Claude Smith: Interstate Transit  (written in 2006)

 

A recent turn in my life's path produced a complete shift in perspective that suddenly brought two major areas of my life (my art and my work to support it) together in a sudden revelation and focus, and resulted in the explosion of this current body of work.

 

Early in my life as an artist I made a decision to become a massage therapist in order to free myself from any and all concerns about the art world, whether it be commercial considerations and worries about meeting others' expectations or esthetic considerations for the same reason.  I had discovered that massage therapy was something I was good at, possibly for the same reasons I am an artist.

 

Hovering around every decision we make in life there operates a law of unintended consequences that flows from the existential uncertainty, imperfection, and lack of data inherent in the human condition. For thirty years I have simultaneously explored the very fringes of mindfulness and perception in purely non-figurative abstract art and worked as a massage therapist on over 24,000 bodies. And it was not until this present series of images that what amounted to a wordless, conceptless meditation on the body and being embodied finally broke the art/massage-work barrier.  The hours and hours and years and years of work with my hands in this field created an understanding, a consideration of our humanity that I was not even aware was going on.  The unrelenting daily task of the masseur is to face naked humanity, humanity stripped of all props, uniforms or costumes, medals, positions....

 

Since making the decision to have a dual career, I have moved with great freedom along a path of relative obscurity, having little or no goals to impress, attract, gain recognition or reward. This path, though operating in two spheres, met in the common area of my sensibility as a human being.

 

So, bodies. Our "body-ness" is the very water that our consciousness, our being, swims in. Our selfhood is so wrapped up in our bodies that it is all taken for granted, in fact, becomes invisible.... Many have "made art" about or with or from the body; and even in the media, we seem obsessed with the body.  So much so, that every viewer will come to a work of art that seems to feature a body with a built-in lexicon of perception. But lexicon and name and concept are not the same as the thing-in-itself. And instead of seeing what we are looking at, we see the universe of our names and the entire cognitive and associative network we have created around the mysterious and numinous actual things themselves.

 

It is apparently no mistake that the explosion of this recent series into my life came indirectly and by a reductive process, a wiping off or uncovering. The action of wiping is the negative form of the gesture… that totally unified revelation of character that has absorbed me for years.  The other steps that led right up to this latest series are also significant.  For several years, I immersed myself in the perceptual and artistic stance known in Japan as "wabi-sabi" .  As I said at that time:

 

This group of work is about seeing deeply.  The Japanese term Wabisabi  has its roots in Zen Buddhism, and is a comprehensive aesthetic system that leads us to a deeper appreciation of life as a whole.  Truth comes from the observation of nature.  All things are impermanent, all things are imperfect, all things are incomplete and are in a constant never-ending state of becoming or dissolving into nothingness.   There is great beauty in the inconspicuous and ephemeral.  Wabisabi is an appreciation of the evanescence of life and of our own mortality.

 

Shortly afterward, I stopped "making art" altogether:  in essence, my art process became one of pure seeing and discovery, beauty found in objects discarded as no longer useful, but retaining all the history of their use, plus the action of the operation of nature in the world, through wind, rain, sun, oxidation, etc.  This flowed naturally from the idea of wabi-sabi.

 

Once having removed any sense of myself as the doer or maker of art, I then soon found myself back in the studio working with the drawings and marks and diagrams created by non-artist friends of mine as we sat around the local café, discussing across several weeks the nature of the fabled "G-spot".  The "art" arose simply and naturally out of life lived, and I had become very sensitized to the power of the little sketches my friends had made.  This series also seemed to explode in front of me, becoming the "G-spot variations".

 

It was after several exhibitions of the g-spot work, in a period of emotional ebb, I decided to once again turn away from any consideration of the results of my process as "product" and away from all formalist considerations, to go back into the quiet of the studio and just see what would happen.  I began with a series of small-scale oil paintings on wooden panels. At first it was not clear at all that these smudges of light floating in an enveloping darkness were bodies, or if they were bodies, what it was they were doing.  My hands completely led the way into this dark space, as gradually I realized that it was the outpouring of an inner knowledge gleaned from my years of work as a massage therapist.

 

The Work Itself

 

What can we say of the work itself?  This boils down to asking what can we see in the work itself.   The work demands a mindfulness that can rise to that of its creator.  Without that mindfulness, there is only a collection of featureless bodies.  It is always a danger to the meeting with mystery to be able to identify or name the thing seen.  Once named, our nature is such that we stop really seeing the thing itself at all and become immersed instead in a world that is more properly called language or symbol or the modern "semiotics".  Since I am interested in the mystery itself, I have tried to keep away from that area, which is why all of the figures lack defining features.

 

First of all, it’s important to notice the overall form. One immediately sees "cell" after "cell" of fleshy bodies, moving in and through a warm inky space.  Although every piece is created and meant to be a "stand alone", from the beginning, I chose to show the pieces in this way, as an aggregation or a collectivity.  In aggregate, there is a very lambent, flickering quality to the overall field, like hundreds of tongues of flame.  Each individual vision or cell, whether it contains one or more persons, is a transitory moment of these bodies in time and an ambiguous space.  Within the individual confines of each piece, the bodies have pushed away the encompassing dark, and eventually one sees that, barring any known light source, they themselves represent the light in their visibility. In the actual lives of individuals, all of these transitory moments are all happening right next to each other, hundreds and even thousands of them.  Though all encased in our individual bodies and restless desires and dreams, we can gain a sense that we're all in these dark and ambiguous and mysterious experiences together:  emerging out of the dark and unknown of non-existence, struggling with the multitudinous forces of existence, and disappearing back into the unknown dark.

 

Another result of spreading all of these pieces across an entire room is a curious reversal, a sense that things have been turned inside out.  Although these are manifestly "skins" or surfaces of flesh, they individually and collectively convey a sense of interior experience, our experience of ourselves embodied, almost sucked out of the unknown into the light.  Hence, what is normally interior has become the external environment here, which brings the viewer an added perspective of meditation.

 

As one gets oriented to this alternate universe, more and more observations and distinctions arise almost of their own energy.  What at first appeared to be black negative space is seen on closer inspection to be a warm environment, still inky, but rich with a complex mixture of reds, browns, violets, and a little black.  Some of the figures appear to be almost sudden single gestures, as though that pose, that particular rhythm of smearing conveys its very essence, and further elaboration would be distracting.  Many are manifestly joyous celebrations of our having been blessed with a body and senses:  one may experience an almost child-like wonderment, recapturing those early first days where one could be transfixed by the mere proprioception and experience of one's own arm or foot.  Then, there are many where two or more figures are actively engaged.  Sometimes it seems clearly that they are making love, but in others, their activity is much more ambiguous and even troubling, as one senses that love or passion have been replaced with a disconnected mechanical quality.

 

 

One then sees many pieces where the figures are enmeshed in tangles of lines, entwined and knotted, or covered and entrapped, or else  spinning out threads of a complex arabesque.  In all of the pieces, however, all facial features are omitted, which does create an eerie overall ambiance, where sound and sight and smell and vocalization are absent, and personality and experience and thought are not in play.  One net result of this is that one is thrown back on oneself and one's own innate and inner sense of being embodied in a very essential way.

 

For me, the creation of these pieces has been very liberating.  For one thing it's a great relief to not have to concentrate on formalist considerations, and instead, simply to let the energy come through, as it wants to. Part of my strategy in leaving out the details of the face is to allow each of us to more easily see ourselves in the pieces, and to be in contact with our essential commonality.  Yes, we are individuals but it's this idea that we have dominion  over all life forms, that we are separate and special that causes so much division and pain.  Our experience of emerging out of the unknown into light, into being embodied, and then returning to the unknown is actually one with that of a stone or a tree.