San Antonio Symphony News and Archive

Artists, too, live in our real world




By Mike Greenberg

from the San Antonio Express News 12/20/98



Strange to say, artists are human beings.

They have real lives. They eat. They do laundry. They have headaches and hobbies. They take their children to school. They suffer work-related injuries. They struggle to pay bills. Sometimes they murder and are murdered.

The human ordinariness of artists' lives was driven home in the most painful way last week when Mark Horner, just 25 years old and the superb principal trombonist for the San Antonio Symphony, was shot to death in his home.

A short time later, artist Mike Pogue was found dead, in his car, of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. Horner had been dating Pogue's estranged wife.

Similar stories play out regularly in corner bars, in offices, in high-priced subdivisions and public housing projects. Passions get out of control. People do crazy things. That's life.

Artists are supposed to be different. They are not supposed to be human in the ordinary ways.

They lead big, glamorous lives. They consort with the muses by day and the pretty people by night. Their concerns are intellectual, their issues are spiritual. They are above the mundane. In Japan, it is said of artists that they eat the air.

Their work is not real work, like the work of truck drivers or ophthalmologists. They are tricksters, free-loaders and reprobates, not upright citizens and baseball fans and family folk like you and your neighbors.

Artists are gods. Or they are devils. They are not people.

The image of artists as something other than merely human has its roots in 19th-century romanticism and its negation, modernism.

Romanticism unleashed the grand passions -- erotic, political, spiritual. Artists created the ideology of the age and led the movement toward a new order of self-expression, liberation and living larger than life.

Modern artists stripped their work of reference, representation and familiarity in an effort to bring forth some pure, luminous kernel of Truth, unfettered by merely human histories, desires and facts.

The hubristic, encompassing overabundance of Delacroix and Wagner gave rise to its opposite -- the annihilation of Rothko's shimmering surfaces, the spare objectivity of Webern's tone rows.

Both periods left magnificent, ageless legacies, opposite in sign but similar in value. Romanticism aimed for the ultrahuman, modernism for the infrahuman. Both avoided the merely human.

Artists and aesthetes put art on a pedestal as a thing apart from and better than life and the world. Artists became a sort of priesthood in public image -- an image that some artists cultivated.

Yet artists, like the rest of us, cannot avoid being in the world.

As modernism recedes into a historical style, there is much evidence that the arts are rediscovering the merely human.

Artists increasingly find inspiration not in the distant muses or the inner light but in the messiness, ambiguity, paradox, fragility, vulgarity and splendid ordinariness of life as it is lived.

The deaths of Mark Horner and Mike Pogue were terrible, shattering, impossible to reconcile with our aspirations for beauty, nobility, grandeur, coherence. That, we want to think, is not who we are. But yes, it is.

We cannot live without an art that lifts us above and beyond the pool of blood on the floor, the warm gun on the car seat.

We also need an art that doesn't flinch or gloss or evade, an art of ordinary lives and places, an art with its feet on the ground.

Let us welcome our artists down from the stars, up from the depths, as fellow travelers on a world always half dark, half light.

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By Susan Yerkes

from the San Antonio Express News 12/18/98

.... Certainly no one expected the awful violence that left Mark Horner and Mike Pogue dead - not friends, families or collegues. In the morning they were two creative artists - musician and painter. That night they were the subject of shocking news; apparently a murder-suicide spawned of jealous rage...



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