Mel Chin
Morning effortlessly becomes evening.
Scour news, social media. Look for factual direction or prepare for the notice of a friend’s death. Embrace a pillow longing for the release in dreams, but become ensnared in scenarios with no end, moving through empty streets with apprehension.
The optimistic moment is considered; belief that there could be unifying national duty, by removing oneself, for the true benefit of others, is dashed by polarization’s return with the edge of racism, stropped, to gouge out the heart of the moment.
So in between hours, I meander to the past and muse upon a murky future, to think about more than art and think about how art could do more.
Then evening becomes morning.
In the thick of this dilemma of disease a few offerings, a renewed point of view, consideration of what others must contend with in the world, adding isolation and sickness to their history mired in violence and starvation, a climate shifting regardless of our other woes and thus a reverberating polemic annoying in its simplicity, that there can be no pact with nature without a pact among ourselves.
The Sryian Wheel, as it pertains to my statement
Ecology of Gala, 1997
graphite pen and ink on drawing paper, 15 x 18 inches
A visioning diagram of the complete infective scope of the viral GALA Committee project, In the Name of the Place.
Image: Courtesy of Collection of Gaby and Wilhelm Schürmann
Over twenty years ago I did this sketch depicting a convert viral project as a collective art intervention to be launched on prime time television. I had studied the mechanics of a death-dealing virus and that of a military assassin, with the purpose of applying their effective destructive methodologies toward an inverse path of creative options, in a quest for the generational transfer of ideas. It remains a model for a collective, creative response to multiple situations, as covid-19 (and other decisions and actions) sicken and destroy.
Role Model with RF, JB and MD, 2020
Circling back to virology and insurgent art practice to present an homage to the departed (scientist Rosalind Franklin and artists John Baldessari and Marcel Duchamp). The image is an enhanced drawing of a Corona virion’s pathway of infection and replication. The world-altering presence of the pandemic virus is directly presented as “The Creative Act” supplanting Duchamp’s tripartite formulation of artist, object and audience. This work, with its Baldessarian captioning, takes away the biological insistence that wreaks havoc in a human respiratory system and breathes new life as a conceptual lesson for modeling the practice of art. This postulates a practice that investigates a means of survival by maximizing its incompleteness, instigating its arrival (cloaked covertly), appropriating existing chains of thoughts wherever necessary, and replicating through a creative partnership with its societal hosts.
Trajectory Study: Anti Personnel Cluster Bomblet BLU-61, 2006
graphite on electro-pounced distressed paper, color digital output, ballpoint pen, archival tape 14 1/2 x 10 1/8 + 8 1/2 x 10 1/8 inches
Poster for Hans Ulrich Obrist’s fourth curation of It’s Urgent, for the Luma Foundation, 2020
As Covid-19 ravaged Italy, I dissected and reassembled an image of Giotto’s The Raising of Lazarus, depicting a path toward health. Lazarus remains dead; groups cling together with uncertainty, endangering themselves. Christ wards the masked women and man away from contagion, toward a future free of infection. They stand on a terrazzo chain of the fresco’s landscape, now broken with the lesson of social distance. Shattered halos litter the ground below. Science and fact must supersede faith and assumption.
Safehouse Study, 2461 N. Villere, New Orleans, 2008
graphite, color pencil watercolor, ink on paper, 18 x 20 inches
2461 N. Villere, New Orleans
Mel Chin
All images courtesy of the artist