There is an argument among the adolescent boys of Cinematheque Films.
Most of them are film students. Their disagreement has to do with how to attach the poetry they've been writing to the animation they're producing called Tilting at Windmills.
"It's not really an argument," Tim Barrus says. "It's a process. There is a difference. This time it has to do with the conflict between hope and the reality of total destruction. What else should poetry be about?"
The US National Endowment for the Arts might claim to know. They moved to shut down one Cinematheque Films production that Barrus (no stickler for etiquette) called Artistic Poets and French Sex Bitches. Their condemnation makes the discussion — what is art — germane.
Mary Scriver might know. As it happens, she thinks about art quite a lot.
Barrus has brought his Parisian film group to the Blue Ridge Mountains in the States where they've been filming "Until They Arrive Home Again," a poem by Carl Sandburg. Barrus and I are sitting on a bench beside Sandburg's lake on the Sandburg estate outside of Flatrock, North Carolina. It's a long way from Barrus' loft on Place Vendome. And sitting down for any length of time (especially for an interview) is not Tim Barrus' style.
The adolescent boys—Barrus calls them "My Grunts"—are arguing and setting up tripods and video cameras at the edge of a dam where the lake drains into a mountain creek. The creek is filled with snakes.
"How do they come to any sort of artistic consensus?" I ask Barrus. He pauses.
"They kick it around. Sometimes they kick a thing to death and that's okay. Certainly, they've been doing that with Carl Sandburg. They're not Americans. They're European so it's a little different. Sandburg doesn't intimidate them like he might a group of American adolescents who grew up with Sandburg in classrooms. I brought them here not to just understand Carl Sandburg but to develop some kind of 'take' on America. Most of them have never been to the States."
A writer for Esquire, Andrew Chaikivsky, suggested to Barrus that he do a film on Sandburg versus Genet. As it turned out, Barrus decided to do separate projects on the two authors. The Sandburg film will eventually sit in his Paris darkroom and the Genet project (partly filmed in Larache, Morocco) sits on his desk in a billion bits and pieces. "Like really bad books," Barrus claims, "films are made by editors."
"What does Tilting at Windmills have to do with Carl Sandburg?"
Like Mary Scriver and Tim Barrus: "Everything and nothing. Actually, I think they've given up on Carl Sandburg and that's okay, too."
"Does that mean this film isn't going to get finished?"
"No. It only means that they've been touched by something. This time it's Sandburg's struggle with hope and hopelessness. So they take what they've learned and they go work with it. They iron out the issues. They leave Sandburg in his grave for a while and they try out the stuff they're wading through and then they'll come back to Sandburg. It's how it works. I'm not going to tell them they have to stick to my timeline or agenda because this is art, not Hollywood. I am not compelled to follow the rules of either Hollywood or Manhattan publishing.
"Sandburg sided with hope and strength and America as a kind of muscle." Hope and strength as the steel of America. A Sandburg theme. Vis-à-vis Chicago. Vis-à-vis the America Barrus left (he uses the term kicked out) and the more fundamental America Scriver lives in. A place of sweeping landscapes.
If there's anything both sweeping and fundamental that connects Barrus to Scriver, it's not landscape; it's that elusive thing we call art. Landscape is just a part of a bigger picture. Pun intended.
I asked Scriver, "It seems incongruous that you would know Tim Barrus. How did that happen for you? Barrus scares most people like the boogeyman. A monster I think he sometimes employs to his own ends – it keeps people away."
"When I read The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping I thought he was really Indian and I recognized as authentic much of what he said," she replied. "When the scandal of him not being an Indian broke, I was interested because there's always so much more story. I know Indian charlatans and some of them are Indians! But writers have always felt entitled to assume different identities and it's never been a capital crime until now. Are the Bronte sisters discredited because they used pseudonyms and pretended to be male?
"Once I knew Tim's 'real' name, I Googled and discovered more books, so I read Anywhere, Anywhere, and saw that it was not about porn, it was about loving each other and helping each other. Why should anyone care whether Barrus saw combat in Vietnam before he wrote this book?
"As a teacher I knew gay high school boys who tried to help their partners. As an undergrad theatre student I knew lots of gays, some of whom became famous like Marshall W. Mason, the theatre director. As a Unitarian minister, I knew other Unitarian ministers who were quietly gay and who died of AIDS. In Portland I knew Rodger Larson, who wrote What I Know Now, a gentle and tender book about a boy realizing he is gay. I kid Rodger and his partner Andy as being 'teddy bear gays,' with tummies and beards. But I don't like labels. I like to know the stories of people, not labels. I am not gay. There are many kinds and ways of being gay. And the same goes for not-gay."
"You have had the opportunity to know both Anglo and Blackfeet artists. It's obvious that Anglo artists have more opportunity to expose their art to the art world, or at least, that part of the art world that is economically inclined to attach sometimes-enormous value to a work of art. RC Gorman would have been one example of a Native American artist who broke this barrier. Is this a racial discrimination issue or is it simply hard to get noticed?"
Scriver is always thoughtful and she never judges her interviewer. "As for Anglo artists having more opportunity than Indian artists, I would argue the opposite. Being a romantic 'Indian' is an advantage in the arts."
"Working in bronze seems amazingly difficult. Not too many people are doing it or can do it well."
Scriver is patient with my obvious ignorance. "You are perfectly situated in Paris to find out about the Beaux Arts School and the great shift from marble sculpture to bronze sculpture, which made work like Rodin's possible. Also, the work that is related and key to Bob's bronzes is that done by the Animaliers, a set of sculptors who specialized in portraits of animals, usually pretty ferocious! But also domestic animals. Rosa Bonheur and Barye are two favorites of ourselves. This shift to bronze is related to war, the expertise gained in the making of weapons, especially cannons. There is a strange symbiosis between cannons and monumental bronzes: one is forever being melted down to make the other."
"Personally, I find the big spaces of the American West to be intimidating. Why is so much of this particular sculpture focused on images of the American West?"
"It's mostly timing. The expertise and American foundries arrived with the opening of the frontier and the need to celebrate the Civil War heroes. More recently there has developed a new kind of casting that is much easier and cheaper. We used the old-fashioned 'Roman block' method, but this modern ceramic shell casting — which gets slightly less admirable results – is everywhere now. Small foundries in unexpected places."
Scriver speaks of small foundries and Barrus often speaks of small publishers. A connection?
Barrus thinks so. "The techno-revolution has the art world shrinking (or shrieking). Some people would say expanding but I would say it's shrinking. It's becoming more ubiquitous. Like publishing, it's so about mannerisms. There's more edge in pornography than in the world of art. In fact, it was the landscape of porn that imbued the Internet with technology that worked."
I would call much of the art on the Internet public art. "Public art is becoming more and more abstract," I say to Scriver. "Contemporary public art is almost entirely an abstraction. Why do you think that this form of art attracts more controversy than traditional public art that is more realistic than surreal? The Cinematheque video that the NEA had such a fit about was public art. It just wasn't public art that necessarily portrayed America as a great and shining city on a hill."
"I think it's turning back the other way. The great abstract contemporary movement of the first half of the 20th century is now retreating, though you wouldn't know it from the mainstream magazines. Art of the West or Southwest Art and a few others document a plethora of realistic bronze monuments across the US. We seem now to be reconciling the abstract with the realistic, maybe because of the amazing technologies of image which are often so trompe l'oeil, forcing us to reflect on what is real and what is an illusion or what we want to see."
Which brings me to questions about gender and stereotypes.
"Cowboy art seems very male. Gorman broke with that tradition."
"It's true that his motif and trademark was the Navajo woman with her chin in the air," says Scriver. "It's so distinctive that there have been New Yorker cartoons about it! But his secret was excellent contacts who were interested in promoting him. Don't mistake me: he did fine and unique work, but that's not the same as marketing."
"Could an artist with this kind of background who defies tribal tradition ever return to the reservation? Isn't the loss of his presence a loss for the tribe?"
"Tribes are not romantic. They are cut-throat competitive, both between each other and within. Their reaction to Gorman probably depends on whether they see him as competing with them or being a possible sponsor. I never heard of him sending money back to his tribe. Navajo politics are as vicious as any and he may have felt he was well-off to have escaped."
Barrus knew Gorman when they both lived in Taos, New Mexico. "He got a lot of those contacts in San Francisco. Mary is talking about when he was the most famous nude model around. He was Navajo and he was usually nude when posing so both were pretty authentic. Those were the early years." Barrus is going to see that as more the marketing of a mythology than anything authentic. He maintains that marketing is the American obsession and violence is the real American life. He's an expert on the identity of the authentic. Or not. Barrus maintains that scandal only is. Barrus lives in exile and Paris is that. For him. This particular American life has been lived in the trenches — not the suburbs as Barrus' critics contend. Barrus wouldn't know a suburb if you pushed him out of a moving plane into one and there are a lot of people in publishing who would volunteer to do exactly that. His American life is about exile and the edge. So are his complex books, which Barrus claims are about survival.
"I can't say or predict that My Grunts will side with Sandburg. America as a kind of muscle might sound visionary to an American. I doubt that it sounds too visionary to them. America the workhorse and the train and Abraham Lincoln and pride or a singular nobility through work may be American themes that American culture wants to reflect upon itself, but I'm not too sure that is how the rest of the world reflects upon America. Actually, if I'm going to teach them about America, I would, indeed, bring them here."
I ask the questions. Barrus gives the answers. Or sometimes it's the other way around. This is typical Barrus territory. Getting him to organize his thoughts can be like pulling teeth. He's thinking ten steps ahead of the here and now.
"How do you think they see America, the American story?"
"I note the use of two words that keep popping up in their discussions. One is brutal. And the other is ruthless. I can't say Sandburg would have necessarily disagreed."
It can be difficult to talk Barrus down from the suicidal relationship he has with both film and books. Right now, he's staring silently out across the shimmering lake that is always so fogged in the morning. He says fog can help film although no Hollywood director would agree with that assessment. But Barrus is not your typical anything. This American life, indeed.
I spoke with Scriver about the Santa Fe art scene, which I was recently able to take a brief look at. I noted that that on one level, Indian art is pervasive, but the people with the galleries are not Indians.
"Yeah, well, if you'd gotten into the 'cowboy' art scene, you'd have found that the dealers weren't cowboys. Artists are products. Galleries are businesses," Scriver says.
"Isn't there a cultural disconnect between Indians selling art on the sidewalk on blankets and white gallery owners making big percentages?"
"Don't underestimate the Indian in a blanket. He may be making as much money as a gallery. At home he may not wear a blanket at all. The 'image' of the poor primitive Indian sells art."
"Is there the same kind of disconnect in Montana?"
"The disconnect here is more a matter of East and West. The big money and the fancy galleries are owned by Easterners. Both cowboys and Indians are product. There's a weird and possibly sick little dynamic here where a wealthy professional — often a doctor or lawyer — adopts an artist and controls him (rarely her). Alcoholism often is part of the dynamic. The professional 'helps' the artist by acquiring the art for low prices or even nothing, then storing it until the artist dies (young) and the value assumedly goes up."
"Do any Blackfeet artists go to Europe?"
"Blackfeet who get to Europe go a little crazy! You'll want to read Jim Welch's book called The Heartsong of Charging Elk, which is based on a true story of an Indian man in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show who became ill and was left behind in Marseilles. He goes 'native,' that is, becomes a Frenchman! There are almost always some Blackfeet over at the French Disneyland doing fancy dancing. You ought to go look for them! One older Blackfeet woman who likes to emphasize her tribal affiliation told me, 'Once you make it to France, you'll never have to pay for your own meal or hotel again! The French just love us!'"
"In Europe art schools are everywhere. Are there art schools on reservations?"
"Just the regular public schools, but the reservations have tribal colleges that might have big art departments. The thing is, a school imposes standards, and one of the hallmarks of 'real' Indian art is improvisation in materials and unique vision. You can't go to school for this. It comes from confidence and the ability to really see."
"Many white Europeans see Indian art as more craft that real art. How do they go wrong in assuming this? Why do they assume this?"
"Those nutty Germans try to become Indians, because it was a big part of a national philosophical back-to-nature movement. They admire 19th century objects, which are art because the Indians decorated everything in their lives, but they were defined as crafts, sort of collectibles, thought to be primitive. Everyone always thinks that their own art is 'higher' and 'realer' than that of someone else. Anyway, the modern Indian art movement has assimilated the abstract art of the twentieth century and — at least in the Western US — has absorbed many Asian contexts and givens, which is quite un-Euro."
Where Scriver's America seems a sweeping place, Barrus' America is littered with Lincoln, Sandburg, and disconnect. I am sitting with him in rural North Carolina, hearing words like "brutal" and "ruthless." The setting is idyllic. The Sandburg home sits up on the hill not far away, comfortable and elegant.
"How do you get brutal and ruthless from a place like this? This is seriously nature."
"You note the disconnect. Between a place like this and what's just outside a place like this."
"You mean North Carolina."
"North Carolina and all of its military and racist glory. Sandburg did go to the conflicted Lincoln. Sandburg did go to the depression and the agony. But America sees what it wants to see and what it sees is someone not too controversial whose work they can bring into American classrooms to bore the fuck out of everyone."
Tim Barrus and controversy. The man courts it. He went into exile completely on his own volition, even if he does bitterly claim to have been pushed there. Paris doesn't really care one way or the other — exile is ordinary — even if they cared a lot in North Carolina. And they did. The death threats Barrus gets on a daily basis are breathtaking. His assistant, Kilian Sullivan, says the threats can be a real drain. "Tim ignores them but they come with a certain sadness attached," Sullivan says. Barrus does not call them breathtaking (he's wrong). He calls them American. He is distinctly not comfortable here.
And when the subject of boys and Tim Barrus comes up, American culture goes, as he puts it, totally ape shit over nothing.
