In
Armond Lara’s downtown Santa Fe studio is a long table covered with a jumble of
junk and precious objects – elk’s teeth and heels from old shoes, an old Sioux
dress, parts of pocket watches, glass beads, rusty nails, a shoe horn, playing
cards, paper money. “This is my
palette,” Lara says. “I’ve collected for
a long time – in the streets, flea markets.
It’s a treasure hunt, and most of this stuff isn’t worth a thing –except
that dress that I paid $4,000 for and then ripped up. I look for interesting shapes. I just start putting these things down on a
piece of handmade paper, and then it’s a process of elimination to find a focal
point for the piece. Then I find other
things to add that make the central object out of context. What I want is surprise, surprise and strong
composition, and to get that I need tension.
You never know what’s going to work, an old tie or a pacifier.
A
work in progress – an old black dress, stuffed to form a misshapen body, stuck
with rusted spikes, and draped on one corner with chain – hangs in the
studio. “I was thinking about brujas when I started this piece about a
year ago,” he says, “and it scared me so I stopped. I was invited to show in this year’s Santa Fe
Arts Festival, and this fits their New Mexico theme, so maybe I’ll finish it
and show it there. I don’t know what
I’ll do with it next, maybe pour black paint on it, or roofing tar.”
Other
new pieces on the walls include several examples of his mixed media Nomads series which features blankets
and other objects in collage on canvas.
“The idea,” he recalls, “occurred to me while traveling around on
airplanes last fall. I felt like the
Navajos walking so much, what they were doing versus what I was doing. In half the series, I’m using blankets off
the airlines. American Airlines’ are
good, Frontier’s aren’t bad – they’re a nice bright red and have the feeling of
old Hudson Bay blankets. I’ll use real
Navajo blankets for the other half.
People put too much emphasis on how precious they are. Many of them are gorgeous and priceless, and
I wouldn’t use them, but many were made for the touristas, too.”
People
begin to drift into Lara’s studio. A
young man arrives to wash his car, another trying to strike a deal to do his
framing. The telephone starts ringing
off the wall, so we leave to continue the interview at Lara’s home. It is a new, clean, Santa Fe-style adobe
furnished with contemporary furniture and accented with tasteful and
expensive-looking Indian artifacts and Oriental antiques. Several works by R.C. Gorman are on the
walls, along with a Picasso lithograph and Lara’s own work. Glass and blond wood give the place an airy
feel. A cage with his parrot, Jake, hangs in a corner of the kitchen. Top-of-the-line liquors (Jack Daniels,
Beefeaters, Grand Marnier, etc.) are grouped on the kitchen counter we sit
around and drink a beer. Lara is on the
short side, big chested, and broadly handsome.
As many – perhaps most artists in New Mexico, he is fond of hats. He is, as indicated in the following,
aggressive but friendly.
Are you political at all, as an
artist or otherwise?
No. I worked for government agencies for so long
that I’ve become very apolitical. I even
refuse to get involved in local campaigns.
Politics in New Mexico seems to be a way of life, everyone gets into it,
but . . . Oh, I guess I spent a lot of
time trying to accomplish things culturally, through political channels, and
found that after years and years . . . I guess that was the main thing – in
spite of the progress that was being made, the majority of what was coming down
was lip service. I decided it was time
to quit talking about it, and start doing it, and at that point I decided to
make art professionally.
When was that?
I
left working for government agencies in 1975, I think. So it hasn’t been very long. (Lara worked for Washington state and local
governments, establishing arts commissions.) One of the biggest reasons I
managed to stay there so long, for sure, was because I was a minority, and at
that time the government needed minorities within the structure. Anyway, I got thoroughly burned out on
government policies and processes, red tape, and I decided “that’s
enough.” But it was a good start for me
to get actively, professionally involved as an artist myself. I don’t regret it, because it taught me a
lot. It taught me how to plan anything,
including your career, you know, and more so, how to implement those plans.
What’s your feeling about the
general climate in the country right now?
Political
climates are always susceptible to change in a way that’s really good for the
arts. They’re always susceptible to
change anyhow, based on the whims of the public. There’s always a new trend. It’s easy to foresee that, within a given
period of time, this whole Southwest frenzy will move somewhere else. It doesn’t worry me too much. I think that when economic factors are
really depressed, people who truly support the arts, true patrons, continue to
do so even more. What it really does is
it manages to help the people who are serious about what they are doing, and
who are capable, more than it hinders them.
For sure the people who are just playing around go by the wayside, and
that’s good for the arts. It’s a
cleaning house. Buyers think twice
before they buy something. They look for
quality, and that happens in depressed times.
What was the question?
I’m trying to get your broader
feelings about living in the United States in 1982. We’re faced with fairly serious problems that
go well beyond the economy . . . For the first time, maybe since the late ‘50s,
a large number of people are concerned about us blowing ourselves away. I’m getting away from the other thing, but .
. .
I
know you are . . . As I said before, I really am apolitical. I’m also probably (long pause) . . . a
fatalist. All the suppression that’s
been going on, the nuclear warfare, the possibility of it, I tend to ignore
those things. I think the day of the
artist being a sounding board for the rest of the world has truly passed. No one wants to see black eagles painted on
walls anymore. When I was 25 I did that,
and even when I was 30 years old, because I was smack in the middle of
government, but maybe because I spent so much time there and have an
understanding of how it works, I tend to push it aside and not even worry about
how to resolve these kinds of problems.
That sounds kind of callous and self-centered, but I do live in a very
small world. I literally set myself
aside from all that in a world where the most important thing for me to do is
pursue the art that I deal with and see how far I can push it. It sounds cold and inhumane, I know, but I’ll
tell you one thing – people who know how to live with the earth will still be
here. Taos Pueblo will still be here. That’s one reason they don’t have running
water up there, or a lot of things that we consider necessities. I think they believe, and I believe, that
people who don’t know how to deal with living a lifestyle that doesn’t include
a lot of so-called progress, probably will be gone from the face of the earth
in twenty or thirty years. But if that’s the way it’s supposed to be,
that’s the way it’s supposed to be, and what can I say. It’s awful hard on me to relate to people
anymore. It’s easier and easier to
relate to things around me – trees and water.
Not water, because I don’t understand water. You know I lived in Seattle for twenty years,
and it was above me and below me, and I still don’t know how to swim. Coming from a place like this (Lara is from
Walsenburg, CO), it seems very logical to me that that’s the way it should
be. I meet a lot of people that have to
live around water, that need whatever it gives them. I get the same feeling from open space.
A while ago you mentioned that you
needed to push yourself to accomplish personal and artistic breakthroughs . . .
That’s
something I’ve always fantasized about—accomplishing something. When I was very young, even when I was in my
twenties, my main focal point has always been to accomplish something. Until I got to the point where I was
producing art, I had no idea what that would be. None. But I felt if I’m going to be here, I
might as well accomplish something.
Certainly working for government or in a machine shop – I spent ten
years working in a machine shop – those two things were not fulfilling enough
for me. I didn’t see where I could make
any major contribution to anything, much less myself. In art, at first, I thought, “God, this is
great.” It was great for my ego and it
enabled me to make somewhat of a decent living, and that was all fine, but it
still took me four or five years before I thought maybe I can really accomplish
something with this. That became
all-consuming for me. It’s become
something I do day and night, my whole world.
I must be boring to a lot of people, because that is my whole life. It’s a drive that’s, at times, insane. I spend six dollars to make eight. I buy a
$4,000 dress to tear it up and put paint on it, right? It doesn’t make sense anymore. It is
getting out of hand. But it’s what I do
and I don’t know what else to do. (Pause
) I have a friend in Austin, Texas, who is a teacher, number one, and an
artist, number two, and because he’s a teacher, he’s always been very
human. Recently I talked to him, and I’d
read one of his books and it almost made me cry because it made me realize that
I’m probably getting to be less and less of a human being, and more and more
isolated. What I’m doing to myself ,
pushing out a lot of people who are irrelevant to me, it’s like something that
has to be done right now because that’s the direction I’m going into.
And does that feel fatalistic?
I’ve
always believed that I could do it if I applied myself. But in the process of applying yourself you
have to give up a hell of a lot.
Consequently, my family’s living in Seattle now, simply because I’m so
involved in this business of running around and meeting people . . . It’s very
time-consuming and emotionally involving , to a point where I realized that
both my 3 year old daughter and my wife (he has two grown sons by a previous
marriage) were probably better off in an environment they were both comfortable
with, which is around water by the way, because they were both raised there and
they really weren’t comfortable here in the desert. I’m in communication with them every day and
still care about them both very, very much, but it’s to a point where I can’t
spend a lot of time -- not can’t, I
don’t want to spend a lot of time
dealing with all the little details of everyday life. And my bank account sort of proves that. I have to hire an accountant to take care of
my checkbooks. They haven’t been brought
up to date for months, simply because I ignore them.
You said that art is not a sounding
board for politics, and I inferred that, especially in your own case, it’s more
about a personal kind of expression. Do
you think that’s indicative of the tenor of the times, that this is the age of
the individual and people are more concerned with personal concerns than
national or cultural ones?
I
think that’s true. I studied with a man
by the name of Pablo Higgins who was one of the last of the Mexican
muralists. And up until then, I was in
awe of the gigantic murals that were made by Rivera and Siqueiros, and the more
I got to know him, the more I realized that even as they were doing the murals,
the people did not understand. He told
me this, that the people would come down and throw apples and stuff at them
because, I don’t know why, they didn’t understand what they were doing. At that point, I began to realize that
(pause) that what happened was the government of Mexico really manipulated the
artists at that time to make political statements for them, on their
behalf. That really irritated me. For the government to manipulate the artist
is really the opposite of what we thought it was. We thought the artist was manipulating the
government! That wasn’t true at
all. I worked with a lot of so-called
radical organizations, promoting their cultural backgrounds, and I found within
a very short period that what they really wanted was for the artist to promote
propaganda for them, you know. That’s
not right. I think that at one time
maybe that was important, but after talking to Higgins, I realized it was only
worthwhile to him because it helped him pursue his career. If I’m going to make a statement, it’s going
to be my statement, not anybody
else’s, and I think that’s what art should be about.
Red Dancer, mixed media screen, 24 feet long, collection RC Gorman |
What is your statement?
Hell,
I don’t know. People ask me that every
day. My approach to art is not an
intellectual one. I don’t sit and think,
I’m going to say this or I’m going to make an image of that. I simply approach the materials and react to
them. Usually it’s most successful when
I don’t have anything in mind, it’s totally clear. What comes from that is things that I feel
comfortable with, things that I know about, okay? They’re things that come from the
subconscious rather than the conscious.
A lot of the time what I’m doing, of course, is I’m saying, God, this
really feels like this or that, and consequently I’ll derive a title from
that. But I never think about a title
before that.
What are some of the things you
know about?
I
feel about this part of the world. I
feel a relationship about this world, the way of life, and this
environment. I believe in this
environment, that’s what I know about. I
know about dry river beds and what they look like after there’s been a
drought. I know about chicaras, those little insects that come
out every 14 years or whatever, the sound that they give and the way they split
open. I know about lizards, and barbed
wire fences, and the color at dawn or sunset.
That’s what I know about, basically.
What about dresses?
(laughter) Nothing!
How about parasols?
I
know that they’re nice forms. I saw a
relationship in some of the beadwork that was put on the dresses in the ‘20s
and the beadwork that my mother does, and I try to draw a relationship between
those two things. The parasol to me is simply
a circular form, such a strong shape that I use it a lot. It’s a shape that everybody can relate
to. People from all over, different
backgrounds, come to me and say, “I know about this,” because it reminds them
of, I don’t know, their mother’s cookies, or something in their personal
life. I look for relationships between
shapes and colors and textures. I don’t
see dresses or parasols. I think what
they become are relics, artifacts. I
have a real affinity for relics, I always have, ever since I can remember. I lived in a little town in Colorado that was
right smack on the Santa Fe Trail. We
used to dig up the ground for a number of reasons – everything from looking for
worms to burying something. We’d find
pieces of sabers and stuff like that.
Old things. A lot of the things I
do now – I’ll take new things and make them feel like relics. That’s probably why I do collage a lot,
because I like to haunt antique stores.
I see things there that people have hoarded, and to try and get those
relics out of the drawers and up on the walls appeals to me. The very idea of putting them behind Plexi-glass
appeals to me because it adds another dimension to them and makes them feel
like a relic. I’ve painted in a lot of
different manners in the process of learning – you learn about the old masters
and you learn about the French Impressionists – and I’ve gone through all those
periods. And one day I was painting
portraits in a very old world style, and all of a sudden I realized, what the
hell am I doing? This is the way the
Flemish people painted. I’ve been to
Holland! I don’t know anything about
that way of life. Why am I doing
this? At that point, fortunately, one of
my professors, who happened to be Asian, told me, “You know, you’re right. You should do what you know, and what you
know seems to have a lot to do with texture.”
He showed me how to make paper that had texture to it. His whole background was beautiful, fine,
delicate rice papers with no texture. He
could relate to that, but I couldn’t, and it turned around for me at that
point. I think that’s what this whole
country is about – Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, Arizona . There’s a lot of texture involved, and maybe
that’s why I don’t relate to water.
Water doesn’t seem to have any texture to it. It’s simply a moving force.
What was it that you used to bury
back in Walsenburg?
Oh
God, I used to steal my sister’s precious objects, rhinestones and stuff, and
I’d bury them. And again it was the idea
behind treasures and relics – I’d bury them because then they’d become
that. If we had a collection of bugs or
rodents or whatever, and they happened to die because we left them in a jar
with the lid sealed, then we’d bury them and do some sort of ritual or ceremony. It seemed a very natural thing to do.
In some of your work you’ve old
bits of cavalry uniforms, brass buttons, insignias . . . Is there any political
statement being made there? Any
reference to your own heritage?
I
probably shouldn’t tell you this, but probably it’s true. A lot of times I feel, although I try not to
be actively involved in it . . . I’ll come to Taos and see Kit Carson all over
the place, and it appalls me that people have made heroes out of people who
massacre other people. And so if I make
political statements, I utilize those things to make them with, but I try not
to do it in such a blatant manner that you’re hitting people over the head with
them. Because, after all, it might not
be their opinion. It’s only mine. And also it’s important for me to do it in a
way that works physically and is also aesthetically pleasing. For a long time I thought, oh God, all I’m
making is beautiful things, but then I realized there’s not a damned thing
wrong with making beautiful things. I mean,
critics can call it decorative all they want if that’s all they want to
see. But for me this whole area is
beautiful, so why should I make a statement about it that isn’t?
Skipping around a little bit . . . You
mentioned career planning. Do you have a
plan . . .
(Snickering softly) Oh God, yeah. The very first year I came out here, 1974-75,
I had a definite three-year plan made out for myself, and I went about
implementing it. And I found, to my own
amazement, that within a year and a half I was where I expected to be in three
years. I let that ride for a year, and
then I made another plan, a five year plan, always with very, very high goals,
as high as I could possibly reach. In
the last year some incredible things have happened that had nothing to do with
my plans at all, at least as far as my making them happen. To a point where I can see that in a year’s
time I’ll have to leave here again. So my plans now are tentatively to go to
Europe and then come back into the States.
My thinking behind that is that the art establishment, whoever that is,
has concentrated on American art for so long and for the last four years or so,
they’ve been kind of floundering, not knowing what direction to go in. Last year in New York, I started to get a
whiff that something was going on. I
didn’t know what it was, but my last trip I spent a lot of time there and began
to see the East Coast is looking toward Europe again for the first time since
World War II.
The Italians, the Germans . . .
Mm
hmm. They’re looking for the new
innovative stuff coming out of there, and probably rightfully so, you know,
because what’s happening here, as I see it, is we have a few innovative people
and everybody else copying them or doing take-offs on them. There doesn’t seem to be any real big, new,
exciting things going on. For a while it
was right here (gesturing at the floor), but the longer I stay here, the
exciting stuff is a mere handful compared to the amount of it. Anyway, I figured if I stay here too long I’d
probably get boxed in. Not that that
would be a bad thing—this is home, I could live here forever – but career-wise
it’s probably a good move to go to Europe.
The New York gallery I deal with (Tara Gallery) has arranged shows in
Germany, France, and England, so it’s logical for me to produce it there rather
than producing it here and taking it there.
It’s still tentative, but I’ve found that if I continue to think along
one given path, I usually end up there.
We’ll see what happens. The only
thing that will stop me is me, if I get afraid of it, or too comfortable with
being here, and that’s easy. If I don’t
get into the studio at 5 o’clock in the morning, my day gets wasted because
there’s so much going on. I’m my own
worst enemy in that way because I cause my interruptions. Very early in the
morning I don’t get side-tracked, I don’t side-track myself. I work till noon,
then I can go cruise the plaza or whatever.
What’s your heritage?
My
mother and her family are Navajo. My grandmother was kidnapped a number of times,
I guess. My father came from Mexico during the revolution. His father was a
politician who was sent there from Spain to help organize the government, and
it was the wrong timing because they sent him just at the time the revolution
manifested and they hung him. My father and his mother escaped into the United
States and ended up in Colorado.
Did your mother and father have
very different kinds of influences on you?
No.
My mother had very little influence on me, and my father none. Maybe he did, I
don’t know, he left when I was very young, about three years old. But the
family allowed me to be myself. Because
my mother worked the majority of the time, she wasn’t there to say, no, don’t
do this or that, and my father certainly wasn’t there to say, you should play
baseball or punch somebody in the mouth if they call you a Mexican . . . that
kind of influence never entered into my upbringing. My grandparents were
probably the greatest influence because they were home all the time. I observed
them. They taught me that if there was anything I wanted, I could make it. They
were poor, but it was a way of life for them. They also allowed me to make my
own mistakes. They didn’t tell me when to come home or what to do during the
day, so consequently I spent a lot of time alone in the hills and I came home
when I was hungry. I learned to go to sleep when I was tired, and get up when
God liked. The first few years of my life I think my father’s background
occupied a lot of my time, but I was able to let that go as a teenager, and not
be preoccupied with Spanish heritage or Mexican heritage. I enjoyed it, I still
do, but I don’t feel I have to live it. I don’t know how to explain it to you .
. . People are surrounded by their families, and consequently they tend to lean
in that direction and do what is expected of them. Probably the reason I left
right away after high school was I have over 2,000 living relatives. To be
involved in the middle of that, forget it.
Did you ever speak Navajo?
No.
My grandparents spoke it but they never taught us. I don’t think they thought
it was that relevant that we become what might be termed ‘educated.’ It was
more relevant that we learn how to survive. My grandmother would start to weave
a rug, and unless you went and watched her and really pumped her about what she
was doing . . . It was up to you whether you wanted to learn or not. My
grandfather was the same way. “If you want to learn, come here and I’ll teach you,
but don’t interrupt me while I’m doing things.” If we wanted to learn, we did,
but generally it was just observing that way of life. There was a lot of
self-fulfillment in being able to take a piece of wood and make something out
of it. That was as important to them as it is today for people to make a lot of
money or drive a flashy car.
The photograph of you in the
national ads the New York Gallery has been running, has some unusual features [see above].
The first is . . . Do you play the guitar. That little fingernail . . .
People
ask me, “Is that a coke spoon?” (Laughter) Nobody believes me, but really what
it is is a tool to pick up wet paper with.
What’s the mood in the picture –
it’s not the public Armond Lara. Is this you?
What
happened, I was sitting on a stool, and looking at the floor, at something I’d
just finished, studying it, and that’s when the photographer walked in and shot
it. I don’t take myself too seriously, most of the time I’m clownin’ around and
making what might seem to be flippant statements, I don’t know. But when I’m
working, it almost seems I’m in a fantasy land. I’m not here anymore. It’s not
a place for anything but concentrating on what you’re doing.
Some interesting paradoxes have
come up as we’ve talked – the fact that your work is spontaneous, and yet you
have such a firm hold on planning your career, for example. There’s a strong
feeling of the Southwest in much of your work, yet some elements in it are not
are very genteel . . .
I
met a beautiful lady one time, and she later told me, “You know, you’re a
zebra,” and she hit it right on the nose because I think of myself sometimes as
a contradiction. Planning versus spontaneity, for example – the way I think and
the way I act aren’t always the same. But planning a career and creating the
art are two different ball games. The only person I know who can run his career
spontaneously is R. C. Gorman.
You mentioned earlier that you
believe in brujas and lloronas. What’s a llorona?
There’s
a folk tale out of New Mexico and Colorado that there was a woman who had lost
her child, and I think she was also beheaded. At any rate, after she was
buried, she would appear, and go around crying – that’s what llorona means, crying – looking for her
child. To keep us in line at nighttime, they’d say the llorona was going to get us. I really think that behind most of
these old stories there’s some element of truth. From time to time you hear a
new llorona story. I really believe
in those kinds of things. A lot of it has to do with living in a little tiny
town where strange things happened all the time, and the parochial school had a
lot to do with that, because they would take the children and mold their
background with Christianity. When we came up with a story about llorona, they would counter with a
similar kind of story. What it really did was make a bigger believer in the
devil than it did in God. That’s a terrible thing to say! You take a
ten-year-old kid and lay this kind of thing on him that he already knows
something about, and you’re going to scare the hell out of him. I suppose if
you could show him a miracle it might turn him the other way, but you don’t see
too many of those. (Laughter) But such stories are very much a part of New
Mexico and Colorado. They’re hard to get rid of. But working with them as art
became very valid. It was something that I knew about. But I just began that
piece and I had to back off because I realized I believed in it so much and could
get into it so much that I was scaring myself half to death and could end up
crazy. I’m not too careful about what I say about religious things, but for
some reason that aspect of it, the brujas,
the lloronas . . .
Bruja, work in progress
Did you ever have any direct
experience with them?
Ya,
I really did. At that time in Colorado – strange – there were balls of fire,
actually fields of energy that went rolling down the railroad tracks. I imagine
the tracks attracted that magnetic energy or whatever it was, so we’d see those
and God, you see one of those in the middle of the night and it’ll make a
believer in the devil out of you in a hurry. The ground used to swallow up
hoses, straight down, swoop. You could watch them go down, there no way in hell
you could hold on to them. Kitchen cabinets would fly open and dishes start
flying around the house. This went on for a long time. My stepfather was a cop,
right, and every time something would happen he‘d go check it out and I’d go
with him, and you’d find people on their knees, praying to their santos, you know. It got so bad that
finally they sent these guys down from the university, and they had a special
name for that, I don’t remember what it was, something to explain these things
that are unexplainable. I’ll give you a funny story here. You’re not going to
believe this! This just happened a few months ago. It was five in the morning,
I was on the verge of getting up, and I heard this thump. I get up, go outside
and look around, and there was a little bird on the sidewalk, and I thought
this bird flew into the window and knocked itself silly. I picked it up and
brought it in the house, and I put it in a boxes. And I thought I’d watch this
bird and see what happens. If it looks like it’s going to make it, then I’ll
try and nurse it. I left it in the box, went to the studio and came back about
noon, and the bird was just fine. Beautiful, one of those little black birds. I
thought, maybe I’ll keep this around for Jake, right, but no way can I put it
in the same cage because Jake [his parrot] will eat him. So I went out and I
bought another cage and I hung the cage up and put the bird in it, and it was
singing and just as happy as a lark, and so I locked the doors and left. I came
home that night -- no bird. And I have never found that bird. It just
disappeared. The door was locked, there was nobody here. Very strange, indeed.
(Laughter) I can’t say it was a lost soul because this is a brand new house, no
one else has ever lived here, but it could have been some kind of force, or
someone trying to send me a message
--Stephen
Parks, August 1982
Great article. Loved reading his stories about his life. I never had the opportunity to develope a strong relationship with my grandfather, but have always been intrigued by him and his art. Thank you for sharing
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