The memoir of the artist
is often considered to be a compelling story. For those who are interested in
the private lives of cultural figures, specifically those who have entered into
the annals of history, a book by anyone of note lends a palimpsest of
dimensions to our current understanding of who they were, and how their own
model can act as a symbol for our shared self-knowledge. This is what
constitutes the basis for Rob Mango’s memoir, a story worth telling about all
the experiences in his life, up until now, that have built him as a person and
ultimately as an artist. The voice that does the telling is inimitably his own,
virile and dynamic, the voice of an athlete who became an artist, and for whom
the physical environment and the physical bodies around him were a continual
source of inspiration, reflecting personal and mythical realities. Place also
has been an important part of Mango’s story, specificallly the Lower Manhattan
area which only since he lived there has come to be known as Tribeca, and has
emerged out of history and created its own myth. Lastly, this is a book about
his relationships, about the meetings that precipitated them, and about what
happened in his life because of them. Lastly it’s a story about the progress of
a man from child to man, including all the roles that it encompasses, such as
father, husband, provider, and role model, all wrapped around the soul of an
artist.
Everyone is responsible for
their own myth. But most people are passive about the truth. Not Rob Mango. Since
an early age he has been a competitive runner, and the discipline needed to
keep in shape is a form of self-evident knowledge that has guided his
dedication to art as well. 100 Paintings runs us through the artist’s life in
the last three decades, starting in Chicago where he grew up, while running
competitively, attending the School of the Art Institute, and his early
inspirations and challenges. Mango’s story begins when he is young, growing up
on the south side of Chicago, beginning his education in the world of ideas and
of artistic self-expression. He visits The Art Institute when he is 14 and sees
a painting by Larry Rivers that sets his mind on fire. Soon afterward he
chances to meet the famous Dada agent provacateur Marcel Duchamp, who signs a poster
for him using his famous pseudonym, Rrose Selavy, inspired by the word games of
Gertrude Stein and e.e. cummings. He is inculcated in the ways and means of
contemporary poetry by his mother, who reads aloud at the breakfast table. He
applies and is accepted at The School of The Art Institute, later completing
his graduate studies at The University of New Mexico. Much of this is a sketch,
a preamble to his life in New York, which is where the story truly begins in
earnest.
Mango’s story is prefaced by
a crisis, an unlikely point of origin but one innately endemic to an artist’s
career. After working and struggling for years, he finally gets his time in the
spotlight when a young art dealer named Valerie Dillon offers him not only a
solo exhibition but gallery representation. The gallery director is an intense
individual, who pressures him to make endless versions of a single set of
figures, shortens his solo exhibition to organize a group show of other gallery
artists, ignores the rest of his ideas and works, and sells his work for much
less of a percentage than he has become accustomed to when representing
himself. When a sale goes awry, she snaps and returns all his work en masse.
His story begins with the arrival of the works and the state of mind Mango
experiences as witnessed by his family, a “what now?” moment punctuated by
awkward silence. Yet despite this circumstance, this one moment of freefall,
100 Paintings is a story about success on one’s own terms. This moment is
recalled as if to say “so what!” and move on.
The first few chapters deal
with his youth and his origins as an artist. He grows up on the south side of
Chicago, with a father who is an industrial designer and a mother who he
describes as a “self-educated reader.” Mango comes to the idea of being an
artist from the age of 14 when he views a painting by Larry Rivers on a visit
to The Art Institute of Chicago.
“From that moment on, painting for me was breathing.
I filled volumes of portfolios and rooms with canvases, objects and drawings.
Many of these works have survived, but I did not consider myself good enough to
sign a painting (In spite of my vociferous objections, my wise and caring
father often added my name in the lower right hand corner) (page 39).”
Mango goes through several influences
including Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Surrealism. Though he remains
devoted to the work of Larry Rivers and Jasper Johns in particular, he lost
interest in others because they in turn lost touch with what originally
inspired them and became figureheads for either a political stance or the
partying elite. Ultimately he is inspired by Mercel Duchamp (whom he met when
Mango was 16) and by the sculptural accomplishments of he and his fellow
Surrealists.
“To embody the surreal, of course, is a dicey undertaking.
Surrealism’s domain is the mind’s deepest recess, where the death instinct
resides, along with sex: Surrealism takes much of its power from Eros and
Thanatos. I had existential needs that surrealism spoke to, but I wanted to
transform those needs and insights from literature and theater into an art
object that would live on the wall (page 47).”
The artist accumulates a
visual library of persona based mythologies, and Mango is no different. His
myths form a history of their own, and a quality of formal reckoning that can
only be answered by an engagement with what he has accomplished. Starting with
his Dadaist assemblages (1975-1988), we have him confronting models of
creativity that hearken back to the turn of the century, creating a conversation
with idols of mystery like Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Jean Tinguely,
and pitching him completely into an endeavor that fuses sculptural hermeticism
with cerebrality. He is overtly going against the grain of the education in
classical painting he received at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago,
putting off his inevitable return to the role of the great painter. The
assemblages take of part of his studio practice until the mid-Eighties, at
which point he switches over to panting while tinkering with one last piece
until 1988.
Influenced by Marcel
Duchamp’s “Large Glass,” these Dadaist sculptures combined painting, drawing,
working lights and moving parts, including light sources. They were like
Wunderkammers. Yet what at first may have seemed a tribute to his creative
forebears and an experiment in widening the context for his own artmaking,
might have soon seemed more like a gimmicky agenda for big city art world
notoriety. These sculptures excavated some part of him, but they did not
reflect his relationship with the vibrant environment unfolding all around him.
It was on his frequent runs around the city that he received the majority of
his stimuli to bring the city into his work, and the only way to do that was to
paint.
One aspect of Mango’s life
that would otherwise receive little regard is his background as a competitive
runner. In fact it is something very central to his identity that has shaped
him as a person and has even become a part of his creative process. From his
teen into his late 20’s Mango ran in and won many regional and even national
competitions as a middle distance runner. He came very close to qualifying for
an Olympic team at one point, and it was his choice not to pursue that goal
further that led him to get behind his other aspiration as an artist. In
painting as in running there is no perfect score, only a personal best.
However, once Mango had given up his pursuit of running as a competitive sport
it still remained a part of him and became a way of encountering, musing, and
reflecting his themes and subjects as a painter. In 100 Paintings we often see
Mango running. He does it every day. It jump starts his brain and gets his
blood flowing. He has been running for years and so does not need to focus on
his physical activity, but can instead spend his time looking around him,
seeing the city for what it is, a vast physical environment, constantly in flux
and constantly in motion, all of its parts and participants simultaneously
actual and symbolic.
In one section of the book
titled “Sprinting the Streets of New York City” he describes the role that
running has in his artistic process. Not merely a self-expulsion from the
intellectuality of the studio, running provides Mango with an equally intense
state in which he can encounter, muse upon, and be inspired by what surrounds
him. The forms that occur in painting exist in the world, and the city itself
is a world made of forms that are constantly being constructed, reorganized,
and justified. It’s as if a forest were grown, torn down, and re-harvested
every time one looked out the window. The city is, to Mango, inspiration
personified, and running is the best way to interface with it.
“My runs provided the mental state in which my
paintings were visualized. I saw the evolution of future paintings with all
their complex internal detail. These were works of art I had yet begun or those
still in progress. They were visualized and hovering in my mind, waiting for a
canvas to land on, like so many jets at JFK. I switched pictures on and off in
my mind with facility. By the late 70’s , the infusion of oxygenated blood to
my brain was something I’d done on a consistent basis for more than a decade.
Invention was fueled by extreme physical output (page 78).”
Physicality has always been
a vibrant aspect of Mango’s work, and he has chosen figures to represent
different ideals of the physical, even while they also served as metaphors for
a foil for the artist, like his Samurai and his Jester paintings. Physicality
is both a metaphor and a presence, an ideal and a passion. As a classically
trained painter, the uses and roles of the human body have always been very
important to him.
Place emerges as a constant
theme in Mango’s life, and subsequently in his art. He is in his own words a “pioneer”
of the Manhattan neighborhood now known as Tribeca. It is here that he first
settled and here he has stayed, made his art, raised a family, and made all of
his other important relationships. Tribeca was a product, to some degree, of
neighboring Soho, an area once lain desolate, used mainly as storage, and
inhabited by few actual residents, the landscape dotted here and there by a
bodega here, a deli there. Though many artists moved there at the same time, it
remained a no-man’s land to most others, and was surrounded by a vast landfill
off the side of the West Side Highway, and to the south sat the recently
constructed World Trade Center. Several of his most epic paintings have had the
city itself as either their immediate subject or as a fabric if reality. Though
there were certainly precursors, the first of these that Mango talks about is
RETURN TO THE CITY (1985), which renders the landscape of the city as resembling
an archeological excavation. Mango call it “My first attempt to capture the
most difficult subject in my imagination’s domain.”
I had just built and stretched a 60 by 84 inch canvas
and stained it with pale umber primer, an earthen hue. I did so because there
was dirt below the streets, tunnels and century-old layers of crumbling brick
foundations….I wanted to create a picture illustrating the dominant visual
features of lower Manhattan as body parts; what lay below the streets would
represent the unconscious mind. Like the psyche obscured and unseen within us,
the unconscious smolders under the asphalt, its hidden power animating the
surface, like the rumble of the subways under your feet or the scalding manhole
covers, apparent on any day in New York. Manhattan had become my muse, and she
was almost too much to handle. But for one who craved work, with years of
racing wins behind me, that was the only game worth playing (page 77).”
New York City in the
1970’s had one foot in the past and one in the present, which is to say that it
was a vibrant city mired in its own ruin. The romance of its past was still
there if one squinted. The neighborhood that would soon become Tribeca was one
of the oldest in the city, containing mainly loft buildings dating to the mid
1800’s. Many of these were vacant and held storage. Rob Mango’s presence, with
a street level studio window must have been quite the curiosity to tradesmen
and property owners alike. He was one of the most visible members of a mostly
shadow community of artists who had not found likewise space in an already
heavily colonized Soho. They became the founders of the Lower Manhattan Loft
Tenants Association, comprised almost completely by his neighbors in the
Washington Market district. The reality of city living is that the city itself
is a complex organism constantly undergoing flux and change. Generations have
passed over the same ground that we walk today, a century or more removed, and
there is little left to mark their passing except for an old building or the
name on a street sign. So much the better. The city grinds its past like old
bones, into a fine dust that coats everything. If one wakes early enough and
chances to walk down a street in a neighborhood such as Tribeca, squinting just
enough, one sees the past clearly, not through a film of myth, but as a real
place where people struggled and strived, where generations and families staked
a claim the future of which was unsure. This was the reality into which tenants
of lofts in Tribeca were thrust. Mango has made his way with the full knowledge
that not only could be accomplish so much as an artist, and subsequently life
his life as he saw fit, but that he might, as Walt Whitman said, contribute a
verse.
Another role that Mango had
during his lifetime was that for a period of five years, with the unstinting
support of a patron, he ran a gallery called Neo Persona located just around
the corner from where he lived, and it was this singular activity that not only
connected him to every other artist living in Tribeca, of those he exhibited,
but it was also a driving force behind the manifestation of many of his own
paintings, which had to be made despite the full time pressures of being an
impresario, gentleman director, and in his own way a professional visionary
aiming to raise the bar not only for local artists and their potential
collectors, but for the image of Tribeca itself. Not only did Mango unite the
community of like minded artists around the locus of his own curated
exhibitions, but the ferment of tangentially presented talents created a
wellspring for his own creativity, forcing him to stretch himself beyond
comfortable boundaries. One work that resulted from this internal pressure was
VESSELS, which began as an epic depiction of Lower Manhattan along the Hudson,
where he often saw immense ships moored along piers, tilting in the slight
current, bound for parts unknown. He wanted to show their grandeur and age next
to the new modern buildings of the Financial district abutting Tribeca, but
something else emerge from his perspective, something glittering and special.
He painted a crystalline vase standing atop one of the stanchions where the
ropes that held the boats fast would be tied. This was by no means a real
thing, it was almost like a lost antique that could be a fortune teller’s ball,
an urn carrying ashes, or a good luck charm. The viewer’s attention would
naturally turn from the distant horizon, to the looming boats, and over to this
mystery that glittered in the last rays of dusk. It is as if Mango is creating
a mysterious narrative in which the idiosyncracies of dramaturgy run smack up
against a battle between the story of the future and the story of the past.
In recent years, Mango
has devoted himself progressively to a series of paintings depicting women in
impossible poses. These range from the formal to the mundane but the essential
femaleness of their outward appearance and the struggle to do it justice are
achieved by a variety of effects, as if Mango were attempting to alchemically
translate the real woman into an ideal one and back into a new form of the
real. For the sculpted canvases, which had their origin the first moments of
clarity following the return of his canvases from Dillon, when he decided to
rip them to shreds and reutilize these damaged goods by placing them over a
base constructed from a frieze of bodily forms, Mango added a dozen years later
a series of dramatizations of intimate moments caught on the fly while sitting
in area cafes. Each addition to his oeuvre in both of these cases followed a
crisis. The second rupture was in two parts” 9/11 reduced the World Trade
Center to a cemetery, and the surrounding neighborhood, once the playground of
artists and yuppies alike, had now become a dead zone. Few New Yorkers except
those living within the bounds of Tribeca or near enough to see what happened
on that day, and be forced to live in its aftermath, can understand the
emotional consequences that followed. Yet Mango decided to stay home, to make
the best of it, and pitch in wherever he was needed.
The crisis of the 9/11
period, and the years following it were spent both participating in the
struggles of his community and focusing upon regaining the authority of his own
life, both in terms of family unity and in creativity. As anyone who has
witnessed a great tragedy, and has their life subsumed by it can attest, there
is more than a physical rebuilding involved. Emotional violence breaks apart
our lives on a grand scale, shattering the peace of our days, and creating
eddies of doubt in every corner. This is what Mango experienced. It led him out
of his studio, or rather our of the sacred space he had fed for so many years,
into the street, back into the world of bodies, where he could find new ferment.
It’s difficult to fully
encompass all the events that occur in 100 Paintings. Many of them are meetings
between the artist and the various people who are to become his friends and
patrons and who each lead him into a new experience that will expand his
consciousness, his facility in expressing himself to others about his creative
endeavor, and the very ‘life of the mind’ that makes him who he is. Some of the
people he meets are famous, and some are people who pass the front window of
his studio and enter to engage him in discussions about the work, often leading
to a sale. These are not just opportunities for income, they are the beginning
of friendships, aesthetic relationships that will inform his thinking about the
minds of others, and how he can relate to them. This is another of Mango’s
various talents: he can talk to anyone about his art, his mind, and his life,
and never appear haughty or esoteric. Something seems to happen when new
visitors gaze upon his work, a fusion of fascination with internal reasoning.
Likewise I feel that is what is present in his memoir. 100 Paintings is
presented as an appreciation of what is most valuable in life. Mango is neither
interested in a mere parable, nor is he interested in promoting his own myth.
The paintings do that successfully enough. His story is his voice, speaking
about the character, dimensions, and details of his own life in the last few
decades. The life of an artist, for whom 100 Paintings is a good idea, is just
par for the course. The finish line is nowhere in sight.
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