Don Demauro at 80

“We’re just trying to create something, you know, that, that… that moves people – gets people moving – makes people realize they’re in the fight, too,” says Don DeMauro of the August show at Spool Contemporary Arts Space. “It’s not just our fight now, it’s everybody’s. The fight spills out in the streets.”

When asked if all this fighting is about promoting the arts, DeMauro answers, “Believing in the arts. Now the arts has to rationalize itself in some way. We have to find a reason for being.”

That may be a strange and provocative concept to most of us. But strange and provocative concepts often sputter from the mind of this former associate professor of art, who taught at Binghamton University for 38 years until retiring in 2008, and founded Spool Mfg. 16 years ago.

We’ll have to grow accustomed to calling it Spool Contemporary Arts Space from now on. That’s one of the things that is in transition as the gallery/performance space/screening house catches up to the fact that it has been officially non-profit for only about a year, having been funded primarily out of the professor’s own pocket for most of its existence. It is against New York State’s statutes to have a not-for-profit arts organization’s name end with a manufacturing suffix like Mfg. - an echo of the building’s past life as some sort of textile factory. Spool’s entire neighborhood in Johnson City - known in some circles as the Health and Culture District - is, in fact, in the process of, “for want of a better word, ‘gentrifying,’” DeMauro says. He is obliged to be part of the municipal meetings deciding the neighborhood’s various fates.

It is somewhat surprising, looking at this man, that the August show is tied to Don DeMauro’s 80th birthday. The retired art professor is monochromatic on the day of the interview in a gray t-shirt; alert hazel eyes staring out beneath spiky gray hair and bushy, graying brows; and something gray and chalky clings to his clothing and his hard-working hands. The door to his un-air-conditioned office at Spool is open to the street so that he is visible, sitting at his desk, from the sidewalk and the energy of passing traffic intermittently drifts in.

Don has been the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. In the 1980s he won the F. Lammot Berlin Arts award. He has exhibited widely and once had a solo showing in a gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Some of his works are part of the permanent collections of such institutions as the Smithsonian, the Brooklyn Museum, the Library of Congress, and many others. He graduated in 1960 from what was then the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles (which became the current CalArts or California Institute of the Arts) and describes himself as, “an old hippie.”

DeMauro’s website is filled with statements he has made about his art, using phrases like, “concepts of immanence, singularity, multiplicity and becoming,” and “a socially functional strategy for the existential impulse.” When asked if he could explain what he means to someone who does not have that vocabulary, he laughs and says, “I don’t have that vocab-” then breaks off in the middle of the word and says that, as in a Walt Whitman poem, “I’m one of the roughs really.” Glancing through the open door he proves it by pointing out, “I have a little 13-year-old car out there.” But he then does go on to explain, “I use the term ‘existential’ only in the sense that my own feeling of being in existence is having been thrown here,” a little chuckle still audible in his voice. “We’re all thrown into a particular space and culture that makes for a lot of complexities that we have to find our way in or out of.”

He repeatedly refers to his upbringing in Mt. Vernon, NY as taking place in, “a dysfunctional, middle-class family.” His father, he says, was the dysfunctional part. DeMauro’s dad was an Italian Roman-Catholic and his mother’s side of the family was made up of Russian-Germans whom he says, “tended to be very secular. I think I tended to choose the secular side… it was kind of open.”

The mention of politics in both social and personal spheres keeps coming up and, because this is a presidential election year, even the idea that Trump and Clinton have their own “metaphysics” becomes a hiccup in the conversation. “You come into the world not by choice. You don’t sign on the dotted line to be anything. And then people squabble and fight over you everywhere, you know; whatever little differences there are… the beauty of it and having a consciousness is spending some time figuring it out.”

When asked about the human figure as a recurring image in his work, often in fragmented forms, Don responds, “We deal with the figure in figural terms.” Then he lets his thoughts putt-putt out in words that may, or may not, congeal into a communicative mass. “The figural is the broad aspect of,” he pauses, “what the figure is in its life and living as opposed to being the body… let’s see. If, you know, it goes back to Descartes and mind and body. I mean, you’re always,” he pauses again, “the body’s interesting, I mean,” and here, finally, the thoughts congeal: “I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I was born into a certain kind of family. My mother had a lung removed when I was about 8 years old. That was like 72 years ago so that wasn’t an easy operation. She had to work hard. She worked at the local Air Force base because my father,” he says parenthetically, “that’s a whole other story… She would regurgitate; there’d be bottles of blood and they’d be [congregated] on her nightstand. So that gave me a really potent sense of the

body.”

Does beauty play a part in his work? DeMauro says he has “mulled over” that a lot. He then goes in circles to touch on Francisco Goya, darkness, the poet Neruda, the fact that “beauty” is an awkward word - and ends up never answering the question.

Don came to the Binghamton area from scraping a living together as an artist in New York City. He had spent some years in Vermont and was still under the lingering influence of a beloved teacher from his California college education. (“She wore magenta and turquoise,” he says, and sometimes carried sushi in her purse.) Binghamton U. found DeMauro and called him here. “I was kind of a hippie and they were going to give me $10,000, which was a prince’s ransom to me. I was going to live in my office for a year and live for the rest of my life on the $10,000.”

His life didn’t develop that way, of course. He says it was a good time to be at the University. The chairman of the Art Department was a man whom DeMauro considered visionary - an African-American artist/educator named Ed Wilson, at a time when a black department chairman in a mixed-race university was a rarity. Despite his earlier plan, it wasn’t until nearly four decades later that Don retired from teaching at BU.

So what was DeMauro to do with this statement: “This professor is so HOT I could barely sit through class and pay attention”? This evokes a lengthy stunned pause, then a smile. “That is an interesting comment,” he responds, completely unaware, until informed just now that an anonymous BU student entered that comment as an online evaluation of DeMauro back in 2004. “I think to some degree the ‘hot’ isn’t just,” pausing here again to find the right words to match the meaning, then veering after the pause to say, “to some degree I think I was a good teacher and able to, you know,” pause, then he guns forward with, “I think teaching art is just the really best thing possible because it’s so holistic in its very nature.”

What would he have done if he hadn’t become an artist and an art teacher? “The only other thing I thought I ever could do was be a bookseller.”

This makes sense - DeMauro clearly has a love of words. The August birthday show at Spool, still in the planning phase at the time of this interview, is set to include the spoken word, primarily in the form of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, in addition to some African art and plenty of Bach.

Hakan Tayga-Hromek, the principal cellist of the Binghamton Philharmonic Orchestra, is on board as the featured artist to play Bach throughout an installation that covers six spaces in Spool. “It sounds great from the outside,” Don says. “We’re not just in here. We’re going to blast it out into Johnson City,” through an open door in a side room.

Of family in adult life, Don speaks of an ex-wife and a stepson whom he formally and lovingly adopted. Spool, however, is his baby. “We have an incredible resume,” DeMauro boasts. The things that have passed through here… People come in with an idea and we have the kind of space that will embrace it.” One shining moment in that history was performance art from famed modern dancer Mary Anthony, who performed at Spool when she was in her 80s. “We’ve done film, dance, and theatre. You name it, we’ve done it. Something comes along and our ears perk up.”

DeMauro speaks of art as a community. “It’s not about me; it’s about the audience and the fact that they have some inner life. I mean, audiences are often confused, I think, and looking for meaning.” He grapples here with who the audience is, what their needs are, and structures, and movement. “It’s not the transfer of a meaning. I think that’s the beautiful thing about art, you know. It deals in a kind of ambiguous space between what form and content are and how they’re transferred.”

When asked if it is equally as important that an artist’s voice be understood as it is that the voice merely be heard, the former professor answers, “I think art doesn’t want to be didactic. It’s putting sensate things out there but in question. And none of this has meaning or value until it passes through the audience,” which involves interpretation. He goes on to evaluate that maybe interpretations are healthiest when they occur without a set form. “But, to some degree, there’s always going to be that attempt,” to set a form. “You’re looking for some value for yourself.”

In response to the question of what he wants people who come to Spool to take away with them, he says, “You’re trying to bring something that has a depth to it, and that sort of thing, that the viewer recognizes and they’re drawn into a relationship with that.” His words have grown increasingly quieter as those thoughts swirl around, as if down into a funnel. “A relationship that’s probably different,” searching until he adds, more audibly, “And not be afraid of difference probably. You know what I’m saying. People don’t understand art and they don’t know what to think of it and it comes in all these forms.”

So, if people feel they don’t understand art, why do they come to Spool? It’s that sense of art as community again. He smiles as he says, “The building itself is an important player.” He says neighbors sometimes bring their children in out of curiosity. Then he relates a story of a young neighborhood woman in bare feet who once asked if she could come into Spool. She was, of course, invited in, and after looking around she asked if she could go home and come back and bring her friends with her. “That’s what you hope for,” he says.

Happy 80th Birthday, Mr. DeMauro!

An opening reception for IV, featuring the art of Don Demauro and the music of Hakan Tayga-Hromek, takes place on August 20th, from 7-10pm, at Spool Contemporary Art Space, 140 Baldwin St. in Johnson City, NY. For more info on the show, check out spoolmfg.com. For more info on Demauro, check out dondemauro.com.