ABOUT THE ARTIST
seeds of illumination GRONK - by Liza Simone
"Could you please buckle up?" requests a worried art student sent to drive GRONK to an activity, "I don't want anything to happen to you, because, you know, you're a national treasure."
While GRONK may laugh at this story, the student's anxiety is easy to understand. GRONK's work is in a permanent collection and has been exhibited in more international and domestic museums than you would care to see listed here. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has been documenting his career. A critical look at his body of work, by Max Benavidez, is being published this summer. Plus, he is one of 87 artists featured in the current exhibition Los Angeles 1955==85 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France (showing now until July 17, 2006), for his work with the performance art collective, Asco. Proud to say, this artist is based in downtown Los Angeles. GRONK is one of our own.
GRONK has said, "Conversation is not an art form, as it used to be." It is an art form he continues to pursue. We met in his downtown loft to converse about his most recent projects. Because this was my first visit to his loft-a GRONK museum of past and present projects-as well as our first extensive conversation (thanks to his generosity), the full transcript stands at 29,100 words.
LS: You are experiencing an amazing career. What does that kind of success mean to you?
G: One of the things that I realized early on was that I was going to continue to do what I was doing-no matter what. I was still going to be making things. I always felt that success lay in the fact that you were exhausted when you hit the pillow at night, because you utilized your mind and you utilized your hands to the potential you could with them. That was the measure of success for me.
LS: What can you say to people who do not visit museums or galleries?
G: Sometimes people are not even aware of the fact that they can go into a museum, because they think they are not privileged enough to do that. They may fear a gallery or museum, because they are not in on "the joke," that they will not quite get it. So, art is suspect in many ways. That is why education is so important, because you have to dispel that. The human voice, the written word, it is very important to educate people.
Time Zone
Wall Works is a program where the Santa Monica Museum of Art invites an established artist to create an art project that will be executed by school children. GRONK's collaboration with 200 school children, called Time Zone, can be seen at the museum's Neighborhood Outreach Gallery.
LS: Can you tell me about Time Zone?
G: It is a good piece. It is a conceptual piece. It is an installation piece. It uses art language, but it is also science. It's English, it is many-faceted, and it's fun. There is something that comes about from it that the kids can later have.
LS: How does the program work?
G: I give them an example and show them that that is one way of doing it-but I emphasize that their own way is the way I would appreciate it. I put out the word "time": how that word is used in many different ways, and that time is essential, because we have a limited amount of time. Each project that we do, it becomes about that particular moment of time.
LS: You do many live onsite paintings in museums, where you interact with the patrons. You also take many students into your studio. You have so many ways of educating people about the artist's process.
G: To me, that is the joy of being an artist. It is why I do what I do: to share. I got that from a project I did in a different state, where an elementary school girl looked at me and said, "Thank you for sharing." It was just that one little moment. It made me feel so good about what it was to be an artist. I thought, "She is right. That is what I do." It finally clicked: that is why I am doing what I am doing. I can't save the world or anything like that, but I can share.
LS: From the mouth of babes, as the saying goes...
G: As the saying goes. I have a group of teens coming here soon from the Palms Springs Museum. We are going to make something together. You feel you are giving them an opportunity outside a classroom situation to experience something that maybe they haven't experienced before. That is important to me because, in all truth, I wish that had happened to me as a teenager-but it didn't.
LS: What are some of the things you wish to instill in the people you share with, with students of art?
G: When I engage in conversation with university students or when I see young people's work, I tell them, "Don't show me who I am. Don't show me what my generation is. Share with me how you interpret the world, how you see the world, who you are at this particular moment in time. Surprise me." One of the most exciting things is to be surprised by somebody else's work.
LS: I agree.
G: I think it is about learning as a teacher. The most important thing is that you are constantly a student. You are always learning, in-taking. The more you take in, the more you are able to give back. Art can be challenging, too-loathsome, disgusting. There are all of those different aspects to it. I enjoy being challenged, but I also enjoy things. Work doesn't have to be a hammer that hits you over the head constantly. Yes, that is fine if somebody wants to delve into that, but I think that there is such a wide variety of work being done on, so many different levels. For me, it is not to disregard any of them. I want to be able to participate, to look at it. I do not want to just say, "No, it is horrible," but to be critical about it. The important thing is to have a critical mind-constantly. Always be critical about something. Always ask questions.
LS: What is it that critics just don't get about your work?
G: That you change over a period of time. You grow up while you're in the art world. In a sense, it is like you are a child movie actor and they can't accept you when you are older.
LS: That's funny.
G: Sometimes people will say that my work is not politically driven. Well, perhaps it is not as blatant as some, because I am a person who likes subtlety. There is an undercurrent that is going on, there is a thread that is being woven through the body of work, [which you'll see] if you are really engaged and looking at it.
LS: It is in the projects you choose. [GRONK designed the stage for the new opera Ainadamar. "Ainidamar" means "Fountain of Tears," and is the name of the spring in the Spanish city of Granada, where poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was assassinated by Fascists. The opera was composed by Osvaldo Golijov and directed by Peter Sellars. It debuted last January at Lincoln Center. GRONK also did a series of paintings for it, inspired by research and experience.]
G: You give up your time for projects you feel really strongly about. I think that this opera was a case in point, where everybody working on it was working at the top of their art form. Everyone involved was giving so much to this piece, because they believed in it. They believed that it was a very timely piece. It is about the rise of Fascism. Perhaps we sense that same kind of activity taking place in our own times. A lot of Franco's speeches and the rise of Fascism in Spain were about family values and patriotism. We are hearing the same thing in our day. There are a lot of things going on in our current situation. As an artist, I think that you are informed by the times you live in. So, I think that whether it is in your work or not, at least you have to stand up and say what you believe in-to be honest about it, as much as you can be.
LS: I loved the painting entitled Ainidimar. Can you talk about that piece?
G: It was the one with the bound figure and the lightening bolts. The bound figure is somebody that is tossed into a landscape and buried-like Lorca was. It is also about struggle. It is not just a person. It could be a country. It could be anything that has oppression, but there is still life in there. I thought of it as a bound figure struggling trying to get out of its bonds: an artist, a nation, a country trying to get out of its bind. Obviously, it could be a person. It has lightning bolts all around it. Light, to me, is imagination. Despite the bonds, the imagination is still able to give off its force. When Lorca is buried and thrown into the land, he is still able-the poetry still lives. For me, that is the illumination of the piece. Yeah, we can kill off all of the writers, we can kill off all of the artists, but that doesn't mean that it ends there. There is still the light.
LS: Tell me about the Ainidimar set piece. First tell me about the term duende.
G: Deuende: it is like "soul." That was such an important aspect. It's Lorca's essay that he wrote and the talk that he gave, basically, about the soul. Sometimes, you can do something and it can be quite beautiful, but there is a place that you have to go and explore that's deep inside of yourself. Sometimes that may come out ugly, but it goes around full circle and becomes beautiful-because of its ugliness. That's its beauty. That, to me, is part of the whole concept.
LS: Even though the set was not influenced exclusively by Lorca's life, how was his life incorporated into the landscape of the set?
G: It is not necessarily a landscape on the outside of the land. More likely, it is an inner landscape, the inside of the land [seeds, roots, pods, germination]. Lorca's body was thrown into earth. His poetry was about the land, the earth. However, I do not think of it necessarily being oh-so-gloomy, because within death there is regeneration. Even in death, the seed of imagination can grow beyond the grave. Even if you may think there is hope, there is regeneration. The land has to burn in order to regenerate. Is that tragic? For me, maybe it is romantic. One wall is more of a drawing. There is a kind of unfinished quality to it, as is a person's life that was not able to go further than his age when he died. On one side of the back wall, there is kind of a blue curtain. Where does this blue curtain enter into this landscape, this inner landscape? Well, it is an homage to Lorca's theatricality. The set is an inner landscape, a landscape of culture. On the back wall, there are images of an almost a hill-like landscape. You could interpret that as the landscape of Toledo. There were many deaths that took place there, not just Lorca's. There are body parts, shapes of arms, legs, and different parts of the anatomy littered throughout the set. There is also lettering. For me, it's words. Lorca's creative output was words. So, I created a landscape with a letter on top of a letter on top of another letter. I was creating a language that was part of the set. Words were on top of words. Sometimes it was nonsensical. It is kind of an in-the-spirit of automatic writing, even though Lorca did not call himself a Surrealist [though he was friends with many the day's prominent Surrealists]. He also played with the notion of death a lot, so crosses and or x's also inhabit the space. I listened to the score for over a year. Musically, I was taking information from there. [The musical score incorporates sounds from many different cultures.] That is what all that [visual] blending and meshing together is in the piece. All the queues were coming from the music of the piece. I was creating more of a tempo, in a way. I was creating repeated patterns, as in music. So, shapes and forms are repeated and repeated throughout the piece, almost in harmony, I am hoping, with the music score.
LS: What was it like to collaborate with Peter Sellars [director of Ainadamar]?
G: He is somebody that takes something and will utilize it. I think it is just that pure joy of love, in a way, of experiencing something. We are so enthusiastic about each other's work! We have this mutual respect for each other and that really helps when you are developing a piece. With him, I was given so much freedom to do a project. One of the things about working with Peter Sellars is there are times when you just want to experience the moment with somebody and not think about the inner dialogue. You feel so privileged, in a way, having people like that around. It just adds so much to what you do as an artist. An instance of this [privilege] was one of his instructions for one of the sets. He just said, "Create visual poetry," and all of a sudden, my mind opened up for me. He is somebody that enjoys opening up your world.
I just talked to Peter Sellars and he says he is still thinking about Brain Flame. He was very moved by the piece. [He points to several glass brains that he made in a residency at the Tacoma Museum of Glass Art.] There are my glass brains, on the coffee table. They're in a brainstorm. That is why they are all together. [laughter]
GRONK's Brain Flame
[GRONK's Brain Flame. Welcome to the inside of an artist's mind. This is an animated depiction of what happens during an epiphany. Designed to be projected on the 5,000 square-foot dome at the LodeStar Astronomy Center, and the ARTS Lab of the University of New Mexico. The world premiere was in July 2005.]
LS: What is the narrative of that piece?
G: My first idea was to create a Sistine Chapel-like Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel-inside of a planetarium, but with all these shapes and forms floating around. The screen size is 4,750 square feet, so it is a huge projection. It is an animated piece that is 14 minutes in length. It is about a seed: the seed blows up and creates this world. The world it creates starts to germinate. Things start to happen in it. These creatures appear and they are post-human. They are primordial; they are undefined. Out of deep space, comes this brain with this tail on it. It sucks up one of these creatures. The creature goes inside of it and blows up. Wherever one of its body parts lands, a spark of imagination goes off inside of it, inside the brain. It is kind of a localizing of the Big Bang theory. Every time we come up with an idea, it is like The Big Bang. When these shapes and forms start to float around inside the brain, they're trying to coalesce, to come together to formulate an idea. When they finally coalesce and the fog is lifted, they only show a fragment, a piece of a larger puzzle-but they have coalesced together. So, we only get this one idea. Then, all of a sudden, these black lines start to criss-cross over that idea. The last image is of a seed again. It starts to move and we wonder, "Is it going to explode again?" Well, no. That seed has just been planted in the viewer. He can explode it in his own head.
LS: It is a glass brain. Why glass?
G: Because I had been working in glass before, and I thought that, for me, there was a mystery to it-even though there is transparency. It is like a seed, a seed with this tail attached to it.
LS: Like sperm?
G: I did not say that, you did. [Laughter] That is fine. It is up to the viewer to interpret it that way, but I did not say that. It has that aspect of seed and tail to it and it creates. [More laughter] It's within the circular universe.
LS: It's a creation piece.
G: Yes. It is like a genesis in many ways. That is kind of the notion I was trying for. The glass brain came in a little bit after my original storyboard to the piece. I had the landscape. I had the creatures. I had them making things, mimicking nature, in a way, by changing and altering the world that they inhabit. That, in many ways, is much like the nature of human beings: to alter, to change the environment that they exist in, to create, to build, to move rocks and stack them up, or to make things grow out of the land. I had all of that in the original piece, but I wanted a finale to it. One creature accepts destiny and, no matter what the outcome, he accepts it willingly: to find out what is on the other side.
LS: Can you share some of the things you have accomplished as a working artist here in LA?
G: I think that I have experienced quite a lot both here and traveling elsewhere. It has been very enriching. I can say that I have had a one man show at the LA County Museum, and one at MOCA. I've done the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. I starred in and directed a play at the LA Theater Center the same year I was at MOCA. Not even David Hockney can say that. [Laughter].
LS: What's next?
G: The planetarium Griffith Observatory Mr. Villaraigosa has to say, " We need GRONK's Brain Flame."
Last Note
G: One of the things that I always find amazing is the legend of the doughnuts. When the people at MOCA asked me, "What do you need in order to do this painting the size of a football field?" I said, "A lot of coffee and a lot of doughnuts." So when people read that...
LS: I read about the doughnuts and the martinis. Is it either-or?
G: That little phone call that I just got earlier said, "The martinis will be ready when you arrive on Sunday. [Laughter]
LS: Is there anything new you would like to request?
G: [Laughter] No, the doughnuts have been fine. It started a tradition, in many ways.
LS: That's a lot of sugar over the years.
G: Yes, it is. People roll their eyes when they hear "doughnuts." Why not a French pastry or something? People ask, "Are you still eating the doughnuts? " Well, people keep on bringing them by. On the Anidimar set, the people working in the crew area would bring these huge big boxes of doughnuts. They'd have these smiles across their faces. I'd think "Still I am getting a lot of the doughnuts." I went to Tacoma, Washington, and again the presentation of the doughnuts.
LS: I didn't realize the magnitude of the situation when I decided to bring doughnuts, but it's nice to participate in the tradition.
G: My favorite is glazed. If you noticed, I went for the glazed.
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