Crista Dahl, artist
Interviewed at her home in Vancouver, Canada, August 4, 2007
Born: 1934 in Seattle, Washington
“I am often shocked at the ungrownupness of these lads and
lasses stuffed with useless knowledge. They know a lot; they shine in
dialectics; they can quote the classics — but in their outlook on life
many of them are infants. For they have been taught to know, but have not been
allowed to feel… Their textbooks do not deal with human character, or with love,
or with freedom, or with self-determination. And so the system goes on, aiming
only at standards of book learning — goes on separating the head from the
heart.”
— A.S. Neill in “Summerhill: a radical approach to child rearing,” (Hart Publishing, 1960, p.25-26)
CD:
I’ve gotten a lot of grants for doing different art projects, and teaching dealing with information that I have gathered and created activities for people. I’ve supported my children doing projects related to those things.
It started when I got accepted into the San Francisco Art Institute and couldn’t get anybody in my fairly wealthy family to give me the money to go. So I asked a friend of mine and he said, “Well, all we do the first year are the semantics of art.” So I began to look at the art books and decided that they weren’t very good because what they did was cover from the Fertile Crescent on.
Then I thought I would paint my hands and put them on rocks (laughs) and I would make brushes out of whatever I could find, and so I proceeded doing that.
In the interim the fellow I was living with was drafted, and he didn’t want to go, he tried the conscientious objector thing and that didn’t work, so we talked about going to Australia, then we decided that there really wasn’t enough money to do that.
I tried to get into Canada. They didn’t want me: a cocktail waitress who was an artist with 4 children; we weren’t acceptable. So he came up to Canada and got a job, and then I came up with 4 kids and we got married, and that’s him up there (she points to a photo on the wall). I stayed.
I started working with people in the arts here. It was so different and so much more accepting. We ended up in Lund, BC (British Columbia), and I was asked to come and teach the kids art as a parent. And I went, “I don’t like teaching kids art. It’s just horrid!” Little kids, you know, they do what they want to do. So I just went down there and had them do what I was doing. (laughs) That was great fun. We made pots and blew them up, and we did drawings over drawings.
The teacher liked what I was doing so he sent me to his professor at Simon Frazer (University). I went and talked with her, and I took the responsibility of planning a 2-day session for training teachers. There was such a reaction that she applied for a Canada Council on the Humanities Grant, she thought what I was doing was incredible.
I caused great chaos at Simon Frazer campus. It was interesting. I got these adults to paint themselves, do all kinds of different things that they hadn’t ordinarily done. The pièce de la résistance was when I gave them sticks to fight a war (starts laughing) and they attacked another class in the building. And the people in there hid under their desks! It was good fun. The humanities grant was turned down because of my lack of academic training.
That involved me with an art organization called Intermedia, and through them I met an incredible number of women in the arts, which was impossible in The States, just practically impossible. This was really, really difficult. The classic response when I tried to get someone to handle my paintings — which took me three months to do, working with my kids and everything, I couldn’t do it any faster — was, “Sorry Crista. It’s too bad you’re a woman but collectors don’t buy women.”
I’m taking computer lessons now. I’m going to start on a regular basis, because all this stuff isn’t really out there. It’s just more or less in my head. So I did “Before People,” and then I did “First People,” and then “Civilization,” and then “Now and Future.” I would have four workshops that I would do in one day — two in the morning and two in the afternoon — there was a lot of hands-on stuff.
I had a whole series of grants from the Canadian government, even though I was a landed immigrant, to do the same sort of stuff. The reception was just incredibly good. I had lots of press, national television special, and I was making money on a regular basis, enough to support myself and the kids.
When my kids got to be teenagers — because I’d read Summerhill (“Summerhill, A New View of Childhood “ written by A.S. Neill and originally published in 1960. — Ed.) — they were all doing their own thing. The youngest one was looking like the most outrageous hippie you’ve ever seen in your life: beads, headband, doing too much dope for his age, that’s for sure. One of them had mice and marijuana in the shed on the roof, and was playing The Kinks full blast (laughs), another one was listening to Barbara Streisand. The oldest one was the most conservative and was playing Green Sleeves.
Poor John just couldn’t deal with it anymore. So he moved in to the… I had a little studio downtown, so he moved in to that. And then he got a bigger one, and it got to the point where, “Do you want to spend time with me down here?” Well, I couldn’t, you know I had four teenagers… it was kind of a choice I had to make, I didn’t want to make, but I did. And eventually John went back to The States, and the kids managed to get through all of that, without it doing horrendous damage.
Then I got interested in clay as a mechanism to teach. I developed something where you went through history starting out with the Leatoli Beds, you know the footprints went across (The Laetoli fossil beds, in Africa’s Rift Valley, preserve hominid footprints that are at least 3.6 million years old and are some of the oldest evidence known for upright bipedal walking. — Ed.), and I would have them press their hands on the clay. And it ended up going through various states showing the history of the world, and learning clay techniques at the same time. Not aiming at making anything just working on a square piece — I wasn’t interested in them making anything — I was wanting them to learn something about… that’s the learning thing.
So in a funny way you were taking about learning stuff, I’ve learned by teaching… a lot about the world.
I’ve kept expanding this thing I call “Create Dino Flo.” That means “creates Dinosaurs and flowers,” And then “Prime,” that’s us, and “Gathr,” that’s us, “Sound,” that’s where we first start to get in to the vocal stuff, as they can tell by the structures in the throat, and then “Bury,” the first burials. They’re still Neanderthals at that point.
Then comes “Mark,” that’s farm: marking things and farming, which is pretty much mixed food gathering, and then “War,” “Peace,” and it’s says “Real,” but I first said “Being Here” and I’m happy with that … and then “Gran,” “Para,” and “Child,” and that’s just our grandparents, and us as children to come.
Then you go on to Nam, Ceca, Sam, Eura, Naf, Saf, Noca, Swas, Sas, Neas, Eas, Seas, Oce, Auspo, and Uni. All of this is based on digits because of my learning disability I have always used my hands to count, one way or the other. And I figure, “Well, I’ll transfer this.” I just kept doing stuff dealing with this, and that’s kind of where I’m at still.
The people at the Video Inn accepted Nam-Ceca-Sam, and we wrote letters to everybody in the world. We started a tabloid, and we had international information, and that’s still what I’m doing. And some of that early stuff now, I’m beginning to realize is probably valid. I’m just putting it together on the computer, so I’m facing the computer. I’ve had two computers, but I’ve never really been adept at the computers.
LS:
Are you still intimidated, or are you excited by the prospect?
CD:
Well, I’m just accepting the fact that I have… I don’t think I’ve ever been intimidated, but my sense of it is that I couldn’t get anybody to help me go through the processes so I could do something with the damn thing. Why waste my time if I can’t do anything!
I took a course on the digital camera, because I realized I wasn’t really using it, and the person that taught the course… I did two, 3-hour sessions with him, and I learned. So I’ve done a couple of sessions with him, and he doesn’t talk. He just does something and then, “Your turn.” He was nonverbal in his teaching, and I was able to absorb that.
So I’m off and running: I’m moving pictures around, and I’m taking them off my camera and getting them out of my camera, and moving them from file to file. I already had a lot of stuff; I’ve always tended to use a camera. That’s going to allow me to take a lot of the drawings that I did with the clay stuff and test it out in Vancouver. And then when I get a couple of things together I’ll send it all to anybody who does educational stuff and see if somebody will bite.
Then I became involved with an alternative school. I taught there one day a week. I lived there, went and took some media students to Europe, hung around for a while, and then fell in love with an African, a South African Jewish fellow. We almost got married. I went down there to get married. Let me tell you… South Africa, Cape Town: not a chance. I would have been arrested. I kept doing the wrong thing, all the time, and I didn’t like their attitudes.
LS:
What did you do, for example?
CD:
I’d want to go in to the wrong bathroom.
I’d get on the wrong bus. I’d go to the wrong counter. I’d say the wrong
things. I didn’t fit. Not a chance, not a chance. I just got angrier and
angrier. I would have ended up there with Nelson Mandela. (laughs)
The pièce de résistance was when we forgot our shoes and went to some place where blacks were allowed to go, and I had to pee, and I had burn my feet to go where I could pee. Right in front of the car was a tin shack but I had to go to this fancy stone thing down the way. I just… I left Cape Town twice. The third time I left for good. God, it was just horrendous. Love isn’t everything, it really isn’t. (laughs)
I’m quite intense about people learning by doing things. I’m very frightened of the educational system that seems to have gotten rid of a lot of physical activity because I think there’s a lot of creative people like me, who can’t be still most of the time. It’s kind of frustrating. It really is frustrating.
I worry about the stuff designed by people who haven’t moved around a lot, who design things for other people to use, because I think you have to — and this is the mind/body thing, and understand processes leverage, you know, what happens, power of whatever’s — I think you have to have a sense of body mind. Otherwise I think there’s a great possibility of faulty design.
I probably would have been a good architect, but I’m not… an architect. And I probably would have been a good painter, but I haven’t had enough time. So mostly what I do is concept and performance, and that seems to fit. That is what I’m doing now.
The stuff I do is “in your face,” like I did a performance with a noose around my neck, with 13 things hanging there. I was sitting there and projected on the wall was a series of international headlines, just about 10 by 5, something like that, a big thing in a dark room. I called it “News Noose” (laughs). I liked it, other people did too.
I recently did a thing on John Cage where we went to three neighborhoods and we took different things. In one we went with a cart of toys and food implements and what have you, and then with business stuff in the financial district, We went and tried to get people to make sounds. We drew chalk all over hell. (laughs)
LS:
Tell me about when you were young, and how you learned about your own learning process?
CD:
(laughs) Well…(sighs)… I think I wasn’t aware I… hmm. I just was very busy doing things. I had all of my friends, we were digging to China, and we made a huge hole in my parents’ back yard. (laughs) We had great fun doing that. I think I was about three.
In kindergarten I couldn’t understand why everybody was drawing sticks for people. I had a horrible time in school. I got into an argument with my kindergarten teacher about not being able to play in the boys’ sandbox. I shook my finger at her and told her it was wrong. (laughs) I didn’t like girls’ toys particularly at all. So there was a compromise: I got to play with the boys’ blocks, so I didn’t have to go into the little house.
Reading was difficult. It was very hard for me to learn to read. They started phonics: Dick and Jane and Spot. I can see the pictures, but all I did was listen to what everybody else was doing, and said what they said, as close as I could get to it. At the end of the first grade they realized that I wasn’t reading. So the principal gave my mother books, and my mother taught me to read. That was a blessing.
I can’t do math. Had I run around the block saying “six times seven” it might have sunk in a bit, but it doesn’t work. I can’t count sheep, they start coming over too fast. I can’t slow my mind down to see it, or what have you, so I count on my fingers. But I can understand large numbers; I know what a million people are.
My learning is simply by experience, along with how you said most other people learn. School… I was enthusiastic, very enthusiastic, but when it came to the tests it was extremely difficult, even at university it was difficult. God, I wrote down — because I do funny things with numbers — so I wrote down the wrong time for a test. I turned up at 3 o’clock instead of 8 in the morning, and the guy wouldn’t give me a grade. I had to fight, you know? He still gave me an incomplete. That’s all I could talk him in to; he was an old codger. I had definitely done really good work, and I would have done really well on his test.
Another one I had to, umm… son of a bitch… I got all dressed up in my most expensive clothes and I had to go in to say, “Look, you gave us a test that was not what we expected” — he’d sent his wife — and it was a date test. I can’t remember dates, for crying out loud! And I talked him into giving me a grade by battering my eyes at him: a disgusting thing to have to do, but I needed the grade, and I knew he was susceptible to that. (laughs) So, school was not fun. Not fun. My grades are interesting: I would get A’s and D’s, and E’s, which were incompletes.
I had to take algebra over, twice. I barely made it through geometry. Foreign language was just impossible, because I had to learn the different parts of speech, and that’s just like math. History was good. Architecture was good, because I could draw. That’s kind of where I was at.
So the learning thing has always been by experience. Cooking, sewing, anytime I’ve had a chance to learn something I will learn it. I would rather do dishes than cook. I like to eat, but I don’t like to cook. I collect recipes for my friend Franz and he cooks, and I clean up. I just want to eat (laughs) because food is good. Food and drink is a good thing to do in life. Yeah, good food and talk with friends are probably my favorite things to do. I like that.
LS:
What age people have you been teaching recently?
CD:
What I’m doing now, I’m acting as a mentor at an art organization, and they’re in their 20’s and 30’s. I got a $25,000 grant to work with these young male and female prostitutes. It didn’t take me long to figure out that these kids had had all the art experiences that anybody could ever have. They had also been taken to everything and done absolutely everything. They didn’t have birth certificates. They had no health records. They had nothing.
Many of the groups that have worked with kids in the early part of the century were churches. And they set up a system where, it was secretive, you know — now they call it “people’s privacy” — so you’re plunked with this kid who has multiple problems and no information, and you’re supposed to entertain them? Well, that’s not what they need, and especially if they’re fetal alcohol.
Have you ever seen pictures of fetal alcohol brains? Ugh, God! It’s like slabs of liver! The worst fetal alcohol, it doesn’t look like a cauliflower, it’s liver slabs; they’re so damaged. They have no sense of time, they have no sense of when to eat, and without those two things you can’t get anyplace on time, you can’t hold a job, you can’t do anything, and they’re like that for the rest of their life. Your brain is deformed. And a lot of the kids we had were native, and were fetal alcohol, it’s degrees, like anything else.
Those were the kinds of things I was really concerned about, but I ended up having to do a questionnaire, so this is what I did: I put together a bunch of questions and it had to do with my action with the green stuff on here (Referring to “Create Dino Flo.” — Ed.). I did the best I could, but I wasn’t … it was only recently that I began to understand what I wanted to do in that area. More self-expression, more following one’s bliss to what one does in life.
The problem I ran into is that I made it so that the kids could respond to it — you notice the big print, all of that stuff — and the kids would go through it, but the adults still wouldn’t do the stuff that the kids wanted to have done.
What happened was they got the contract to do … for a school for kids. It was called ICCR, Intensive Child Care Resource. We ended up with three people, a teacher, and two social workers — just a couple of very creative people who were very good with kids — and got them a bus, and changed the whole thing around. We ended up with 30 students that were getting high school diplomas, with these difficult kids. And we were using that as a base.
So we had one person running the place and coordinating everything. And the other person going out and getting all this stuff, and doing the art projects when they weren’t doing school. And it was set up for them to pick, so they had 3 stages at the end, they could chose between 15 things they wanted to have happen.
But you know, it was just… my classic example was this jerk that was running… I mean he was a nice man but he… So this guy that was running the place actually had a friend who worked with wood, but he could never put the 2 and 2 together, even when you told him he never would hear anything. Then we started getting ADD kids, who were refusing to take any more Ritalin, and they were different.
Then the government changed, they got rid of the school because it cost too much. It was working, but that didn’t matter to them. You know there’s this movement to put every kid back in a… you know: group homes don’t work. Well, they work for some kids, in fact that’s the only place you can put some kids. You can’t put them into a family situation, they’re just… they could crowbar you in the middle of the night. It’s not safe for them, and it’s not safe for you.
To make a long story short, I want to redo that, and I would put an enormous amount into the sorts of things that people with problems might actually be able to do. They’re often creative, good cooks, they can do some things.
At this point what I would like to do is put more creative things, more expressive things in this, as opposed to gearing them all towards getting a job, which is what they want. There are really a lot of kids that could do a lot better. That’s one of the major things I’d like to do before I die: take some of the stuff I’ve done in the past, put it into a format for people to use who have a hard time teaching difficult kids. Because my work works with difficult kids.
LS:
What would you tell “normal” kids, if there is such a thing, about how they should navigate?
CD:
Continue to do the things that you do well, but don’t forget to use your body. Don’t forget to look for what you really like to do. It’s the same Joseph Campbell “follow your bliss” thing.
You should really pay attention to all of you. That’s one of the difficult things with the educational system I think for some people. I’ve run into some people who are well educated, who have all of that, and have no relationship to their body at all.
The communication thing has been difficult for me, actually. I had a lot of testing done and I had lesions. I went to a psychiatrist about some of the problems I had, and I did also some testing when I went to university at UBC (University of British Columbia), and their response was — I got a letter saying (laughs) — that I’m an average dyslexic boy! And I have the paper proving it, (laughs) which I think is very funny.
LS:
You seem to be very independent. Is there a regret for being so being independent?
CD:
Well, that’s interesting. I’m out of synch, I might have said that before, the common response of my children, after all is said and done, is: I’m weird. They all love me, in their own way. I’m hard to be around. Regrets…
LS:
I don’t mean to put words in your mouth…
CD:
No, no. Because you do ask yourself these kinds of things. I’m always, “Well, what do I do now?” A lot of my life is controlling myself. Dealing with the brain, I really like my brain. I love my brain (laughs) because it’s so interesting! But it’s a concept a minute type of thing, and it doesn’t seem to slow down. Well no, it doesn’t slow down.
The biggest regret I have is that I’m going to die! I have a limited amount of time (laughs) so seriously, that’s my biggest regret. I would hope I would be able to communicate some of these things that I’ve done in a better way, and if I do that, that would be nice, it would be really nice. The energy that I have wouldn’t be so wasted, as it probably is now.
LS:
So just like everyone else you want immortality.
CD:
(laughs) Absolutely! Yeah… yes, I think you’re absolutely right… yes it’s the pecking order in the tribe, that’s what it’s about. (laughs) I think it’s that simple.
It’s the same with my own artwork. I would say my skills don’t have anything to do with tilling the soil, or making a bow and arrow, it has to do with if you’re going to learn about this world we live in, this is a possible tool. That’s the level I would put my immortality at. If I could add to that: this global thing.
