Meander 1: The Curious Twists And Turns Of My Life
No river can run in a straight line longer than ten times its width, even in a flat valley. If the river is fifty feet wide, it will stray from its course in five hundred feet or less. This is due to shifting sediment accumulation along the river's path, causing variable current speeds. Currents become strong enough to eat into the banks in some areas, and the river begins to meander.
My life is a meandering river. I always follow a similar pattern: a new hunch gives me pause. It could be a notion, a feeling, or an intuition that stops me in my tracks. Some of the 'hunches' recede quickly, but others persisted, waking me up at night and pestering me to do something. Like a current gaining speed, the hunch would grow into an idea that I would then test in the real world, and testing these ideas often led to a new sentiment. Like 'sediments' in the river, these new 'sentiments' would accumulate, eat away at the river banks of my mind and eventually, a new turn in the river of my life would prompt more questions, more sediment accumulation, and the discovery of newfound sentiments.
At times, these meanders affected my art. After high school, I decided to pursue an art career, but I was rejected by the Academy. I was faced with a difficult question: "What now"? I was eighteen years old and my parents wanted me to become a respected professional. If I was still intent on making art—their last choice for me—I needed to make it legitimate. I resolved that the professors could reject me from their Academy, but they held no power over my life. I wanted to make art and, unbound by the walls and strictures of academia, I had no one to please but myself. I was free. The decision to work outside official institutions was my first significant meander.
I was lucky enough to find a group of like-minded colleagues in my native Slovenia. Together, we embarked upon making new and different art. Over the next few years, our group OHO gained national and international renown, successfully participating at the Information Show in MoMA in New York City and the 4th Triennial Exhibition in Belgrade. With this success behind me, and feeling like I could now legitimize myself as an artist which would allow me to receive social benefits like health insurance, I applied to join the Association of Visual Artists. I was again rejected.
Like everyone, I made art objects—paintings and sculptures—because I thought that was what artists were supposed to do. One summer day, when I was 21, I changed directions. What if I collaborated with nature? I decided that, instead of creating something new, I would highlight something that already existed and deserved to be noticed. I learned that the world had its own purpose, and my artistic duty was to recognize it and honor it. Another meander. This shift seemed simple. But, looking back, it was radical. It was my second significant shift that launched my life-long focus on collaboration. I would go on walks into parks and fields and forests, and I challenged myself to notice something new in each space. What remarkable things will I encounter? Over the years, my colleagues and I created hundreds of small installations based on such observations and responses to the natural world.
When I visited New York in 1970, I met American land art celebrities like Christo, Walter de Maria, and Michael Heizer. They worked on an industrial level and in sizes unimaginable to me. For example, Heizer's Double Negative displaced 240,000 tons of rocks and sand, and Christo’s work spanned entire islands. De Maria installed 400 polished stainless-steel poles in his Lightning Field. These artists had support from foundations and wealthy collectors, and my colleagues and I had none. My annual budget for materials was the equivalent of only a half of one of De Maria's stainless-steel poles. The advice I received from these successful American artists was to find a foundation or wealthy individuals to support my work, none of which existed in Yugoslavia. We were on our own.
Returning to Slovenia, I continued to create art without any support from rich benefactors. Again, I was free. Beti Žerovc was an art history professor at the Academy that rejected me as a student. When asked to identify the most critical works in Slovenian art, her students identified two of my projects in their top 10 list. I created them just a few years after my rejections. It just goes to show how creativity and an institutional stamp of approval sometimes move at completely different paces.
In 2017, fifty years later, the OHO group presented at the Biennale of Venice, one of the most prestigious cultural institutions in the world. We were celebrated for our exemplary and pioneering work linking art with nature. After I received the invitation to participate in the festival, I received a rejection for a grant to 'bring art to different communities’ in the Pacific Northwest. This was after the Pomegranate Center had already helped communities build dozens of public spaces and gathering places. We were turned down because the agency only supported serious career artists. Yet another example of creativity and institutional approval being out of step.
These rejections certainly caused sediments in my life. They were significant but also had the paradoxical effect of causing me to persist in my art career, on my own terms. And the freedom those rejections prompted allowed for a period of introspection that forced me to pay attention to nature and the world at large. Paying attention to the natural world soon invaded my subconscious, so much so that I began dreaming about the future of Mother Earth. One of those dreams was so powerful that it prompted another meander along the river path of my life, twisting and turning, leading me to the west coast of the United States. I will write about this in my next blog.