Below is the best tribute to a young artist that helped me out when he was just a young student from one of those funks that we get into when the world seems to be a dark place into which our work  disappears  silently.

I began with his help teaching me basic computer skills and typing and stamping,  and  trudging to the post office with my submissions to engage once again. So much of it was due to his beautiful smile , genuine warmth and good humour  . The tribute is written by Aimee Lutkin who went to school with him and indeed made some great art with him.

I post here in tribute and sorrow for all the art he might have made . He will continue to inspire me and I hope you too. I will post a piece he wrote the  music to very early on in his life . : The Pie Socialite.”

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-ijYZDLLymWQ/ToKefHIVoNI/AAAAAAAAAOY/jbly_Uz4y9g/s1600/IMG_8707.JPG

Tuesday, September 27, 2011
Some Thoughts I Have About Raymond

Raymond and I have conducted our relationship in secret for almost fifteen years. We weren’t hiding it, we weren’t up to anything-in fact there was a very marked lack of any sexual attraction between us though he has given me many compliments on my rack over the years. Thanks, Ray, by the way. We just had very different lives, different social circles, different schedules.

So when I found out he had died it was about 24 hours later and only because someone posted something about it on Facebook. FACEBOOK! I was in my office and I got up, walking past all these computer monitors and silent typists wearing headphones and stumbled out onto the street. My body shook. I didn’t know who to call. Our lives are like a venn diagram and no one else seemed to be in that overlapping area, that little place where our friendship existed. Just like that all traces of it were gone. I barely have even any photos of us together.

I wanted to call him and ask if it was true.

When people die everyone says the same things. Unlike our friendship my grief isn’t private-it’s shared by everyone who knew him, loved him. It’s shared by everyone in the world really, because time keeps marching on and keeps dragging us from each other and we try to forget during the in between times. We probably have to or every moment would be this agony of feeling, just constantly screaming at the top of our lungs, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Because in this moment, knowing that he is gone, I wonder why I ever said anything else.

My last word to Raymond was on Gchat. We have been IMing each other pretty much every single day since it was invented. Maybe that’s why it was always so easy to tell things to Raymond that I could never tell anyone else- about my chronic depression, about my family, about my low self-esteem. Most people don’t want to hear about those things because they think it makes you tainted in some way, like a sick animal that should just slink off somewhere shady to die. Raymond never made me feel like any of my thoughts or feelings were unsafe to share. He never made me feel like the things I hoped for were stupid. He was, no matter how much we butted heads, always kind which is not something many people (definitely not me) manage to be. And my last word to him on Gchat was, “whatever.” I was annoyed with some disagreement we were having. I wasn’t angry or anything just being dismissive. On Sunday I called him to see if he wanted to go get a drink and he didn’t answer. I can never take back that last irritated conversation. So instead I want to remember the last time we were together which was at his house a few weeks ago.

It was rainy as shit. I went to his house and we drank beer, ate pizza and watched stand up. We smoked a cigar on the stoop and made a pact that we would do a stand up show together by November. We looked out at the rain and said we should write a song but by the time we got upstairs we were too lazy and drunk. We sat around his room while he played music and talked about people we love, think we might love, think we might get laid by. We said good bye and I hugged him and said let’s do this more. He agreed. Memory is strange because now, wanting it so desperately to be true, I think as I left I said I love you. Did I? Had I ever? It was true and he must have known it but even though I can picture myself saying it and I can picture him bashfully mumbling, “Love you too, Aimee, now get out,” or something like that…I don’t know if it really happened.

I doubt very much that I was anywhere in the top best friends of Raymond’s life-he had so many. But I believe our friendship was one of the most special in my life, one of the most unique and long lasting. A huge part of my life has been extinguished and besides I Love You I’d like to tell Raymond that. We don’t always know the ways we touch people, what compartment inside their psyche or heart we fill. I can walk into so many rooms in my mind but now one of the biggest ones is empty. If there are people in your life who shape you, understand you, indulge you, argue with you, make up afterwards with you, get crazy on the dance floor with you why keep it a secret? I wish it hadn’t been. I didn’t even know it was until I knew he was dead.

On my iTunes there is a bunch of music Ray picked out and a few that he wrote, a couple we wrote together. The ones I was involved with weren’t as good, but he always helped me anyway. One in particular popped up a few months ago and I hadn’t listened to it in awhile and it made me so happy to hear it. It reminded me I had this friend who wrote me this silly song just because I asked him to and a tear came to my eye even then. It was for a video I made about an evil villainess called the Pie Socialite who pies her enemies and Raymond wrote it from the perspective of her boyfriend before she goes evil, when she’s just plain old Holly his girl. He probably wrote it in like two minutes but it’s so catchy and funny and sweet. I’m listening to it now as I write this and trying to remember all the moments we’re supposed to remember in times like this- when I flashed him on stage during his first show with Ohnomoon, watching him walk out my door forgetting he was still wearing a pair of bunny ears over his hat, him running down the hall away from me in our high school after teasing me, tasting honey together at a harvest festival, smoking pink cigarettes on my stoop, dragging his drunk ass into a bed while he clutched a slice of pizza, him chastising a driver who almost doored me in Williamsburg as he biked cavalierly by, roasting together on Brighton beach, the sound of him calling me Red which is a nickname no one else living remembers…

There is nothing in this life worth as much as the capacity to be loved and to love others. I love Raymond Blanco. I believe the world and my life is a lesser place for not having him in it. There is no solace.

URBAN TOPIARY is an open ended interactive web project born and inspired by Brooklyn and other venues of the imagination.
Episodes are to be resolved and become 3D during live theatrical events to be announced.
Characters ready to be introduced with their own chapters include:
Mz D’Comstruction. Pecan Sandy and O’B Wilde.
If you want to become a digital star or have poetry to add to an upcoming mash up of such please contact Pamela Enz.
This work was made in close collaboration with the multi talented Vera Beren .

Ramnath Siva and I are collaborating on a photography project which graphically captures and scrutinizes these changes in India’s urban landscape.  Bangalore-based photographer, Ramnath Siva, is interested in narrating the story of his city’s ongoing development into a world-class IT hub.  Despite the growing immigrant population, urban sprawl, and horrendous traffic, Bangalore still retains its small-town character as defined by its laidback lifestyle, greenery, and cool weather.

Similarly, Chennai beautifully embraces its physical and cultural contrasts in that a vibrant classical arts scene flourishes along side a booming IT sector and Kollywood (Tamil film industry).  As a performing artiste based in Chennai, I am interested in examining several questions about the relevance of traditional culture in urban India.  Can classical Indian dance, in particular, remain an integral part of India’s modern culture while retaining its traditional aesthetic?  How have urban India’s westernization and movie obsession affected its traditional culture?

Therefore, Ramnath and I have designed two photo shoots for this project which aim to address both of our artistic goals.  Each shoot will be done in several distinctly urban locations within Bangalore and Chennai.  The focus will mainly be on the interaction of high fashion and Indian classical dance with the urban sprawl of both cities.   We hope that the resulting images will create a polarizing statement about the glamorization of classical Indian dance.  More importantly, we hope these images will also symbolically depict an antagonistic or harmonious relationship between Indian classical dance and modern, urban culture.

So far, one photo shoot in Bangalore has been completed in July 2011 with the remaining shoots to be done over the next three months.  The photographs from that session have been edited and compiled into a small video clip enclosed below.

CREDITS

Concept:  Ramnath Siva & Kiran Rajagopalan
Photography & Video:  Ramnath Siva
Project Narrative:  Kiran Rajagopalan
Dance Composition:  Kiran Rajagopalan
Traditional Costume Design:  D.K. Tailors (Chennai)
High Fashion Costume Design:  Bassam Apparel Studio (Chennai)
Jewelry:  Sukra Jewelry (Chennai)
Hair:  Spratt Hair Studio (Bangalore)

( looks up after some contemplation…. )

Well, I was taught not to say the bad words ..you know and I won’t say them now even though its a kinda a new sort of freedom to throw them around like they have no particular weight .. like their meaning’s lost somewhere in outer space – lost to the newly cruel/cool..I said cruel oh, well my father taught us not to say these words because he was a guinea and he’d heard ‘em all “Wop do wop de doh” and all..greaseball.

Anyway,like the other biggie myths generated by suburban parents ,the strange man who’d show up uninvited , crash the party with his dirty yellow cigarette some generalities stuck. About the “colored ” boys which I later felt was a misrepresentation expecting when I was young , very and living in in an all white BLIZZARD WHITE ZONE and had not actually seen one in person- colored -I imagined that they’d all spill out pink, puce, yellow and orange some huge crayola box of flesh human shaped…

To the point.. They told us black men smelt differently. (SIGH) Well experience informed me number one .. that the dirty yellow cigarette was white and that black men do smell different. Better . Intoxicatingly good after ..um..ah you know an intimate experience. Especially after that. I’m so enamored of that particular fragrance I’ve crept up often behind some dusky man in an elevator or paused at a street crossing , eyes closed and sniffed . Inhaled. I’ve been frightening. Yes I admit it. There are so many betters we neutralize by calling “differences ” So many betters ,size, and color and scent which is what all the other lies are made up from -FOR ..to cover the fear, the fear of the powerful that its rights might be challenged give the “others” some betters .

So is this racism? Oh, ugly word. Is it racism sniffing strangers because they’re delicious after all and different is not a dirty word, Smell not pejorative. But how can I come out to the world and admit I’ve smelt enough men of all colors in myriad situations to approximate a scientific study. Yes , its true – a representative sample – Well I did I do and I can testify testify as to why I go stalking the world for more ..eyes closed sucking up close – forcing frightened brothers off elevators two floors below their original destination.

My Art is Me & I am My Art – a short story about memories, identity and art

by Maarten van der Heijden

Dear colleague-artists from Berlin, Suraharta, New York, Manila, Chcago, Vienna, Aswana, Paris, Tartous, Los Angeles, Tirol, Madras, St. Charles, Bangalore, Washington, Haskovo, and more,

Rabbi Tamarah Benima said:

“Is it possible to make art about the shoah? [. . .] As a member of the second generation you do not have the direct experience of persecution and loss, but you do carry all the images of the Shoah with you. One has to do something with it. If you do not, you have two options, either you are insufferably shallow, or you go crazy. Neither are attractive options.” [1]

And I, Maarten van der Heijden, wrote on my website:

“I am a second-generation-jew born in 1947. I have had previous careers in Baroque Music as a Violone player, and in science and clinical practice as a Child Psychologist. After a midlife-crisis I did entrance-examination at Gerrit Rietveld Art Academy Amsterdam, where I studied from 2005 till 2010.“ [2]

About the WHY of this career-switch I wrote:

“I always knew that I was Jewish, but that fact had until about my five fortieths year little meaning to me. About Judaism and about the war at home there was no talking. And in terms of faith, we were ‘nothing’. When I was 45 years, I ended up in a – what belated – midlife crisis: job gone, wife gone, everything totally uncertain. I needed support, love and hope. And then I realized, well I can go to the Baghwan, but I am Jewish, so why not go and explore what Judaism has to offer me? My search for my Jewish roots began with a course on Jewish Spirituality with Carola de Vries Robles and a course in Jewish History with Andreas Burnier, and ended, via double-bass playing in a klezmer group and attending various rabbinical lern-groups, with a second-generation support group at the Jewish Social Work on the impact of the Holocaust. Finally, in November 2001, I made a trip to Auschwitz (and back!) with the Auschwitz Committee. I was speechless and I was beaten utterly perplexed: the history of Judaism appeared at the same time outrageously and clamant beautiful (the Talmud and Jewish mystical traditions) and also inconceivable awful (the horror of the Holocaust). This was for my narrow little shoulders almost unbearable. And I thought: I have to do something with this; how can I do something with these vehement and contradictory feelings? My answer was: that is only possible by means of VISUAL ART.”  [3]

@Maarten141BOXES [The Book of My Life]

In art-school, after lessons about conceptual art in 2008 I began making an ego-document: The Book of My Life: @Maarten141BOXES. It is an autobiographical artproject about  the unpacking, archiving, documenting, photographing and clearing away of the content of the 141 moving boxes that were in my house. I was carrying these boxes with me my whole life and during my life their number was growing. In March 2008 I had no idea of what was inside these boxes: books, piles of paper, old agenda’s and diaries, familyphoto’s and a lot more. Stuff from the different houses and places I lived in, and things I did put in these boxes after the death of my mother, my father and Omi, my grandmother . . . I could not  (and still I cannot) throw away the content of these 141 boxes. A friend of mine called the piles of boxes standing in the corridor of my house my ‘wall of identity’.

@Maarten141BOXES has now become a Bilingual Interactive Internet Artwork in Progress and you can follow it and comment on it via Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. You can find it on the following link:

http://www.maartenvanderheijden.nl/141-boxes

INVITATION FOR ARG ARTISTS (AND OTHERS!)

Dear colleague-ARG-artists from Berlin, Suraharta, New York, Manila, Chcago, Vienna, Aswana, Paris, Tartous, Los Angeles, Tirol, Madras, St. Charles, Bangalore, Washington, Haskovo, and more.

I would verry much appreciate it if you send me your thoughts, questions and comments on @Maarten141BOXES. Your comments and questions may become part of the work and your ideas may influence the way this work will develop. So please send me your questions and comments in the form of words and/or images.

“MARTIN”

In 2010 I graduated at Gerrit Rietveld Academy and in 2011 I had my first solo-exhibition “Martin” in the Borne Synagogue.

In my artworks I use the photographs the allied forces took at the liberation of the nazi concentrationcamps in 1945. These photo’s are so extremely horrific that they virtually disappeared from the public domain . . .

Nicolas Bourriaud wrote:

“Contrary to the received idea, we are not saturated with images, but subjected to the lack of certain images, which must be produced to fill in the blanks of the official image of the community.” [4]

Susan Sontag wrote about these photographs:

“Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seem plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after … When I looked at those photographs, something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but part of my feelings started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.” [5]

And Rabbi Tamarah Benima said about these photographs at the opening of my solo-exhibition:

“I can not remember when I first have seen these photographs [. . .] I fell apart when it dawned on me: “So much I am hated as a Jewess”. The measure of the Jew-hatred, centuries old, centuries nourished, more difficult to exterminate than the Jews themselves, was visible, was felt, was clear on these images. This is my story, this is my mythology, if you will, this is Maarten’s story, this is his mythology, if you will, this is our heritage; it is not the only thing we have inherited, there is infinitely more, but this at least we have inherited, with this we must in any case do something. [. . .] With the way Maarten did do that something, he has placed himself in the middle of the Jewish tradition. [. . .] Maarten’s work testifies to the unbroken will to live. With the shit something meaningful is created. [. . .] Maarten van der Heijden has taken his responsibility by giving the the Jewish suffering an artistic form [. . .] a form that makes up the questions that must be questioned. And that, in an almost ‘cheerful’ manner, declares: It has been, it is still there, it is not gone, it will always remain, but we go on.” [6]

Christian Boltanski said:

“At the beginning of all the work there is a kind of trauma: something happened. [. . .] When I was youger I was very crazy; now I’m very normal. I only do what I do because I used to be crazy. Art for me is one way of talking about problems and about the past; sometimes, as with psychoanalysis, you are a little better for having done so.” [7]

and:

“There’s someone who has a problem and tries to resolve it by making an object, and the person who looks at it has more or less the same problem and is also going to resolve it a little bit while looking at it. [. . .] The artist has to be – and this is a very Romantic idea – someone who resolves his own problems, speaks more or less about himself, and who, as much as this is possible, is able to resolve the problems of others, is able to pose questions to others.” [8]

ART

I end this story with a 8:50 minute video of my 2011 exhibition in the Borne Synagogue, named “Martin” after the-grandfather-I-never-knew, the conductor Martin Spanjaard, and with some images from  the exhibition.

Video (8:50 min.) of  2011 solo-exhibition “Martin” in Borne Synagogue:

http://www.vimeo.com/25078707

[1]        Tamarah Benima (2010). In: New Israelitic Weekly, 23, 19 March 2010,

(p.31); read full text at:

http://www.maartenvanderheijden.nl/agenda-a-press/79-tableau-of-roses

[2]        http://www.maartenvanderheijden.nl/cv

[3]        Maarten van der Heijden (2010). Sublime Sublimatiion of the Shoah?

Thesis, Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam (p.5); see for english summary,       dutch text and illustrations:

http://www.maartenvanderheijden.nl/books

[4]        Nicolas Bourriaud (2005). Postproduction. New York: Lukas &

Sternberg (p.52)

[5]        Susan Sontag (1977). On Photography. London: Penguin Books (p.20)

[6]        Tamarah Benima: About the artworks of Maarten van der Heijden. Text

spoken on 8th of May 2011 at Borne Synagogue; see for full (Dutch) text and      more info:

http://www.maartenvanderheijden.nl/cv

[7]        Christian Boltanski (1997). In: D. Semin, T. Garb, & D. Kuspit. Christian

Boltanski. London: Phaidon (p.8-9)

[8]        Christian Boltanski (2009). In: C. Boltanski & H.U. Obrist. Christian

Boltanski / Hans Ulrich Obrist. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung

Walther König (p.30)