My work continues to be influenced by ideas related to poetry, information, massurrealism, the internet and abstraction. Much of my work this last two years has been involved with the use of lettering to create abstract relationships and rhythms. I have been writing - or rather constructing - a great deal of collage poetry composed of electronic email and other digital texts found on the internet and collage sound works composed of electronically manipulated snippets of sound from a wide variety of sources but most related to or found on the internet. In fact the internet is the central theme of much of my activities though, artistically I do not have much interest in the 'digital' or high tech look. I am not particularity interested in mechanical forms of artistic production at this time but still regard the practice of art making as a spiritually based activity. What I mean by 'spiritually based' is somewhat ambiguous. It has to do with one's personal relationship to the life around one and the inner promptings of the heart - of intuition: of an intuitive process of working. Collage for me is the perfect medium for this form of expression because one's involvement is based in the development of a sensitivity toward and an appreciation of the materials one is working with, which in all most all cases are ephemeral in nature. This fleeting quality of papers and the messages and images they contain seems a fitting material for the contemplation of our temporal condition - of our brief sojourn in this world the world known in the Cabala as Olahm Ha-Assiah, the material world, the world of shells.
According to this same thought, to make art from these things, to respect them, to order them, to give them a new life is a kind of restoration of the world, a way to symbolically have mercy on the world. They say that in all things are sparks of the divine and that they live in these shards, in this world of shells and that these sparks wish to find their way back to the source from which they originated and you could say that this is the very light of God desiring to unify itself. So as an artist the development of one's work is to ever become more sensitive, ever more aware of the world around one and especially the visual world which is a language in itself. There are traditions in art of imposing mythic themes upon artistic expression and there is again, something heroic in the idea but I propose that everything no matter how humble is a part of this heroic struggle toward the release from limitation and the embrace of beauty for light is the source of all that we know as beautiful and the absorption in light is to be beauty itself. So I suppose behind it all, the struggle for commercial success, for dominance, for clarity, for joy, for understanding, for a sense of fulfillment, these are all a part of a drive toward the return; a return of the sparks of Life toward their source, and all of our struggling and fighting and stress that we suffer are a release of that energy which wished to be free and wished to return. I know this may be hard to see in my work. But I work in a completely visual manner and the very act of creating my art is a participation in this struggle. In Mexico there are a lot of posters in our area for La Lucha which are the wrestling matches and La Lucha means wrestle and wrestle mean struggle and a major source material for my work this last couple of years has been wrestling posters. I see the term La Lucha as a very potent symbol of the nature of life and certainly the life of an artist. There is in the wrestling matches a small area where men dress up in a comic way with their masks and their personas that they wish to project and the voluptuous women in bathing suits and the whole thing is a kind of funny spectacle and a parody of the heroic struggle that the arts often attempt to articulate but it contains all of the elements - as a performance and a subculture - that animate the life around us. Yet in is quirkiness, in its failure to achieve or even strive for something sublime it makes one uncomfortable and there is an underlying feeling of distastefulness. Before, in Picasso's day, he saw the bullfights in the same light and I am sure he felt the metaphoric relationship of the bull fights to the nature of life in general, only today, with the wrestling matches it is not man against nature but man against man and man as persona and persona as public spectacle. The same with works of art and with the work of the artist in general. There is a need to establish a level of spectacle, of excitement and engagement and everything in the commercial aspect of the art world is like that to a certain extent. It is a careful process of the management of perception and of presenting the work of artists in such a way that the observer is lead to have an appreciation of the works presented. This is a good thing I think, it is why we put a frame on things, to give them, not only protection but a sense of value and dignity. The experience of art is a delicate one and there are always those who wish to dismiss art as insubstantial and as of little worth and this is clearly evident in the school systems, all things creative, that strive toward beauty or sensitivity seem to have unrelentingly been removed from the daily disciplines of the children but I have to ask, what is the value of knowledge and technology if intuition, observation and a sense of the dignity of things and of ourselves has not been inculcated?
