TRUTH
That was a word disguised as a question, posing as a potential art exhibition that was presented to me in 2008, when I was captain of the ship for a place called Pharmaka. Pharmaka started as a group of painters getting together every Tuesday night to look at and discuss art, drink some beer, and have some pizza—all the while moaning about the all-elusive art world. Those moans became words that took the form of a statement that morphed into a manifesto. Once we had the manifesto, we needed a name, and settled on Pharmaka, which is Greek for “a poison or remedy,” but in ancient Greek also means “an artist’s colors.” As “painters,” we were all after that ever-elusive idea of truth in our work. We used the word in our manifesto multiple times, stating, “Painting has always served as a conduit between the artist’s need to express some inner truth and the audience’s ability to share in that truth.” We then went on to say, “Postmodernism teaches us that the idea of unassailable Truth (with a capital “T”) is untenable. But that only means if there is a “truth” to extol in the world of art, it is the truth of an honesty that can exist between the artist and the viewer, and between the artist and the medium. Thus, truth in art can have the luxury of not being preoccupied with the idea of a Truth for all people; rather, it can be defined by and exist in the moment of interaction between artist and artwork, and then between artwork and viewer.”
To finally drive the point home, we added, “The public has become more sensitive to this truth than ever. The relentless bombardment of media truths (advertising, news, images, and commentary from all sides) has so inured the public to media manipulation that scarcely anyone expects to find truth in the massage parlors of the media marketplace (or as Marshall McLuhan once wrote, “The media is the massage.” [pun intended]). When artists are not being “honest” to themselves or “true” to the medium, the media-savvy public takes little notice of their work.”
This quest for truth was the presetting of a stage in 2004 that would culminate in a curatorial adventure begun in 2008 and brought to a close finally in 2015.
Now back to a little more history. The Pharmaka group of painters opened a gallery space in downtown Los Angeles in December 2004, thus creating a meeting and exhibition space. Suddenly we had the daunting task of curating shows to keep things moving, fresh, and interesting for our growing audience. When we opened the doors for the first art walk, we had 12 people walk in, look around, and walk out. Two years later, we were getting 4,000 plus people walking in between 6 and 9 pm on the second Thursday of each month. We had an audience who was eager to see what we would do next, which meant we had pressure to produce meaningful exhibitions that would back up our original manifesto. It was the success we all hoped for—but if you are not careful, it can sweep you away and out to sea.
We were in need of exhibition ideas, and I was encouraging everyone in the group to step up onto this platform we had created and be heard and seen—in other words, curate a show. My plea for fresh ideas didn’t fall completely on deaf ears. One day, I received a call from Laura Hipke asking if I would be at the gallery that day because she had an idea for a show she wanted to pitch to me. I agreed and she gave me her pitch. Truth, what was it? Was it universal or personal? Was it definable and, if so, would we know it if we saw it? Is great art truth? Is bad art truth? What is it? She needed to know, and her need had led her to this moment of speaking her truth to me about her idea for an exhibition. She didn’t know how to go about putting it together or make it happen because she had never curated a show before. I had a little voice in my head telling me to suggest a more conventional show, but that would be too easy, and she was set on truth, so there it was: Truth. The word I had used so many times in the Pharmaka manifesto and spouted over and over while discussing art. Truth. An idea that was potentially on its way to becoming tangible.
I suggested she start writing down all her thoughts about truth and partner with one of the other artists who had curated a show and knew the necessary steps. She agreed and asked the painter Vonn Sumner to co-curate and they started the conversation about the whats and hows. It didn’t take long for them to work out the details of Laura’s idea; it would start with one artist painting a predetermined-size canvas, then giving that painting to the next artist, with their own canvas of the same size, and then having them respond to what they were seeing. The catch was they couldn’t know whom the artist was they were responding to. It was a visual game of Telephone. This idea was proposed to me, and I thought it had some potential, so I encouraged them to refine it and define the show from start to finish. Laura came in and measured the walls of the gallery, and calculated that, if she had 20"x20" canvases, and had them spaced a foot or so apart, there was room for 49 canvases, which translated to 49 artists. I agreed to the show, got out the calendar, and we tentatively penciled in a date.
Then, as if preordained, the first snag happened. Vonn was struggling with the idea that an art exhibit would or could define truth. On top of that, his wife had been offered a teaching job in Pennsylvania, and they would be moving soon, so he would have to bow out of the project. Laura came to me, quite upset over this change of course, but I told her to move forward with it on her own because, if she was that passionate about it, she must see it through. She seemed relieved by my words of encouragement and said she would indeed carry on.
But there was a storm brewing out over the horizon; few saw it coming nor could anyone predict the catastrophic damage it would cause. The day Lehman Brothers announced they were finished, the economic lifeblood of western civilization was suddenly poisoned with mercury, and the chance of life as usual was looking bleak. When the economy goes over a cliff at 100 miles an hour, the majority of the art world follows at 150 miles an hour. And that is indeed what happened, as galleries began closing because people stopped buying art. It started on the west side of Los Angeles, where the rents are highest, and started heading east like a tsunami, until it hit the corner of 5th and Main and I had to close the doors of Pharmaka in October of 2009.
But I digress. There was another key event that happened before the closing of Pharmaka, which was Laura asking for my help in contacting artists for her show, called The Circle of Truth by that time. I agreed, but realized if I was going to be attached to this project, then we had to really tighten it up and have a mission statement that would be our go-to place for any questions we might encounter. Laura agreed and I began by reading what she had, then writing my own draft of it, then giving it back to Laura and her husband Randy, and then back to me for a final okay. Then the real issue came up: who was going to be the first artist to kick this off? I assumed it would be Laura, since it was her project, but she was as resistant to that idea as a man getting into a filled bathtub with a plugged-in electric appliance sitting on the bottom of it. Her self-protecting intuitive mechanism kicked in and she politely said no.
A few names were tossed around but they weren’t sticking. Then Laura brought up a very good point: if I was going to participate, I wouldn’t be able to follow someone because I would know who they were, being part of the “which artists to choose committee.” She then smiled and her eyes got big and bright as if THE universal light switch had been turned on, and she looked at me and said that I should start it off. She spent the next few minutes arguing her case until I agreed I would be artist #1.
Suddenly, I was strapped with this task of defining, via paint on canvas, what my idea of truth was, and that idea could potentially set the tone for the entire project. I realized that this would require some soul-searching of my own, but I had a handful of other brush fires I was trying to stomp out. One was how and when to close Pharmaka, the next the end of my 14-year marriage, and, topping it off, a world economy that was hemorrhaging. At that place and time, truth with a capital “T” was living in another dimension.
From the start, the Circle of Truth was to be a microcosm of the ideas that Pharmaka embodied. A predominant idea was that art exhibitions would be judged on the art, not the names of the artists. This was the same approach used for choosing artists for the Circle of Truth. I knew we needed to have some known artists in the mix but just having who’s hot this month was not something I thought would make for an interesting exhibition. And who is to say whether someone who is unknown today might be a household name in 5 to 10 years, or vice versa.
In the beginning, I presumed this would be straightforward, and we would choose one artist to follow another, and follow the list that Laura and I had drawn up. But much to my surprise, some artists delivered works back to us I didn’t expect, causing an atomic-swerve of sorts.
Giving my painting to Lisa Adams was a mutual decision between Laura and myself. I had an idea that if we gave an abstract painting to a representational artist and vice versa, it would keep everyone slightly off balance and force him/her out of their comfort zone. What we got back from Lisa was a surprise, as I wasn’t expecting her to focus on the cascading veils in my painting. I assumed she would pick up on the white square in the upper left hand corner, and see that each square or rectangle decreased in size as it went out across the canvas. And I wrongly assumed she would recognize it as the visualization of the Golden Ratio, which is why I painted the cascading veils over them as a means to camouflage the true meaning.
But for Lisa, the veils were the “thing” that she couldn’t get past—her interpretation of translucent free-form lines became tightly measured bars hovering over snowflake-like patterns. It was the opposite of what I gave her, yet it was very similar—like half-siblings. We gave Lisa’s painting to Margaret Lazzari and she dismantled Lisa’s structured lines, pushing the paint towards a state that hovered between a loose figurative image and pure abstraction. We next gave Margaret’s painting to Jim Morphesis, who picked up on the figurative part and painted a skull, which was fascinating for me, since my painting was based on the ratio of the human face.
In short order, the original idea embedded in my painting became a subconscious undercurrent. As we progressed, this continued to happen over and over, with one painting informing the next without knowing its true origins. And that, I realized, was the key to what we were doing—creating a microcosm of what civilizations do over generations and decades, if not centuries. We forget where our language comes from, and, as an American that speaks primarily English, I think most people tend to think of English as its own thing. Actually it is a fusion of many different languages and cultures that span hundreds of years—all mashed together under one umbrella. The idea is this exhibition is the umbrella and all the art under it is the different ways people see, think, feel and respond to their environment.
Artists are usually thought to be more sensitive, aware, and questing for unanswerable questions that have the potential to give our lives a deeper meaning and purpose. As human beings, we are a continuous summation of our experiences, and the way we look often gives only small clues about what the impact of those experiences is. This exhibition breaks the facade open, giving us a glimpse, not only into what these artists saw and how they responded, but I think on a much deeper level, to a visual micro of the macro. It is a truth that is without an agenda, but instilled with a purpose.
– Shane Guffogg
June 14, 2014 Venice, Italy