GEwIZ- Coping In Hell
Geo Geller in conversation with Issa Ibrahim
Manhattan based documentary filmmaker Geo Geller gives voice to the voiceless and to those who are in their own private revolution and wishes to articulate for those who are undiagnosed a perceptual lens into the inner life of those with lived experience, the diagnosed. Geller first met the artist Issa Ibrahim in 1999, as he was escorted and shadowed by two Mental Health Treatment Aides to the screening of the HBO premiere of Jessica Yu’s film The Living Museum,about an artist asylum at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, NY that highlights Ibrahim’s art and story. There began a 20-year friendship and 15 years of filmed conversations. Abandoned by his family, he credits Geller and a small band of supporters with supplying the love that nurtured and fortified him. Upon Issa’s release in 2009 their nightly hours-long phone marathons quickly became music making and recording sessions in Geo’s Chelsea apartment, dubbed “The Spaceship”, that yielded this bounty of lyrical poetry and folky pop/blues. The duo records under the name GEwIZ, a portmanteau of Geo with Issa. Their LP ‘Touching Madness’ presents for the first time some of the fruits culled from those sessions. There are plenty more in the archive.
Here is an excerpted transcript of one of their filmed discussions dealing with insanity, relevance, and the death of subtlety.
Geo Geller: You said a very interesting thing that got my attention, which made me come here to your studio, was that some people need to have their freak out to realize that that's not where they need to be.
Issa Ibrahim: I was just saying that once…if, not once, if people wake up to the fact that we’re screwed and it's only getting worse, and that most of us are narcotized on something, if it's not prescription then it's whatever else they're using or drinking or whatever, if we can wake up to the fact that that's the state that we're in we'd be better equipped to detox from the thing that's keeping us narcotized and helping us cope, learn to cope in a straighter sense, and then I think once we're really straight and focused we'll be able to combat the issues at hand. Like the various leaders we have who are screwing us up and the state of the world we're living in. I think only the most focused individual, and group of individuals who remain focused, can really combat the bullshit.
Otherwise, we'll just be smoking and drinking and popping our psychotropic pills and our anti-anxiety medications and watching our Kardashians and our reality TVs and get stuck in our little devices, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, and things just happen all around us and we'll just kind of be lost in this fog of distraction and fog of coping in an untenable situation. Coping in hell. We're learning to cope in hell, and I think we need to wake up.
I won't say I'm fortunate enough to have been woken up because I'm still sleeping. I detach, I pull away, but I really do feel like the times when I really do focus is what I'm painting or writing a song and downloading from on high, wherever and whatever that is, what's really going on and then I can paint it, and not even know what I'm painting, but there it is. It's like painting tomorrow's newspaper…today.
And I'm not the only one, there are a lot of people who are doing that, artists and writers. What good that is I don't know. I can't say that I'm reinventing the wheel or what I'm doing is anything special other than just the fact I'm doing it and I'm cognizant, in a de facto sense, like after the fact, of what it is I'm trying to communicate which is just bringing a message which is just,
“Let's get it together people. Let's, you know, wake up. Let's put the joint down, let’s put the bong down. Let's cap that liquor. Let’s put the liquor in the liquor cabinet.”
I don't know if I'm really beating the drum for temperance. But I'm trying to beat the drum for sanity because I've been insane. And I really do feel like I've gotten out of a mental hospital, to a larger mental hospital. And there isn't an administration that's treating the ill. The administration, which are the figureheads and the presidents and the world leaders, are the ill. And it may sound really kind of crazy but the real administrators, the people in charge, is God in the heavens and the angels, and they’re so detached and they’re just leaving us to ourselves. I don't want to sound like, “it's end times,” but it really feels like there's no one in control. That we are out of control as a society, as a civilization.
Once upon a time, maybe five or six years ago, maybe a little bit more, when I woke up to the fact that I was kind of channeling something, I thought that my paintings made a difference. But I'm almost fearful that they don't make a difference anymore. That I've missed my moment, or my moment has come and passed, and the message doesn't matter because we're already here. It's not like, “Careful,” it's like, “Here we are.”
And I get the feeling people won't want to know that, so they won't respond to it. And those that do know it are too busy in themselves trying to survive it and cope with it.
So that's why I haven't been doing much painting, lately, because what the hell else more is there to say? And I've been here before in my career and then found sustenance or something to say, but I'm really at a low ebb at this point, at this juncture. I really do feel like I don't want to go with the doom and gloom. I don't want to just paint the world in flames. Who wants to see that?
GG: Hieronymus Bosch did it.
II: Yeah. And he was predicting it hundreds of years before I was. It's depressing, if you really think about it, which I try not to think about. But I have found myself looking at my easel. Looking at the blank easel, and the blank wall and wondering, “What next?” And realizing that there's nothing else. There's nothing. Yeah, I did my job as a messenger. Brought the message. It was responded to with chuckles and laughter and, “that's funny, yeah.” And no one got it, really. And those who did just kept on truckin’ with it. And I could just be one of many people over the centuries who thought they were bringing a message and ended up just dying, and life just went on. It's almost like to give myself some sort of relevance I almost want the world to end, or for there to be some sort of major shake-up, otherwise I'm just irrelevant. That's kind of what I’m feeling. I feel irrelevant. I feel empty. I feel obsolete.
GG: Well, you're over 50 years old now.
II: That may have a lot to do with it too. Maybe I've just aged out of relevance. I've been feeling that way artistically and musically, as I’ve been getting this whole new computer, digital set up, and realized that now I'm just like any other dude in Brooklyn, laying down tracks and making bullshit music, you know? As opposed to, once upon a time, when I was splitting the atom. I mean, comparatively.
GG: Well, where were you?
II: I was behind a walls of a mental hospital and doing whatever the hell I could do and doing a good job of it. But, you know, that was my moment. Everybody has their moment. And I don’t know, maybe my moment has passed. I don’t know. But, like I say I've been here before.
GG: When?
II: A couple years back. Five, six, seven years back
GG: While you were in or out of Creedmoor?
II: Just as I got out. And then I had a huge spurt of creativity, and things really picked up. But then there was a period where, I don’t know.
GG: Well, are you managing your expectations? Maybe you're just projecting that this is the end.
II: I don't like that expression “managing your expectations.” What the hell does that mean? That's like, “scale it down, boy! Scale it down!” You know what that sounds like? That sounds like, “don't forget you're a patient,” which sounds a lot like, “don't forget you’re a nigger” which sounds like…
GG: You read a lot into that one.
II: No, really, it feels like, “just calm down, now. Don't get too excited. Scale back. Manage your expectations.” Where really I've survived this long by thinking big and thinking outside of myself, thinking as big as I possibly could, getting grandiose with it because that was the only way I could survive. So, I don't want to now discover that this is, you know, “down boy, down boy.” Fuck that.
GG: Come on. Remember, we were talking about relevance. That's what your last commentary on your life was that you're irrelevant and I'm saying, well maybe you're jumping to conclusions.
II: Well, I fear I’m irrelevant.
GG: Well, if you fear it you usually get the thing you're most afraid of.
II: You're full of platitudes and cliches.
GG: I learnt it from you.
II: I do truck in cliches, yeah, I do.
GG: But anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that maybe your projections are just because you're in a lull. And that's okay. I love lulls. It's like my quote about Henry Miller, when someone asked him where he got his inspiration, and he said, “inspiration? I hate inspiration! It consumes you! It's like a fire! And it's not like you sitting right here.” And so, I understand that, and I think you do too. And so, I love when I'm not consumed by inspiration.
II: I like inspiration. I like to be consumed. I like the fire. I like the flames. It makes me feel alive. That's like people who cut and burn themselves? To feel alive? I use the flames of inspiration and the swords of inspiration to cut and burn and to feel. To feel something.
GG: So maybe you’re just not consumed at the moment.
II: Things have gotten so bizarre and are getting even more bizarre that they defy my imagination. We are living in what I would have imagined. Or maybe what we're living is so unimaginable right now that I can't imagine anything to comment on it. Donald Trump is president. Isis. The hydrogen bomb and North Korea. It's like it would be overkill, and I believe in subtlety, even though a lot of my stuff hasn't been the most subtle, but there's always a subtext going on even in the most outrageous stuff that I do. But I’d have to really search to find a subtext to the insanity if I were to paint something that would be a reflection of what we're going through now. I'd have to really beat my head against the post to find the subtlety in the blatant ridiculousness of it all. There is no subtlety. Subtlety is lost. It's like the entendre, double entendre? There’s no entendre anymore. Once upon time in comedy and in TV, one of the greatest things about TV comedy and even film for many, many years was the entendre, the subtle kind of like, “is he really saying what I think…? Does that really mean that…? Oh boy, that was clever.” But that has gone out the window. It's all so in your face now that subtlety is gone. And I feel like I'm a part of an older generation that appreciates something that no longer exists, and people don't care about and don't know about. Kids coming up today have no idea what subtlety is, you know? Or an entendre. Or just like limning a certain detail. They have no idea. So, I mean it's lost.
I did that recent sale at the Queens Museum and these two guys came up, “nah, that wouldn't happen! Those are two different… Marvel Universe, DC Universe,” and they were arguing over like the stupid details. They were arguing over the dumb shit that they want you to argue about and not what I was trying to get across. And then when I tried to say, “well, actually it's this,” they're like, “nah, that don’t make no sense.” And it was just so disappointing that they didn't get it. Yet they were having an argument about it.
And I know that there are people who stand in front of Picasso's and argue about an aspect of it that the artist himself and many other people who appreciate it can see beyond. And I guess people only bring what they bring to art, and that's okay too, I suppose. But having experienced that, it was disquieting. The level of low IQ. I should have been grateful that even a low IQ person can argue about what I'm putting across. But it was startling, and very disquieting. And that's how I’m sure a lot of people look at what I'm trying to do and what a lot of other artists are trying to do, hopefully. I know there are other artists out there who are trying to bring subtlety back, or not bring it back but hold on to it. I don't know if there's any bringing it back.