-shelf, subdued steel sign. Why not some huge complex wooden carved sign (weatherproofed), all over the facade? That is what you do, supposublee, idnit? Plus, a woodcarver without a carved wooden door? It seems . . . inauthentic.
Finally, this privileged American, who bebops across borders like a jump-rope champ, said the most astounding thing, which will begin my final, long, looping riff:
. . . the terrain [of Ruiz's psychocultural landscape] is the place where knowledge of the self in the world is confounded by the insistence of consumerism, trade names and labels. "I am against the machine at all costs; all its impersonal marks, its unquestioned shortcuts, its blind speed and all its timesaving methods."
I am amazed that an educated adult can make this statement. This is the 21st Century. Tell you what, Hector: make me an inch. Freehand. Go on. Blank piece of paper. Five marks. It has to conform to international standards at microscopic level. I've got to be able to use it. Can you do it?
Who makes your chisels? How do you sharpen them? With an electric motor? What decides the grain size of your emery cloths? What are the tolerances of the valves in the cylinders of the car you drive? or the sprocket measurements on your bicycle, how did they get that way? How can you make such stupid remarks, when your entire world depends on the beauty of our system, you ungrateful prick. You ought to stand up tall, raise your arms, and praise the human mind for numerical control machines, which make your life run so smoothly.
You're a liar and a hypocrite, Hector Ruiz, when you disrespect your homeland. When you came back to this country from wherever you were after two years, you were thrilled. You felt such a lightening rush of relief and gratitude that it almost made you swoon. You could finally relax about the assurances: your cell phone will work --you can choose among phones; who put up the satellites? the US, for free-- the taxi or shuttle has a fixed rate, no mordida; gasoline is everywhere, food spills off the shelves, people speak your language, and, best of all --the system is in place.
You came back to the United States of America and found the machine had been humming right along, efficient as ever. You hooked right up with all your old friends, whom the system had been supporting, and your family, and all kinds of new people. Meanwhile, everything has improved since you've been gone, no thanks to you. You are welcome. Artist grants from the city, the state? Step right up! Want to rent a place cheap, no graft? Come on over! The water runs all day and night, and so does the electricity. Internet? The world of information, and endless contacts, await you at about a dollar a day. Alcohol? It's legal, drink up, no religious police to whack it out of your hand. You are free, Hector; tell me a better place to be.
[UPDATE July 3rd: Just to seal this topic properly, we received another email from Mr. Ruiz. I'll just give you the highlights, with the reminder that this guy didn't and doesn't owe me anything: answers, reasons, whatever. This is not, and never was, a dialogue.
First he says he didn't even read it all --"to boring." I think he read every word.
He dismisses my anti- / pro-American argument with a single comment that the country "could be better."
He offers to get me into his show free to "explain" the pieces, as if they were incomplete without discourse. But I can tell from photos his work would do nothing but make me angry; they have nothing to teach me.
Then he says he likes to box. Great. What an intellectual. I've already declined this invitation once, but now it occurs to me: what kind of woodcarver would risk his hands boxing? A person whose livelihood depends on his hands would, presumably, want to take the best care of them. He doesn't worry. (Is boxing the reason his carved hands are so swollen?)
He lists the countries he has been to, including India and Thailand and other Asian countries; also Scotland. This list just reinforces my argument that he is stubbornly anti-American, in the face of obvious facts that the US is a blessing to the world, not a curse.]
Posted by Jerome at July 2, 2005 04:46 PM | TrackBack