MEL CHIN

Mel Chin is a conceptual visual artist. Motivated largely by political, cultural, and social circumstances, Chin works in a variety of art media to calculate meaning in modern life. Chin places art in landscapes, in public spaces, and in gallery and museum exhibitions, but his work is not limited to specific venues. 

SCRIPT: FIREPLACE

There is no fire and the hearth is cold.

I’m sitting by a fireplace in the studio where I construct my art.

This fireplace, this building, was stacked together in the 1930s here in the hardscrabble reality of Appalachia. To build it, locals hauled down the rocks broken from hills of folded stone, and plucked stones from their fields of corn and tobacco.

These were rocks that seemed to propagate in the soil, to challenge the plow, and intensify the bitter crop of poverty.  

Eleanor Roosevelt came by this place in 1934, a year after her presidential husband started radio broadcasts that sowed his vision of encouragement and hope, clearing the dust left over from the Great Depression.

Now a pandemic victimizes the health and lives of us all and a dire echo of that Depression quakes American security once more.  Massive fires burn out west in climate-change-parched areas while small-scale conflagrations of frustration are coinciding with largely peaceful soulful protests that Black Lives Matter in cities across the country.

I can’t chat with you as someone who has soothing wisdom from experience.  None of us has previously experienced the wounding rains and winds that are making landfall into coastal cities with increasing frequency, the almost daily reveal of homicidal systemic injustice, the daily count of the infected and the dead.  While we are grateful to the exhausted essential medical workers, to law enforcement actually acting in true service and protection of citizens, and to the beleaguered fire crews fighting back non-stop against an advancing hell, we still have to contend with resistance of reason and lack of care for others by an unmasked population rejecting science.

It seems our country is mired in a consuming political polarity. It all points to a future too tough to call. 
Although I am physically quarantined from fires of the west, and from the physical public participation of the Black Lives Matter movement, these events are burdens doublefold; they weigh on me, and they have deeply affected my spirit, my colleagues, my family.   

Let me turn away from an uncertain future to reflect on the fires and disease that visited this land before.

For thousands of seasons the indigenous people here set controlled fires to undergrowth beneath the massive canopies of the American forests, aiding the soil’s fertility.  The Woodland natives picked up what nature’s lightning most likely put down.

Then they encountered a pandemic of smallpox.

Facts matter. Something has to ensure that history is not conserving myths that serve sham reputations, pervert our present and muck up hope. The story of colonial germ warfare, a gift box within a box finally containing a snippet of smallpox-soaked rags that caused the virulence that ravaged the people of these woods, does have a historical source.  But here were more vectors. The disease, which the Lakotas called running-face-sickness, moved in and up with Spanish conquistadors and explorers, then continued with its spread through the English colonists. Its horrible reach was coupled with intentional violence, not fully covered by histories regarding the founding of our country. We can say names of tribes like Qualla, Tuscarora, Cherokee, but the individual names of hundreds of thousands, whose lives did not matter, will never be said.

The days have begun to darken as the ash from the western fires reaches us. 

There has been the choking smoke from store bought tiki-torches, fires recklessly started by men playing with guns at gender reveal parties… in areas that must be in complete denial of global warming’s effects, and flames of rage, sparked by grief, ignited by hopelessness, kindled by the failure of leadership, and law and enforcement forever stained by racial bias.

James Baldwin powerfully warned in his New Yorker article back in 1962: "If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! “

Americans didn’t dare everything since his warning then -- now it seems we are deep into  "the fire next time”. 

Eleanor Roosevelt, who stood before this fireplace, wrote that, “In the long run there is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one’s position, state it bravely, and then act boldly. Action brings with it its own courage, its own energy, a growth of self-confidence that can be acquired in no other way.”

 And Baldwin reverberated her thoughts,

“A country is only as good, only as strong, as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become… I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.”

The world were living in has a 5th Generation internet connectivity to almost everything. We can find Roosevelt’s, Baldwin's ruminations, instantly. However, their inspiring thoughts are mingling with endless ads, trolls, gas lighters, hackers and foreign agents in our societal media.  We are in a real deep state of anxiety. Mediators of information intentionally fuel the fears of the ill-informed. 

It is a messed up matrix for anyone, in which a true position is harder for one to determine, to act boldly upon.

So what can we make? An artist who did say something smart, Picasso remarked, “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…”   Right now we endure an autocrat President who present lies as truth. What do we do to return art to Pablo’s job description? 

 There is no fire and the hearth is cold.

I’d be lying to you if I said I have no burning questions. 

Could a fire of wise intensity, like the controlled burns of the indigenous Americans, actually nurture the regeneration of justice? …Could a righteous blaze oxidize opportunistic pathologies? Could a steadier flame shed a healing light on the roots of insecurity for someone with a blinding rage against others? … Could it do more than scare Karen off her high horse and get me on a hot seat to really go after that wisdom I say I don’t have? Maybe I need to burn off my cultural training that places myself as a creative force to make this fire, ask these questions, and take on new lessons from the youth engaged on the street, that are taking the risks. Be willing to settle where I’m needed… be part of the flash that burns hot and out quickly or be part of the cleanup crew to sweep up those ashes and put them to good use. At least, be part of the spectrum of the liberating action, as Mrs. Roosevelt advised. 

Nice monologuing with you…Gotta get up, and get on with this!