James Drake


In his recent artwork, James Drake both documents and questions the possibility of interpersonal communication, presenting it as complicated, obtuse and highly situational. Drake gives us a complex vision of a new language invented out of necessity, or that of an old language that needs re-invention. These works are an eloquent version of the moment at which the need to communicate is found to be both a personal and a social requisite for love, happiness, even violence and anger - a requirement for the world either to have wings, or to die in a vacuum. It is the moment when people discover that a version of speech frees them from unbounded silences.


A Thousand Tounges Burn and Sing
detail, cibachrome
1998


Making a break with his previous masculine works, Drake's current work was inspired by groups of women outside an El Paso prison. These women, who patiently patrol the minimum-security prison, have developed a remarkable new language to communicate to their men inside. Using a fluid language of body gestures and hand signals, these women communicate from street corners many floors below. They dance a silent, determined choreography, waiting for signs from the prisoners above. Drake's work documents this unofficial grammar of hope, and testifies with empathy to these women's creativity and endurance.

A grammatical complexity within these images and words exceeds language itself, for expression is a matter of desire, not education, and the hope for communication is always an impetus for creative solutions. Drake's accomplishment is to have shown this without sentimentalism and yet to have preserved the emotional urge at the center of it. Drake's haunting vision of a new language invented by the necessity of a prisoner's beloved to communicate with the prisoner represents a dumbness made eloquent.

Drake shows us that finding a way to communicate doesn't come through instantaneous inspiration, but rather is earned through struggle. This is because the way we exchange our thoughts and ideas is subject to strong cultural forces. As culture defines and determines structures, powerful institutions are organized to enforce them and limit rogue associations. In defending these definitions, entire families, tribes and countries fight and die over the shifting signifiers, such as race, nation or religion. But these signifiers are neither universal nor solid. The color red may signify violence in some cultures, but represent purity in others. Some cultures exaggerate masculinity, others femininity. Moreover, shifting contexts alters interpretation. We know that by adding a different caption to an image, we can dramatically change, even reverse, its meaning. And a physical act that appears violent may in fact be an expression of love. Even our quintessential linguistic guide, a dictionary, is forever being corrected, edited and supplemented. Words, images and gestures await a contextual embrace to determine their meanings as history sweeps the old into the dustbin of another time. Truth is foreign to language, a stranger to images. As the writer Umberto Eco tells us, the same language that we use to claim truth is that which we use to tell lies.

So in the end, there are no definitive meanings, and that fact is perhaps the only truth. Rather than hard meanings, we have interpretations, oblique and incomplete attempts to establish significance. While the fixed image or printed word may suggest a finality or closure, and thus a full understanding, this is an illusion. What we have instead is information to be interpreted according to a social value system. Instead of following analytical reason, our understanding obeys a cultural logic, fraught with emotion and unconscious forces. Popular media's claims for truth are false, and there is a great deal of room - and work - for artists.


Conversation-Inside-Outside
detail, cibachrome
1998

It is perhaps fundamentally frightening that truth is a function of multiplicity of views, or of context rather than content. The ambiguities, however, also can be freedoms: the freedom to change meanings; the freedom to create new meanings from old ones; and the freedom to detach from strong institutional forces to produce new, more intimate meanings. It is this way of looking at expression and interpretation that forms the basis of art. Artists inevitably are at odds with convention and regulatory methods in the way they communicate, for art is ultimately an expression of dissatisfaction with the norms of institutional communication.

\ For artists, the investigation of any culture force simultaneously produces a memory and a prophecy - a memory and prophecy of relativisms, paradoxes and intangibles. We can look to James Drake for revelations and speculations. If 'truth' is elusive, then art's contribution is not to truth itself, but rather to the nature of communication. In art, there must be an awareness of secondary qualities - of the ways in which race and gender affect speaking and listening, and making images and seeing them. Equally necessary is an awareness of the kinesthetics of bodies and their latent communications that undermine the obvious. Indirect meanings and analogies, double meanings and contractions must be understood. The power, the subtlety and the limits of each medium at every moment it is used must be accounted for.

Until a few years ago, James Drake could be described as a masculine artist. His carefully constructed and beautiful works looked at masculine culture while taking advantage of that culture's tools, methods and myths. For example, he built a pair of huge welded steel 'cocks' that, using V-8 automobile engines, engaged in a ritual machine fight. Appropriated from the Mexican-American culture in El Paso/Juarez, his earlier work exaggerated the notion of masculinity in action, a poor man's version of the Vegas boxing match to death or serious injury. Drake also has wrapped guns and motors in snakeskin, using that metaphor of metamorphosis to provide more surrogates for a cultural force assumed to be masculine.

The essence of communication at a cognitive and social level is now Drake's content. His understanding is that utterances are indeed words and symbols. But they are also a bodily production. Prisoners' communication among themselves and with others is one of the breaths taken in and out, the timbre of a voice, the tempo of an incomplete sentence, the inflection of a tongue in a mouth. Despite institutional constraints, or perhaps because of it, communication is always intimate. It is this intimacy that Drake is now compressing into images and words, the intimacy of hesitation, of confession, of attempts at redemption, of laboriously earned optimism and laboriously earned world-weariness. This is the architecture of the prisoners and their loved ones and the signs they bear between them. A man and a woman share a space haunted by institutional boundaries. They attempt a speech which is honest, if uncomfortable. This is much like therapy with its 'speaking cure,' in which a subject comes to speech by recovering the unconscious, however vile. In communicating, we are each other's therapists in intimacy. A prisoner and a loved one are each other's hope for atonement, each other's father-confessor, each other's pardon. The haunting of the past is real but so is the trusting.


Conversation-Inside-Outside
detail, cibachrome
1998

But this is the rub: Language and its sister images and bodily poses are themselves a sort of prison. Nietzsche has written 'We have to cease to think if we refuse to do it in the prison-house of language; for we cannot reach further than the doubt which asks whether the limit we see is really a limit....' So in order not to substitute one prison for another, Drake creates an empathetic environment that allows us into this space. We come into these artworks to rethink our own relation to the complexities of intimacy and of the languages of intimacy. He creates a lateral trajectory of words and images taken outside of time and history to compress their hesitancies and triumphs. He asks of us that which these people ask of each other: to consider the darkness within all light and the possibility of a burning tongue that sings of freedom.

Bruce W. Ferguson
London, England
1999


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