Victor Maldonado
What are the stories that need to be told? What are the limits and ethics of authorship? When does the vocabulary of collaboration and art veil human trafficking and exploitation? How to do the right thing? How many cooks spoil the soup? Those are the kinds of questions that Mathew David Rana and Earnest Patrick “Rick” Butler are interested in posing for each other and to the participants of OPEN ENGAGEMENT, an art and social practice conference, with their comic book collaboration THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Ernest Patrick Butler, His Battle with God, Life and Self.
Originally from Yakima, Washington, Rana received his MFA in Social Practice from CCA in 2008. It was while a graduate student living in Oakland that Rana first encountered Rick Butler. Butler was living on the streets and selling handmade crochet caps as a way to earn money to survive with his pit bull Mama. It was for Mr. Rana’s MFA thesis project that the two would first form a friendship to retell the story of Mr. Butler’s struggles and transformation on the street in THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY of Ernest Patrick Butler, His Battles with God, Life and Self.
What began as a bright idea during a basketball game in 2008 now brought the two gentlemen from Oakland to take up residence in Portland, OR, for a four day art and social practices conference. And even though I had been following the OPEN ENGAGEMENT conference Rana and Butler’s project was not on my radar. But fortuitously the classic 70’s era van that the two drove up in was parked in front of my house and they had piqued my interest. Was this a type of homelessness in my neighborhood? Or was this just a form of social practices taking shape in my neighborhood?
It was just before their presentation at PSU for OPEN ENGAGEMENT that I first introduced myself and found out about their project. As an undergraduate I lived in Oakland for six years and the project brought back a Bay Area spirit I was happy to have in my Pacific Northwest neighborhood.
I had a chance to talk to both Rana and Butler just before they left town on their way to Yakima to visit Matthew’s mom and introduce her to Rick for the first time.
VM: How did you get involved with OPEN ENGAGEMENT?
MDR: I was in CCA’s MFA in Social Practice program where I heard about the conference and last year I made contact with Jen Delos Reyes at Social Practice West at the SF MOMA, that put together a series of panel discussions and she sent me an email about it.
VM: How long ago did your collaboration begin?
MDR: We met in March of 2008. I was still in the Social Practice program at CCA.
RB: He was actually washing clothes. In the comic book there’s a laundromat – that’s where I met him, at that laundromat, where I was working.
VM: How long had you been in the neighborhood of 40th and Broadway, where the laundromat is, in Oakland?
RB: I had lived in Oakland all my life, the Bart Station I started hanging out when I started selling the hats in 2007.
MDR: We weren’t really collaborators until September 2008.
RB: We met during March Madness and that’s when we started talking. I started talking to Matt about how it was living out here in the streets. He just came in to the laundromat to get crochet lessons – to learn how to make hats. It wasn’t until later that Matt mentioned he’d like to be a part of the book idea I came up with and brought up to him. It was just an idea. It wasn’t anything serious.
MDR: Yeah, you were just talking shit saying, “Yeah – that’s the type of thing that’s going to go in my book.” We had a rapport before we started on the comic book.
RB: Yeah, it was just that there were so many things happening out here – so many things had happened since I was out here when I met him I had run through a million stories you wouldn’t see if you’re not out here 24/7.
VM: So when I met you here in Portland you told me you intentionally lived out in the streets – what does that mean?
RB: I said purposefully. I didn’t want to stay where I was living, I didn’t like my jobs, I wasn’t happy and at the time to be honest with you I thought, I came out there to die, I didn’t come out there to do anything. I came out there to die. But, in the course of things happening, the dogs, the book, all kinds of other stuff and I’m realizing at my age at the time, like right now I’m only 44, I realized I have forty good years left, I can’t spend the rest of them sitting at this BART station, so I have to figure out something. At the time that was the goal. I was just fed up and frustrated with a lot of things. But, Matthew, the dogs, and people from BART changed all that.
MDR: But when I think we first started talking you didn’t talk about yourself as homeless – never really. You would always say, “I live outside.”
RB: Yeah, basically, because I was living outside. I had a place to lay my head, per say. I was living at Mosswood Park for a while. I lay there for a minute. What happen was that I was walking back to BART from Mosswood. I was carrying around this really heavy luggage. I mean, I was still ashamed; I didn’t want people to know I was homeless, that I was living outside. Then one day it just became epic carrying around the luggage and I was like, “people are just going to have to know.” Even to this day some people still don’t know that I was sleeping outside. I tried to upkeep as much as I could. I would shower and wash my clothes. Just to be neat and clean so people wouldn’t really know. I don’t want people to do the judgment thing. To think, “oh he’s just a bum.” It got to the point where people are just going to have to know. I didn’t care about possessions and I got tired of lugging by bags around. And, when my bags were stolen; when the fourth one got stolen I just had to laugh because there was nothing of value in them; just for me. The thing was I could always get those things again.
VM: Judgment and value seem to have a lot with how you see yourself as a man through the shame that you describe. What does it mean to you to present you story within an art context? To not only be judged as a man but as a form of social practices? What does it mean to be exposed to the elements in Oakland around the context of the BART station and then to be in the context of OPEN ENGAGEMENT and be exposed to the conference participants? What kind of judgments have you seen occur and what type of value systems are you aware of because of this collaboration? Have you found people comfortable engaging you and talking to you about the ethical and moral concerns you each have?
RB: I don’t talk to people about what we do as art. He might, as he’s in the art world. I’m in a whole other world. So when people look at this with me they are looking at it as life experiences. Because when most people read the book, and it’s only that big, they’ve been through something that’s in the book, they’ve had a boss who gave them a job but doesn’t pay them, they moved in with the person they thought they were in love with them but then that person didn’t end up doing it. Or, they’ve been through some family issues. Something in the book touched them. They didn’t look at it as an art thing. They looked at it like it was a book that hit to the point. Especially women come up to me and hug me and say, “Oh my God, I know what you’ve been through, and I’ve been through that.” But no one has ever come to me and said, “Man this is a pretty good art book.” I mean unless it’s been someone who’s been a comic book collector. Other than that the people I deal with don’t deal with it like art.
VM: So the comic book created a common ground for you to share your story?
RB: I wasn’t really talking to people. The comic book opened up the door for newer people. Like I said; I brought out one set of friends, the hats brought out one group of friends; the dog brought out another set of friends; then the book brought out another set of friends. At each level I got to know more and more people. Even though you may have never bought a hat, even though you never spoke to me, or bought a comic book you always wondered why the hell I was out there. When they finally say the book they were all like. “Oh my God is that you,” and I was like “yeah.” Then they would say how much is it and I would say ten dollars and that was that and they were gone. It was never like, “Oh, that’s you, no thanks.”
VM: So the comic book helped you create value for your experiences? I’m curious why you never speak about your crochet hats as craft or art objects?
RB: I never looked at them like that until later. I look at it like if someone takes a canvas and puts a bunch of colors on it and decides to put a price on it then no one is going to necessarily buy it. But, if you put those same colors on a hat then you can sell it. It’s a different scenario. People have to have them.
MDR: I wanted to speak to the question of value in an art context. There is a lot to say so I guess I’ll just start. We did show the comic in an art context for my MFA show by creating a wall treatment. We put up some of the original drawing but also some of Rick’s hats alongside the hats that I made sitting with him. And, we gave the comic books away for free that were sort of on a spinning rack. But I think something that’s been pretty interesting to me is that the art world, the art context, is not as responsive as the people at the BART station or the people who are interested in comics. I think it’s just like what was good about using a comic is that it was accessible and that it could be gauged in may different platforms. You have to gauge it on the one hand in this economy of comic books. And then also because you’re out there selling them they also have some relation to Street Spirit newspapers. So there are these different levels of bleed.
RB: It was funny, when we were trying to sell the book to comic book stores they didn’t want anything to do with it. They didn’t want anything to do with it. I thought that was funny because we’re out here selling them and they would ask me how many we had left and I would say that they were going like hotcakes. And they just weren’t interested. So if you go by comic book stores you would think you couldn’t sell any and then you get back to the BART station and you’re selling them. I see it as your missed opportunity.
MDR: That’s also been our experience here: the kind of exclusions. I mean I don’t want to call it interesting, it’s been pretty real. But I think the book provides a ground for some kind of discussion, for some opening up of some preconceived idea of who you might be. And I think the book does that in the narrative of the comic starts off that way by stating that people become homeless for many reasons. And, I think that’s something you’ve had to overcome.
RB: I see it as your missed opportunity. I read the front of the book all the time where it says, “I remember saying that I would never sleep outside…there are many things I said I wouldn’t do.” Then it says my birthday, and that I’ve pretty much done them all. But, I’m still OK. And I think to myself, would I be OK if I hadn’t met Matthew. The book opened up for me to talk to my parents. With my parents it opened me up to get this van. Would I even be in the van or would I still be sleeping on a bench. The book opened a lot of doors for a lot of stuff.
VM: How much do you think your collaboration is helping create value around this model as apposed to a tried and true model like painting? What advice
RB: I just tell everyone to have fun and that if you’re doing what you love it will work out. Somebody will buy it. You don’t always have to haggle. My thing is I went through a lot of work to make it I’m not going to change my thing to make a dollar.
MDR: I think that as far a promoting this kind of work, in a weird way, I maintain various collaborative relationships, and for me originally this project was about friendship. Just about the story. It wasn’t about deploying the comic book as a social form to battle issues of homelessness. It was just about the story and friendship and about the relationship. This sort of storytelling form and what it means to tell someone else’s autobiography. Throughout our process, when I started out, I was trying to stay very aware of all the levels of asymmetry of power, of race and class between us. I think I was so worked up about it that I wasn’t probably having enough fun and being so fluid. Throughout this I’ve realized, agonizing, trying to make the right decision, the right ethical decision. What I think were good choices were not always good choices, I mean I had to let that go a little bit just to keep moving. And it keeps changing. The stuff we deal with. The stuff I’m dealing with. It gets pretty complex. It changes a lot. Like being up here. I had this idea that we could come up here and present this project together as collaborator and there could be some kind of leveling of some of these questions but in fact it brought them up more full force and made them more present for me. This makes me ask questions about what my expectations were coming up here. It just keeps evolving and I keep learning to just keep appreciate my mistakes more. Because what I think has been most productive is for us to talk through some shit.
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