Memento Mori
Night
Peter Wise, photo by Karen Nunley
PETER WISE
Bellingham, MASSACHUSETTS, USA
From the cloying lines of Simon and Garfunkel’s iconic, “Hello darkness my old friend” to the depths of the human condition as in a Cèline novel, the nature of the abyss, oblivion, an uncaring universe, depression, and human nature are inescapable. Goys, of course, knew this, as many artists do while also being able to embrace darkness and describe it through words, images, verse and so on. It tends to be a cathartic exercise for these people, if eventually an unsuccessful one but it needs to be done. My work is no different in ambition when it comes to darkness as a known enemy is far better tolerated than an unknown one. The free-floating anxieties of all human beings can and should be expressed and much of my work is attempting just that.
I was born in New Mexico in 1950 and developed an interest in image-making early, surrounded by “Anglo” art as well as Indian and Mexican art and architecture. The latter two may be one reason I look at art as a very large tent as these cultures employed very different media than conventional Western European modes of expression - blankets, sand painting, wood carvings and so on. I went on to include dadaism, that is sometimes described as “anti-art” under the art category. To this extent I consider myself more as an image maker than an artists which I hope is a distinction with a difference. Over 40 years of creativity, my ideas about “art” have changed a great deal (one being that “art” is a catch-all term with virtually no boundaries. However, I have generally always though that art cannot exist without a degree of socio/political engagement. This can be overt and or unconscious as images are created of course within a wider context of society and politics. Complexity arises when the images produced are confused with propaganda or a specific agenda, polemical and didactic, but it has never been easy to create work that is meaningful without a degree of controversy, starting with the aforementioned very definition of art. In any event formal art synthesized with politics enhances the value and power of both and are really unavoidable even in the work of Grandma Moses, for example. The forms chosen, the colors employed and the means of execution all have roots in the social context and history from which they spring.