Renewal/Rebirth: RT Livingston

Sep 9

Sep 9 Renewal/Rebirth: RT Livingston

By Cynthia Martin

This year marks two decades since four coordinated terrorist attacks killed over 3,000 people in New York City. To remember and commemorate the tragic events of Sept. 11, UCSB’s Special Research Collections has published the online exhibition, 9/11 RENEWAL/REBIRTH, a solo showing of artist RT Livingston’s photographic portrait of the following year at Ground Zero.

At the time, Livingston – who has lived in Santa Barbara since 2006 – was living in lower Manhattan, nine blocks north of the Twin Towers.

Between Sept. 11, 2011, and Sept. 11, 2002, Livingston took her camera, an Olympus Stylus 35mm point-and-shoot, along with a Sony cassette video camera, and roamed the streets near the World Trade Center, documenting the gradual recovery of a devastated neighborhood.

“I wandered the streets of Lower Manhattan day and night often sneaking beyond guard posts or making friends with military personnel as I documented the surrounding areas,” Livingston says, “The imagery, often gritty and sometimes out of focus, was quickly snapped as a means of avoiding having the film and/or equipment confiscated. I didn’t rely on the polish of the print to tell the tale. I relied on its guts.”

Livingston hopes that the exhibition will remind viewers of the potential for rebuilding, “even with extremism on the rise, to a safer more tolerant world.”

Ideas/Matter

RT Livingston laughs when asked how she defines conceptual art. “Well,” she says, “I’d like to write a book about conceptual art, but I don’t need to because the whole book would be contained in the title: Conceptual Art: It’s the Thought that Counts.”

“Sometimes an idea comes, and bam, I know exactly how to materialize it. Sometimes I mull ideas for years,” Livingston says.

This transformation – based on language – can take many forms, from drawing to performance, but always with Livingston’s eye for experimentation.

Duchamp, the great absurdist provocateur, is Livingston’s art god. “He gave me permission to do whatever I deem necessary to create art that gets my point across.”

Livingston’s methodology – inspired by both Shakespeare’s line, "All the world's a stage,” and Marshall McLuhan’s thesis, "The medium is the message,” opens ever-expanding possibilities to explore.

“My art is all about survival. It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous, commenting on life and the human condition along the way.”

*RT Livingston performing in New York City, ca. 1983.*

The environment, especially issues concerning water and clean air, has been on her mind since her childhood in Hamburg, New York, a Lake Erie town sandwiched between Buffalo's belching steel mills on one side and truck farms on the other.

Livingston moved to Santa Barbara in 2006 with thirty years of artistic practice and labor under her belt. Livingston created art from her studios in SoHo, Tribeca, Springs-East Hampton and Woodstock, New York. She took graduate courses at Rutgers and Princeton universities, reaching the level of ABD (all but dissertation) in the PhD program at Rutgers. While in graduate school, she worked as a curator at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University.

She later was the owner of Lapp Princess Press, an independent publisher of artists’ books (1979–1984) and in 1983, she founded The Page Museum in New York, an alternative exhibition space, and formed the band, The LAW, with musicians Lloyd Allen and Mitch Watkins.

Her 1981 Y Paintings initiated Livingston’s tendency to create series. Painted from her Hog Creek studio in the Springs, the series examines water and the sky’s fleshy sunset colors, drawing parallels with the female form.

Water enters her work on many levels. In response to the 1985 drought in New York City, Livingston and The LAW produced the song, “World without Water,” which aired on MTV.

Livingston traveled to California in 2003 to create an installation in the Mojave Desert which revisited her deep connection to the 9/11 attacks. The simple rectangular CHAIN/LINK enclosure is her personal memorial to all those who died on Sept. 11, 2001. It speaks in symbolic terms. “We are either chained or linked together. The enclosure is either a cell or sanctuary. You choose.”

Also in 2003, the Santa Barbara County Arts Commission sponsored Livingston’s installation WINDSOCK RIDGE at Elings Park. The piece honored the 100th anniversary of the Wright brothers first flight. Sixteen commercial windsocks were placed on 21-foot gas lines that ran 750 feet across the promontory facing Hendry’s Beach. The environmental work made the invisible visible and in so doing, demonstrated a powerful energy source that was being wasted. Symbolism, always at work in Livingston’s oeuvre, is at play in the choice of color: international orange.

In more recent years, beginning around 2009, Livingston has turned her focus to painting the Pacific Coast. “I paint and draw what I’m looking at.” The resulting series, The CiC: I draw the line where the water meets the sky,” represents the physical act of drawing a line across the horizon, while simultaneously expressing Livingston’s aesthetic, philosophical and environmental points of view.

Humor is often found in her work. Lotusland’s 2015 Flock exhibit, curated by Nancy Gifford, is an example of how she approaches a serious issue with accurate wit. SITTING DUCKS: HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT / SITE composed of 24 wooden mallard decoys, camouflaged as rocks and placed among a bed of river rocks is an absurdity. Decoys are meant to attract; here their survival depends on not being seen.

HERD AROUND THE WORLD, is Livingston’s seriously fun on-going global participatory project, launched in 2002. The artist took six plastic farm animals – petroleum-based by-products – to their origins in the oil fields of West Texas to make a point about artificiality and the environment. Sixty people, many from Santa Barbara, have participated as “herders” documenting their chosen animal(s) as they travel the world in search of reality and the meaning of life. In 2016, the Santa Barbara Center for Art Science and Technology exhibited the work, featuring over 200 photographs and videos projected onto the exterior walls of the complex.

Two years later, moved to respond artistically to the deadly Thomas Fires and subsequent debris flows in Montecito, Livingston performed her mournful postmodern ballad OH WE MOURN, at the Lobero Theatre in Santa Barbara.

And in the past 18 months, Livingston has chronicled the pandemic in her audio/ visual project, CORONATIME DIARY, and was featured in The Art of Face Masks online exhibit curated by Esther Jacobsen Bates and Georganne Alex for the Elverhoj Museum in Solvang.

What’s next? “In addition to painting and installations, I want to create more sound work collaborating with talented creatives in bringing my rock operas THE PURGATORIO and LAZAR to life.”

RT (Rosanne Truxes) Livingston’s various archives are housed by the UCSB Library Special Collections.