Cover Story: Creativity and chaos

Chris Hansen stands staring at the hole, which is not a portal to another dimension, but a volleyball-sized gash in bluemilk's front plate-glass window.

The source of the fissure is still under investigation; no bottle or rock is evident in the shards of broken glass on the gallery's floor, which was already littered with debris and dust from the Midtown art gallery's recent electrical repairs.

The mystery missile is just the latest headache for Hansen. In mid-April, he was working late on grant proposals at the gallery when he heard an explosion in the back alley and ran outside to see 20-foot flames bursting from the breaker box. Though nothing inside was damaged, the fire put the gallery in the dark for six weeks while its electrical system was overhauled, forcing the seat-of-the-pants arts group to cancel some events and host others with the help of a generator and candlelight.

For Hansen and bluemilk co-founder Chris Kowalski, the timing couldn't have been worse. Having shuttered their gallery-cum-studio space in the fall to focus on securing nonprofit status and apply for grants, this spring was supposed to be the season of bluemilk's kick-ass rebirth, relaunching their popular monthly multimedia art openings (now called Portal Openings) and a new menu of musical and literary programming.

"We're the jockey on the horse still sitting in the starting box, raring to go," Kowalski says of the setbacks. "We laughed when it first happened."

Oddly enough, the two Chrises are laughing still, and the latest offense, the fractured front window, seems to hardly dampen their enthusiasm.

Such resilience may explain why bluemilk has lasted as long as it has, despite a mind-boggling series of shifts in focus. What was born as an underground arts magazine in 1998 eventually grew into a gallery and studio space known for its interactive multimedia events. But this eclectic cult of creativity also has experimented with Internet broadcasting, theatrical production, slam poetry and music recording — among other endeavors.

Now, with its nonprofit status finally in place and a healthy grant from a top-secret sugar daddy donor, bluemilk appears poised to prove its mettle as a major player on the arts scene. It recently returned to publishing, putting out the glossy Create magazine, sort of a lite version of the arts publication that set this whole experiment in motion.

The process of writing grant proposals and securing nonprofit status has helped bluemilk crystallize its long-term goals. Its founders plan eventually to build a multimedia creative center and museum, but meanwhile, they've turned their focus toward education, manifesting itself in a series of upcoming classes on everything from yoga to painting.

But first, they must clean up the broken glass, sweep away the dust and perhaps overcome their own artistic anarchy. The group's history of leaping from project to project has left some critics wondering if this new emphasis on education will actually stick. Hansen and Kowalski acknowledge it's been a winding journey so far, but they remain committed to their ever-evolving dream of artistic convergence.

"I guess if we wait a few years, you'll either see me in a straight jacket or an art history book," Kowalski says. "It might seem like chaos, but I think we have remained true to our mission of allowing creative people to be creative, everything may seem to be changing, but it all really has stayed the same. Unity through creativity has always been our focus."

Hansen puts it this way: "Even with the power outage, I think we've got one more big chance to try and make it in this space."

In person, it's hard not to be swayed by the power of the Chrises' offbeat charisma.

"What they're really good at is that they're both infectious about encouraging creativity," says Brett Lockwood, a lawyer, painter and board member of Prudenia Inc., the organization's nonprofit entity.

Kowalski, 29, tends to talk in big ideas, his deep voice shaking the table as he riffs on topics ranging from astrology to atomic science. Hansen, 25, turns the conversation from the cerebral to the practical, dealing less in big ideas and more in the nitty-gritty details.

Though they make a big fuss that "bluemilk is more than just us two" and are quick to give credit to their team of volunteers, the duo definitely does most of the dirty work, and they're the ones most likely to be found manning the shop at their Spring Street headquarters, electricity or not.

After graduating from Tulane with a degree in social science, Kowalski moved to Atlanta to pursue computer animation. But the painter/graphic designer soon got the idea to start a publication to unite the city's arts community. In late 1997, he met with Ben Tran, an Emory student that Kowalski worked alongside waiting tables, and a handful of others interested in helping with the project. Tran enlisted fellow Emory student Hansen, an English and philosophy major who became managing editor.

Working from Kowalski's one-bedroom apartment, the group produced the first issue of bluemilk magazine in spring 1998. The name, Kowalski says, just bubbled up from his subconscious. Creativity, he says, comes from "out of the blue," providing nourishment for the soul that he likens to milk.

"Everybody knows milk, everybody drinks milk, unless you're me — I'm lactose intolerant," he says.

The magazine was a kaleidoscope of artwork, poetry and articles originating from a distinctly outsider perspective. Its popularity caught on quickly.

"When we did the first issue, we really had no reason to believe there would be a second issue," Hansen says. But a second issue followed, then a third and fourth. By issue five, Kowalski realized he needed to get everybody out of his apartment.

In August 1998, bluemilk opened an office in a small storefront on Spring Street, subletting what is now the gallery from a furniture refurbishing shop. As other tenants of the building moved out, bluemilk expanded. It took over the rear of the building and installed art studio spaces that could be rented out to help pay the rent. The front area became a formal gallery, with the magazine office moving to the unit next door.

Dubbing their office/studio/gallery Paradigm Artspace, bluemilk began hosting monthly Paradigm Shifts, art openings that also featured music, poetry and performance art.

"We were trying to shift the paradigms of what people expect from an art opening," Hansen says. "And hopefully trying to be refreshing and not have some stuffy environment. Each party would try to outdo the last."

The concept caught on. Five hundred people showed up for the January 2000 event. The magazine was generating a lot of buzz, and Kowalski and Hansen were running things "on adrenaline and good will," as one observer noted. The monthly Paradigm Shifts premiered works by a bevy of artists, mostly newcomers without gallery representation.

Despite their successes, Kowalski and Hansen decided to put the magazine on hold and focus on the future — the Internet. They began filming the increasingly surreal Paradigm Shifts and broadcasting them online as bluemilk.TV. To host the events, they created alter-ego characters with names like Lord Meeko and Klasnost.

And then things started to get really weird.

Jon Kowalski, Chris' younger brother, had a dream.

A performance artist who had joined the bluemilk effort, Jon dreamed of a light blue figure that shined with mysterious intensity and channeled feelings of peace and love. Two days after the dream, at the March 2000 "I Love You" Paradigm Shift featuring new works by brother Chris, Jon re-enacted the dream by assuming the role of Blue Man, a visitor from another dimension called Prudenia who represents the next evolutionary step for mankind known as homo prudens. (See accompanying bluemilk glossary.)

From then on, the mythology of Prudenia began to manifest itself more and more in bluemilk's Paradigm Shifts, which one participant described as "creativity circuses."

Out of the mythology grew the Prudenian Method, also called Act As If. The Chrises are quick to rattle of its rules: Everyone is creative. Everyone is connected. There is no barrier between stage and audience. And everything is beautiful simply because people are looking for beauty.

"Not only is this an artistic movement, we really feel like it's a humanitarian movement," Kowalski says. "It allows people to have the excitement of being a creative person, of having your mom put the picture you drew in school on your refrigerator. It's that feeling of pride, that feeling of 'that's me up there.'"

Chris Kowalski tells a story about his father. For 20 years, the senior Kowalski was in a Dixieland band on Bourbon Street, "the best tuba player in New Orleans," he says. But at home, the Kowalski family was struggling to make ends meet. As the family grew, his dad was forced to quit the band and take a regular 9-to-5 job to pay the bills.

"It really hurt him," Kowalski says. "To this day, he still wants to do music and he can't. It's kind of like his dream wasn't realized. I feel like there's lots of people who are out there who are exactly the same way. They have to do one thing, but they want to do another thing. And here's a chance for them to do it, even for one night."

With the goals of Prudenia in mind, the Paradigm Shifts encouraged audience members to get involved in something creative, from performing on stage to putting on costumes and finding their inner superhero. Hansen says the essential permissiveness of the Prudenian Method helped him rediscover his inner musician.

"I spent a long time thinking that music was for somebody else to play," he says. "But after we moved into this space, we started playing music. And at that time, we didn't have any instruments, but we had all these paint cans ... So I would, like, play drums on the paint cans with pencils, then that evolved into a set of bongos, then we were all singing, then we were all writing songs and writing a musical. And before you know it, we were playing bass, we were playing guitars. And the only thing I can attribute it to is being in an environment where it's OK to experiment creatively, and not being afraid."

Hansen's experience fits squarely in what he and Kowalski call "creativity therapy," based on the idea that giving folks a chance to express themselves artistically allows them to discover a higher, better form of themselves.

Because of its essential tenant that all creative action is inherently good, bluemilk has grown into a horse of a different color from the established arts community. From the start, the group decided that it wasn't going to criticize anyone's artwork or run reviews in the magazine.

But that open-door policy has led to detractors. One critic called the art in the Paradigm Shifts "all inclusive — painfully so."

Such derision doesn't upset Kowalski, because as he sees it, bluemilk doesn't want to be part of the established arts community.

"We like getting our hands dirty with the art," he says, "but it's really about the creativity, not the product anymore. We do process and not product because in our process, we want people to be in the positivity realm. 'Be good,' you've heard us say. In our small way, we are changing the world with this positivity, through this process of creating."

Liz Maher believes in changing the world. Meeting the folks at bluemilk certainly changed hers. The connection came through Jon Kowalski, who auditioned with the Beggar's Group, an experimental theater collective that Maher founded in New York. After hearing about Prudenia, she began to introduce the concept of "putting good into the world" through her art.

"It transformed everything we were doing as a theater group," says Maher, 27.

This summer, Maher relocates to Atlanta, where she plans to start a series of yoga classes at bluemilk, teaching a particular brand of yoga that "emphasizes finding your creative core."

"The way bluemilk defines things and the sort of grander outlook that they bring to creativity are what is really missing f rom the art world at large," Maher says. Like bluemilk, the Beggar's Group isn't concerned with criticism. But in a culture of such inclusiveness, one can't help wondering, how do you know you're not producing crap?

"That's my constant question," Maher admits. "I don't want to produce crap. But I think it comes from a belief that quality exists, sort of like truth exists, and that when you hit it, you sort of align with that which is good and truthful. But I'm in a constant search for that."

The question of what separates crap from quality is not one that weighs on the collective minds of bluemilk. In an atmosphere of anything goes, Kowalski says, if anything is going, then it must be good.

"It really is the creativity," he says. "Because of the freedom, the total permission, I think that some of the product that does come out of this — even though we're not looking for product — is some of the best product you'll find. It's like the music is more beautiful because it's free."

Unfortunately, free art -- beautiful or otherwise — doesn't pay the bills. As a former intern puts it, "They wanted to attract a young hip audience to these events, but let's be honest, who in their 20s has money to be spent on art?"

Though the Paradigm Shifts were bringing in big crowds and its monthly Slam City sent a spoken word poetry team to national competition, Hansen and Kowalski decided last fall to temporary close the gallery's doors.

"We were jumping over the same hurdles every month to open new shows or put on events," Hansen says. "We absolutely had to stop and reflect. And in doing that, we said that the benefit of nonprofit is, if you get money in advance then you know exactly what you can do."

After a few tense weeks, and even a couple of particularly dark days when it looked like the end was near, Prudenia Inc. was approved for nonprofit status. A major grant came through "at the 11th hour and the 59th minute," Hansen says, giving bluemilk enough backing to reopen and restart its Paradigm Shifts, now called Portal Openings. Slam City has been replaced with the more relaxed Poets & Storytellers series, and a new Acoustic Slam & Jam music session is also on the lineup.

But the new nonprofit mantle comes with new responsibility.

Boardmember Brett Lockwood says the transformation to nonprofit has made the arts group take a step back and reconsider its core mission.

"I think they're starting to manage themselves better and are doing a better job of putting themselves on sound footing better," he says.

Lockwood acknowledges that bluemilk's history so far has been marked by several shifts in direction, but that pattern doesn't bother him. He sees the group as a sort of incubator for creative expression, one that's experimented with several formulas over its history but is just now finding its stride.

"In a sense, the stars have kind of shined on these guys," Lockwood says. "It's like there's been some kind of guardian angel looking after them. Maybe that's because they've got such good karma or because of the good creative energies coming back to them. I think that they've touched a lot of folks along the way, and they've had a lot fun."

John Tindel calls himself a shy, meat-and-potatoes kind of guy. The painter and musician left nursing school in Alabama after the classes kept making him vomit, transferring instead into graphic design. He moved to Atlanta after college and eventually landed one of the studio units at bluemilk. Tindel says he felt an immediate kinship with the two Chrises after meeting them.

"I realized that they're almost exactly like me in that they are normal, down-to-earth guys who can create stuff that makes you think they're really not that normal," he says. His paintings, with jagged, razor-finned fish and severe, graffiti-informed figures, certainly casts doubt on Tindel's assertion that he is, in fact, normal.

His works will be featured at this weekend's Portal Opening, titled Groovehaus.

As a resident artist at the gallery since last spring, Tindel says he's sometimes intimidated by the vast folklore of Prudenia.

"I still don't understand it all," he says. "It's a little hard to digest. But I think they want to be able to give inspiration to people. And it works."

Though he has no formal fine arts education, Tindel will be teaching a class on painting-by-doing at bluemilk this summer, another indicator of the nonprofit's focus on education.

To Tindel's thinking, the main thing bluemilk is lacking is marketing skills. With a little better promotion, he says, the Portal Openings could go from being OK to being great.

"I'm always like, 'You guys might want to think about making a little money,'"he says. "But that doesn't even cross their minds. You just get a blank look on their faces."

In truth, the money issue remains a daunting one. Though managing bluemilk definitely takes up the bulk of their time, neither Chris is currently salaried. As Kowalski puts it, "We're destitute as hell."

Lockwood says he and other members of the Prudenia board (which includes William Chace, president of Emory University, along with Kowalski's mother and Hansen's father) have asked that the duo revisit their goals at the end of this summer to hammer out a strategic plan. One thing to consider is the question of compensation.

"We're going to have to come to a crucial decision at some point as to how sustainable our vision really is," says Hansen, who, like Kowalski, pays bills by working side jobs.

Despite the lack of funding, Hansen says he remains committed to this experiment in creativity because it has taken him places he never thought he'd go and pushed him as an artist.

"Whatever happens, the story of bluemilk is still being written," he says. "And I can't really let the story down."

Neither can Kowalski, who ends all his e-mails with the simple command of "Be good."

"We talk a big talk," Kowalski says. "But we know we just got a little art space in Atlanta. It's just a little thing and we have only so much power to do anything at all. But we really believe that if everybody in the world said yes, it would be a really big yes."

Hansen adds: "It would be a resounding yes."

Groovehaus / Portal Opening No. 4 featuring the artwork of John Tindel will be June 22 at 8 p.m. at bluemilk, 1123 Spring St. 404-815-8911. www.bluemilk.net??