MEL CHIN
In Aubin’s docu-poem Meanwhile, Mel addresses a black and white photograph of Nicholas Murray Butler, the Columbia University president who in 1933, months after the Nazi book burnings, called fascism a stupendous improvement. He speaks to Butler directly, with the patience and precision of someone who has thought very carefully about what to do with a man who won't look at you. He choreographs the camera (aka Cat).
Mel names Mr. Gildersleeve, the Confederate apologist and philologist who hangs nearby, as the person Butler's profiled gaze will swing toward when it needs somewhere to land. And then he says, quietly, frankly, in this room of honored members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, “Nick-- I’ll call him Nick. I'm here. Don't look away. Look at me.”
That is one of the most devastating and alive pieces of political art Catherine believes she's filmed in their life. And it’s so completely, unmistakably Mel Chin: subversive, tender, almost gentle in his fury, and so rigorously thought through that it arrives looking like improvisation. Intentionally so. The gap between depth of urgent preparation and lightness of gesture is where he lives and works.
As a way of naming the place we artists are trapped, he once wrote that “entertaining antics and creative expression are privileged in our perverse culture, which masks the hopelessness it creates and the brutality it pardons.” He's spent his entire career finding ways through that quagmire, responding both to and within such a complex environment.
His work has remediated poisoned soil, infiltrated prime-time television, conjured entire imaginary civilizations from the wreckage of this one. No ground settles beneath his feet. He keeps moving through, toward, past, inside the unfathomable depths of what it means to be alive in this world together, always ready, always game, always driven to go further than the last time.
And then, in Aubin’s loft building, on very old, uneven, loudly creaky stairs, he played his guitar and sang. Beautifully. As if music was simply the most natural mode of transit. Because, for him, it is.
He is an intellectual mentor to Aubin and to Cat, a north star who proves, every time, that art can be serious and playful at once, that political commitment and imaginative freedom are not in tension but are, in fact, the same thing held from different angles.
We are so honored to celebrate him as one of our 30 Luminaries. Nick can look away. We never will.