Hybrid Garden Varieties
Combinatory Exercises and their Use.
A version of this text accompanies an exhibition opening on Saturday, June 8th, at Galería Espacio Mínimo in Madrid.
Of all the art professors to whom I am indebted, the Chicago Imagist artist Barbara Rossi (1940-2023) occupies a special place. The image I have of her is the one of a petite woman with wide blue eyes and smile, an impeccable and spotless appearance, her white hair on a bun and wearing a long skirt— a remnant, I always thought, of the fact that she was a Catholic nun for several years before becoming an artist. As she walked into the painting studios she would pull out a rag so that she could wipe out whatever stool she was going to sit on to ensure it had no fresh paint on it. There was a psychological intensity in both her demeanor and her painstaking work, the latter drawn from vernacular and Pop culture (weirdly, I am reminded of her work whenever I see the logo of the Mister Softee ice cream trucks in New York). This was a common trait of the Chicago artists grouped under the “Hairy Who” of the late 1960s, also known as the Chicago Imagists. Incorporating elements of abstraction, surrealism, and cartooning —but also from unexpected sources like Egyptian hieroglyphs— some of Rossi’s early works consisted in reverse paintings on plexiglass, made with astonishing attention to detail and technical accuracy. I remember once when she was showing us this body of work one of us asked her how she felt about those works 20 years or so after making them. She thought about the question for a moment. I never forgot her response, which I should frame and hang in my studio: “it was the right thing to be doing at that moment.”
I was in Rossi’s drawing class in the spring of 1991. Her assignments were clearly delineated. The way she taught us to research was important, and it spoke of the interests —but also methodical approach— of the Imagists. Like I mentioned, their visual references went beyond art history. Art historian Robert Loescher once theorized that the ethnographic collections of the Field Museum of Natural History where very influential to that generation of Chicago artists, who were seeking an alternative visual language from the dominant New York abstraction of the late 1940s. Like Pop artists, Imagists were looking at mass culture, but they also turned to ancient cultures, ritual and/or utilitarian objects, and outsider and folk art; Rossi made us consider sources in the same way. During a portion of the class where we studied gardens, Rossi showed us examples from Renaissance and Baroque (e.g. Versailles) designs, followed by works by many artists using different motifs, and with the final assignment of having us draw our own imaginary gardens. For some reason it got into my mind that I needed to make an alphabet of gardens, with each letter taking the form of a building within which the garden would be contained. I remember staying up all night making the 26 gardens (one for each letter), even having to time myself to move on to the next drawing in order to finish in time for the class.
Another assignment, which was also related to a classic Imagist artistic approach, was the creation of “hybrids”. As I recall, the assignment was rather simple: draw 10/15 everyday household objects (like a chair, a lamp, a toaster, etc.) and then create hybrid combinations of them (that is, merging the visual elements of one drawing onto the other). This merging of common objects is surely connected to the classic surrealist random juxtaposition approach, predicated by the famous phrase by Comte de Lautréamont that André Breton embraced: "as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table." So, we would draw a toaster-chair, a lamp-screwdriver, a shoe-pencil and so forth. The alchemy of those combinations was thrilling to me; not just because of the resulting imagery, but because of the metaphorical/narrative possibilities they offered. I then proceeded to take a further approach and out of my 16 or so hybrid drawings I made 8 hybrid drawings of each pair, and then 4 hybrids of those and so forth. Barbara took photos of them when I presented them in class; 25 years or so later when I saw her again (and sadly for the last time before her passing last year) in Chicago, she told me that she still had those photos and they had entered into the body of research she would show in class, which was both humbling and touching for me.
Exquisite-body surrealist alchemy aside, the hybrid drawing approach is perhaps something that might be drawn from the natural history world (like the Field Museum that the young Imagists visited as students) and from another individual who also came from the world of faith: Georg Mendel, and his 1865 essay, Versuche über Pflanzen-Hybriden ("Experiments on Plant Hybridization"), which became the foundational publication for modern genetics.
Years later, when I started merging my pedagogical practice with my art practice, I realized that Mendelian inheritance theory (2 copies from each gene, one from each parent), when applied to art-making, can also function as a dialectic/dialogic process. During the aughts (2000-2009) many of us were experimenting with pedagogical/lecture presentation formats; they ranged from Steven Schenk’s Pecha Kucha in Tokyo to Adam Lerner’s Mixed Taste lectures at the Belmar Lab in Denver.
I drew from my interest in hybrids and Leibniz’s Ars Combinatoria and diagrammatic reasoning to see what would happen if we could turn the academic lecture into something more dynamic. In Mexico City in 2010 I organized something called the “combinatory lecture”, which consisted in inviting individuals to create a 3-minute lecture on a subject that they were experts on. Later they would be paired with one another to merge the subjects of their lectures, producing a 3-minute lecture on that merged subject, and so on to arrive at a final presentation that comprised all prior elements.
A common criticism to the idea of creating random juxtapositions is that it is more about fun and entertainment (like Mad Libs), a mere whimsical and silly game. In fact, this combinatory approach is linked to a modernist genealogy (following the Mendelian terminology) of aleatory art and indeterminacy, as well as accident art. I am interested in hybridity as a component of pedagogical counterpoint — on which I hope one day to be able to write about more extensively. Rigid systems of thinking result in homogeneous and banal ideas; what is required is to devise mechanisms to shake them up. Surprise juxtapositions allow us to see problems and questions differently.
As I was working on a series of drawings dedicated to Ana Mendieta (which go on view tomorrow), and I considered how my remote connection to her was that I was also a Latin American artist who ended up going to art school in the Midwest, trying to make sense of my relationship to my own cultural ancestry, I ended up doing hybrid drawings, recalling those early Midwest student years. The reason I enjoy the process is because it is nor pre-ordained; the reason why I see it as good pedagogy is because we are producing new knowledge, not teaching something to which we already know the answer. But mainly because, as Barbara said, it is the right thing to be doing at this (and perhaps any) moment.
It is the right thing to do at this moment- what a wonderful expression and insight. And felicidades in your show and the Ana Mendieta drawings.
Beautiful post