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Art Light R.i.p.

Art Light R.i.p. image Art Light R.i.p. image
Parent Issue
Month
May
Year
1993
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

Publisher Jesse Arana contemplates Tyree Guyton's Heidelberg Project at an Art Light interview.

ART LIGHT R.I.P.

BY TODD SPENCER

Last summer saw newspaper boxes materialize all over Ann Arbor's downtown sidewalks sporting a new monthly arts newspaper, Art Light. Now those boxes are all empty, as Art Light's unlikely publisher had to call it quits after eight issues.

Art Light readers turned to the newspaper for gallery listings, artist profiles, commentary on the local arts community, and the work of local photographers and poets  Twenty eight-year-old Jesse Arana, Art Light's founder and publisher, leapt many hurdles and crossed many bridges in the eight-month attempt to make it a viable commercial proposition. In the end, however, saddled with a shrinking volunteer staff and money problems, Arana layed the publication to rest In March.

Arana dove into the Art Light project head-first. As the newspaper boxes indicated, this was no hobby but a serious effort to establish Art Light as a local fixture. Such an undertaking would be a difficult and ambitious proposition for anyone, but especially for Arana. He undertook the creation of Art Light just a few short months after arriving on Ann Arbor's doorstep, fresh from six years as a Hindu monk. He got a job at a Taco Bell, rented an apartment and joined the Artist's Coop.

"I was a very restless kid," says Arana, naturally enunciating every word with precision. I've always desired to do things that were beyond my reach...which is why I could start something like Art Light, because I can sit down and say, This is impossible. You have no capital, you don't even have a car, you don't know anybody in this town, so start a monthly newspaper on the arts."That's the type of project that appeals to me for some reason."

Arana's personal history is as evocative as the opinions, words and images that were often found in his newspaper. He grew up in Geneseo, New York, near Rochester. He dropped out of school at the age of 14 so he could attend art and literature classes at the local college where his father taught. He then studied painting in Paris. At age 20 he found himself a starving artist in Rochester with a painting studio, a rock band, and a theater internship. He also found himself unfulfilled. "I was doing everything I wanted, and still, I wasn't happy," mused Arana.

He decided to devote himself 24 hours a day to the spiritual, which led him to six years of monastic life as a Hindu monk. After completing a ten month hike across the United States with another monk, and writing a book about the experience, he decided to defrock. He then came to Ann Arbor to finish his degree and to try to get his book published. Sporting a five o' clock shadow and round glasses, Arana doesn't necessarily look like a monk. But his dark hair is closely cropped, his clothes are earth-toned and his bare feet dig into his front room carpet.

The idea for Art Light ("Light" referring to "enlightenment" and not a play on distillery ad copy) came to Arana after he attended an arts dialogue hosted by the Performance Network in February of 1992 entitled, "Outlook Arts: Lookout!" The program was a series of panel discussions by artists and arts organizations concerned predominately with Governor Engler's efforts to completely eliminate state funding for art and culture. Under Engler's plan the Michigan Council for the Arts (MCA), the organization that allocated grants to artists and arts organizations, would be eradicated.

At the time Arana attended the aforementioned program at the Performance Network, a statewide grassroots campaign to stop Engler's plan had been successful, but the MCA still found its budget slashed by 40 percent.  The arts community in Ann Arbor was going to suffer and some saw the need for the diverse art organizations to come together in order to fight for survival.  Arana spoke to politicians, artists, arts administrators and gallery owners, and decided that Ann Arbor needed a forum in which groups could announce their plans and events, could pool their resources, and could exchange ideas to solve problems and help each other through the financial crisis.

Although All Light was successful on many fronts,creating such an arts dialogue was not one of them. Arana criticizes administrators and organization directors for not jumping aboard. 'The plan was to use them (art organizations) as a revenue source, to have them buy space in the paper," he explained. "Art Light could have been a perfect vehicle to support the non-profits by drawing more people to them. It was directly along the lines of what the MCA was telling them, which was to start looking at ways to market themselves, to make a profit, to wean themselves away from public money."

"I went out into the arts organizations and a good number of them told me, You're crazy , this is impossible, it'll never happen, we're not interested.'"

So why didn't they bite? Nan Cheezek, the executive director of the Washtenaw Council for the Arts offered this explanation: "If the divergent segments of the art community in Ann Arbor are going to come together, and they do need to, it has to happen face-to-face in person. That's not the kind of goal you can set for a newspaper to accomplish. I can become educated and informed through something like Art Light, but it's not going to get me involved."

Cheezek says that more successful dialogue occurs at events such as "Outlook Arts: Lookout!" She also mentioned the monthly Network Lunch meetings at the Real Seafood Company as a better tool by which to accomplish Art Light's purported goals.

Cheezek does have praise for the newspaper, however. "Art Light was informative. Some of the articles were very controversial and thal was good because it stirred things up, and that was needed," stated Cheezek. "There's a place in this community for an arts newspaper, I just don't know what that place is. Jesse put out a good one, but he was a little unrealistic about what it could accomplish."

When Arana figured out that the money for the publication was not going to come from the arts community, he looked to the business sector, where he was pleased to find much support. In the end, however, it was not quite enough.

The segment of the arts community that will most miss Art Light is, arguably, the poets, fiction writers, and photographers. They're the ones who could look to the newspaper to see the work of their fellow artisans or as a place to publish their own work. In its eight issues, Art Light showcased local poets such as Josie Kearns, Matt Smith, and David Orlowski, and featured photographers like My-Linh Kotre, Yitah Wu, and Stephen Graham.

"It really did serve the artists," says Arana. "Most of the artists felt that even if they didn't agree with everything that was in Art Light every month - or it wasn't their taste - they were still rock-bottom glad that it was there." Local writers also appreciated Arana's non - competitive philosophy when it came to choosing what to publish. There was no need to send your work to Art Light on a micro disk with a cover letter and a S.A.S.E.

"It was low-tech," says poet Justin Wright. "I just went over to his house and showed him my stuff. He plcked out the two he liked bestand I typed them into hls computer. It's a rare opportunity that you get to meet and befriend the publisher of your poems."

" A lot of writers," says Arana says with a smile "were surprised they didn't have to slit their wrists in front of me to get published."

Another service for which Art Light will be missed is the monthly gallery listing. As an outsider turned insider, Arana was surprised at the lack of attention the local art galleries received, especially when compared to the super hype garnered by the Art Fair.

"It's just as easy for people to go to the galleries that are here year round as to walk around in the heat of some Roman festival with 200,000 other people. At the galleries you can stand and stare in silence at the work. The gallery page was an attempt to bring people in to see those works - stuff that may be truer and better art than what you find at the Art Fair."

The newspaper was successful in almost everything it set out to do, except serving as an arts dialogue and becoming financially self-sustaining. There are some lessons that Arana could pass along to any who would follow in his footsteps.

"If I had either a slightly larger pool of regular advertisers or one more person on staff selling ads, even if only a few every month, we'd still be printing right now. But finding a volunteer to go out and sell ads is really really shooting for the moon. Art Light was simply a typically undercapitalized small business."

Arana also says that if he were to do it over, he would not have attempted to get readers to pay for their copy. "I got boxes right next to The Ann Arbor News so everyone would know this was for real, and I wanted them to put fifty cents in the slot. It was an experiment. Everyone told me we should go 'free' right away, and they were probably right. I could have made a faster, bigger impact by making Art Light free from the beginning, instead of just the last three issues. There are a lot of other free papers: it's a tradition here. We later went 'free' because we weren't serving our advertisers."

In mid-March Jesse carne to terms with the masochism that would be involved in going any further with the arts paper. "I realized I was doing it more and more alone. I didn't even have a vehicle to take it to press. When you're doing a 5,000-copy publication and the printing press is two hours away, and you have to do distribution for two or three days...to work on an issue knowing you don't even have the ability to take it to the printer is a big spiritual letdown. So not only was I making difficult editorial decisions and hopping on the phones in the morning asking people for an extra hundred dollars. I was also carrying around the burden of knowing that even if I print it, I can't distribute it. I literally distributed 3,000 of this last issue's copies on my back, walking around town."

In the end. as you might expect from a Hindu monk, Jesse Arana has no regrets, and is happy for his successes. "If 500 years from now we crack open a copy of Art Light, we can look at all these people who were making art in Ann Arbor. That thought alone is enough for me."

 

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