Myth Messages

Myths of My Ancestors: An Artist's Statement

My great-grandfather Edwin Carlson, a Swedish immigrant, won the Chicago Marathon in 1917. My grandmother Ingeborg showed me a black and white photograph of him standing next to trophies and awards; even at a very young age, I could see that this photograph documented a mythic ancestor who loved to run.

Edwin's avocation was running, but his vocation was milkman. He used his delivery route to train; in the early morning hours he took milk bottles from his wagon and ran them to various Chicago residences. Sprinting back to his wagon one morning, he leapt over a fence and snagged his wedding ring on his uplifted arm on a laundry-line hook secured to a wall. In a freakish act, the hook tore the flesh of his ring finger off the bone. A doctor tried to save the finger by suturing it to the hand, but infection set in and Edwin died of lockjaw a few days later.

My grandmother's repeated telling of our family's fact-based myth of grand misfortune often ended by her saying “and then three months later the Depression hit, and my mother and my sister and I lost everything.” In order to ease overwhelming grief, well-meaning friends encouraged my grandmother's mother, Ellen, to forget her sorrows by “imbibing,” initially a benign, comforting practice but one that ultimately developed into an unrestrained addiction.

My grandmother escaped her alcoholic mother by marrying, at 17, a German gambling man named Clifton — a printer by trade. Their first child, Donna, suffered oxygen deprivation during delivery and was ultimately diagnosed as mentally retarded. It wasn't until my mother was born, the second of three daughters, that my grandmother began to see light at the end of a hellish ancestral tunnel. “She was my angel — Nancy never cried,” she would tell me proudly, as if somehow the beatific birth of my mother redeemed a tragic family history.

Yet history repeats itself: my mother's father also died young. Almost a year to the day after her father's death, my 18-year-old mother gave birth to me. My own father, an unhappy man prone to violent outbursts, was in and out of my young life — mostly out — perpetrating an unrelenting anxiety in me. As an adult, I learned that his ancestors, proud Poles, fought many wars with the Swedes. I wondered if I was given a genetic predisposition to visualizing dual forces, ultimately seeking ways to reconcile them.

My mother divorced, then married again; we moved south with my step-father, a man 13-years my mother's senior, who was in the final chapters of a 20-year career in the Marine Corps. We lived on a naval base in North Carolina where my mother gave birth to my only sister. In retrospect, this period was an intermission in a play that begins as a tragedy, but now may be seen as commedia, similar to ones told by Dante and other great mythic storytellers. 

A year later, the four of us, Walter, Nancy, Carey and Deborah, moved back to Chicago so that my mother could live near Inge, Donna and her youngest sister Sally. I grew up in an extended family dominated by women and their myths. I think of myth as a true story, but one whose facts may be difficult to substantiate; one must trust a myth. Myth may also be an object according to Webster’s second definition: “[Myth is]…an object, or a character regarded as embodying an aspect of culture.” 

All of art history, Western European or any other cultural art history, contains myth in its lineage. In studying Western European art history, I was taught that Greek Art beget Roman Art, Roman Art beget Early Christian Art, which beget the Renaissance, which beget the Baroque, and so on and so forth. Of course, this lineage is more complex than I can summarily write. And so it is with my own art petites histoires and their confluence with art historical grand récits. The art objects I create for my installations aim to object-ify myth with reference to my genealogic and art historical ancestry. Objects are fact; they have a demonstrable existence. I am descendent, I am heir to and of the object.

You may participate if you choose, objectify personal and public myths, art of individual and collective cultures. Visual art reminds us, indeed, makes us remember our art historical ancestry in all its depravity and redemption.

In remembering, I reflect, genuflect, then create work that continues the lineage for those who will come after us.