“Inner Spirit, Authentic Voice”
by Sal Strom

As the present influences the past, artists often go through a process of decoding their history while merging the here and now, creating an enriched experience of contemporary life and culture. The blending of real life situations that include personal experiences in politics, religion, and culture becomes a path in the process of discovery that leads to one’s unique core essence. This authenticity becomes a collective cultural experience away from a homogenized society.

We live in a world that wages war on emotions. Since terror is an emotion, the
War on Terror is purely a “war” against our deepest feelings. Instead of fear and isolation, we should be encouraged to cultivate our unique individual voice while living active, passionate lives. We are global, not each in an individual world. Through celebrating our differences and accepting one another we begin accepting peoples differences rather then labeling each other, which in the end divide our society.

To start a dialog toward healing our divisions I created a story based on a six-phase process called “Gerund“ (Latin: to carry on) from the art theorist Lucy Lippard. A famous quote from Lippard that frames today's situation, “The Personal is Political”, fits my own life. I will explore the six-phase process from an abstract but personal viewpoint.

1. Naming - Being labeled as a Lesbian white daughter of a Marine. Or in simpler terms being defined as male or female, transsexual or trans-gendered, gay or lesbian. Instantly one associates that person with the label.

2. Telling - The daughter of a war-ravaged suicide victim stumbles across a box of war letters from her deeply philosophical Marine fighter pilot father. She realizes there is a legacy or a visual story that needs to be woven into her creative practice. This continually haunts her and creeps into her work.

3. Landings - She realizes this “burden of the past on the present” is not going away even after repeated attempts to pass the letters off on others, asking the recipient to not return them. Again and again the letters resurface and begin to merge with her own visual imagery. The past influences the here and now.

4. Mixing or “miscegenation” - The female artist goes onto to marry a Japanese woman, descended from the very people her father talks about killing. The father intermixed deep declared philosophical statements about valuing life and then proceeded to proudly state “I killed 6 Japs today.” The Marine father would later describe to his children in detail, during drunken ravings, the sounds associated with” killing Japanese women and children as he dropped bombs on them, never able to forgive himself.”

5. Turning Around - The irony of this story is these two women decide to have a child but need a sperm donor. They chose a German male friend to fertilize the Japanese wife’s egg. Due to a family secret the German did not know at the time that his father was a German solider for Hitler. The child will be raised by the Marine’s daughter, herself a direct descendant of a warrior against the Axis powers. So the Marine who became a killing machine of Japs in response to actions by Hitler now has a grandchild connected to Hitler.

6. Dreaming - By combining races, war survivors, and gender-blended marriages we could live in a world more tolerant of our historic baggage. This would result in a refined acceptance of the entire human race as grandparents and other family members are inclined to accept their blended descents, whatever their heritage. In this angst-laden dream the child lives with an unsure sexual identity growing up with questionable gender, beyond labels.

Living in a world that has a “Passion for Destruction” I see real footage on the Internet of soldiers being blown to pieces and have become both intrigued and desensitized by the depiction of reality. I fell into playing with the footage, contributing to the dehumanization, uncomfortable in the knowledge that the footage is of someone’s son being destroyed.

Like death, the video becomes art, images that speak a language to be viewed with the naked eye without the true belief these are real human lives. Seeing the piece as art rather than morality creates my personal conflict. It is impossible to fully detach from the meaning that lies behind a visual experience. I would like to use such images as the tool to open a dialog among many people.

Humans perceive one another in degrees of difference. Perhaps we will find we have more in common then we'd like to think, like two sides of the same coin. Life can be a binary experience. Lets help pave the way toward carrying a mindful attitude, a conscious awareness toward tolerance and acceptance as we celebrate our differences.