(From a speech given at the Institute for American Indian Arts, Santa
Fe)
The real Art occurs in the imagination : then the Work begins. The tools
are whatever we can get, beads or pixels, hunting bows or a computer.
I began music in my head. Then about age 3, I discovered the piano,
and the world changed up for me, because I could express outside what
I heard in my head. As a teenager, I wanted an instrument I could tune
and I craved mobility, and I lived with a guitar and a mouthbow. In the
sixtes I was introduced to early electronic synthesizers, and in the
seventies to the computer. Throughout my crayon days, my watercolors
and oils days, and my eventual falling in love with digital painting
on the Macintosh, one fact has made itself clear: an artist will make
music on pots and pans, or an orchestra, and we'll make images in the
sand with a finger, or whatever else is available, including the computer.
In case the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear about
computers is a pie chart, let me tell you that computer artists are also
doing what can only be called fine art. We make art on computers for
the same reasons that Da Vinci, Rembrandt and Mozart made art with their
available tools: because we love to. Asleep and awake, I dream about
manipulating colors and shapes and sounds and rhythm. I earn my living
giving concerts and speeches; when I'm done, my eyes are just hungry
for pieces of pure sound and pixels of color, so I take my imagination
into my studio, and play with sound, and I paint with light.
I had been using Mac Paint from the early 80s, and then when I got
my Mac II, I fell in love with PixelPaint for visual art and Opcode's
Vision
for music. I "play" music and I "play" visuals.
But here's the great thing about computer art: you can have some wonderful
times while you're on the way to becoming a master, even if you start
today. If you're really an artist, you don't have to know a lot to
accomplish
a lot. You can make eloquent artwork with talent, desire, and a pencil
and paper, or as a beginner with a computer graphics program.
It would be my dream to have color and sound setups like I have at home,
in every school, on every reservation. To me, a Macintosh is a natural
and easy to learn tool, and it belongs in the hands of our beadworkers
and powwow singers, our linguists, our historians. (See Cradleboard Teaching
Project) Native artists are already far beyond the realm of lavendar
coyotes and the demands of the tourist trade.
As for myself, I have my usual ulterior motive for spending peices of
my time teaching computer art to the students, staff and teachers at
the prestigious but financially lean Institute for American Indian Arts.
In my opinion, Indian people suffer from a lack of self-identity and
self-esteem as a direct result of the communication gap which has persisted
these past 500 years. If Indian artists, mothers, thinkers had been able
to communicate effectively with European artists, mothers, thinkers long
ago, history may have been different. With computer technology becoming
so affordable and so awesome in the area of graphics and communications,
there is a potential for the Native alternative point-of-view, (which
is quite splendid, btw), finally to be shared in major and ongoing ways
that would both raise the level of Indian self-esteem-self-identity at
the same time as providing the rest of the world with a much needed medicine.
Some artists are still uncomfortable about computers. Well, there IS
a learning curve, sort of like learning to drive; but once you learn,
you can go anywhere, and beyond other peoples' train tracks.
Buffy Sainte-Marie
Go Back to Buffy Art Show