Tunnel Visions
The elusive paths of Martín Ramírez.
Two weeks ago I visited the Outsider Art Fair in New York— a joyous, VIP lounge-less event, completely different from a contemporary art fair in its relaxed, unpretentious and unabashedly unfashionable atmosphere. The abundant curiosity and jovial mood of the visitors reminded me of the early days of the New York Artist’s Book Fair, which was (and to an extent, still is) more of a reunion of like-minded artists than a market for high-end collectors. Mostly I found myself doing something that I almost never do anymore at art fairs: becoming visually sucked-in by various individual pieces, so captivated by the inner worlds of the artists represented that the hustle and bustle around me would momentarily disappear. Among them, as it is usually the case at these fairs, were works by Martín Ramírez, one of the masters of this complicated “genre” (as I will explain) and someone who I have always admired; although this time the work got me thinking about questions of interpretive slippage.
Over the course of my life, from Mexico to Chicago, Ramírez has made repeated and fleeting appearances, just as his images of passing trains. The first was in the late 80s, in Mexico City, shortly after a kunsthalle-style space opened two blocks down from my high school. It was the Centro Cultural de Arte Contemporáneo, created by Fundación Televisa. In spite of its name, most of its exhibitions were not of contemporary, but modern art (Klee, Munch, Kahlo, Izquierdo), with others being odd, unorthodox art historical choices (like a survey of the tenebrous, baroque Spanish painter Valdés Leal). I do remember, however, watching a slideshow at the entrance of the museum with black and white photographic portraits of contemporary artists (Haring, Warhol, Acconci, Flavin, and others) and being slightly puzzled about their homogenously uncanny and strange looks. I felt a strange blend of fear and fascination, wondering to myself: will I, too, transform into an eccentric, slightly unhinged figure like them once I become a professional artist? Does the path of an artist inherently require one to seem—if not be—somewhat mad?
A couple years later, I reflected again on that question when the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo opened an exhibition of the work of Martín Ramírez, organized by Elsa Longhauser. Ramírez was born in the area of Los Altos in Jalisco in 1895 (very close in time and place where my paternal grandmother was also born). He worked the railroads in the 1920s in California, after which he became homeless and diagnosed with schizophrenia leaning toward catatonia— often described as being unable to speak. He was institutionalized first in Stockton and later in Sacramento, where a clinical psychologist, Tarmo Pasto, began observing and supporting Ramírez’s interest in art. Ramírez produced hundreds of extraordinary drawings depicting trains, cowboys and vírgenes up to his death in 1963. His work was rescued by artists Jim Nutt and Glady Nilsson, two Chicago Imagists (from the group that later became my professors at the Art Institute, and who were very interested in the vernacular) who along with their dealer Phillis Kind purchased a vast amount of Ramirez’s works from Max Dunievitz, director of the DeWitt State Hospital, who had kept them after the artist passed away. They organized the first Ramírez solo exhibition in 1973.
Of all of Ramírez's drawings, it is his recurring depiction of trains entering and exiting tunnels that has stayed most vividly in my memory. Much has been written about this imagery, often interpreted as a metaphor of both freedom and imprisonment, reflecting his uncertain journey as an immigrant, and ultimately offering a window into the exploration of his inner consciousness. Still, my recent re-engagement with these works made me feel the need to write about what those tunnels mean to me in particular. As I pondered their significance, I realized that before delving deeper, two key aspects needed to be clarified—particularly for those, like myself, who are not experts in either Ramírez's work or the field itself.
First, the very question of whether, or the extent to which, Ramírez was indeed “mad”, and the perceptions it generates of his work, is highly problematic. Various critics and curators have pointed out that, should it not have been from the marginalization he suffered as immigrant, the clinical parameters used in the 1940s to diagnose mental illness, and for the effect of social and racial inequities (as well as the fact that he did not speak English) he might not have been categorized, and therefore not institutionalized, in the way he was. “I am not convinced of his mental illness at all, and certainly not his ‘madness’”, I was told by Brooke Davis Anderson, a leading curator and scholar who was founding Director and Curator of The Contemporary Center at the American Folk Art Museum in New York from 1999 to 2010, has published three books on Ramírez and who has also organized three major exhibitions of his work. As she sees it, “his identification as mentally ill was overemphasized from day one, [and has become] a window blind blocking the story of a 20th century immigrant a father, a husband, someone who traveled up and own California, who held jobs— the fullness of the man was never allowed to be part of the investigation of his work.” But biography aside, she adds, “I really encourage us to begin our conversations and scholarship about Ramírez as an artist first, and then the life circumstances and hypothesis next.” The scholarship of Victor M. Espinosa, she emphasized, has been key to further understand the complexities of his work.
Davis Anderson also questioned the assumption that Ramírez had no say about being in an asylum. “By the end of these [exhibition] projects, I did feel that perhaps Ramírez chose to be in asylums because they were a safe place to make art.” In the traditional lingo of those who seek sustenance in military or homeless shelters, he sought “three hots and a cot.”
Nor is it true that Ramírez could not speak. Wayne Thiebaud met Ramírez when Thiebaud was a student at Sacramento State University and got to talk to him, an experience that Thiebaud himself describes in an essay titled “Remembering Ramírez.”
Secondly, the concept of “outsiderness” within modern and contemporary art practice is also problematic and historically has always been fluid. Consider, for instance, MoMA’s early acquisition of folk art, which was largely influenced by Alfred Barr’s belief that vernacular and popular art forms embodied the modern spirit. Barr’s view, in turn, was likely shaped by one of MoMA’s founders, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, a significant collector of folk art starting in the 1920s. However, by the time she passed away in 1948, Barr’s conception of modernism had shifted, possibly influenced by Jean Dubuffet’s notion of “Art Brut” in the 1940s. As a result, a portion of the Rockefeller collection was eventually gifted to the Folk Art Museum when it opened in 1961 (other pieces went to conform the Rockefeller Folk Art Museum in Williamsburg, VA). Yet, despite this shift, there were exceptions that illustrated the evolving boundaries of modernism: Henri Rousseau, a self-taught artist embraced by Picasso and celebrated by other fellow artists, remains to this day part of MoMA’s canon. Not to mention that Starry Night, the iconic painting that anchors modern art history and is by far the most famous work in MoMA’s entire collection, was created by a largely self-taught, destitute artist who struggled with mental illness, rather than by an established figure. The self-awareness, intellectual solemnity, ideological drive, and irony that dominated the discourse of much of avant-garde and post-war art likely led MoMA curators to quietly set self-taught/outsider/folk art to the side (as an interesting coda, here I want to note that an important MoMA exhibition that explored the relationship between modernism and outsider art was Glossolalia, organized by Connie Butler in 2008).
I also asked Brooke Davis Anderson about her own feelings about the very term, “outsider art”. From her point of view, “the only thing I appreciate about the term ‘outsider art’ is that it points to the flaws and inadequacies of terminology and labels and categories in art history. And that the “science” of art history doesn’t aid our deeper understanding of artists, all artists. I think [the term ‘outsider’] assists the marketplace more than anything else, and reaffirms the ‘artist in the attic’ notion of creative makers.”
And now on to Ramírez’s underground passages.
The tunnel is a rich visual figure, one used by a myriad contemporary artists, either in literal representations such as Do Ho Suh’s 95 Horatio Street, or with interactive like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Voice Tunnel; land art interventions like Michael Heizer’s Double Negative from 1969 or Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973-76) or in more symbolic approaches like Lygia Clarks’ Túnel from 1973. One of my favorite contemporary art works featuring a tunnel is Stan Douglas’ Overture (1986), one of the Canadian artist’s earliest works, where he used the footage of an 1898 Edison silent film of a train going in and out of a tunnel with a voiceover reading of Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Looking at those works, one can find evergreen themes: passageways of transformation, the transition from the unknown into the light, the human lifespan from birth to death (and/or the memory before birth), the inexorable oscillation of consciousness into the subconscious and vice versa, the human links to the natural world, entrapment and escape, and so on.
So where do Ramirez’s depictions of tunnels and trains fit in this universe of themes? Obviously the work has autobiographical elements drawn from his life as a railroad worker, and the train can be read as a symbol of both his identity, the journey of his life that took him far but to unknown places from which there was no coming back. His work is like the exploration of the rugged geography of his mind where trains circulate through tracks and tunnels connecting his memories. But as I previously suggested, what I get from those pieces, and from his work in general, has to do with slippage and about what I would term as runaway meaning.
In his book The Ego Tunnel, German philosopher and cognitive scientist Thomas Metzinger argues that there is no such thing as “the self.” Conscious experience to him is like being inside a tunnel, with a limited, subjective view of the world. Our brain constructs a tunnel-like reality that we experience as if it were the entirety of the external world. In reality, however, this model is a filtered and constructed version of reality, shaped by cognitive processes.
Artists, like anyone engaged in society, must construct a public persona—much like the contemporary artists I saw as a teenager in that slideshow at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo. Their appearances struck me as both odd and calculated, as if they were novice rock singers posing for an album cover. Artists typically classified as “outsiders” appeal to us because we perceive them as unconcerned with public opinion: their work is for themselves, and they remain entirely true to their own identity, seemingly oblivious to both self-awareness and the gaze of others. In this, we see a raw authenticity that draws us in, turning us into voyeurs of their private worlds. Yet, the artistic process of contemporary artists is rarely so self-conscious or calculated. As Rimbaud once wrote, art is “a rational disordering of all the senses... all forms of love, of suffering, of madness; [the artist] searches himself; he exhausts all the poisons in him and keeps only the sweetness of the poisons.” In a way, we are all mad, and we are all normal. What we perceive as the singular vision of an "outsider" artist may, in fact, be more a reflection of our own narrow perspective. When we approach art with this mindset, its true meaning will always elude us.
Maybe Ramirez’s tunnels, and the trains that forever run through them, could be seen as the infinite quest of meaning within the labyrinth, the search of the self, the pursuit for categorical definitions and truths. He is just one of us, and we are just like him: passengers in the train of life, permanently searching for meaning, ever going through passing moments of darkness and light.
A superb read, thank you!