Transcriber: F Laffeber Reviewer: Amanda Chu
Like Will mentioned,
I'm very interested in the notion
of how much tradition hinders or facilitates creativity.
And I want to draw a few parallels from my own life,
which is art - being an artist -
traditional music,
and then the last part will be about wine
and traditional wine-making
versus a more kind of global, technical style of wine-making.
I was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
into a family of artists.
And New Mexico is a beautiful place,
the landscape was beautiful.
My father was a stone carver,
my mother a water colorist,
and from a very early age
the idea of what is aesthetics,
what is beauty,
how to seek beauty,
how to live beautifully,
and most importantly for an artist, how to make beauty
became a very important question in my life.
By the time I was about 15 years old,
I was already in my search
but really hadn't gotten a grasp on which direction it was going to take.
And by this time, my family had moved back to the East Coast,
and I was in Richmond, Virginia,
skateboarding down the street to my favorite alternative music shop,
which was called Plan 9.
And I went in for the kind of skateboarding music section,
but as I passed,
there was a very small word music section,
which back then was quite rare to have at a music shop.
And a CD caught my attention out the corner of my eye,
called "Georgian Folk Music Today."
I thought, well, that doesn't look like Atlanta.
There was Georgian writing, and it was very Eastern looking.
So I bought the CD,
skated back home,
and popped it in my stereo,
and was floored.
There was something about the resonating polyphony,
there was something about the harmony,
and it spoke to me on a deeper level than any type of music I'd heard before.
So I decided I needed to find out more about this ancient country.
Meanwhile, though, I needed to get an art education.
So I set out to go to school
at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
And about three years deep into the education,
I was feeling that I wanted something a little more traditional.
I was very interested in older forms of art and realism,
and doing research.
I was looking for where is that old school
that would give me what I wanted to sink my teeth into,
and ended up in Moscow.
While I was in Moscow,
I painted all summer long
and managed to get accepted at Surikov Academy.
And I met my teacher, Vyacheslav Zabelin,
and something about the way he taught
reminded me of my first experience with that Georgian music.
When he talked about how to see color,
how to feel space,
how to merge content with form,
he was never speaking on his own authority
but on authority of a tradition that transcended his own personal ego.
He talked about how
"John, wherever the eye is small and humble,
then there's room
for something much greater than the eye to appear in the work."
And he always talked about his teacher
and his teacher's teacher and his teacher's teacher.
And somehow I realized that they looked at themselves
not as independent artistic creators in and of themselves
but as bearers of a torch
or as artists that could channel an ancient craft through themselves.
It was very different than the experience and approach in America.
During that time,
I came to Georgia in 1995,
and the experience was -
These are some of my paintings from the early period.
The town I live in.
But when I first came to Georgia in 1995,
still a student in Moscow,
an unbelievable experience happened.
I was taken - like probably most of you,
the first time you come to Georgia -
straight to a restaurant from the airport, or to a big supper at someone's home.
And being a vegetarian art student in Moscow
in the mid-90s from America,
you know, there were some culinary disappointments.
And when I showed up at Georgia, at this incredible banquet,
I was blown away by the variety of vegetables
and cheeses and food, and wine that was good,
and it was pouring, and it never stopped,
and eloquent toastmasters.
And I was about 10 horns deep into my feast
when the toastmaster summoned the musicians.
And lo and behold, the musicians that walked in,
I recognized.
I studied a little Georgian while I was in Moscow,
I told them in Georgian,
I called them by their names.
They turned out to be the very same musicians
that had been on the CD that I bought when I was 15 years old.
So I realized that my relationship with Georgia
was not going to be a simple one.
I bought a home in 1996,
was still doing graduate work in '98,
and spent all of my free time
painting and collecting folk music in Georgia.
And again, there was something in the polyphonic tradition
that I came to understand
that had the same notion that my Russian art teacher had.
It was that a Georgian traditional polyphonic song
can't be sung by one person -
it's a dialogue through harmony.
And on the one hand,
there's 26 different ethnic regions and singing traditions in Georgia,
and each one has their own style and their own rules
and what is authentic and what isn't authentic.
And yet within it,
part of the authenticity is extraordinary improvisation.
There's an amazing dialogue
that is an exchange between the singers.
In Kakhetian folk music, for instance,
you never do ornamentation paralleling one and another,
the top two voices;
there's always this chase,
like two birds flying through the sky,
playing with one and another.
And this idea of structure and formality
being a platform or a springboard for intense creativity -
creativity that, in my opinion, was often deeper
than when someone just had a guitar in their hands
and could play anything they wanted.
I found the same experience to be true
when I traveled through Spain.
That in flamenco, for instance,
great flamenco is a dialogue
between the guitarist, the singer and the dancer.
And while there are extremely rigid traditions
of how the bulerías or the farruca should be performed,
each and any member of that trio
could command the rest to conform and change pace
based on absolute improvisation.
So, again, I was growing more and more deep in my conviction
that tradition can actually be a wonderful way
to foster creativity
rather than hinder it.
So this idea of freedom and structure,
and travelling through the mountains and valleys of Georgia,
collecting folk songs -
same is true of dance.
It's even true of the chanting tradition.
And then, a new chapter in my life began.
It was a serendipitous day.
I was standing in mid-August
underneath the hot Kakhetian sun,
in the afternoon, making this painting.
And as I was making this painting,
trying not to pay attention to the mosquitoes,
the sweat dripping off of me,
all the dust I was breathing by the cars that were driving by.
And then, on top of all of that,
a young man drove up with an old tractor
about 50 meters from where I was standing,
and wasn't moving - he kept the tractor going.
So I'm trying to focus on art and space and color,
and there's this (makes engine noise) behind me.
And I'm wondering, you know, couldn't he just get on with himself?
Why is he here?
And I see that he's trying to call out to me.
I call back to him, "I can't hear you.
Could you turn off your motor?"
And he says, "Well,
I don't have a starter, and I'm in a flat place,
so no, I can't turn off my motor,
but I really want you to come to my home for dinner tonight.
My name is Gela Patalishvili,
and I have some business to talk to you about."
So, I was kind of startled
at why the stranger invited me to his home for dinner
but happy that he'd left with his tractor
so I could go back to my painting.
And I went to visit Gela that night,
and I found a young Georgian, that was -
There's a sequence and a tradition to the toast,
as many of you know,
around a Georgian feast.
And almost all of his toasts were about nature,
understanding nature, listening to the vines,
the ancient tradition of wine-making.
And at a certain point -
I think we were drinking out of bowls then,
10 drinking bowls deep into the feast,
he says -
with tears in his eyes, he said:
"Why are you only focusing
on Georgian folk music and chants and dance?
Why are you neglecting the very pulse of our nation?
The very heart is wine."
And he says, "We have an 8,000-year-old wine-making tradition,
525 autochthon varietals,
and yet, basically,
it's almost been only in the periphery and in small villages
is the ancient practice of making traditional Georgian wine
still kept alive,"
and that more and more of the wine that is going to export markets
isn't carrying a Georgian passport -
it doesn't have necessarily Georgian character.
And he said that himself, his grandfather, his great-grandfather,
everyone had been making wine
and that he didn't want to be the link in the golden chain
that had spanned for 8,000 vintages in Georgia,
despite war, despite famine, despite all the trials in history.
He didn't want to be a member of the generation
that let that link break,
and would I help him.
Basically he said, "Do you have conscience?"
And I'm an artist
and I don't have a deep bank account or deep pockets,
and so I said: "Well, what do you need from me?"
He said: "Help me buy this vineyard.
It's a perfect place, a perfect terroir location."
So we bought the vineyard,
and then we realized we had to build a place
to actually make the wine.
And it wasn't until we actually had the wine
and realized we needed to sell it somehow
that I started doing a lot of research
of what might be the market.
And the philosophy of the company was we would have only Georgian varietals,
we would use only traditional methods,
and we love nature,
so we were going to take care of everything and do it all organically.
But the more and more I started to read,
I realized there were two wine worlds out there.
There was a wine world that was celebrating
that New World wine regions
had released traditional wine-making from its chains -
that all of a sudden, you know,
the different varietals that were used in Europe, in Spain, in France and Italy,
that each village had their own traditions and their own methods,
and some of the wines are a little bit funky
and very nonconformist.
All of a sudden, more and more of these regions
were trying to garner Parker Points and lucrative markets.
And the influence of this New World taste,
of big, jammy, oaky, high-alcohol wines,
on the contrary, was not facilitating creativity,
it was actually homogenizing the world of wine.
So you could go to Napa Valley, Barossa,
or you could go to France or even Telavi
and taste a wine that was more or less made with the same aromatic yeast,
with the same enzymes and the same stainless steel,
using reverse osmosis and so forth.
And there was, then, a counterwave to this
of a young group,
many of the millennium generation winemakers and wine connoisseurs
that decided they wanted to bring character back to wine,
they wanted to celebrate the diversity.
And in order to do that,
they were going back to the roots and the traditions
of different wine-making techniques.
So, again, bringing this back to my idea of a search for beauty in life,
I realized that diversity
was an integral part of aesthetic pleasure,
an integral part of living a beautiful life.
And I ended up being part
of what some people are calling a wine revolution,
of bringing back character,
bringing back face,
to bringing back a celebration of diversity,
of texture, weight, flavor in wine.
And strangely enough,
you know, here we have a monastery from the 11th century -
a 6th century monastery
that has a winery from the 11th century -
that was recently re-established at Alaverdi.
And travelling with the bishop of Alaverdi,
we ended up in some of the hippest bars
in New York City, San Francisco and Los Angeles,
meeting wine buyers that were already selling our wine
to a public of people that had,
let's say, a very counterculture public that loved these wines.
And this is a story of how ancient wine -
a wine-making tradition that's 8,000 years old -
actually, inadvertently has become cutting edge.
Some would even say avant-garde.
These are the wines that break all the rules.
And these are the wines that are -
together with parallel efforts being made in countries all over the world -
to bring back greater transparency to wine
so that it's pure,
so it has more rooted not only to tradition
but rooted to the stones, earth, wind, sun,
from where the wines came from.
So, the summary of my life of searching for beauty,
I can say,
is that first of all, it's easier to preserve a tradition
than it is to re-establish it.
So before you lose it,
and the next generation decides
that there was something that had a lot of value and quality to it,
it's very difficult to establish
and, in some cases, impossible to establish.
There's something about the passing on of a tradition
from master to disciple that matters.
And I've seen a living art school
that stems the millennium,
and there's a generational passing on of the torch.
And I've seen societies of people that go to museums
and look at textbooks,
and they try to paint like the old masters.
The two are very different.
I've also tasted wines
from people that read books about the old ways of doing it,
and I've tasted wines by winemakers
that have learned from their grandfathers how to farm,
and there's a huge difference.
So, living in Georgia is a celebration for me,
but I wish Georgia, and I wish all of us
to kind of do what we can
in order to make sure that we properly value
what it is we think it's time to let go of.
And that actually,
tradition can facilitate an evolution of aesthetics and beauty,
and certainly,
it can be an incredibly positive force in creativity.
Thank you.
(Applause)