I share the cooking responsibilities with my wife Pat, yet I find myself doing the lion’s share lately solely because I enjoy it. Pat thinks I’m a kitchen control freak—probably right! When I cook, I see myself as a reincarnation of some long-forgotten French chef who was best known for inventing a sauce so compellingly tasty that it became synonymous with the best of gourmet offerings. But in reality, I’m a kamikaze cook. I usually have no idea how things are going to taste in the end; it’s hit or miss, and the wine makes everything better anyhow. But if I learned anything from my imaginary French chef, it’s that good cooking is all about timing and serving overdone green beans would get anyone thrown out of Le Cordon Bleu!
Aside from some of my more curious kitchen experiments like curried prawn and crab meat balls (recipe on request) the times change, and what was once fashionable to eat years ago, now takes a back seat in contemporary cooking. Changes are inevitable, and time plays a large part, affecting everything in its path. What was once an acceptable idea can easily get turned into the latest taboo, and like cancer, they metastasize.
In the early 1990s, the art world found itself in an uneasy situation concerning what was considered pornographic. It began with a touring exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs (The Perfect Moment). The images on tour depicted nudity, but one image in particular, Man in Polyester Suit, got more attention than the others. The image showed the mid-section of a man in a suit with the pants’ zipper undone and a protruding black penis hanging out. The exhibition was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, and a number of high ranking politicians at the time questioned how our federal dollars were being spent on this kind of smut masquerading as art. There followed an attempt to sue a museum and its director (Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center and Dennis Barrie). In the end the museum and its director were exonerated, and all was well again in the world of art. Time moved on and time healed those wounds, but not before artists themselves began to question the precariousness of their First Amendment rights.
In the Fall of 1990, The Union of Maine Visual Artists held a symposium/discussion on censorship. It was chaired by the Union’s then president Tom Cornell (1937–2012), who asked those in attendance to define the concept of censorship and pornography and how those issues might affect the creative process. Pandora’s box was opened, and the opinions expressed were passionate and heartfelt.
Attending the discussion was painter Dewitt Hardy (1940–2017) who looked at censorship through the prism of history and how art and literature changed with the times. Writing in the Fall 1990 issue of the Union Journal, Cornell argued that “the worst thing that ever happened was when the emperor Theodosius, who was a convert to Christianity, decided that all of the ancient knowledge in the world was the enemy to Christianity,” subsequently ordering the burning of the Library of Alexandria. All that knowledge went up in smoke because one angry man saw himself as a savior of the times he lived in. We can only imagine how those old scholars processed the destruction—what was lost could never be regained. They needed new answers to old questions; it was a new drawing board.
Union Journal Winter/Spring 1991 (Owen archive).
In the Union Journal Winter/Spring 1991, there was an open letter from the International Artists Network (about which I can find no reference), asking the artists in the Union to react to what was happening in China, more specifically, Tiananmen Square, and one man in particular who stood directly in front of a military tank. Why? Because he saw liberty being crushed. The letter asked to consider the implications of that moment and interpret it in any and all art forms. They saw mirrored in that defiance the tenuous loss of artistic freedoms in America. This is the excerpt from that letter: “Sometimes we too need to leave a sign for those in the future for their history of us about what we think is important. We want the rare drama of an anonymous man whose brief and sudden gesture has so globally inspired the people of our world and so affected the events of our time.”
When the artist finds moments of contemplation in the studio, time falls away. Creativity takes shapes that are unexpected. The outcome has the possibility of surprising the maker. Of course there is no guarantee this will happen; art has a way of keeping us on our toes when the unpredictable emerges. But within that moment when time has no real bearing, there is the chance to leave a signpost for future travelers, something they might ponder and wonder about how we got where we are today.
This again from the Union Journal Winter/Spring 1991: “Maine artist Avy Claire created what she called the ‘Valentine Project.’ The idea was to make one hundred small paintings, each one a heart with a repeating motif of leaves, to represent new growth. These small works were sent to each member of the US Senate, with this message: ‘You have the power to make decisions that affect the fate of the world. You have the opportunity to work from your heart for peaceful solutions.’” I wonder how that simple idea may have altered the minds of those senators; did they see it as a signpost, a guide for future generations?
As humans we often try to imagine the reasons why our ancestors chose to make those turns in the serpentine trail that leads from the past to the present.
—International Artists Network, Union Journal Winter/Spring 1991.
Those twists and turns bore the hallmarks of the times they lived in, the ever-changing moment. I have no crystal ball, I can only look at history in the hope it gives me a clear idea as to some direction I might take along this crooked path. But in the meantime, I’ll be in the kitchen making lemon chicken. Tonight I need some comfort food!
All the Best from the West of Ireland.
Image at top: Diana Dorhiti, Avy Claire and her Valentine Project, photo from The Bar Harbor Times, 1991.