Have you stopped by the AS220 Galleries lately? Any of them? Because if you have, you've no doubt seen the sprawling show You Can't Call Your Own Baby Ugly by none other than AS220 founder and spiritual guide, Umberto Crenca. I could tell you about the explosion of enormous semiabstract ink and paint works, the hundreds and hundreds of Bacon-meets-Dali mind warp doodles, the walls of painted wood and metal pipe projections, or the jet-black whittled pear tree sculptures and not even come close to elaborating the entirety of this show. It's all from a man whose expansive endeavors in running AS220 often overshadow his prolific and wide-ranging artistic output. I sat down with Bert the day before his big opening to ask him some questions about what the show means to him and how he thinks about his work. Along the way we discuss the merger of art and life and that silly little construct called time.
Catch the words from his own mouth at his Artist Talk this Friday, November 19 at the Main Gallery on Empire St. from 5:30 to 8pm.
So this show is on occasion of the 25th anniversary.
It's a combination of celebrating my sixtieth birthday and twenty-five years of AS220.
So in that way, what does the show mean for you?
Well first of all, I feel privileged to have all the galleries of AS220. I know I'm the founder of the organization and have been showing up for twenty-five years, but I still feel privileged. I think it's a great opportunity to be able to exhibit here, and to have all the galleries is over the top.
I think also what people will see here is a tremendous amount of work. I mean, hundreds and hundreds of pieces of work. Sometimes people have difficulty distinguishing me as an artist from my work at AS220, so part of my intent with this show is to help people fully realize that I am a very committed and very prolific artist and set that identity, fix that identity in people's minds. So that was a huge part of this. I had done a show a few years ago with an artist from Spain named Detritus, and we called that show Just an Artist, Not an Artist, and that was my first move in that direction to start getting the larger community to fully accept me as a full-blown artist. I never have any resentment about that, but it's just the reality that given the popularity and the renown of AS220, people have the tendency to predominantly identify me with that work. I hope that this does that, that people will come to a different realization.
I have also self-published a book with the help of a couple great artist and designers, a book of some of my doodles. Again, the whole theme of the show, You Can't Call Your Own Baby Ugly, the name of the book You Can't Call Your Own Baby Ugly, and given the nature of my work over the last five years, which is primarily generated from my imagination, it's very raw in a way, in terms of what it expresses psychologically and emotionally. And I think so many of us on this planet have a tendency to beat ourselves up internally about who we are and how we see ourselves and our place in the world - are we good enough? Are we too fat, too skinny, too tall, too thin, not smart enough, not handsome enough, not whatever? And I think for me, I like to externalize that stuff in my artwork, so often people respond to the work as being kind of aggressive psychologically and emotionally.
It's visceral.
Visceral is a good word, and in fact it is. And I don't have an issue with that. I'm comfortable with that. And in some ways I think my whole life has been dedicated to getting people to liberate themselves from a lot of the crap and self-imposed baggage, both as artists and in the general community as people. That's reflected in my work as well: that idea of, liberate yourself! It's okay to have ambiguous feelings about your sexuality, to have ambiguous feelings about politics, it's okay to not always feel pretty inside. It's okay! It's totally okay. So I think a lot of what's project in the psychological and emotional content of my work is about that.
Talking about showing your artistic identity to the patrons of AS220, do you ever experience that break between the business-Bert and the artistic-Bert that other people see? Or is it more that your endeavors in one inform your endeavors in the other?
Absolutely. It's a blur to me. There's no separation to me in the art that I produce as a product - and I don't mean product from a commercial point of view, but something that I create, an object - I make no distinction between that and all the rest of my activities in my life in terms of me being an artist. I feel that all of the same skills that I apply in making artwork I apply in my dealings with people, whether they be bank vice presidents or they be kids in jail, you know? It's all the same skills and it requires a certain sensitivity, a certain compassion, a certain intelligence and a certain openness, and that is what I feel when I approach a blank piece of paper.
I started AS220 at 35. I had had a whole number of different lives. I had had a zillion different jobs, so what I chose to do with AS220 was a choice. It wasn't something I just fell into on some certain track that I did not have complete control over. I had complete control for the first time in my life to live in an unheated space, and create something that was open to anybody and everybody on the planet. And so for me, the distinction between being an artist and what I do at AS220, and what I do when I'm interacting, or working deals, or any of that stuff, that was the whole point of my dematerialization in 1985 and my creation, my work to create AS220 was the idea that it was one life, not a 9-5 life and then an after 5 life and then a weekend life, which is the way I was living. And not all the people that I was involved with prior to AS220 really fully understood where I was mentally and emotionally. So although they may have been comfortable in the lifestyles they were living, I was not. And I fully wanted to dedicate myself to being an artist. Through both working at AS220 and what I do in the studio I feel I have accomplished that.
Can you introduce us to your exhibition group? Who is Umby Baby or Bert Cranky?
Umby Baby was a term that a nun that I had as a teacher in the sixth grade called me. In the sixth grade, my mother was in a mental institution. It was one of the most traumatic moments and most defining moments of my entire life. And I think it was that time that she was put in the hospital that she was literally carried out of the house in a straight jacket. So it was the most dramatic and most defining moments in my life as a person, as a human being. And I call upon that time almost on a daily basis, that moment in life. I can't talk about it enough, I can't deal with it enough, I will never get over it. At the same time, I have no regrets about it. Also, by the way, my mother conquered mental illness, and spent the last ten, twelve years of her life completely happy and completely in control of her mind. That was an amazing thing to watch her battle that and win that fight.
So that sixth grade nun is the person who got me drawing, who got me into music. She also wacked me around. But she also hugged me and let me cry for hours and hours in private. The notion of being an artist was put in my head by that woman. Her nickname for me was Umby baby.
So these different characters are specific incarnations of you throughout different points in your life?
No, they're all the people that make me up. So Umby Baby is one, a very defining one. Ump was what my mother called me. My wife calls me Umberitcus Maximus. Many people call me Bert. My formal and proper name, and the one that I cherish and feel that I have to live up to every day of my life, is Umberto Crenca. I was named after my grandfather, who, even though he died when I was about 5 or 6 years old, left an amazing impression on me. He was just a man of such character, as was my father. All of those names have heavy meaning for me. And I am cranky, I have been called Bert Cranky many times by numerous people, and it got reinvented and reinvented many times and I'm certain that I'm responsible for that in my behavior and lack of patience some times.
I have really incredible models in my life, and some of them are in the work. I've done portraits of people in this show that have set a standard for me that I will never fully achieve. There's a portrait of my wrestling coach that was insane in terms of his expectations for me, and he really molded me. There are a whole bunch of people that I have yet to document, but they will come. You know, in my work there are all these different series of work, and I keep adding to these different series. So that's why the work is not for sale. You can buy the entire body of work for a two million dollar donation to AS220 to create an endowment for its youth work, and I'm very, very serious about that. That's a very challenging thing to endow that work and I would love to be able to do that. And if I had a big empty studio, if all his work disappeared, then I would be so intensely compelled to fill that studio up with work. These are my friends. These are the people I live with. These are the people who are most honest. These are the people I'm most comfortable with. These works of art. I don't like parting with them. The idea of selling work to me is a weird thing. It's weird. Like...selling these....It's weird, you know? But I could use money, you know, money's okay. It's the way we do business.
It seems like that close relationship to the works is really tied to your process - functioning without references, just pure expression. I was wondering: Allen Ginsberg has said that it sometimes takes him ten years before he can go back and see a piece that he's done and really see what it means to him. How long is that period of gestation for you, before you can go back and start to try and see what you've put into a work.
Well first of all, you referencing Allen Ginsberg is very touching to me because he's a tremendous inspiration and I think he's an absolute genius and one of the most gentle, creative minds we've had in our history.
I think time is a very arbitrary construct. So I don't think gestation is something that happens post-. I think it's something that's been happening before you were born and throughout your existence. To try to identify influences in a linear way or to reflect on things in a linear way is a complete injustice. It's a convention; it's something we have to do to be able to talk to each other and try to rationalize all this craziness. But I think it's completely inadequate. I don't think there's any before and after. I don't think there's any mystical world or physical world. I think it's all the same. All things happen all the time. The future, past, and present are all part of everything.
So when you talk about reflecting or gestating or when you begin to understand what things are...well beginning to understand something I think is a different issue. I think that has a lot to do with maturity and life's experiences and how we as a species evolve. So sometimes things that are revealed through our subconscious in things that we make we may not be able to articulate or understand until we reach another level of experience or maturity.
So if that's what you're talking about, the number ten seems pretty arbitrary, but there's a lot more things that we sense in this world that we can't begin to articulate or understand. There's a lot more that we have lived. There's a lot more that this idea of the past has influenced us. The future is influencing us in the present. What we smell, taste, feel, hear...there's a billion more messages. Think about people that are autistic and have trouble screening the input. In some ways they are more in tune with reality (that's a weird thing to say, too), but in some ways they're more in tune with the complexity of reality and it makes it impossible for them to function in some cases. So it takes time to be able to distill from all of these experiences and all of this information.
The past is still influencing the present; the present is influencing the future and informing the past. These things are just one big blurry, mushy thing to me that I love. And it's a tremendous realization for me that this idea of time and past and present and future is something that I don't need to concern myself with. They're all very inadequate ways that we try to describe things and communicate with each other about ideas. It's all very inadequate. It's a construct! I have a quote in the book that says that in the process of creating, time is not suspended, the construct is demolished. When you're fully engaged in creating, which to me is one of the purest acts a human being can accomplish, that when we're deeply immersed in that without the distractions of the job or the responsibilities, and you're really completely focused on the creative process, I think the construct of time is just demolished. It doesn't exist not even as an idea. Picasso used to say people used to criticize him, "how can you smoke, it's so unhealthy for you" and he says "I smoke when I create and when I'm creating I'm immune to these things." You know?
Really, you should go check out the show. You Can't Call Your Own Baby Ugly runs through November 27. Also, don't miss Bert's Artist Talk in the Main Gallery at 115 Empire St. on November 19, 5:30-8pm!
