Weaving a Message
Lisa Miller's art is rather confrontational, and the Los Gatan hints that her next work will surprise the locals
By Sandy Sims
'Don't worry, I don't clean my studio for anyone," Lisa Dale Miller said over the phone." The driveway at Miller's home in the Los Gatos hills winds down behind the house to her studio. Meeting her there is like meeting a good friend. She's warm; she wants to give you tea, make you comfortable and she has an easy laugh.
The sparse artwork and peaceful atmosphere around Miller's studio belies the body of work she's created, and the enormous project she's working on now. But the 16 bright red lips glued in neat little rows to a white square, hanging on the west wall, hint that Miller's art is about more than creating beautiful pictures. Each pair of those lips is tied up with ribbon or barbed wire. "I want my art to make people think about what's happening in their world," Miller says about the piece that she did in Japan.
Over the last nine years Miller's projects have confronted such issues as the Republicans' stand on traditional family values and Japan's male-dominated culture. One project called into question whether or not the human species can survive its own cruelty. And in that vein, Miller's new millennium project was an attempt at transforming society. Miller even took her musical skill to Kosovo last year as part of an art project to help heal children devastated by the war.
Originally from New York, Miller and her husband, Richard Gordon, founder of the software company Tera Systems in Campbell, moved to Los Gatos six years ago after living three years in Tokyo.
In Japan, while still in her early 30s, Miller's solo work blossomed. The American Embassy sponsored her painting exhibit "Family Values" and lecture tour at the American centers in Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka. She was the first foreign artist to be invited to exhibit in the Fukuoka Biennial at the Fukuoka Museum of Contemporary Art.
Now Miller is making her mark in the Bay Area and beyond. Since returning to the United States, Miller's work has been exhibited in New Mexico, San Francisco, Sacramento, the Mountain View Center for Performing Arts and the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art. She has been a pioneer in what she calls realspace/cyberspace installation with her "Millennial Burn, Parts I and II," exhibit at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History.
Miller's current project, "Harvesting Profit," is all about Silicon Valley.
"I've lived in Silicon Valley six years and haven't connected to this valley yet," Miller says. "This is a car culture. People get in their cars and don't talk to each other. Miller says she never owned a car before she came here. "In New York, you're free game as soon as you step out of the door. Anyone might start talking to you."
But," she says, "people sacrifice like hell to live here."
'Ritual' size 39' x 39.5' completed in 1998.
Miller says, when she first moved to the valley, she heard sweet reminiscences about disappearing orchards. "People talked about how funky and artistic Los Gatos used to be." But now, she says, those reminiscences have turned into grieving. "People are talking about how entitlement and greed consciousness has taken over.
"Nowhere in the world do people have the sense of entitlement as people have here," Miller says. "I grew up in New York, so I'm no country bumpkin," she says. "I mean, people are making gazillions and building enormous houses that guzzle energy, and maybe the house is just for a couple or a small family," she says. "That kind of over-consumption can't be sustained.
"I thought about my project as a way people could talk about what's going on," Miller says. "It's me trying to connect, too."
Miller is connected to the high-tech world through her husband's business. She's worked for him in the past, helping with various administrative tasks, as his business was getting off the ground. Through him, she's become proficient at the computer.
At her studio worktable she fiddles with her laptop computer and figures out why this or that picture isn't booting up right. Her last project and her current one are actually a cutting-edge art form. "I call it realspace/cyberspace installation art," Miller says, with both a website and a corresponding museum site. "Harvesting Profit" is in cyberspace now. The culmination will be at the Triton Museum of Art March 6-April 8.
Miller's multimedia project, sponsored by Macromedia Corporation, TellSoft, Arts Council Silicon Valley, SONY Electronics Corporation, Knight-Ridder.com, is a community project and requires the cooperation of Silicon Valley residents.
Valley residents can log onto www.harvestingprofit.com and follow directions for leaving visual, oral or written commentary about the last 50 years in Santa Clara County.
There are seven categories in which people can place comments: congestion, bring back, get rid of, housing, land-use issues, orchard stories, and start-up stories. For those not online, Miller offers an address for submissions. (See below)
This project is all consuming, Miller says. She has videotaped former orchard owners as they walk where their orchards used to be. She's videotaped Saratogans, fighting to keep the Heritage Orchard--one of only two left in the valley--from becoming play fields or a gymnasium. She's videotaped Hispanics in East San Jose who, because of the high rents, live three families to one house.
Miller is dedicated to getting as much commentary as possible. "I will video tape anyone who asks," Miller says. She's hoping to get more start-up stories, especially the older ones and would like more people to telephone in audio messages.
"Lisa is amazing," says Kathleen Moodie, exhibitions director of the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, where Miller's last installation exhibited. "She tests everything thoroughly before it's ready to exhibit. Nothing is left to chance." Moodie says Miller's Santa Cruz exhibit took a lot of electrical wizardry, and Miller made it all work. "If anything went wrong, Lisa was right here to fix it," Moodie says. "We never had to put up an out of order sign."
"Lisa researches everything," Miller's husband, Richard Gordon, says. "She spends a lot of time contemplating and studying, and then she works fast." Gordon says, because of Miller he's learned to appreciate art that's provocative. "Some of Lisa's work has changed my perception completely," he says.
'Millennial Burn II Installation' completed in 1999.
All of the information Miller gathers for "Harvesting Profit" will be woven into an installation art piece at the Triton.
Robert Milnes, director of the School of Art and Design at San Jose State University says, "in installation art, the viewer becomes part of the art, wanders through it and interacts with it. It's not complete without the viewer's presence, because there's no single way to see it."
Miller chooses installation art because she wants her viewers to have an experience, rather than just to look at an object. There's nothing for a person to buy and take home. "For me it's not enough to express something beautiful. I want to move a person's thought process, connect them with something greater." However, along with every installation project, Miller creates paintings that are for sale. "That's how I support my art," Miller says. "Sometimes I do well, and sometimes I don't."
What visitors to the Triton can expect is something akin to a ghost orchard, interwoven in some artistic, multimedia high-tech way with all the videos, audio sounds, photos and written commentaries. She says Saratogans will be surprised when they see it, because Saratoga plays a big part in the concept.
Milnes says installation and performance art--where the artist is actually part of the art--began in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when artists and musicians were staging "happenings." He says San Jose State has been teaching classes in installation art since the 1970s, and it's very big in the Bay Area.
"You don't see much in galleries," Milnes says. Usually, they are installed in nonprofit exhibition places. San Jose State has two galleries devoted entirely to installation art and performance art. "We have graduate students whose whole study is this kind of art, Milnes says.
He says some outdoor installation projects are huge. Bay area residents might recall the Running Fence, 18 1/2 feet high and some 20 miles long that artist Christo installed in Sonoma and Marin Counties in 1972-1976. These days there are a number of such projects around the world.
Forty-two-year-old Miller is the only artist in her family. "My parents used to say they wondered where I came from." She says her father is a Fortune 500 executive and her mother is a socialist. "I guess I'm what you get when you cross the two," Miller says laughing. Miller read Ram Dass when she was 12 and has been meditating ever since. Miller's brother is an environmental lawyer and her sister has been president of a number of companies.
Miller grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., where she says public schools encourage students to do everything. "Everyone wrote poetry and played musical instruments," she says. "I got a middle-class Jewish education that emphasizes what you can give to the world as the reason for education." She began her art career studying painting and sculpture at Rhode Island School of Design in 1976. In her senior year, Miller created an installation project that she says had to do with ritual. She says her art is her ritual.
When Miller's husband took a position in Japan in 1991, Miller's friends thought she was crazy to move to what is perceived as an anti-feminist country. "I had been making extremely feminist art in New York City," she says. However, it so happened the neighborhood she and her husband moved to had one of the most contemporary art museums in Japan, the Hara Museum. The chief curator there suggested Miller hang out for a year and schmooze with the art world, go to openings. "I hate that part of art," Miller says. "But I did it."
'Millennial Burn II Installation' completed in 1999.
Miller says her break came when the attaché from the American Embassy was looking for an American woman doing cutting-edge work.
The attaché asked Miller to show her work at a new American cultural center in Fukuoko, on the island of Kyushu, Miller says. This was after the 1992 Republican convention. "I had heard Patrick Buchanan's speech about the traditional family and was freaking out," she says.
Enraged and frustrated by the GOP stand that Miller says left a lot of nontraditional people out, she created a series of four 4-foot by 5-foot paintings called Family Values. Among the four paintings were two self-portraits, which she rarely does. One showed Miller as a victim of Buchanan's crusade because she's a feminist, humanist, and non-Christian American. The other self-portrait shows Miller with the words, Know Thy Enemy. Miller explains in a quote she gave to the Japan Times, "I am the enemy of those who require their audience to be passive, nonthinking humans."
When the embassy asked if they could exhibit Miller's work at the new cultural center, Miller said yes, but she would only show her Family Values paintings. They agreed.
"The press I got from that show gave my work a context in Japan," Miller says. It also emboldened her to immerse her art into Japanese feminist issues.
The tide was shifting then for women in Japan. In 1993 the prince and princess married, and Japanese women were proud that the princess was a smart, Harvard-educated woman. One more woman was elected to the Japanese Diet. Feminism was beginning to happen in a big way Miller says. Then she read that the princess had spoken two minutes longer than the prince and was told never to do that again. The princess agreed.
This sparked Miller's next political piece. She says "Japanese women keep their mouth shut and endure."
She created four paintings. Each one was of an obi--the sash that wraps around a woman's waist in the traditional dress. Written lengthwise along the obis in Japanese was the sentence, This is the sound of Japanese women demanding change in society, participation in government, and management of large corporations. "Of course, the gallery was silent," Miller says. But she'd also painted the words Gaman shi nai (patience no more) above and below the obis. The red lips in her studio are another work depicting Japanese women's bound silence.
Miller also took on pornography in Japan. "It's everywhere you turn in Japan," she says. "I'd get on the train, and the guy next to me would be looking at this very degrading whips-and-violence stuff."
She created performance art that involved overhead videos about the sacredness of a woman's body, while on the floor below lay a large pile of pornographic pictures. Miller destroyed the pornography ritualistically by writing on the pictures and then by setting them on fire.
When she had completed her performance art that night, there was dead silence. Then, Miller says, she heard some whimpering. "I realized this was some kind of mass crying," she says. "I thought I'd freaked them out." Afterward, many women came up to her and said they wished they could have destroyed the porno pictures with her. "I realized then," Miller says, "that I'd deeply touched a chord.
"I turned a corner on performance art that night," Miller says.
Coming to the Bay Area, Miller's art began confronting more than feminist issues. In 1997, at the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art on S. First Street, Miller did a major project. Viewers found themselves walking through an installation art piece that essentially said they were the endangered species because of bigotry, hatred and other human brutalities.
In 1999, Miller got a grant from the Cultural Council of Santa Cruz County for a project on the new millennium. This was the first time she used the Internet in her art.
People either logged on to her "Millennial Burn" website, or went to the museum in Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and sat in one of three artistically designed booths. Either place they would hear a meditative message asking what they would like to banish in the new millennium. They were to either email their response or put it in a box at the museum.
Some 200 responded by email from around the world. Several hundred more came to the museum. "Fear was No. 1 on the list," Miller says. She was particularly touched when a contribution came from Kosovo, saying they wanted to release ethnic hatred.
Miller followed up with rituals. She burned all the contributions at the beach, then returned the ashes to the museum to a simple Japanese-like display. The mountain of ashes could be seen on the website or in the museum. The next ritual was the ladling of water (visually on the website) from one urn to the next, while mentally making a commitment to action, to banish the thing the visitor wanted to banish.
Miller finished the project with a performance art that included her being covered with the ashes and cleansed of the ashes. "A symbolic cleansing for the new millennium," she calls it.
'Bones' size 42" x 5" completed in 1995.
Not long after the "Millennial Burn," Miller spent two months in Kosovo. She was there with a Catholic Relief Services art project designed to help heal the children traumatized by the war.
Miller, who knows how to play frame drums, was to play them with the children. She says drums are a big part of Middle Eastern music, and music is an integral part of the Albanian-Kosovar culture. But the drums in Kosovo had been destroyed along with everything else.
"The kids went wild when they saw the drums," Miller says. "They started dancing, screaming and laughing." They brought songs. "It was music therapy," she says. "It was the most amazing experience of my life." She heard a song and watched a play created by the children about one horrific experience. "The children found a way to use art to express something horrific," Miller says.
Miller says she got home from Kosovo last March during the big dot-com buying frenzy. "It was bizarre," she says. She'd been driving around Kosovo for 2 1/2 months in a Land Cruiser because the roads there had been destroyed by the bombs. "I come home," Miller says, "and Land Rovers are a status symbol, used to drive to the store."
This only served to highlight for Miller the strange values that have taken hold here in Silicon Valley. The dot-com bubble has burst recently, which is more fodder for Miller's "Harvesting Profit" project. She's hoping people will come to her website through most of February and share their Silicon Valley stories. "I need more audio and more start-up stories," she says.
Miller's project can be seen on the Internet at www.harvestingprofit.com.
Those without a computer, may send statements to Lisa Dale Miller, Harvesting Profit Images, c/o Triton Museum of Art, 1505 Warburton Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95050.
Everyone is welcome to the opening reception at the Triton on March 6, 6 to 8 p.m. Triton Museum hours are Tue., 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Wed. - Sun., 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. For more information, call the museum at 408.247.3754.
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