splitting the light: art/work/dance from jericha senyak

Perceptions of Bellydance

2012-02-14T11:50:00.000-05:00

Had to share this one because it's so ridiculously true. Thanks to Astra Starr.

That's Not Art: the longing for meaning in contemporary creative work, part two

2012-02-12T15:16:00.001-05:00

From part one of That's Not Art: We've got this ancient, creaky, and generally unhelpful question kicking around, a question that pretty much refuses to understand that it's really time to retire to the Vault of Currently Useless Queries along with What does garum taste like? and Are you a witch? (Oh, wait.) I'm talking, of course, about the question What is Art?

Jackson Pollock, "No. 5" (currently the most expensive painting ever sold)

The problem with the What is Art question is that we can dismiss something as "not art" very quickly, but we don't usually get around to saying what it is if it isn't art. If you don't like Jackson Pollack (and I don't, myself, although I could dutifully make an argument for his importance as an artist if you paid me to) and you say well those are just scribbles! you could be totally and completely correct, but "just scribbles" actually isn't totally divided from the category of art. What do you call stuff that is supposed to be art but for one reason or another you don't want to accept as such? I'm really sorry about this, but "garbage" or "trash" or "shit" or "sludge" can still perfectly legitimately fit into a category of meaningful creative expression. Listen, a guy sloshes some paint on a canvas without looking at it and sells it for several million dollars. If he wasn't selling it at all, but just covering his house with canvases of sloshed paint thrown at random, would you still tell him it wasn't art, this thing he was making that he felt a drive to create, over and over? Yes you would? Boy oh boy, who made you the big bad sheriff of acceptable-forms-of-meaningful-expression?

Almost everyone, at one time or another, has looked at an artist or an artist's work and felt the desire to dismiss it as "not art." The age-old cry in art galleries and museums of "My five-year-old could do that!" resounds with many people, but there are as many reasons to label something "not art" as there are people to do the labeling: it's not spiritual, it's not beautiful, it's not uplifting, it's technically incompetent, it doesn't tell a story, it's not universal enough, it's not personal enough, it's not open to interpretation, it's too open to interpretation, it's religious, it's tacky, it's kitsch, it's elitist, it's just a handicraft, on and on...

In the first part of this essay, I took some time to address an issue that forms a major part of the discussion of what is and isn't art: the question of patronage, or the relationship of art to money. I believe that many people feel, on some fairly fundamental level, that something happens to art as it moves into the realm of commerce. We don't respect literature written for money (dollar-a-page pornography, romance novels, trash sci-fi) and we don't respect art created for money; we feel that it is somehow less worthy than art created for almost any other reason, and, in fact, we often question whether it is art at all.

That gives an interesting perspective on the question what is art? We can define art in any of a hundred ways, many of them actively contradictory, but I would say confidently that I make art to make money is one definition we are all prepared to ridicule. Not that art cannot or should not make money; artists have to eat the same as everybody else, and we do still seem to believe that things that move, inspire, delight, energize or excite us aesthetically are both valuable and truly worth something. I believe it is the difference between value and worth that may help us feel our way through the strange fog surrounding the accusation of that's not art!

All artists should read this.

Lewis Hyde makes a beautiful distinction in his book "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property" between "work" and "labor" and another between "value" and "worth" that I want to use here. First of all, he says, "work is what we do by the hour. It begins and ends at a specific time, and, if possible, we do it for money." But labor is different. Labor, says Hyde, "sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it's harder to quantify. 'Getting the program' in AA is a labor. It is likewise apt to speak of 'mourning labor': when a loved one dies, the soul undergoes a period of travail, a change that draws energy. Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms: these are labors." Why is that distinction useful? Because it helps us understand why the idea of creating something specifically for the purpose of making money clashes with our idea of what constitutes art. Of all the possible definitions of art, there is a major commonality: we see art as labor, not as work. Which is almost to say: the aspect of labor comes first, before the label of art. We have a very hard time imagining work leading to art; we define art by its being a labor. I don't think this is a tautology when it comes to trying to understand why we're so uncomfortable with the concept of art being produced for profit: I think we just forget that there exists a major difference between work and labor.

Now, if you would kindly hold that thought, I'd like to move on to Hyde's definition of "value" and "worth." Hyde says, "I would begin the analysis by saying that a commodity has value and a gift does not. A gift has worth. I'm obviously using these terms in a particular sense. I mean 'worth' to refer to those things that we prize and yet say 'you can't put a price on it.' We derive value, on the other hand, from the comparison of one thing with another." That comparison is usually in the marketplace, and when we talk about value we're usually talking about exchange value or market value: that is how much we can get for it. "Worth," though, has nothing to do with what we can get, in a tangible sense, for handing something over. Worth has to do with what something gives us, what we get, in an intangible sense, from having or holding something outside of reference to other goods or money.

Alphonse Mucha, 1900

I don't want to jump directly from here to say that work makes things of value and labor makes things of worth, because that isn't necessarily true at all: one person's work may make something another person feels is of enormous worth (a sweatshop worker makes Calvin's lucky rocketship underpants, Alphonse Mucha's chocolate ads are things of beauty), and one person's labor may make something that is of enormous value (Van Gogh makes a painting that turns out to be valued in the millions). However, I will say this: work is time spent that is valuable, and labor is time spent that is worthwhile. That is, the correlation between work and value and labor and worth has less to do with the product and more to do with the actual process. We are suspicious of a creation made by work because the time spent on it is reckoned in the value of dollars rather than the worth of the endeavor; or, to say it another way, when a creation is made by work and not by labor, the creator knows its value and not its worth. That doesn't mean that it has no worth whatsoever - but we have a much harder time finding, feeling, or understanding it.

Likewise, it is very difficult to put a price on something made by labor. When laboring on something, a creator know the worth of the work being done, but cannot assign it a value without translating the time spent laboring into the terms of work: i.e. "I spent twenty hours on this painting, and I wasn't thinking of it in terms of dollars per hour, that was just how long I needed to make the painting...but okay, let's say my time is valued at $20 an hour - so that's a $400 painting plus frame and material costs..." Let's face it: this value is arbitrary. Factors to take into account could be the amount and cost of training received, dollars lost because the painting was being done and not some other work valued at a fixed price, etc etc, but fundamentally the time spent doing labor is very hard to reckon in terms of value because the whole point of distinguishing work from labor is to say that there are some ways of making things that cannot be valued. Labor takes exactly as long as it takes, and it can't really be assigned an exchange value -- at least, not until it is done, at which point you can see its beginning and end, and try and treat the finished process like work. That is, it is impossible to know the value of something you are laboring at until you are done laboring. That is emphatically not how work functions, and it is not how value functions either. So it is always an approximation - something any artist who has ever attempted to sell work can tell you.

Joseph Beuys, "Telephone T------R" (from Two FLUXUS-Objects,
Edition of 24), 1974

Originally (as you may or may not recall from the closing line of the first part of this post) I intended this essay to set up a comparison to those things we denigrate scornfully as "not art" by examining the idea of craft, but I think I'm seeing craft coming into play here in a slightly different way than I'd originally intended. I'd like to think of craft here as a meeting point between work and labor -- craftsmanship being a quality that can be seen in an object that may be the product of work or labor -- or even some combination. ("Artisanal" is a similar word, although it seems to me to be used more commonly for products that are consumed, such as soap or cheese, than to more durable goods.) A work of art may or may not have a high quality of craftsmanship; for example, Jackson Pollock's paintings are falling apart because they were not well-constructed with durable materials. (This is not the same as saying the act of painting was itself lacking in craft in Pollock's case, although people who are not fans of his work look at it scornfully for just that reason -- whatever his contribution to the history of art, he's one of the major painters who gets the "but my 5-year-old could do that!" line; the rebuttal to which is "Yes, but your 5-year-old didn't, and Pollock did). Sometimes, too, the lack of craftsmanship is the point of the artwork, as in the Fluxus movement, which evolved in large part as a reaction to "high" art and took its DIY aesthetic as a point of pride, elevating a sense of open accessibility to art practice over refinement and training.

So craftsmanship is not considered by most people to be a necessary element in the creation of a work of art, although a perception that technical craft and refined ability went into the making of a work does (I think, anyway) tend to generally improve that work's reception in the public eye. We still have an easier time understanding something that looks like it was difficult to make as being "legitimately" art, and I think this is because we see the labor present in the work when the difficulties inherent in its creation are visible to the eye. When we don't see the labor, something in us feels cheated -- and perhaps this is because we understand craftsmanship as having both worth and value. When we see a work of art that we perceive as poorly crafted, it's more difficult for us to understand why it is hanging on the wall for us to look at.

What do I mean by craftsmanship has both worth and value? A craftsman is not necessarily an artist: he or she often does work, not labor, creating things specifically for use and for sale. We don't see craft as crashing with value; indeed, we usually see it as adding value, in the sense that something handmade is usually more valuable than something machine-made. In this case, it is because something of worth (the care and thoughtfulness and skill of the creator) adds to the value of the time spent producing it. Conversely, in the creation of art, the time spent producing the piece has no intrinsic value because its purpose is not to make something for sale; as I said before, the labor that goes into making art cannot be reckoned until the work is done. If you are creating a beautiful hand-turned table, you know at the beginning exactly what object you will have when you are done, and you can reckon the approximate number of hours it will take you to make it. If you are creating a painting, a piece of music, a story, a sculpture, no matter what you are intending going into it -- well, let me just say that I have never heard of an artist who could say exactly how long it would take to produce any piece that felt meaningful and complete, nor state with any clarity at the beginning exactly what form the finished work would take.

Perhaps I am wrong, or generalizing. But I do feel that that is the specific difference between work and labor (work is quantifiable and labor is not) and that craft is a useful term to play with because it is in someway exactly what we mean when we contemplate the idea of art made for money -- that is, work, but done with a thoughtful, creative and intentional sensibility that makes the line blur just slightly into our felt understanding of what labor entails. The outrage we feel when we see a million-dollar painting on the wall that looks to us like somebody dumped a bucket of paint on a piece of cardboard comes from feeling cheated of both worth and value: not only do we not see the appearance of any true labor, we also see no craft, and therefore nothing that would create value in the time the artist spent on it: hence a price tag that seems utterly disconnected with what we are looking at.

Jeff Koons, "Ushering in Banality," 1988

When I showed the Koons sculpture in the last post as an example of something that makes me want to kick and scream and yell that's not art! what I was pointing at, I think, is my sense in looking at that work that it is lacking in worth -- and the fact that Koons asserts his pieces have no "hidden meaning" underscores my sense of resentment. I do, however, see the craft of his work -- I might hate his aesthetic, but he has one, and he can make things well; the Michael Jackson of that horrible sculptures looks like Michael Jackson, and I can say from my experience as a sculpture model that it is hard to do that. So I do have to agree that there is at least some reasonable grounds for value in his work. And to be honest, commentary on pop culture is fundamentally labor, not work -- even if we don't like its expressive manifestation, or find it shallow, making peculiar artifacts that serve no purpose but to engage the eye is not a quantifiable process.

Until, I think, artists becomes successful enough that they know their pieces will sell -- and that, I think, is the point where the work/labor distinction really begins to break down, because all of a sudden there is value in advance of the completion of a work. This, too, is why (I think) we still venerate the "starving artist" in thought if not in deed: what is compelling there is the sense of integrity, of the worth of the artist's work being preserved as the driving force in its creation, rather than its value. And yet, in some way, I still don't really feel that this, or the thoughts leading up to it, answers the question of the strength of the conviction -- which seems to be shared by artists and the public alike -- that however we define art, our definitions converge around a sense of labor in the production of something of worth. Maybe what this is leading to actually ties back precisely to that accusation that's not art! -- that is, that in fact we do, in some way, define art by what it isn't, and what it isn't is work -- because work that includes a sense of worth in its reckoning of value is craft, not art.

Is this a tautology, a reductionist argument, totally a circular definition? Maybe -- I don't totally know. It feels like a meaningful exploration to me. But even if I am just thinking in circles, I think that having this conversation at all, trying to open up exactly what our felt distinctions and prejudices are when it comes to what is and isn't "real" art, is useful to artists in the face of the perpetual struggle to try and make a living from the things they love. So many artists are uncomfortable in the world of the market, and the attempt to try and find a meaningful way to price and present the things we make can be painful and disheartening. Understanding where our discomfort comes from and how the fear of "selling out" arises, when and where we start to point our fingers in the age-old accusation, well, it feels right to me to try and tease out a language with which to speak of the complex intersections of creativity and commerce.

Finally, of course, some of the problem arises from our ridiculous and dumbed-down approach to anything made by human hands. To illustrate what is perhaps the bigger problem, I'd like to close with two rather startling images: a screen capture of the first page of the Google search results on my computer for the word "art" and one of the first pages of results for the word "craft." I made the search initially for images to use in my compare-and-contrast moment above, but what I got back was so startling I had to leave it alone entirely. I'm not entirely sure what conclusion to draw from the results that come up here, which indicate that apparently the internet thinks of both art and craft in terms of what appeals to, yes, your five-year-old. Draw your own conclusions, please. I'm entirely too mystified.

Manifesto

2012-01-26T15:44:00.000-05:00

Joy is One Big Fuck You to Oppression

Emily O'Neill once quoted me as saying that every moment of joy in the face of oppression is an act of revolution; I will die believing that, and I don't know about you, brothers and sisters, but I think revolution's what we need right now, and bad. Every day it seems like some new horrific thing is happening in this country, and I mean scarier than usual, big big scary, rights being stripped from women, transfolk murders, police brutality, the growing clarity with which we face the total submission of our government to the big money that hates most of us. I've had a bad morning. I've had a bad month. Right now it's either write a goddamned manifesto or break down in tears. So here it is, folks, the articles of my revolution:

This country is two countries splitting every moment down the center. It is the private property of a scant handful of fanatics in the grip of a fear and greed I think so far unequaled in the chronicles of humankind, the natural heirs to the country's history of violence and oppression, the moral great-grandchildren of those who slaughtered the native peoples of this place and called it their own by right of conquest. And it is also a place where now queer folk can marry and Dear Abby columns hold advice about the etiquette of threesomes, where slowly but surely the right to live outside the restrictions of an archaic "norm" is flowering, a country where people still allow themselves to dream.

Each news story I hear about some small and shrunken soul trying to wrest our rights away from us makes me cry out in anger because I believe in this country, in the magnificent artists and the dedicated peace workers, the healers and the thinkers, the farmers raising happy chickens and the musicians in love with the glory of a chord progression, the poets and the storytellers, the teachers, the true spiritual leaders, every person in this country who remembers what gratitude feels like, who knows what it means to give thanks for what you have instead of thinking that there is not enough happiness or food or love or money unless you take it away from someone else.

I believe that anger is a force for justice, and I believe in the power of protest, the strength of voices; but I also know that lashing out builds nothing, and you cannot break the stranglehold upon your dream by flailing against the fingers on its throat; the only way to break its grip is to make your dream bigger, to swell it, to make it grow and open and unfold like a tree damn well exploding full-fledged from an acorn. If you have got the shakes like I do, if your tongue lies heavy in your mouth with horror, if you want to lie down and cry or break everything in sight and yell this is not the world I believe in, well, it is up to us. So make love. write music. paint something so gorgeous it makes you want to weep. go out and dance. cook for someone. make one stark raving lovely moment just to say: right now, this country is beautiful. right now, you cannot have my joy. Because they will take everything from you, from me, and they will have nothing when they're done as they had nothing when they begun, and this is the heartbreak of it all: it would be so nice to call them evil, to think they will be satisfied when the world is in shards around them. But they will be just as bewildered and impotent and lonely then, just as afraid of dying, just as frightened and completely empty. And all that taking and taking and taking will have been for nothing, you understand, for nothing.

So become a fountain, a spring, an underground river of creation. Go put some joy into the world. Go dance and thumb your nose at them, pity them, for they can make nothing, for they are starving and you have this great big beautiful soul to make the world larger, to fill it so full of fresh bread and and blessings it can't be eaten up. Go sing hallelujah and praise God if you have one, praise the skies, praise your mother, praise the page you write on, praise the pen and the tongue and the body and its blisses and its strangenesses, go praise the mysteries, praise your teachers, praise memory and longing, praise the smell of the air after rain. The one thing that is incomprehensible to those who seek to take is the act of giving. If you fill yourself up with bitterness, choke on your fury, get up from your garden to go throw stones and curses, they will just smile: already they've stopped you from making things, from giving thanks, from bringing joy. Remember this. They can squash your rebellion, they can silence your protests, they can gag your cries for help. They can't shut you up if you know how to sing.

Me, I think that making art is how we appreciate, celebrate and give back to the gods. And what on earth are we here for otherwise? For Lewis Hyde, a thinker much beloved by me and the author of The Gift, one understanding of the genesis of art lies in how Walt Whitman made his work; Whitman, Hyde says, speaks about art as breath, of 'his inhalation as "accepting" the bounty of the world, his exhalation as "bequeathing" or "bestowing" (himself, his work.)' In a world full of gifts, the making of art is the natural cycling of gratitude and generosity; our breath, as it animates us, also animates this flowing give-and-take of gift. The whole notion of creativity, Hyde says, is bound up with this sense of gift, and there are three gifts inherent in the making of a work of art:

"The initial gift is what is bestowed upon the self - by perception, experience, intuition, imagination, a dream, a vision or another work of art. The ability to do the labor* is the second gift [by which he means what we often call talent or vision].The artist's gift refines the materials of perception or intuition that have been bestowed upon him [or her]; to put it another way, if the artists is gifted, the gift increases* in its passage through the self. The artist makes something higher that what has been given, and this, the finished work, is the third gift..."

I believe that a life lived joyfully is a life lived wholly under this poetic commandment -- to take the great light of the world and praise it by fashioning a great celestial dome and setting it with suns; then the light may shine out again through the suns, and we make paintings, and poems, and great cathedrals of the midnight and the peacock twilight and the fine, delicate early morning dove in praise of those new luminaries, and the great light shines again through those works, and this is the kaleidoscope at the heart of humanity: how and why we split the single vast infinity into a thousand endless finite magics, the better to worship each and every possible permutation of the marvelous. We breathe in marvel and breathe out wonder, and there is no better way to praise the universe or to exist in it than this: so let us make moons, many, many moons, and hang them in the sky, dance under them, and sing of them, and lie beneath them, full of radiance and rapture...

This is what we are here for: to increase the faces of the divine.

* my italics

the poetics of space (x): fragments from A Fool for God

2012-01-24T11:38:00.001-05:00

I've just finished the first full draft of my novel, and I feel pretty good about it, and it's my birthday so I'm going to pin up a piece of it on this virtual wall here and allow myself to imagine that this time next year it will be on its way out into the world in bound and published form. Because what are birthdays for if not for dreaming of the year to come?

Not much of a setup needed for this fragment. Our protagonist, George Kepler, has just had his notebook stolen and replaced with a peculiar box containing an esoteric invitation; he is in his kitchen examining it in the middle of the night when he realizes that the front door to his house is unaccountably open.

It had been flung wide, so that the night poured in. It had stopped raining, and it was no longer cold; in fact the air came in boldly and lucidly as a dark wine. It struck George that the open door, far from signifying an intruder in the house, had an air of invitation, as if the house was encouraging him to step outside under the stars.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, George shuffled out onto the step and poked his head up at the sky. The clouds had vanished except for a few pearled rills around the moon low in the sky, and the galaxies were wheeling overhead; the city was good for stars, as cities go, mostly because the streetlamps were at best sporadic in their functioning, but tonight’s empyrean was unusually spectacular. There was still a deep somber blue to the sweep of the dome, shading down into real darkness towards the east but still a fine turquoise around the western rim, and everything looked very sharp and black against it. The impression grew in him that the great curve of it contained an aether, something closer to liquid than air, with the stars suspended near the top and him breathing it in below; the way that certain fragrances smell almost tangible, heady, that was how it seemed to him. He did not wonder who had opened the door. He accepted that it had been opened for him, so that he could come out and be here with the night –

He felt brilliantly awake, as if he had rested well for hours; despite recent exhaustion by his labors on the Book and the deceptive hollowness of his cheeks, George was a good sleeper, and he loved the feeling of waking up suddenly and absolutely in the drench of morning light from a substantial and satisfying night of rest. He felt like that now, only instead of the glad presence of the sun there was this grave and subtle loveliness of the deepening sky. For all its immensity, it seemed to bend down towards him graciously; he fancied that the moon and her nacreous handmaidens were smiling at him. The night felt – well, not his, exactly, but glad to see him, as if the other things awake in it were happy that he’d come. The dark trees proudly lifted with their lines ink-drawn and elegant, the buildings warm charcoal smudges of shadow with their rooftops fiercely held: he saw things usually solid and flat as now strange and grand and sentient, like Baudelaire’s Nature, watchful and knowing. He felt somehow acknowledged, as if each thing around him had given one small knowing nod before returning its attention to the sky; and he also felt very clearly that the things around him were engaged in a silent and respectful interaction with the firmament.

He stepped down into the street and began to make his way down the little hill on which his old wooden house perched gently with its view of the sea; and it, too, though he did not turn to look at it, felt more alive than he had henceforth given it credit for being; it was doing something without him, there in the vinous air, participating in some grave and profound conversation in which he played no part. He didn’t mind. He felt rather merry. The city wasn’t empty or deserted; his street was a little one, tucked away and quiet, but down below in the belly of the Old Quarter there were golden lights, and he thought suddenly how long it had been since he went somewhere where there was music, or dancing, or an overabundance of laughter. Lovers of words get lonely without noticing. He felt for his hat and was surprised to find it on his head; he was still wearing his slippers, but so what? It felt like a festival night. Perhaps it was a festival night, and he had simply not noticed. It was the right time of year, even if it was oddly warm for a December evening. But the unseasonable fineness of the air felt like nothing more than a cheerful haphazard blessing, the way unexpectedly beautiful days show up sometimes and make even the sour-faced relent a little in their devotion to dissatisfaction. He wondered if the Archangel was still around, and if the beer was any good these days. Confidently he set off down the hill into the round belly of the night.

Wish me luck, please.

That's Not Art: the longing for meaning in contemporary creative work, part one

2012-01-20T10:20:00.004-05:00

Jeff Koons, Michael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988

We've got this ancient, creaky, and generally unhelpful question kicking around, a question that pretty much refuses to understand that it's really time to retire to the Vault of Currently Useless Queries along with What does garum taste like? and Are you a witch? (Oh, wait.) I'm talking, of course, about the question What is Art?

Hey, look over here: it's a hideously ugly statue of a a very peculiar American icon holding a pet chimpanzee! Koons did a series of three and one sold at Sotheby's for 5.6 million dollars. It's crass, it's kitsch, and since Koons himself claims that there's nothing in his work but surface value, we're totally allowed to dismiss it. Listen, it's so terrifyingly easy to hate on this guy:

Koons has inherited aspects of the Dada movement and the spirit of Pop Art and achieves a perfect fusion of artistic language and popular culture, art and life. In the Eighties his work was termed either neo-geo (new geometric conceptualism) or neo-pop because of the way he puts real commercial products together and presents them as timeless works of art. However, both the methods and tools he uses to challenge the materialism of the affluent West are original and innovative. Koons is far from being critical of the forced or excessive consumerism of the West: on the contrary, he appreciates its artistic value and uses the same forms of communication in his work that marketing, publicity and mass media use. As the artist himself says, his work has no other aesthetic component than the aesthetic of communication itself. With a view to communicating with as wide a public as possible, Koons researches the idea of a “work for all” which is immediately comprehensible because there is nothing intellectual, no hidden meaning, behind it.(From the Museum Madre website on their 2003 exhibition of Koons' work)

Dude appreciates the artistic value of the forced or excessive consumerism of the West. Yikes. So, that, like, makes him not REALLY an artist, right?

Man, I hate saying this. But if you ask me, no. I think they guy is still an artist. He creates stuff for people to look at that wasn't there before, that -- like it or not -- provokes questions about the way we see the world. Yeah, but it's so ugly. Yup, it's hideous. I saw this piece in a museum when I was in my teens (musta been SFMoMA) and the only response I could think of was to walk away quickly. But the guy crafted it. He made it. He made conscious aesthetic choices. He made a statue of an icon: that's a pretty great way to participate in the artistic tradition. Yeah, but he says it's meaningless. Yes, but what are we going to say about art that doesn't announce itself as Meaningful with a fanfare of trumpets: oh, that isn't art, it's, um, well, a thing that somebody made that isn't art.

The problem with the What is Art question is that we can dismiss something as "not art" very quickly, but we don't usually get around to saying what it is if it isn't art. If you don't like Jackson Pollack (and I don't, myself, although I could dutifully make an argument for his importance as an artist if you paid me to) and you say well those are just scribbles! you could be totally and completely correct, but "just scribbles" actually isn't totally divided from the category of art. What do you call stuff that is supposed to be art but for one reason or another you don't want to accept as such? I'm really sorry about this, but "garbage" or "trash" or "shit" or "sludge" can still perfectly legitimately fit into a category of meaningful creative expression. Listen, a guy sloshes some paint on a canvas without looking at it and sells it for several million dollars. If he wasn't selling it at all, but just covering his house with canvases of sloshed paint thrown at random, would you still tell him it wasn't art, this thing he was making that he felt a drive to create, over and over? Yes you would? Boy oh boy, who made you the big bad sheriff of acceptable-forms-of-meaningful-expression?

Okay, so maybe it's the price tag: this totally unrefined and pretty much aesthetically nauseating creative practice is being valued as worth more than I will ever make in my entire life by a factor of ten to twenty. Gah! Horrifying! But art has always had a very peculiar and problematic relationship with patronage. John Berger, in his amazing book Ways of Seeing (which anyone who likes art even a little bit should immediately read, preferably several times), makes this point about a famous piece by Thomas Gainsborough, a painting that is precisely the sort of art we tend to think of in contrast to Koons.

Thomas Gainsborough, Mr and Mrs Andrews, 1743-1749

An interesting article in the Scottish Socialist Voice explains the argument over this painting very simply:

The conservative art historian Kenneth Clark describes this as “an enchanting work” and accounts for the cornfield in the background in terms of Gainsborough’s “Rousseauism”, a view of nature as a lost realm of innocence associated with the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau. Berger cuts through the bullshit: “They are not a couple in Nature as Rousseau imagined nature. They are landowners and their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and their expressions”. Indeed, apart from the 18th century attire, Mr and Mrs Andrews could easily be relaxing during a break at a Conservative Party conference. In contrast to Berger, however, the art critic Lawrence Gowing suggests that the couple were engaged in “philosophic enjoyment” of “the genuine Light of uncorrupted and unperverted Nature”. Berger’s reply to this obfuscation is scathing: “In most cases, the possession of private land was the precondition for such philosophic enjoyment – which was not uncommon among the landed gentry. Their enjoyment of ‘uncorrupted and unperverted nature’ did not, however, usually include the nature of other men. The sentence for poaching at that time was deportation. If a man stole a potato he risked a public whipping ordered by the magistrate who would be a landowner. There were very strict property limits to what was considered natural”.

(You can read the rest of Alex Miller's article on Ways of Seeing here)

In fact, in a very weird roundabout way, the much-praised artist is doing something a little bit like Koons: creating a gold-plated depiction of icons of status and wealth alongside their possessions. Michael owns an animal; these people own a view.

Listen, the point I am trying to make is not that what Koons makes isn't ugly, or that Tracey Emins' stupid bed piece that everybody argues about isn't hard to understand as a meaningful piece of creative expression; I think I've made it abundantly clear that I think Koons has the aesthetic sensibilities of a diseased hippo, and as for Tracey, well, I won't be the first to say that it'd be bloody nice if I could get my dirty laundry into a gallery for lots of money. But I didn't have that idea; she did. And if it's not art, what is it? "Clever marketing" comes to mind, except that the only product being sold here is one part personality and one part something-to-look-at, and quite frankly that's as good a description as any of my favorite Chagall or Van Gogh painting: a thing that has no function other than to engage the eye and the mind and create a strange conversation about meaning between the personality of the creator and the personality of the viewer (and, perhaps, the personality of the work itself once separated from the creator's mind). The term we have for things that exist to do that is generally accepted to be art.

Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533

Like anything else, art can serve multiple purposes: another image Berger mentions is Hans Holbein The Younger's The Ambassadors, painted in 1533. This is a painting of rich guys with their stuff. it's a beautiful painting -- hey, they had beautiful stuff! And sure, it's got that memento mori slipped in there in the form of an anamorphic skull (that peculiar warped slanty thing in the middle at the bottom, in an amazingly fractured perspective: if you view this painting not on a computer screen, for example projected onto a wall, walking right up to the right side of the painting so you're on the same plane with the image and squinting will warp the skull into 3D!) but basically this lovely canvas we regard as such a work of Art in the classical, compared-to-which-Jeff-Koons-is-a-pretentious-dickwad sense is a self-congratulatory handshake between two rich men. Here's an awesome excerpt from an essay on the painting by Mark Calderwood:

The perceptual framework of the sixteenth century was shaped by the new humanist ideals and learning which permeated aristocratic society, fostering a dynamic and artistically literate social culture. The increasingly self-conscious intellectualisation of painting pervaded courtly society; games with portraits such as devising and interpreting elaborate allegories were popular pastimes among the nobility. (...) Portraiture and patronage in the sixteenth century were not bounded by modern distinctions between public and private, secular and spiritual, individual and corporate: in renaissance society, these purposes were not absolute but inseparable. Luxurious and costly commodities, portraits served as visual self-fashioning announcing the wealth, intellectual taste and sociopolitical prestige of the owner, and as conspicuous consumption to enhance social position. At the same time, the sitter’s character and interests, personal ties and self-perceptions were reflected in their depiction and surrounding symbolic or allegorical attributes. Familiar with the articulation of the private individual in relation to the public realm, contemporary audiences recognised equally the multiple aspects of portraiture, while looking to clues of patronage and context to support interpretation.

In the case of The Ambassadors, no surviving record confirms its patronage. Jean de Dinteville [on the left] is traditionally accepted as the patron, although this assumption does not fit well with the complex nature of renaissance patronage, or emerging interpretive hypotheses proposed by North (2002) and Bomford (2004). A more satisfactory explanation is that Georges de Selve [on the right] was the patron. Although influential and legally noble in the early sixteenth century, the de Selve family were parlementaire noblesse. The bourgeois judicial and mercantile origins of this socially mobile class prevented their complete acceptance by the French aristocracy; accordingly, social promotion through allegiance and patronage were important considerations for members of such families. As incumbent of a wealthy bishopric, de Selve possessed the means to commission the work. The key sight/construction lines of The Ambassadors converge on de Selve’s figure, indicating his importance to the painting itself. These lines are grounded in the religious schema of the painting, further consistent with clerical patronage. In this schema, the doubly-coded iconography refers as much to churchman as statesman: the self-fashioning functions of The Ambassadors more readily pertain to de Selve than Dinteville. The painting’s ownership by Dinteville indicates that it was intended by de Selve as a generous gift, which would garner social prestige and create the obligation of favourable future regard from a distinguished family, in addition to being a demonstration of uncommon personal affection.

(You can read the rest of the essay here.)

So this whole division between classical art and contemporary art as meaningful and meaningless, respectively, which people like myself who love more traditional concepts of aesthetic beauty, is, um, kinda totally wrong. We see contemporary art as being increasing driven by and/or in reaction to consumer culture: ick, thinks I, who wants a creative lexicon that focuses on crass, hideous, plastic, ugly, things? But - ack! - we've got to acknowledge that even profoundly "beautiful" or "symbolic" art like Holbein's was just as consumer-oriented. I hate Koons' assertion that his work is all surface and no substance; I want depth and meaning in my art! I don't want art that has no inner life or deeper meaning! And yet -- the spiritual richness of Holbein's painting is linked to an elitist Western aristocracy with a conqueror mentality, and the beautifully constructed symbols amount essentially to a pile of status symbols to assist in social climbing. Um, rats.

That being said, if you're still saying yeah yeah yeah, but even so, that was art and this new stuff is crap, look at Damien Hirst (oh, please don't make me!) and his diamond-plated motherfucking crystal skull, it's not art, I won't accept it! I still there's an unfinished discussion to be had here about just what it is we're defining when we castigate something as not-art. And to do that, I want to look at another kind of not-art entirely: stuff your grandmother makes, or your mother's friend with a knitting/beading/painting hobby, or things little girls in Peru make to sell to gringo tourists: that's right, next week I want to talk about craft.

2012-01-18T09:34:00.002-05:00

A Lion in Winter and The Watcher in the Night

2012-01-06T17:39:00.001-05:00

Ah, winter -- the time for the giving of gifts in almost every culture. I feel fairly strongly that humans seem to need charms and trinkets and magical toys less in summertime, when we have the whole world to play with, and come to long for them more when the cold and the dark hold sway -- perhaps because the vanished sun and frozen earth give us more need of small, powerful, hidden comforts: the pleasure of warm quilts on a bitter night, a light in a window in the darkness, the snugness of a house against the storm outside. So too might we delight more then in tiny worlds, in amulets that hold the promise of the richness of the world returning, the way the seed holds the tree sleeping in the ground until the spring?

In any case, here are some amulets I've given as gifts this winter, to keep hearts warm against the cold and dark. A Lion In Winter was a gift for a young woman I admire, on the theme of kick-ass ladies. It contains, on the front, anArt Deco illustration by Erté, an influential fashion designer; a vintage advertisement depicting an Amelia Earhart-era young lady in the cockpit of a solo plane; a vintage poster image of Josephine Baker, the famous entertainer who was (among many other notable things) the first African-American woman to star in a major film and a noted contributor to the Civil Rights Movement; and a brass clock gear as a reminder that we are not just cogs in a machine, here.

A Lion in Winter (microcollage amulet, front view)

On the back, an Art Nouveau image of Alphonse Maria Mucha's plate L'hiver (winter); the fabulous Rider Tarot card Strength, which depicts a woman opening a lion's mouth; a horse from a Tibetan prayer flag, called a Lung ta, which traditionally symbolizes the transformation of bad fortune to good fortune; and a silver elephant charm. Elephants charms have all sorts of meanings; in Indian symbolism, the elephant god Ganesha is known as the Remover of Obstacles, a patron of arts and sciences, and a deva, or deity, of intellect and wisdom. Generally, qualities associated with elephants include wisdom, grace, dignity, power, patience, luck...the list goes on, i.e. they're really nifty.

A Lion in Winter (microcollage amulet with elephant charm, back view)

(The name A Lion in Winter comes from a Broadway play about Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was one of the most powerful, influential and kickass ladies of the Middle Ages; it seemed appropriate to the timing of the gift and the meanings of the amulet.)

The Watcher in the Night was made for a friend of mine who has a very close affinity with owls, and as she's been having something of a dark year I figured an amulet containing and honoring something that can see and hunt and play in the dark would be right and good. The branch our little owl friend is perched in is a painted rosemary twig; rosemary traditionally has the power to avert nightmares.

Watcher in the Night (microcollage amulet with rosemary twig)

Stay warm, my friends.

The Lion in Winter: miniature vintage print collage, pendant frame, sterling elephant charm, gold chain. Dimensions: 2" x 1 1/2".

The Watcher in the Night: miniature vintage print collage, silver ink, rosemary, pendant frame, silk cord. Dimensions: 1 1/2" x 1".

Gifts.

severed heads and seven veils, or a short(ish) history of Salome

2012-01-03T21:33:00.005-05:00

Salome Headdress, January 2012

It is actually difficult for me to know how to begin to write about Salome because the moment I introduce her name you are probably already somewhere else, drowning in visions of severed heads and seven veils, and I'm going to have to work a little just to wrest back your attention. Or else you don't know what I'm talking about at all, and that's almost as difficult.

Okay. Storytime. Salome was the daughter of Queen Herodias and stepdaughter of her mother's second husband, Herod Antipas - yes, the Herod who figures in the story of the death of Jesus - who was half-brother to her mother's first husband, Herod Philip I. She is not named in the Bible, but these family details, given to us by the account of the historian Josephus, allows us to determine that Mark 6:21-29 refers to her. And her is a King James version of that passage:

"And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist.

And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, and brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother."

Now, I want you to read this carefully. Great. So now you are aware of the fact that it was Salome's mother who wanted John the Baptist's head on a platter. Which leads me to a mild conjecture, here. We have a pretty vague temporal period for Salome's life (c AD 14 - between 62 and 71, if you'll believe Wikipedia). Nor does the quote in question make any reference to the dance being lascivious. The conclusion I have drawn from these two facts is that the traditional story (sexy young thing does suggestive dance for dirty-old-man stepfather and promptly demands severed head as compensation) is full of holes, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that Salome wasn't actually a cute little girl cheering up a grumpy, bored, tired, stressed tetrarch with a goofy folk dance. And then, when offered a reward by the king, off she goes like a good girl to ask her mother for advice. And Herodias suggests a nice head on a platter, and Salome, not knowing any better, goes back obediently and asks for it.

This makes further sense if you know that the Gospels claim John the Baptist condemned Herodias' marriage to Herod Antipas as incestuous (since he was her ex-husband's half-brother - although this still seems less icky to me than marrying one's cousin, a practice which remained fairly uncondemned until, oh, a hundred years ago) and that Josephus claims John's popularity made him a dangerous rebellious influence. The plain fact that her mother told her to, however, does not seem to have dissuaded a single male painter from portraying Salome herself as the licentious, seductive manipulator who callously sent poor old John to his doom. (Of course, the fact that the line in Leviticus usually quoted to "prove" the evil of homosexuality -- which says men who lie with men as with women should be stoned -- is just below a line prescribing the same punishment for adulterers somehow has not led to claims that people who have affairs should be excluded from the rights and rites of marriage. Weird! It's like people pick and choose!)

Where am I going with all this? Oh yeah. I've been inspired to create a choreography around the story of Salome. There have been hundreds and hundreds of iconic Salome dances, but all of them have hinged on the idea of Salome being sexy. I want to play with the idea of a younger, more innocent Salome, dancing happily at a birthday feast, being used to carry out a rather horrible political execution. And also I would like to imagine her ten years afterwards, and what it might be like to be a woman who all the world will see, not just now but for all time, as the personification of destructive femininity and dangerous sexuality when all you ever meant to do was listen to your mother. What would it feel like to have that forced upon you, to carry that death with you, to face the act of dancing after the repercussions of that dance?

In all the portrayals I have ever seen, not one person - male or female - seems to have taken it upon themselves to ask that question. We're all too fascinated with her dance of death. She lived to marry twice and have three children, if Josephus is to be believed -- and yet the only thing we ever think about is that single, life-ending dance. (There is no evidence whatsoever that she did a 'dance of the seven veils' - that was a later addition to the story.)

Furthermore, the story of Salome is inextricably caught up with the history of bellydance. Look: here are some famous Western paintings of her prior to the 1800s.

Salome (Fra Filippo Lippi, c. 1452 to 1465)

Salome (Albrecht Durer, 1511)

Salome (Lucas Cranach, c. 1530)

Salome (Titian, 1550)

Salome II (Michelangelo, c. 1609)

Salome (Jacob Hogers, c. 1630 to 1655)

Hey, you know what's funny about these pictures? First of all, she's hardly dancing. Even the most scandalous of all, the Hogers image, is not exactly depicting her doing the hootchie-kootchie (although showing that much ankle was admittedly fairly equivalent, back in the 1600s, if not more so). Secondly: she's white. She's a Christian-looking gal in a Christian-looking palace. Well, that's odd. Because last I checked Salome was a Jewish princess dancing in Galilee two thousand years ago. Right, before there were any Christians.

Well, of course painters painted what they knew, and there's nothing wrong with that. No, what's interesting is what happened in the 1800s, after Napoleon sent his troops into Egypt and all of a sudden the Middle East was the hip place for bored white Western men to fantasize about. Not to make a joke out of what happened there, but it's so absurd that if I don't laugh I might cry. Let me point out that although there were women doing a dance back then from which modern bellydance traces a direct lineage in terms of movement vocabulary, men weren't allowed to see it. So any men who brought back stories or images of exotic Oriental dancers were either lying or paying prostitutes to dance for them, or both. (And why would a prostitute perform anything but a salacious dance?) (Let's also recall that the word harem means women's quarters. That's right, not "exotic boutique of sex slaves." Place where ladies live. Where men can't see them unless they're related, especially not crass, lascivious, colonialist French dudes. That being no kind of story at all, however, the Western visitors took it upon themselves to just make shit up.) Okay, cool, now you've got the picture. So what happened? Well, the whole school of painting we call the Orientalists sprang up. And pretty soon Salome enjoyed a little resurgence in popularity. Only this time she looked like this:

Salome (Pierre Bonnaud,1865)

Salome (Henri Regnault,1870)

Salome (Gustave Moreau, 1876)

Salome (Maurycy Gottlieb, 1879)

The Stomach Dance (from Oscar Wilde's Salome)

Salome (Lucien Levy-Dhurmer, 1896)

Salome (Alphonse Mucha, 1897)

The Daughter of Herodias Dancing (James Tissot, 1886-1896)

Salome (Lovis Corinth, 1900)

Salome (Franz von Stuck, 1906)

Salome/Judith II (Gustave Klimt,1909)

Well, what have we here? First of all: tits. Yowza. Breasts everywhere. Apparently the Bible neglected to mention that bit. Because, you know, it's so reticent where inappropriate female sexual behavior is concerned. And second of all: although not every one of these ladies looks exactly Middle Eastern, there sure is a lot more of the kind of adornment and drapery lying about that we Westerners know sure as shooting wasn't kicking around any sorta Christian palace. You know, tiger skins, fancy rugs, jeweled headdresses, big earrings. These are a very far cry from the tame and tidy little ladies Michelangelo & Co were painting looking faintly scandalized and averting their eyes from John's nicely served-up skull.

Now, fast-forward a few more years. I'm going to skip some stuff, although I don't want to. Basically, a bunch of Western ladies (Theda Bara, Mata Hari, Fritzi Schaffer, Maude Allan, Mary Garden, Alla Nazimova...) decided to play dress-up. Their costumes, inspired largely by the Orientalist painters, went ahead and set the stage for representations of "bellydancers" in the West. Okay, okay, here's a couple to look at:

Fritzi Schaffer as Salome, c. 1910

Mata Hari, early 1900

Did I mention that the word "bellydance" didn't even exist until the 1893 Chicago World Fair, where a promoter named Sol Bloom used it to refer to the performance of Little Egypt? It's a translation of the French name for the Middle Eastern dance traditions involving pelvic movement, danse du ventre, which literally does mean "dance of the belly." (Although, at that point in dance history, not much stomach movement was really involved -- my personal theory was the Westerners were so freaked out by the idea of a woman's hips and pelvis moving that they couldn't even bear to refer to it and therefore generalized vaguely to the area above. But that's just me.) Where the hell was I? Oh right. Okay. At that time in the Middle East, women actually practicing these dance traditions were wearing far less revealing costumes. But tourist trade and traffic from the West was increasing in the Eastern cabarets all through the first part of the 20th century, and those dudes were looking for what they were seeing back home in America, in dance theaters and in films: ladies in little beaded tops shaking their what-have-yous. Therefore, traditional dance costuming underwent the following transformation:

Samia Gamal (1949)

Chawazee, Cairo (David Roberts, 1842)

("Chawazee" is a spelling of "Ghawazee", the name of one of the most famous dancing tribes in Egypt, whose traveling female performers gave rise to the classic Egyptian style of bellydance, raqs sharqi -- literally, "dance of the East" -- by the beginning of the 20th century. Samia Gamal is one of three major dancers who developed and influenced the Egyptian style of the first half of the 20th century within film and at the iconic 1920s cabaret run by businesswoman Badia Masnabi.)

Maybe it doesn't look that different. But what it represents is not a gradual transition within a country's own history, but a rewriting of an Eastern, female dance form by a Western male fantasy. Perhaps Samia Gamal would have ended up dressed like that a hundred years later even without any Western intervention -- but the fact is that as it happened it was American and European men who dressed her, not her grandmothers in the dance. I'm rushing this a lot. Sorry for all the stuff I'm leaving out. (Go look it up! It's fascinating!) But anyway. Fast forward a while more, to the present day. Much of this history has been forgotten, or has to be pieced together, or is considered basically derelict now that we're out of that horrible 1970s, I-dream-of-Jeannie, make-your-husband-a-sultan phase...

Ray Mirijanian's Music for Belly Dancing (1970s)

And now something interesting is happening. The most amazing and talented dancers of the modern day are changing their costumes. And here are some iconic images of them:

Rachel Brice

Deb Rubin

Zoe Jakes

These are some beautiful, hard-working ladies.They are Western dancers who combine the classic movement vocabulary traceable back to the Ghawazee with articulations of their own, ranging from hip-hop to yoga to vaudeville, for a style we call Tribal Fusion bellydance. These are some of the pioneers in the Tribal Fusion community. Their work is absolutely astonishing, and though you can call it seductive if you want, these are powerful, strong, women who very much own themselves and carry themselves with both an air of regalness and a sense of humor, which makes them hard to objectify. Now, I want you to look at their costumes for a while. Remind you of anything?

Salome Dancing Before Herod (Gustave Moreau, c. 1875)

I don't know about you, but I find the similarities in costuming to the Orientalist Salomes astonishing. Astonishing mainly because although we regularly acknowledge the role of the Orientalists in the development of the history of bellydance in the early 20th century, I have nowhere seen a reference to the fact that dancers in the early part of the 21st century are now adorning themselves with precisely the sort of style espoused by painters in the late 1800s. Go back and look at the headdress Levy-Dhurmer's Salome is wearing, or Alphonse Mucha's belt. Yes, Fritzi and Maude were wearing this stuff in the late teens and twenties, but then it went away. After them we got goofy crap like this from Rita Hayworth until the 60s, after which I refer you back to Mr. Mirijanian's friend, above. It wasn't until the 80s that we even started to get a break from this kind of gauzy, glitzy, Disney-version-of-the-Orient crap.

Well, I think that's pretty interesting. And more and more, here in the West, I see a shift in style away from the harem pants and towards the luscious, draped, headdressed style the Tribal Fusion divas are rocking. Dancers who are trained in the classical Egyptian styles aren't doing this at all, mind you, but Tribal Fusion is exploding as a style and this shit is in. And nobody's talking about Salome. Well, I want to talk about Salome. So I made myself a fabulous, vintage-y, over-the-top headdress, and I put Salome in it.

And I will do my dance for her, I suppose, in the hopes that she is remembered for what she might have been, and not what she was made to be. Because for all of us to simply take her on, without a second thought or second glance, is to say that we don't care what story is told about our dance. But I do. I really do.

A Box of Sky (Invocation for the New Year)

2012-01-02T00:01:00.002-05:00

...Don't you know yet? Fling the emptiness out of your arms
into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds
will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

- Rainer Maria Rilke, First Duino Elegy, trans. Stephen Mitchell

(Haven't you grasped it yet? Throw from your arms the nothing that lies between them
into the space that we breathe as an atmosphere --
to enable the birds, perhaps, in new zest of feeling
to hurl their flight through the expanded air.

trans. John Waterfield)

The first night of a new year, filled with the sound of the rain and the radiator gurgling away to itself in the dark. Here is a box I made, a few months back actually, a little afternoon project to fill a corner of the Night Garden with feathery paper wings. This evening, invoking Rilke, it seems right enough to have them along.

They're a bit blurry in the closeup; the only camera I had to hand was my grouchy old Canon point-and-shoot, which is beginning to make truly horrible crunching noises when I turn it on. Of course, I could say I did it on purpose, to give the illusion of flight...but I think really I'd rather make it clear that I at least theoretically know how focus works....

And Rilke -- oh, that image, seeing the whole sky resonate with the flinging open of your arms, all the birds afire with the opening of your heart! I think for me these lines more than almost any others carry the sense of the immensity of joy, its clarity and transparency in the moment of turning your face to the world and crying: I am so grateful. If I have a wish for the year that is emerging now out of the mists, it is for something like this, for a sense of flight, of giving my whole self over to the fantastical beauty of existence. For a long time I have been toying with the idea of becoming an artist, which is to say that I have been wistfully making things; because I am young, and relatively debt-free, and healthy, and without attachments, and very, very lucky, and because if not now then when, I am going to spend this year doing the audacious and mildly idiotic thing of trying to take myself seriously as a maker of art. Because either I have what it takes to actually make my way through the world by means of my creative fire, or I don't; and far better to find out now, when the consequences of failure are small (after all, I can always get another cafe job) and the meaning of success is astronomical (think of how much more of my life I'll get to spend doing what I love!).

My marvelous friend Rae, in her reflections for the new year, gives a lovely thought to the determination to immerse oneself completely in a meaningful practice. What happens then, she says, is transformation: i am not separate. i am not someone making art, i am art creating itself over and over again in every new moment with a distinct and precise mindfulness. from this process sacred objects are sometimes born and these are the things that we usually point to and call art.

The birds, hurling themselves gladly through space -- I want, this year, to open the sky for them.

bellydance update: waltz of the sugar plum belly

2011-12-16T16:50:00.004-05:00

There's some video footage kicking around these days from Dancing into the Dark, the bellydance performance I featured in last month along with Chaya Leia, Sahina and Sarah Jezebel Wood. I'm working on a video of Sahina's beautiful solo from the show, Autumn Winds, which will be up soon, but in the meantime here's my goofy, mostly-improvised, holiday-themed piece, Waltz of the Sugar Plum Belly, which was an experimental foray into a project I've just started working on: the recreation of the entire Nutcracker Ballet as a subversive bellydance spectacular. Subversive Nutcrackers already exist, of course (I'm thinking of The Slutcracker, the amazing Boston-based burlesque show, in particular) but I do feel that this one would be a pretty phenomenal reimagining.

I shot most of the show on a little two-bit camcorder dragged in at the last minute, and since I was handling the camera work, when it came to my solo I just stuck the camera on the tripod, pointed it at the stage and hoped for the best; I tried to do my best to try not to sashay right out of the shot, with moderate success in my first piece and utter failure in my second (which is why you won't be seeing it here). Not, perhaps, the world's best advertisement of my videography skills, but I got a big kick out of doing this piece and I'll just have to trust to Sahina's solo to showcase the wonders I can produce with poor lighting and a point-and-shoot camera. The music for this piece is a remix of Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Sugar Plum Fairy I found on Youtube; I downloaded it on a whim, and then when I went back to find out who had made the remix I could not for the life of me find the video. So, please, if you happen to know who's responsible for this little bit of mixological magic, get in touch with me so I can give correct & enthusiastic credit!

the poetics of space (ix): a collection of marvelous museums

2011-12-07T21:09:00.003-05:00

Note: This post originally appeared in January of 2011 on an outdated blog, now fairly defunct. The extreme excellence of these museums, however, is more relevant than ever. If the state of the world, and especially politics, is getting you either wholly worked up or down in the dumps, just remember that people are still building fantastical, phenomenal things for the sheer fabulous hell of it. It will help with the panicking. Trust me.

One day I will build a museum that is the delighted child of every collection of the marvelous, a gracious bow to the old cabinets of curiosity in how they strove to show the great harmony of being, a grand new dance of entrancing exhibition...but in the meantime, here is a selection of some other magical locations in which the dust of fascination sinks slowly through the dark:

The Main Street Museum, White River Junction, VT

The closest I have ever been to this fantastic idea is its website, but my friend Sarah assures me it is as bizarre and wonderful as it appears: full of peculiar taxidermies and objects in assorted wonderous categories such as "Carbon; Color as a Hysterical Reaction; Cute Things; Flocking; Objects Chewed by Pets; Teeth, More Teeth, Things with Nail-holes; 'Things Made from Animals or Parts of Animals,'" etc. (from their Wiki)

The Museum Of Jurassic Technology, Los Angeles, CA

Now, I have been here, and it was one of the two times in my waking life I have ever felt like I was entering into the space of my dreams. The exhibits range from Napoleon-inspired collages to alchemical clock experiments to superstition boxes; above, please examine a lovely mosaic made entirely from butterfly scales arranged with a boar's hair, viewable only under microscope. The place itself seems at first glance to be a small and shabby warehouse, but like all good dream places it is far larger on the inside, and the dark halls carry the uncanny sense that you had better look at everything, because even if you are lucky enough to find yourself in the same room a second time there is no guarantee that it will be the same...

The Museum of Love, now accessible only via the gardens of nostalgia and the internet

My father built this delightful and peculiar website for his 40th birthday party. It probably explains a lot about me. If pictures survive, I'm still too young to see them. This will be true at least until my deathbed. This most excellent image, however, called The Museum of Love and Mystery, by the equally excellent Jim Woodring, will suffice to show the spirit of the party. (In fact, if the "Dutch Uncle of Dreamland" wasn't there, it was just because the merry-go-round had other plans for him that night.)

Why is this included? You don't know my father, after all (although you probably should; he's a swell guy.) Why, indeed? Because more people should do this, that's why -- leave living (if dusty) monuments to odd events scattered in the back alleys of cities and the internet in order that somebody might stumble upon them one day and think wow, that musta been a real weird good time! hmmmmm, maybe it's about time I got around to throwing me one a those...And thus, of course, are revolutions born.

This is probably the time to explain that my father is responsible for a great deal of what I know and love about the truly weird and the wildly beautiful. He also has a wonderful recipe for absinthe, a copy of which I was promised upon my 21st birthday, but the 3rd anniversary of that grand holiday is fast approaching and so far no dice. (It is, of course, a closely guarded secret.) A semi-thwarted alchemist, my dad had to content himself with growing wormwood in a hidden El Cerrito backyard and consulting books on alembics for proper distallation techniques. I did my bit by testing for methanol content, i.e. drinking a lot.

(Oh yeah - and if you like this, you may also enjoy this visually outdated but still hilarious whimsical internet toy, also courtesy of Mr. Josh Senyak...)

The Museum at Purgatory, a book by Nick Bantock

This is not the Museum at Purgatory, but rather a 15th century
illumination: 'Souls Released From Purgatory' from the
'Hours of Catherine of Cleves' at the Morgan Library &

Museum, borrowed from the Wall Street Journal's website.

I was not highly taken by Griffin and Sabine, although as a lover of artist books, arcane letters, collage, inventiveness and the macabre I have been told that my feelings on the matter are nonsensical and I'm just jealous I didn't think of it. This is not true in the least; I'm jealous I didn't think of The Museum at Purgatory, which is not only a cabinet of curiosity in the form of a book but also takes place in an ever-shifting city that I thought I had invented, at the age of sixteen, in a short story called The Man in the Orange Silk Shirt. Apparently there are multiple gateways to that marvelous and melancholy metropolis, as it seems evident that Bantock's Purgatory is the same bloody place as my unnamed citadel...(I will find the story somewhere and present quotes from the two texts side by side, but it will have to wait until after my laptop's quite done self-destructing and I can find my files again.) Anyway, this book gave me shivers of delight: instead of letters, it displays wonderful invented artifacts, from an imaginary geneology of spinning tops to a set of archaic altar boxes. It takes to the luscious extreme the longing inherent in books written on collections, from the section on The Collector in Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project to the cabinets in Bruce Chatwin's Utz: the reader's desire to see the magnificent object in all its strange and holy order.

The WebMuseum: Joseph Cornell

Here you may see collected images of the work of Joseph Cornell. Their physical forms are all over the place; there is no Cornell museum, although Robert Coover's The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) and Charles Simic's Dime Store Alchemy: The Art of Joseph Cornell are essentially hybrid museums in themselves, prose poems displaying Cornell's essence as surely as the bottles in the Pharmacy (left) display their mystic contents, the books themselves like the careful, crafted cabinets...

There are those you don't discover until you find that you have been following their spirit's leavings for the last two hazy decades. I did not know Cornell existed until I was already making things he might have loved. But without his starry influence, silent and spidery, would it has passed into my blood, this love for old encyclopedias, small krakens, tiny bottles, amulets and charms...?

work in progress: The Night Garden, imagined

2011-12-03T12:48:00.003-05:00

If you are curious at all how I managed to come up with such a peculiar thing as I am currently constructing in the main room of my apartment, here is its essential creative genesis, as written out by me on January 14th, 2011, when I'd idly stuck some tent poles in our dark hole of a living room and wondered how on earth to make a room with no windows an enjoyable place to be.

There is a city sleeping in my house right now, a labyrinth, a dream of fronds and pebbles glossy underwater, a reverie, a columbarium, a living room. Think of that: a room that is alive, that could breathe life into us, a room we could inhabit like the two cupped hands of a garden. I have not built it yet. But it is there, peaceful, waiting for me to draw it from the realms of the unmanifest into the manifest. It is a room without windows, a funny little cave blown open by the gust from the front door, and therefore it must be a night garden, full of the wondrous damp plants that love the dark and exude like jade perfume the earthy smell of moss and root and wet soil. I woke up the other morning and the whole room was in my head, a splendid hothouse Parisian cafe dream of longing for lands of sun and minaret among the mist and iron lampposts.

Imagine if the Art Nouveau paintings were a place, if the unfurling struts of Alphonse Mucha's artwork were delicately folded into a doorway. For his paintings have no ordinary backgrounds, seem glimpsed instead through scrollwork, a tracery of leaves, more kaleidoscope than landscape and yet inviting and warm as the door to some grand salon swung briefly open to reveal a burst of light and laughter, the smell of blossoms, fragrance, smooth bare shoulders fresh as peaches in the winter night. Though they now exist on everything from necklaces to iPad cases (seen, for example, at left, decorated with two panels from Les Heures du Jour, 1899, 'Repos de la nuit' and 'Éveil du matin'), when has a room ever been built that allows you to step into the brocaded intricacies of his imagination?

Victor Horta, later Baron Horta, came perhaps the closest with the Hôtel Tassel --and why is it that I can only find pictures of this bloody stairwell? Here are two different views of it, both lovely; of course other pictures do exist, but they all seem rather barren compared to the living curves and fernlike profusion here at the turning of the steps. I have yet to see a room by Horta that seems as alive and sinuous as this movement between floors....

Another marvelous place my living room has its roots well folded into is the Chapel of the Chimes, a columbarium built by Julia Morgan in Oakland, California. This place seems more holy library than repository of death, a labyrinth full of exquite vaulted chapels full of open stonework windows, so that from afar you may see one room full of a sacred light but when you try to reach it you find yourself inexplicably elsewhere, in a mossy garden echoing the sound of water, or a hallway like the spine of a magical beast...

And I am influenced, of course, by the tattooed work of the great Gustave Moreau, whose Salome Dancing Before Herod helped shift the river not only of art but also of ten centuries' worth of dance...but that's another story. For now, his mystic space, o ye spirits, how he sees light...everything bathed in a kind of moonlight, the spray of a fountain, the silvering of stars at twilight. His paintings are draped with dreamers, sleepers, visionaries...as if he understood before anyone what Baudelaire meant by La Chambre Double.

An Orientalist, to be sure, but one interested in the realm of reverie; his Salome, dancing, is not a lewd seductress but a mystic, in a trance state...later artists (including Mucha) painted her increasingly as a scheming strumpet, but Moreau allowed her a kind of dignity (with the exception of a peculiar watercolor of such a completely different style I feel brazenly entitled to overlook it entirely. This not being an art criticism lecture but a sheerly personal imagining, I will simply pretend it doesn't exist...) (Do you see the moss that creeps into Cleopatra's room? How wonderful -- not the usual violent female Pharoah up to her elbows in blood and rose petals, but a woman caught between two worlds, the earth coming to speak to her in the splendor of her chambers...)

And finally, there is my own last, lost, living room, an ode to Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin, Gaston Bachelard, Lewis Carroll and Louis Aragon. I don't miss it; I hadn't learned how to make a sacred space a living one. It was magical, oh yes, but not really all that functional; it was hard to actually inhabit it. What I want, really, is some kind of living library, a cathedral of images simultaneously vast and mutable and snug, a place to sit and read and dream and laugh at once grounded in this world and opening onto another, full of strange streets and mystic possibilities, a room that opens up like a book. Actually I would like a whole house like this, but that's probably a little ambitious...

the poetics of space (viii): a fool for god and magical books

2011-12-02T22:51:00.002-05:00

Webs New Inner Diction, 2007

What is this stunningly beautiful thing you're looking at here?

It's an altered book sculpture by the artist Brian Dettmer, whose work is really so extravagantly and exquisitely extraordinary and gorgeous that I have to go and look at pictures of the things he makes in little quick dips over the course of several days because they're so beautiful it hurts me.

I will say more about this in a moment.

Someone I absolutely cannot remember at all introduced me to Brian Dettmer when this unknown person & I were in a class together and it occurred to him (I know it was a him) that I might like Mr. Dettmer's work. He sent me an email with a link to some photos. This was maybe three, four years ago. I can't find the email. I hadn't even thought of it for, oh, two or three years.

I was reminded of it yesterday when I saw this. Some friend of mine had put up a link on Facebook to a story about a mysterious paper sculptor who was leaving stunning little pieces of art all over libraries in Edinburgh, Scotland. (It's really a rather lovely story - you may wish to read all about it, and look at the lovely pictures too. I recommend it. Ten sculptures, left in ten different libraries & museums as tokens of love & gratitude, each made with wonderful visual and textual puns from a carefully-chosen text...if you can resist this sort of stuff, you'd probably best stop reading now.)

Gift left in the Writer's Museum, Edinburgh, Scotland

I would have enjoyed all this on any occasion, but I found it profoundly and specially mysterious and wonderful because eight hours previously I had been struggling to describe something very oddly similar: a sculpture of Salome literally carved out of the interior of a Bible. I had been finding it quite difficult to put into words the physical characteristic of the sculpture, the way it was crafted, its shape and texture and the way it was made from the book. And then, boom, just like that, the next morning the internet presents me with the image.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the book sculpture I was describing does not actually exist, or rather, does not exist in this temporal and spatial dimension, which make sit somewhat difficult to provide pictures of. It is the creation of a character in a novel. Because, as it turns out, I am writing a novel.

This comes as rather a surprise.

A Fool For God is the working title of the novel I started writing on November 3rd for National Novel Writing Month, also known as NaNoWriMo. Today, December 2nd, I am about 35,000 words in, which is certainly nowhere near the NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 in 30 days (and even then that's a pretty slim novel), but it is approximately 30,000 more words than I have ever consecutively put on paper outside of the demands of academia. The longest story I have ever written is quite possibly lost to obscurity forever; it was called The Man in the Orange Silk Shirt (or it should have been) and it was about a man without a name living in a city in constant flux, where a cafe might at any time become a bathhouse and canals that dry up and become billiard tables, etc, who falls in love with a woman he meets only to have the city simply shift them apart just when it's getting good, etc etc. It was maybe 15 Word document pages, so around, yes, 5,000 words or so.

Does this matter? Well, in this case, yes.

Though words on the whole are one of my favorite things in the entire world, the only attempt at a novel of my own that I've ever considered for longer than 30 seconds as a serious possibility is some scandalous iteration of a Harlequin Romance that would simultaneously revolutionize what is, let's be honest, a fairly dopey medium while also quietly making me a huge pot of money at the hands of the sort of people who read romance novels without realizing that they are (gasp!) being subverted by my clever whatsits. (Needless to say, so far I have written precisely zero pages of this mindbending work.) The reason that I am suddenly over halfway through a novel I simply didn't know existed is because as it turns out the NaNoWriMo format is kind of a magic trick, at least as far as I'm concerned.

I started writing it because I was sitting in a cafe on November 1st and writing in my journal, which up until now is the only sustained writing practice I have had (beyond this, anyway, which is closer in my opinion to declamation than composition, so I don't count it) and I started wondering why I'd never written anything narrative-driven of any length at all, considering my deep and earnest love of storytelling. And hey - it's the first day of NaNoWriMo, wouldja look at that. Okay, Jericha. Why not do it? See if you've got a novel in you!

I have recently become an artist model, and I spend several hours a week being paid to stand perfectly still while people turn me into art. This is as far as I'm concerned an absolutely impossibly magical job, and it gives me a great deal of mental space in which to do a great deal of essentially useless imaginative thinking. Such as, for example, conjecturing the plot of a novel out of thin air and a lot of stolen references. I came up with a plot on November 2nd while posing by cobbling together my favorite bits of several utterly incompatible novels (including but not limited to The Man Who Was Thursday, Adventures in the Skin Trade, Tropic of Capricorn, Through the Looking Glass, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, and The Hearing Trumpet. If you have not been introduced to any of these fine books, I would point out that making their acquaintance will probably help enormously in deciphering the more peculiar associations of my psyche.)

An average novel ranges from 50,000-80,000 words, according the ever-infallible internet, and so the simple thought behind NaNoWriMo is that by encouraging you to write a mere 1700 words a day for 30 days you can finally extract that great work that lurks permanently in the recesses of most book-loving craniums. I'm sure it doesn't work for everyone - but listen, if you sat me down and told me to write a noel, GO, I'd have a whole lot of nothing. But I can do 1200 words a day. I can't do 1700, as it turns out - that's why I'm only at 35,000 - but I can do 1200 words a day more than no words at all, which turns out to be a lot. I can sit down and write 1200 words. They might not be brilliant, or relevant, but I can write them. One foot in front of the other kind of thing. One day at a time.

And so, all of a sudden, I have this book. And I had a plot, but it's wandered off to get a look at the scenery and in the meantime everyone it was supposed to be supervising has got wind of their freedom and decided to do things their own way. Which is to say that I sit down to write every day and I have almost no idea what's going to happen next. For example, the character who makes the Salome book was very emphatically and definitely not invented by me. George, my main character, is coming up to the book bindery he runs and he looks up at the top floor window and wonders if Sarah is there. Who the hell is Sarah? Well and all of a sudden there she is, scowling, and snarling and throwing things and making these beautiful works of art in a damp attic. Oh. And just to make sure I've got the picture, along comes Circumstance and pops up all these heartbreakingly fantastical images of artist books through the entirely unrelated medium of Facebook, just to make sure I've got the point, which is probably something like you're really not in charge here. Which is entirely wonderful and absolutely fine with me.

Log 1, Brian Dettmer, 2007

Writing this book has become a process much more like reading than writing; 1200 words is approximately one scene, and each time I sit down to write I'm not sure quite what's going to happen, and then I discover it, and then just when I'm not quite sure what's about to happen next it turns out I've done my daily words & it's time to get up and leave it for tomorrow. This keeps things in a marvelous state of suspension and excitement I had no idea existed. I haven;t the faintest clue if it's any good; I couldn't care less. Okay, yes, I hope I get published and make oodles of money and the book gets turned into a magical sparkly film with fabulous effects and a Philip Glass soundtrack. To pretend otherwise would be an utterly filthy lie. But I am delighting in the writing of it in an entirely unexpected way. It's December now and NaNoWriMo is over, and I can't put my word count up for all the world to see; but I keep it on a sticky note on my desktop so I can see it. And then I look at things like this, or Su Blackwell's astounding and delicate book art, and how much it looks like the inside of my head and the art I most want to make. And I think that I am probably so steeped in books by now that I'm not really writing at all; I'm just sweating story at this point, sponge-like, leaving words trailing behind me like snail-slime. Books! They will never die; humankind will never weary of them. The internet exists just in part to exult over the wonders of the tangible world. How else, indeed, could I share these beautiful things with you?

the poetics of space (vii): a winding path

2011-11-26T20:34:00.004-05:00

There was a moment in 2008 that changed the way I dance.

I was at Rakkasah East, the biggest bellydance festival on the East Coast, performing in what I believe to be the first piece put on a bellydance stage by a group from a university dance department - in this case, one choreographed & created by Donna Mejia, who I've mentioned before, and performed by her along with dancers from the Five Colleges (Smith, Hampshire, Mt Holyoke & UMass, anyway; I don't think we had anyone from Amherst. You can see it here.)

I was a decent dancer, considering the extent of my training; I'd been teaching beginner classes at Hampshire for a couple of years, and Donna was doing a pretty awesome job of kicking my butt (because she does that). But we were sitting in the audience at Rakkasah and the Solstice Ensemble came onstage, and although all four dancers walked on like they owned the floor and moved in stunningly mindblowingly beautiful ways, one of the dancers stood out to me as if she had a spotlight on her - and this, you understand, was before the dance actually began. I don't think anyone could have ever found the words that would make me understand what her simple act of walking onto the stage managed to convey. To say I was struck by the importance of posture sounds almost idiotically simple and dry, but it's not; it's the difference between a good dancer and one whose movements can break your mind in half. (And here, just in case you were wondering, is what they looked like when they actually started dancing...)

(Note: this video is actually from Tribal Fest 2009, but I am absolutely certain I saw them perform it at Rakkasah, even though I can't find the video anywhere.)

I didn't know the name of the dancer who affectedly me so fiercely (she's the one with the dark hair that's sort of spilling down, and the white flower in it, and if you can't tell why I thought she was more awesome than the rest of them I don't blame you; they're all spectacular) but I went away awestruck, and I began to teach myself about posture, and convey it in my classes: how you hold yourself alters your dance profoundly, I tell myself and my students both, not just in the actual movements but in the moments between movements, in how you walk and how you pause, in your stillnesses and in your transitions. For me it was a monumental shift in my sense of myself as a dancer: I began to feel that I could bring some fierce and fiery center into how I moved, and I discovered a new elegance, a new articulation, a new clarity in my own movements and in the dancing of those I admired.

Cut to last weekend. I helped organize and host a night of performance in Northampton, where I live, with fellow dancers Chaya Leia and Sahina, and our feature performance was a dancer from New York named Sarah Jezebel Wood. I knew she taught with Sera Solstice in the city, and I watched her perform with delight & awe, but it wasn't until the next morning when I went to her intensive workshop and saw her stretching that it hit me (you, dear reader, of course knew that this was coming) - it was her I had seen on that stage over three years earlier who had so completely realigned my understanding of elegance and grace and performance.

I babbled something about it to her; she looked politely bemused & accepted the compliment graciously. But it really did mean something to me, because the inspiration of her walk, so long ago, has traveled with me down the winding path to the present to reemerge at last just when I am wondering if I really and truly get to make a life out of the things I love. I would suspect the answer's yes. For me, and by extension you, oh dreamers of fantastical things. I suspect that despite the voices howling at us to get jobs we hate and behave like normal people, there are existences to make out of the love of beauty, fire and compassion...

work in progress: The Night Garden, updated again

2011-11-09T21:03:00.001-05:00

The one and only time I have ever been fully freelance was the summer after my first year at Hampshire, when I was living in a tiny, stuffy wooden room with no furniture that opened every night onto the most spectacular thunderstorms I had ever seen, editing how-to cooking videos for About.com and reading MFK Fisher and eating almost nothing but watermelon, asparagus sauteed with garlic, and kalamata olives with monterey jack cheese. (This is one of my more potent foodie recollections.) I wrote a lot of blissfully bad love poetry and practiced bellydance in the oppressive heat every evening as the spidery rain-shadows crawled down my walls and the neighbors escaping their apartments yelled, laughed, and dropped bottles across the way. I don't know if I have ever felt as freely, sweetly independent and creative as I did that summer - until, that is, I quit my job in retail and went back to freelance editing a mere month ago.

Maybe it's not seeing the grouchy public come a-buying every day, each customer sporting what my father calls the "pinched, acquisitive face" of the perpetually dissatisfied shopper. Maybe it's the first bite of winter in the air, setting me to dreaming of magical interiors where the heart can dream fantastic feathered dreams through the white silence of snow. Maybe it's just having so much time to organize my own way all of a sudden -- I've been working full-time in the same kitschy little store since well before I graduated college, after all, my days chopped into tidy pieces determined by a schedule made to fit two dozen people. But it seems to me that I am more inclined than I can ever remember being to sit down and make things. The Night Garden has grown more, in fact, in the last month than in the last full year put together. I am writing a novel, to my own great surprise: it's NaNoWriMo, after all, aka National Novel Writing Month, and both my father and my little sister are industriously turning out their thousand or so words a day. So why not me? I've never written anything non-academic longer than fifteen pages, and all of a sudden I have thirty or more about an unconventional Jewish mystic who is either being plagued by an obnoxious secret society or visited by angels, and characters are showing up uninvited left and right. He is currently emerging from a tunnel I hadn't known about, any more than he did; perhaps I am as a much a fool for God as he is, solemnly obedient to the mysterious paths that appear before me. Or something. Anyway --

Despite the fact that it was nearly 70 today, in mid-November (a week after a freak storm dumped a foot of snow on us, taking our electricity down along with the thousands of still-leafy branches!), there is a delicious satisfaction in taking the time to make beautiful things, knowing that winter is coming and the living things of the world will be hidden soon; for while the sun is dark and the land is barren we must take our joy in the spirit of the world from symbolic things: the dishes we cook from our harvest to share on cold nights, the amulets and shining toys we make to hang among the lights we kindle to keep the dark at bay, the quilts we sew to sleep beneath while winter takes the roof, the gifts we exchange to remind ourselves of the gifts of the earth that will come again in spring. Therefore I am preoccupied with paper trinkets and intricate words and tiny lanterns, trying to find my way to say to the world: thank you, I will honor you throughout the dark...

the poetics of space (vi): entering the memories of others

2011-11-05T11:59:00.002-04:00

I have been meaning to write for some time now about seeing the Oakland Museum's lovely exhibit Michael C. McMillen: Train of Thought this past August, which produced a kind of revelation in me. McMillen is a man who works on both a grand and a minute scale - sometimes simultaneously, as with Red Trailer Motel (2003), an installation built like the doorstep to a ramshackle and decrepit motel of old boards, corrugated tin, and fading painted doors; old tires lie around, and there are grime-encrusted signs for gas and oil, but the state of decay seems (to me, at least) to be occurring in a slightly lunatic landscape, a shabby and weirdly mystical lunar plane not unlike that of George Herriman's Krazy Kat cartoons. It's a full-size installation, which is to say the doors are real doors, and you could park your jalopy in front of it quite naturally (if you could get it past the museum guards, anyway), but there's a wonderful and entirely separate dimension to it: peek into the tiny apertures on the doors, placed just where the suspicious spy-hole goes in ordinary doors, and you'll see inside of each a minute room of elegance and stereoscopic depth -- and movement, too. In one room a tiny ball circumnavigates a tiny pool table; another view of a shabby room with a bleak dark window in the back seems disappointingly lifeless unless you wait long enough to be rewarded by the sight of a fish - yes, a fish - suddenly swimming into view beyond the tiny pane.

(I had never seen scale so ingeniously combined, although I had imagined it for projects of my own: in the original conception of my thesis work, the room I built would be filled with exactly this kind of tiny window, though placed in the covers of books instead of doors, leading to all kinds of tiny and wondrous landscapes. I had neither the technical skill nor the time to make it so, however, and the installation, I think, suffered as a result -- it would have benefited from just such a dreamlike mechanism of entrancement.) Anyway. I was enjoying all the works that I encountered - the Museum, in an inspired act, had planted them throughout its many rooms of California art, so that you might stumble upon them unexpectedly, a technique that for me absolutely added to the sense of wonder and discovery they inspired anyway - and rambling around happily without much purpose when I found the Pavilion. It was in a room apart, a high-ceilinged one, and you had to go round through a long curved alleyway of corrugated steel to get to it, which lent the space a very particular sense of being by a dock, a quay, a place where dark swells would slap against the (unseen) pilings - although I'm not sure I could say why it felt that way, exactly. Have I ever actually been down a dock lined on either side with rusty metal walls far higher than my head? I don't think so. Nevertheless, what happened was a transformation of a room in a museum into a place, a piece of the world with its own identity, located elsewhere - already, before I even got to the installation itself.

As I came around the corner I saw the name of the piece for the first time: The Pavilion of Rain, said the placard, which is a name I might have chosen myself under other circumstances for an artwork of my own design, so resonant a phrase it is to me. Pavilion conjures up images of silk tents and Zen temples; rain, that most mystical and moody of weathers, is especially dear to my heart, and the conjunction of the two pleased me enormously: it put me immediately in mind of a place of prayer and meditation, a dignified and quiet spot in which to appreciate the winds and fogs.

What I had wandered into was a large room, mostly taken up by a flat shallow pool, perhaps roughly 18 feet square. It may have been larger or smaller. The room was filled with a blue crepuscular light, and I use the word crepuscular both for its actual meaning (pertaining to twilight) and for the sound of it, which is to me slightly weird, faintly creepy, and oddly suggestive of vines and slithering things. Twilight can be a time of pure clear azure, but this was a swampy light, as if the shack existed deep in a place where the sun tended to shy away from appearances and low wispy fogs made it their business to rise from the waters.

It did not, I'm now realizing, feel anything like what you might call postapocalyptic, despite the ramshackle and rusty nature of it and its strange, melancholy sense of isolation; visually it could be aligned with, say, The City of Lost Children (I could only find a really awful still to illustrate, but the green water and the decrepit sort-of-steampunk architecture of the pier might give some sense, at least, of the visual parallel - and anyway, everyone should see that film) but it didn't feel like that at all, any more than The Red Trailer Motel -- a relic from a weird and lonely landscape, yes, but one made of an internal melancholy rather than external devastation. I walked down the little rope-edged walkway into the shack and sat down on one of the small benches within. I didn't feel taken aback at seeing this in place of a tidy temple of some sort, as it happens - perhaps because the place itself was so profoundly and utterly complete. Let me explain. What usually irks me about installation art - my own included - is the clarity of the act of installation - even very interesting and thoughtful works still usually have some sense of the place in which they've been put bleeding out around the edges, interfering with my ability to grow totally immersed.The gallery never really vanishes. Such pieces have a tendency to suggest an experience rather than genuinely create one: they give you the tools to imagine or understand another place or time or happening or shade of meaning, but you're still in some part conscious of yourself standing there in the room looking.

Outside the shack, looking at it, that was still there to some extent, though it was pretty muted by the insistence weirdness of the light, the great metal walls curving around, the emphatically life-size scale of the shack. Inside, however, I felt clearly and powerfully that I was sitting not in someone's else's piece of art but inside their memory. And this sensation deepened to a point of absolutely wild intensity when all of a sudden it began to rain.

The Pavilion of Rain (1987-2011) - Michael C. McMillen (photo taken by me!)

The interior of the shack was so weirdly personal that it was hard to cling to the sense of abstraction necessary to remember logically that you are viewing art. I don't mean that there was anything especially cryptic about it, some suggestion of a history that we as viewers couldn't get at, which would have had the opposite effect; I mean that the placement of the windows, the strange light coming through them, the picture hanging by the door, felt to me intensely specific, as if they could only possibly have come out of a very strong and vivid memory, not just of the look of a place but of its feel, its emotional timbre and its resonances of meaning. It felt absolutely like being put into a moment I had never lived through. And the rain -- it had not been raining when I walked in, but all of a sudden there was a faint rattle on the roof, which quickly grew into a downpour. And what absolutely broke open my brain was the fact that the rain was real. It was not the suggestion of rain, not the sound of it, but the actual living joyous dolorous drumming and leaking and pattering of it; it smeared the windows and dripped from the eaves and caught the light and left its peculiar pale shadows on the walls, and I sat there in the wet twilight in that tiny room with its dingy mirror and tried to keep my heart from beating its way out of its chest.

After a while the rain stopped, and gave way slowly to the croaking of frogs, or maybe cicadas. And I sat there in a state of strange suspension, feeling myself dropped body and soul into a moment of someone else's existence - its loneliness and its sense of wonder, its smells and sounds and emptiness. I have yet to experience another work like it, so haunting and alive, so absolute. I have never encountered a work of art that put me so wholly into another world, another sphere of existence totally unknown to me. To take a memory and let others live through it as if it were their own -- that seems to me to be a kind of masterpiece. Let me just say that I was awed. (I am still too humbled by it to be entirely inspired to create something like it of my own, but one day - one day! - I would like to...) More than anything, the realization that I am allowed, if I like, to make it rain in a museum came as a kind of epiphany. Previously I had always thought pretty much only of ways to represent that kind of experience, because, well, that's what artists do. Sitting in the Pavilion was my first inkling that there might honestly be a way to stop symbolizing what I mean and instead somehow really make it! Perhaps that sounds obvious -- but it doesn't feel that way. McMillan, in The Pavilion of Rain, is the first artist of my experience who has skipped merrily past signs and signifiers straight to the signified. Now there, I think, is a worthy ambition.

You can find out more about Michael C. McMillen through the Oakland Museum's press release on the exhibit.

Have Faith in the Color Blue

2011-10-09T21:56:00.003-04:00

A dear friend of mine is building a miniature fairytale castle. What could be more wonderful? She wants it to be a thing she's famous for, someday, a gorgeous minute hand-crafted, hand-designed confection of childhood dreams and very real planning, a thirty-year venture as serious as the building of a full-scale house. (And why shouldn't it be as serious, the making of a shape and shelter for your daydreams? Your body needs a roof, and warmth, but so does your soul...) Me, I ardently love the miniature for the way it concentrates meaning down into amulaic form, so that a tiny teaset gives you all the pleasure of a girlish childhood afternoon to hold within your palm. And while I sometimes cringe at the things that fall into the camp of childlike -- things that are called whimsical or precious when they are merely self-consciously, contrivedly "adorable," like an oversweet old woman playing aggressively at being the child-who-believes-in-fairies -- well, when I was a kid the world did have a total, stubborn, deeply personal wondrousness built into it, and I played quite seriously with the making and remaking and perfecting of dreamy, mystical universes that colored and enhanced and deepened the real one around me. (I am not twee enough to put that in quotes -- the "real" one, as if I had the silly idea that my fantasy world was equally valid or some such toff; as far as I know, that sort of thing is what grownups say patronizingly to children and children don't care about at all. I knew perfectly well what was imagined and what was not. That didn't mean I felt the invented one had no effect, lent no tint whatsoever, to my ordinary days...)

What I admire in this friend of mine is her determination to bring some part of that childhood reverie alive in a creative, artful, imaginative way, instead of clinging to the hope that someday her prince will come and little birds will one day do her dishes and she'll be the fairest in the land forever, etc. So many of us throw away our toys and cling to our childhood ideas. She has brought her toys with her into adulthood, and so has kept with quiet dignity the quality of play that keeps daydream from stagnating into the disillusion or delusion so many women suffer about the arrival of white knights and pretty dresses. Still, despite her wisdom, she suffers from a wistfulness -- a struggle with faith, I'd call it, a sense of being torn between the sweetness of the world that brings us the vocabulary for daydream in all its shades of twilight blue and lemon blossom and love, and the bitterness of knowing that for all its colors and very real, solemn magics, things still unfold with scrambles and suffering too dreary or confused to even make a story out of. Which is true? the soul says, the watercolor sky and the stars shining and the leaves in splendor or the fact that I can't get along with my beloved and there are bills to pay and no happy endings? Where do I place my faith? If I choose the colors of the night, the taste of chocolate, the glow of the lights, and believe that to be the real shape of the world, I will be so unprepared for suffering: happiness is so easy to take away again. And if I choose the long dreary days instead, believe that there's no more than this for us, so as not to be surprised when the cruel moments come, is not my heart already broken...?

So I made her an amulet, a tiny silver prayerbox to whisper in the night: and isn't that this strange and wonderful thing about the world: that you may be certain of both. Somehow we are led to think of the sweetness and bitterness of being as great enemies at war with one another, that one must or should or ought to win and thus wind up somehow more true. Perhaps it would be easier that way, if we could be certain of our allegiances. But I think they exist more peacefully than we believe. A broken heart is no more true than the color blue, in all is majesty and glory. I would like her to have faith in her lovely, airy dreams, to know that the shape of a castle, a butterfly's powdered iridescence, the color blue, are what truth is, the things that make up the world alongside grief and fire and plastic and the sound of the rain. You may celebrate them safely.

Have Faith in the Color Blue (microcollage amulet, front view) -- October 2011


Have Faith in the Color Blue (microcollage amulet, back view)

Have Faith in the Color Blue: miniature vintage print collage, pendant frame, Czech glass beads, silk ribbon. Dimensions: 1 1/2" x 1" x 1/2". Gift.

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Bellydance classes!

2011-10-01T21:52:00.003-04:00

If you're in the Pioneer Valley/Northampton, MA area and are curious about or already love the expressive, joyful, richly historied dance form commonly called bellydance, come check out the class I'll be teaching starting this Wednesday, October 5th! Open to all levels of experience and ability, warm, welcoming, safe and super fun. 5:30-7:00 pm at Studio Helix, 3rd floor of Thorne's Marketplace on Main Street in Northampton. Alternative payment methods available if the class cost presents a financial hardship (just drop me an email). Picking up an 8-class card saves you $$ and gives you an incentive to get yer lovely belly moving with us! (Classes on class cards do not need to be used consecutively & do not expire.) All shapes, sizes, and comfort levels absolutely embraced.

Looking for a dance class but can't make this one? Check out the beautiful & diverse styles of Sahina's classes at Studio 116 in Amherst (she also makes gorgeous costumes!) or Chaya's classes at Blue Guitar Studio in Easthampton. Both of these lovely teachers & performers will be featured at "Dancing into the Darkness," a night of bellydance performance and live music celebrating the joy of dance in the depths of winter, also showcasing Sarah Jezebel Wood. It's coming right up at the Karuna Center in Northampton, MA on Friday Nov. 18 at 8:00 pm. Oh yeah, and I'll be onstage too!

Alice Meets The Others

2011-09-08T23:12:00.004-04:00

The lovely lady who commissioned the Three Seasons of Flowers amulets from me came back with another request: an amulet for a male friend of hers. He likes tiny art things and Burning Man, she said; he spends all year getting ready for it...

So of course I headed over to the Burning Man website and discovered that this year's theme is a particularly resonant one for me: "There are moments of crisis and frisson in our lives," the main page says, "which inform us that we've somehow crossed an inner threshold and are changed. Thus moving from one state of being into an unknown other obliges us to face our innermost insecurities, and it requires faith, a willingness to leap off the ladder of ordered existence. Our theme this year invites participants to join with others in creating rites of passage." Well, cool. I am very much in favor of leaping off that ladder, and so are some of my very favorite artists...


Alice Meets The Others (microcollage amulet, front view) -- Sept. 2011


Alice Meets The Others (back view)

Alice Meets The Others: miniature vintage print collage, reclaimed pendent picture frame. Dimensions: 1 1/2" x 1 7/8" x 3/16". Commission.

I love the idea of Escher -- he of the famous hands sketching themselves -- drawing John Tenniel's* Alice (for who stands more vividly for journeys across inner thresholds than she?) with one of Dali's magical sprouting eggs. (Talk about leaping off the ladder...he melted the bloody thing.) And Chagall, with his goats and his dream-colors and his floating lovers, is certainly a painter of shifted states of being, and also, for me, a painter of faith...

The melancholy sun on the reverse is an alchemical image, from a sixteenth-century engraving; the marriage of the sun and the moon is an important part of the alchemical process, and for the alchemists the transmutation of elements was not only a search for the making of material gold but also a purification of the self into pure and precious matter. And tattooing is one of the many archetypal rites of passage...as is swimming naked, of course. (The Thomas Eakins painting from which I took the nudes is known variously as Swimming, The Swimmers and The Swimming Hole. Nude swimming in the 19th century was the loophole in the prudish restraints set on the display of the body, and I love Eakins for going ahead and presenting us -- in 1885! -- with such a brash portrait of young people enjoying nakedness.)

Going naked in the snow is another rite of passage of sorts, and so it seemed perfectly appropriate to deposit the ambiguously-gendered bathers in the white-blanketed field of Monet's The Magpie...the idea, on the whole, was to introduce some of the great bold and dreamy figures to each other in a new state of frisson, to give a window onto a magical world in which they might collaborate to form new realms of fierce and delicate experience. Hopefully he will find all this appropriate. If not, I shall be glad to keep it for myself...

*Tenniel's drawings for the scene with the sheep in Through the Looking Glass, combined with Carroll's descriptions, are the closest thing I have ever seen to an accurate depiction of the workings of my night dreams...they are very strange and wonderful, and they give me a peculiar feeling of dream homesickness...

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work in progress: The Night Garden, updated

2011-07-15T14:44:00.002-04:00

The truth is that at least one small part of why I was so excited about my recent flower amulets is the fact that I could just sit down and make them and be done. This is not true of The Night Garden, which has been driving me mildly crazy because of the pervasive and persuasive illusion that the hours in the day to finish it simply won't exist as long as I persist in wanting to eat, sleep or see sunlight. I have also admittedly been struggling with a gentle existential panic, i.e. what the hell is this thing for, anyway? Okay, so I went ahead and built a crazy turquoise arbor in my living room; what is it doing here and why have suddenly started seeming like important questions to answer before bothering to going ahead and covering the entire thing with silver detailing inspired by Gustave Moreau's 1876 Salome Dancing Before Herod (Tattooed Salome)...I had always planned on having mirrors as an integral part of the space, adding light and depth and volume in the way that only mirrors can -- it always seems to me that well-placed mirrors give a space a sense of being adrift somewhere on the edges of a silvery lake. And it struck me at some point that with the lovely wood floor and the warm light the room would suddenly become an astonishingly lovely place to dance in. That realization, in turn, seemed to give the whole space an instant and elegant sense of purpose. Bellydance, my beloved dance form, is beautifully attuned to mystical, numinous, extravagant and creative spaces; the movements of the dance, lovely in themselves, seem to harmonize with curvature, rich colors, depth. It is the opposite of a minimalist dance form. (As an example, here is the extraordinary Donna Mejia, an incredible dancer, teacher and choreographer, whose mentorship I have been blessed with and who has taught me to place an extremely high value not only on technique but also the history, practice, culture and ramifications of the collision between Middle Eastern and Western dance traditions...)

Sorry -- distracted by jaw-dropping beauty and power, there. What I mean to say is that the Night Garden is a perfect space for the joy, rhythm, and ass-kicking love for the body that is bellydance. It's still a work in progress, very much so. But it's so much clearer how I want it to feel, how this particular space is crying to be used. It wants to be a garden of celebrations. It wants to be a votive altar to illumination, an invocation to the gods of language who allow us to communicate our moments of grace. It's a small place, and mostly private: I live here, after all. I'm not sure where it was that I lost my once-strong sense of what it was I was trying to accomplish here; perhaps I've simply changed my mind about beauty for beauty's sake being enough if you leave it shut up in your house and give it away to no one. If I couldn't give this room a reason to be beautiful I might go screaming mad and tear the whole thing down in feathery paper shreds around my ears: all this work just to sit in it? But if I can teach someone to dance here, if I can give even a small handful of women a plunge into the blissful, exhilarating experience of inhabiting a drumbeat like it was their own stomping hearts banging inside them, then this room is already exalted, and to make it more beautiful is a kind of prayer. I think. Maybe. We'll see.

a section of the new mirrors

more mirrors...

a slightly better glimpse at the bird detailing

finally finished the gold detailing on the swirlies, an endeavor only slightly less epic that the Sistine Chapel's ceiling

Three Seasons of Flowers

2011-06-29T13:16:00.003-04:00

I do think it's kinda fun to play "spot the famous painting" with these.

Autumn (microcollage amulet, front view) -- June 2011

Autumn (back view)

Spring (front view)

Spring (back view)

Summer (front view)

Summer (back view)

Three Seasons of Flowers: miniature vintage print collage, reclaimed pendent picture frames. Dimensions: Autumn and Summer 1 1/2" x 1 7/8" x 3/16"; Spring 1 3/8" x 1 3/8" x 3/16". Commission.

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the poetics of space (v): the Janus of Joy

2011-06-29T12:50:00.003-04:00

It is a breezy summer morning alive with sunshine, and so of course I am thinking about joy. I say of course because the word joy, when I think it, is full of light and lively sky, shaking watery aquamarine like a white-walled Mediterranean pool of cobalt tile and glass and then the russet and gold of the bed of a stream through the redwoods and then tumbling into nothing to do but dance bare feet deep in the grass, yes that's joy, the bright drench of the air when it's too full to stay its edges and just spills on over into everything.

And here is something that walks a fine line between joy and the numinous:

Microcollage Flower Amulets (front view)

I made these yesterday -- the first commission as an artist that I've ever received, from a woman who saw my Kicking Ass & Taking Names amulets and wanted some of her own to give "to three young women who are learning how to grow flowers." (Isn't that delightful?) Like the previous amulets, they're microcollaged -- the smallest amulet is about 1 1/2" square, and they're made from minute snippets gleaned from vintage poster catalogs. Those are three of Alphonse Mucha's iconic decorative panels from 1896 peeping out there -- Spring, Summer and Autumn -- among flowers gleaned from famous and not-so-famous paintings; van Gogh's Almond Blossoms and cherry blossoms plucked from a Hiroshige landscape have been transplanted into the amulet on the left, for example. (I had even more fun on the back of them...)

Now, amulets for me fall generally into the category of the numinous because they are potent magical objects, first by the grace of their materials (etched glass, intricate silverwork, carved bone, polished stone...all share the virtue of being small, solid lumps of durable matter made mystical by the addition of some special, careful, intentional work by human hands...it will always be hard to feel amulaic properties in any mass-produced object; craft - not necessarily art - seems to matter here) and secondly due to the sense of worlds-contained-in-the-palm-of-the-hand that they seem to carry with them. Amulets are often in the shapes of animals or parts of the body, and this shrinkage, this miniaturization, has a fiercely and decidedly magical sense to it -- small things often seem to be packed more densely with the stuff of existence, as if all the vividness a living elephant contained stayed with it as it shrank down into the ivory charm, so that something just one inch tall still seems to swagger with a whole savannah. (This seems to hold true only to a certain size. Beyond a satisfyingly graspable smallness, miniatures pass out of the realm of the amulaic and into the realm of the merely curious. Microminiatures -- statues in the eye of a needle, say -- are astonishing, but not sacred.)

So these flowery amulets have that property, certainly; I love the bright hothouse lands within them, the complex, intensified, distilled worlds. In them, each element being so carefully chosen, there might be that paradise I claim that numinousness is nostalgia for. But they also make me feel joyful, and joyfulness to my mind is very different than numinousness, and in fact I almost never think of them side by side; it is only in having made these amulets, this week, that it occurred to me that I have never really tried to see how these two quite distinct and phenomenally important feelings of mine fit together. I think I would like to explore this for the first time now. Okay: so what's the joyful element within them? One part is the act of joy in making them, absolutely, the deep, abiding, harmonious pleasure and satisfaction of seeing something minute and lovely emerge under my hands. And one part is just how beautiful they are, little drops of loveliness added to the world, the sense of having created something that is good to look upon and makes the soul expand a little outwards. That lights up at least one important difference between joy and the numinous right away: joy is an outward feeling, a feeling of sharing something. The numinous is an inward feeling. It comes with a sense of secrecy, of the hidden.

(Look, you might ask here: why are you even bothering to compare these feelings? Clearly they're different; okay, so let them be different, what's the big deal? Let me clarify: the reason I want to explore them side by side is because they share a language in my soul, a language full of words like honey and rain and glass, and because my sense of meaning and beauty at the heart of the universe comes -- I am pretty sure of this -- from getting to feel these two feelings. Usually I feel them at different times; sometimes -- in Venice when I was 18, for example -- I think they are the same feeling. I don't know why I have never wondered until now what's going on here. But I am always interested in trying to give voice to things felt deeply for which we have almost no language. So this is a rumination in the service of poetic clarity.)

Alleyway, Sintra, Portugal (Louis Yannucci)

Here, for example, this image. Joyful or numinous? Alleyways for me fall into the numinous: mystery, possibility, things around corners, the sense of the hidden or the forbidden beckoning; the alchemist's guild that might meet there, the secret masquerade ball, the talisman someone dropped that is a key to the labyrinth you have not yet entered, maybe a door into an older, stranger world. But those warm red edges to the windows, such sweet yellow and blue light, the vivid green leaves -- those are joyful things, eliciting in me a rush and a surge of delight. There might simply be a table laid beyond those steps, with good tomatoes and red wine and someone I love and a glimpse of the sea, the sky cloudless high above through the thin pale slice of the tall stones. (Borges is a poet of the numinous; Neruda, a poet of joy.) What is the relation of these feelings? A kind of a Janus: one faced turned outwards with gladness towards what is, the other turned inwards with longing towards what might be.

If I stand by my earlier agreement with Mircea Eliade about the numinous as nostalgia for Paradise, perhaps joy might be characterized by a sense that Paradise was never lost at all, that we are here in it right now...! Joy is the clarity we breathe when all the world feels akin to us, all close and full of laughter. And aha! that leads me to notice: for me, at least, I think of joy as tending towards things already alive (redwoods, flowing water, fresh strawberries warm from the sun, tangled bodies, spring rain), whereas the numinous feels like a kind of alchemy by which dead matter becomes animate, is given a soul (alleyways beckoning, amulets inviting, doors and dark streets suddenly holding breath and potency in their silence...) Maybe that's it: if Paradise is everything alive and full of meaning, well then joy is the celebration of just that, the dance that bows to the things already breathing! And that sense of longing inherent for me in the numinous -- well, I think it's the yearning to sense the same kind of mystery and potency in things made of brick and stone that I feel in trees, in my hands in the earth, in my feet slipped down into water. I am sure it is there -- otherwise I would never be so full of dream cities and mystic cabinets and holy books; I would worship Nature only, and not astrolabes and alphabets as well as almond trees and the color of the sky at dusk...

Yes -- I think that's right. There will always be a sense of loss in numinous things for me, beautiful and melancholy, because the inwardness of the numinous feeling comes from the knowledge that the life of most things is hidden, masked, and only by looking with my best mystical squint will I be allowed to see it. And joy feels so fresh and easy because it comes from things that are alive through and through, unmasked, bare-footed. The creative act feels joyful because it is a pulling of things from the realm of the hidden into the shared realm, the living world of daylight; it builds a doorway to a place that lives only inside me, which is to say: it is a glimpse of what might lie at the bottom of the steps.

Hamsa Medicine Cabinet

2011-06-04T11:23:00.005-04:00

Hard at work on the house, I took a moment to put together this cabinet. The shelves will eventually be filled with bottles of luminous shape, size and mystic properties, of course.

hamsa medicine cabinet (copper flashing, cardboard, papier mache, acrylic, ink) - April 2011

hamsa medicine cabinet (side view)

hamsa medicine cabinet (detail)

"It is things going right," Syme cried, "that is poetical! Our digestions, for instance, going sacredly and silently right, that is the foundation of all poetry. Yes, more poetical than the flowers, more poetical than the stars -- yes, the most poetical thing in the world is not being sick." -- G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday

Hamsa Medicine Cabinet: Copper flashing, cardboard, papier mache, acrylic, gold ink, patina solution (a marvelous, poisonous, cobalt-blue liquid you can buy for twelve bucks a bottle). Built for the Byzantine Bathhouse of Joseph Cornell (formerly known as The Bathroom).

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the poetics of space (iv): you must change your life

2011-05-31T15:19:00.005-04:00

I found a beautiful collection of Jorge Luis Borges' poems at the Bookmill today. One of those strange, perfect days where everything is in alignment, plunged in the sparkling waters of the world up to my eyeteeth, the kind of day where the sky is splendid and small possessions long longed-for appear as if by magic. (Later I found a perfume I bought once, years ago, and have not been able to find anywhere else since -- a spicy, intoxicating scent of vanilla and chai and cardamom, all the way at the back of a bottom shelf of discount beauty products, half-fallen down behind. This is how the universe speaks: in secretive, nuanced jokes.) When I opened the book and glanced down at the page, this --this -- was the poem.

Matthew XXV: 30
And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The first bridge, Constitution Station. At my feet
The shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.
Steam hisses up and up into the night,
Which becomes at a stroke the night of the Last Judgment. From the unseen horizon
And from the very center of my being, an infinite voice
Pronounced these things (things, not words;
This is my feeble translation, time-bound, of what was a single limitless word):
"Stars, bread, libraries of East and West,
Playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars,
A human body to walk with on the earth,
Fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death,
Shadows for forgetting, mirrors busily multiplying,
Cascades in music, gentlest of all time's shapes.
Borders of Brazil and Uruguay, horses and mornings,
A bronze weight, a copy of the Grettir Saga,
Algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood,
Days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,
Love and the imminence of love and intolerable remembering,
Dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,
And memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy,
All this was given to you, and with it
The ancient nourishment of heroes:
Treachery, defeat, humiliation.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
The sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes:
You have used up these years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem."

the poetics of space (iii): musings on the numinous

2011-05-30T10:11:00.004-04:00

numinous things: astrolabe paper art...

"Numinous (pronounced /ˈnjuːmɨnəs/, from the Classical Latin numen) is an English adjective describing the power or presence of a divinity. The word was popularised in the early twentieth century by the German theologian Rudolf Otto in his influential book Das Heilige (1917; translated into English as The Idea of the Holy, 1923). According to Otto the numinous experience has two aspects: mysterium tremendum, which is the tendency to invoke fear and trembling; and mysterium fascinans, the tendency to attract, fascinate and compel. The numinous experience also has a personal quality to it, in that the person feels to be in communion with a Holy other. The numinous experience can lead in different cases to belief in deities, the supernatural, the sacred, the holy, and the transcendent.

'Nostalgia for paradise' was a term also used by Mircea Eliade to help bring understanding to the numinous."

(Wikipedia)

...and real astrolabes...

My father is currently writing an essay on the numinous, which I can't wait to read -- in part because numinousness is an enormous and important part of who I am, but a strangely easily subdued part, one I get oddly distracted from in the movements of everyday life. When I was working on my thesis at Hampshire it was an intense presence for me, because I was crafting a work that sought to both illustrate and spark off the process of evocation -- the word I use to describe the constant, quiet mist of images that rises up in me whenever I glance inwards, a mixture of memory, things seen by or read about by me, imagined places, associations, fragments of dream, all tipping and tilting together like the glass beads inside a kaleidoscope to produce a shifting pattern of ever-changing images of which the character is the same -- that is to say, numinous. Old city streets, smears of light on rainy pavement, arched doorways, hidden gardens, snatches of song, night-blooming flowers, intricate toys, tiny keys, attic rooms, alchemical closets, ancient brass instruments, winding stairways, musty and mysterious bookshops: I didn't know Mircea Eliade called it nostalgia for paradise until I looked it up just a moment ago, but that's almost exactly how it feels, if paradise is a place where every single thing is rich in meaning, where each object has a vibrant presence.

...and lamplit alleyways...

My sense of joy and my sense of mystery and my sense of meaning is based on glimpses of this world, the realm where nothing is flat and everything has a life -- the world at the root of the world, the world inside the world, the paradise before doubt. There is a murmuring fountain in me of images coming up from this profound inner place; all I have to do to feel its emanations is think for a moment about a resonant word, the word rain, for example, or amulet, or the color cobalt blue. And up it comes, a hundred kinds of rainstorms, each image translucent, delicate, evanescent, mysterious; endless permutations of amulets, each intensely mystical enough to paralyze me with transcendent longing; blue glass in the sun and in windows and buried in earth and supporting the heavens. It's as if an imp sat deep within me, nestled in a gutter in a peaked roof high up over the numinous city way down inside me, too deep to just be able to glance down and see it down there inside me -- and this imp did nothing but blow bubbles, all day long and into the night, fine iridescent bubbles, each one carrying a faint reflection of something of that profound, mystic, inner world from which it rises, floating gently up into my everyday mind just long enough to let me glimpse the minaret, the alembic, the starry moss before it dissolves, soundlessly, gently, as another bumps it...

...and amulets and old glass beads...

What do you do with all this? This imp does not stop blowing bubbles, and these transparent, shining impressions of a paradise of meaningful things is always present when I go to touch it, like a faint thread of music. But often enough I am not paying attention at all, and somehow I forget, daily, that it is even there. My numinous self needs connection to my surface self: books, conversations, soul-yanking experiences that refresh the wellspring within. This is it, the essence of my being, I know that; when I go down into myself, this is what is at the bottom, and there is nothing underneath it; it goes all the way down. I don't know what there is to be done with it. I just know it's me, this stuff, the underlying essence, the stuff that remains under all the things that change -- what I'm thinking or doing or worrying about or wondering, 23 years of flux and change, the flow of thoughts and emotions and choices made and actions taken, under all those shifting things the fountain patiently bubbles up its marvelous images. I am all the mystery I can hold within myself.

...festivals, toys, bones, altars...

Listen: what I'm saying is that the divine presence is inside all things, a shared core, a poetic substance, a fluid of meaning, a profound and wonderful mystery. And when we feel cut off from the divine it's because we can't get in, somehow, can't get down into things, talk to them, feel their fierce vital strange familiar substance in harmony with ours. My idea of a living hell is a world where things are just things, flat, surface only, nothing inside, unyielding, my attempts at making meaning just sliding off. A lamp only a lamp, with no resonance of warmth, of home, of small sun: just a thing. Numinousness, the way I mean it, is the opposite: the mystery within, the inexplicable and marvelous life of things, presences we don't understand and are grateful for. In the midst of numinousness ordinary things turn into carnivals, festivals, initiation rights. In the lost paradise we were not alone in the world. Everything spoke to us, might reveal a harmony, a truth, a story, a scent, when addressed with the proper reverence.

But this is easy to forget. Look, it's good to live a life that is mild, pleasant, cheerful, mostly unruffled. That's fine! That's lovely! Just don't let go of the mystery. I think it's harder to go down into it when you're actually relatively happy -- because it makes living on the surface of things much more enjoyable, you're not trying to escape misery or fear or desperation, you can just stay up here where the emotional weather is fair. Why concern yourself with the stuff that's gonna kick you in the kishkas? Mystery means not having it all figured out. It can feel pretty profoundly at odds with stability. I don't think it is, necessarily; I just don't think that we, as a culture, know much about being both stable and steeped in the mystical. Mysticism is old-fashioned -- I mean the kind of mysticism where you don't try to put occult forces to work to determine your future or align your chakras, but simply sit with it, delight in it, the strange and glorious and incomprehensible swell of the world, live a life that moves through it, breathes it, tingles with it. Why is that important? I don't know. It's just what lives inside me, and I feel clearly and firmly that everything I do that is not in connection with the numinous is just getting by. Often pleasantly, beautifully, enjoyably -- but at a couple of degrees of separation from the world as it really is. The world is having a life, steamy and kaleidoscopic and wild, and I can partake or no. But if I don't, it will be exactly -- and I do mean it feels to me just like this -- like passing by a marvelous festival of light and color and strange smells and stomping dancers and bells that has come from nowhere and will be gone forever and going home to read a book because I am too shy to take a deep breath and fling myself into the dance. I like reading alone in the evenings. That can be its own numinous experience -- but not if I have not chosen it but rather turn to it out of some vague fear of getting lost, caught up forever, given up once and for all to enthusiasm -- from en + theos, having the god within. Is that what I'm afraid of, I wonder -- or it is just that living sedately is so much easier?

...and Odilon Redon

L'Oeil, comme un ballon bizarre se dirige vers l'infini (The eye, like a strange balloon directs itself towards infinity), 1878

And here is The Man Who Was Thursday on the secret face of the world:

"'Then, and again and always,' went on Syme like a man talking to himself, 'that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face for but an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained. But the whole came to a kind of crest yesterday when I raced Sunday for the cab, and was just behind him all the way.'

'Had you time for thinking then?' asked Ratcliffe.

'Time,' replied Syme, 'for one outrageous thought. I was suddenly possessed with the idea that the blind, blank back of his head was really his face - an awful, eyeless face staring at me! And I fancied that the figure in front of me was really a figure running backwards, and dancing as it ran.'

'Horrible!' said Dr. Bull, and shuddered.

'Horrible is not the word, said Syme. 'It was exactly the worst instant of my life. And yet ten minutes afterwards, when he put his head out of the cab and made a grimace like a gargoyle, I knew that he was only like a father playing hide-and-seek with his children.'

'It is a long game,' said the Secretary, and frowned at his broken boots.

'Listen to me,' cried Syme, with an extraordinary emphasis. 'Shall i tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front --'"

the poetics of space (ii): Sustainability & Seduction

2011-05-28T11:12:00.001-04:00

Cliff dwelling, Bandelier, NM

Kevin got me a really beautiful book the other day, called "Building Green: A Complete How-To Guide to Alternative Building Methods" by Clarke Snell & Tim Callahan. We've been talking a lot about houses, and the itch in both of us to build one, or maybe lots. In many ways all the large-scale work I do is essentially practicing for the big one, that is, the day when I'll be able to build not just magical adaptations but actually design and plan and build a whole magical house, interior and exterior in harmony with all the fierce values I believe in and which we regularly overlook: namely, that the spaces we live in should be not boxes but secretions of the spirit in the same way that the mother-of-pearl in an abalone's shell is a secretion of its strange soft body, tough but also shining. Modern houses mostly fight the world-as-it-is -- seeing the outside environment as a set of hostile factors to be controlled and curtailed into nothing more than scenery. We walk around inside these blank, aggressive boxes and have no relationship to them, no impulse to touch walls or lie down on the floors, no feeling at all that through the house the living textures of the outer, natural world and the inner, personal world can have a conversation -- about comfort, or warmth, or the deep reassurance of stone, how a curved wall mimics the caves in the cliffs long ago when we took shelter in the earth herself, the profound ways in which we are still here in the world even indoors. We think being inside a house means we no longer have our feet in the dirt, as if on the threshold of a house we stopped standing in the hands of the earthquakes. What I want is a house that reminds me that I am always outdoors, just wrapped snugly in a smooth layer of shell, the way we understand an acorn to be, or a snail...

The reason I already love this book is because the authors feel the same way that I do about the meaning of the word house. What I love the most is their five requirements for a building to be considered "sustainable":

The frame of a low-impact home

1) Low impact: "Minimal impact on the building site and the environment at large through careful, conscious design and utilizing replenishable materials that create a minimum of ecological destruction through their use."

2) Resource Efficient Through the Life of the Building: "Human use [of a building] requires environmental resources for such things as heating, cooling water and electricity. A 'green' building provides these human needs efficiently, conserving resources."

a traditional adobe building

3) Long Lasting: "The longer a building lasts, the longer the time before the environment is asked to give up those resources [used in the building process, such as building materials, tools, and fuels] again to replace the building. Therefore, the longer a building lasts, the 'greener' it is."

4) Nontoxic: "To sustain healthy lives, we need to sustain a healthy indoor and outdoor environment. A 'green' building, then, needs to provide a healthy indoor environment while doing nothing to harm the outdoor environment."

and my personal favorite...

a traditional Icelandic building

5) Beautiful: "One of the biggest sources of our environmental woes is the constant and polluting movement of humans about the planet, To create a sustainable lifestyle, we need to stay put more of the time and derive more of our social, physical and spiritual sustenance from our own backyards. For example, it takes along time to build healthy soil to grow good food; to build a network of friends and compatriots that will be the basis for community; to nurture the trees and other plants that will be part of the house's cooling strategy. These things simply won't happen if you aren't sufficiently seduced by your home to stay there for the many years it will take to turn it into a real place that nurtures both its inhabitants and the environment., A 'green' house, then, needs to be beautiful, a place that is as hard to leave as a lover and as unthinkable to neglect as your own child." [my italics]

an earth house by Peter Vetsch

Yowza! What an idea! It's not sustainable if it's not seductive: well, why do you think I spend so much time building peculiar and beautiful interior modifications? So that I will want to be in my house, and so that others will want to be there too -- the first steps towards bringing together a community. Sure, I rent this place, and I won't be here forever, but that doesn't mean that what these guys are saying doesn't apply. Living thoughtlessly in a place even if you know it's temporary gives no gifts to anyone, not yourself, not the people around you, certainly not the place in which you live. The problem is that most of our dwellings -- especially! the temporary ones -- are built so thoughtlessly that it's almost impossible to really profoundly and meaningfully inhabit them. I suppose part of why I create such huge and complex installations in my own house is because I hate the idea that the space in which I live does nothing to sustain me beyond provision of the purely mechanical functions of a shelter, and that doing otherwise is impossible for anyone who doesn't have the means to build their own home from scratch. I am trying, mostly, to remember that inside the house I am still inside the world, that I have not walked out of it just because I closed a tidy door behind me, that it is always here with us in all its shape and fire and meaning.

work in progress: The Treehouse

2011-05-13T22:32:00.003-04:00

The transformation of an ordinary apartment into one living & livable work of art.

Read about its genesis or see how the seeds were planted

updated September 2011

a recent inspiration: Meka's cob cottage

The Treehouse? Um, that'd be my apartment. It's a fairly ordinary third-floor walkup with nice floors an walls originally of a hideous dingy white the landlord kindly condescended to let us paint. Why I am presenting my living space as a work of art, albeit one still very much in progress? Why, because I believe that living in a rented set of rooms on the budget of a recent undergraduate with a retail job should not be an obstacle to living in a magical and astonishing space. The challenge is not only how to enact a mystical transmutation of essentially mundane elements armed with not much more than cardboard, paint and spare time: it's when as well, for one of my more profound realizations this past year has been just how hard it is to fit the active creativity I felt in college into a life outside of academia. Nor does it seem to be just me who's having this struggle: it seems that friends and family from high school through middle age are grappling with the thorny question of when do I get to have the meaningful life?

So this project has evolved over the last year from being an attempt to make a nifty place to live into, well, an attempt to live a nifty life, perhaps -- that is, to experiment with finding both physical and mental (or emotional, or spiritual) space for a creative, thoughtful, intentional way of life in the midst of the ordinary and overwhelming demands of paying off student loans, working for not much beyond minimum wage, paying bills, balancing relationships, and trying to sleep sometimes too. The work is dedicated to the memory of Robert Seydel, a truly astonishing professor at Hampshire College who passed away earlier this spring, for he was the one who confirmed for me the truth whispered in my soul (lucky me, for this) by my parents: a rich and mysterious life can be folded and fit into the ordinary; wonder has not left the world; we have not lost the power of sharing souls with things.

The Treehouse is being built piecemeal: I work on this, then that. Any pretense of methodical, room by room progression has been summarily abandoned; often I don't have the funds on hand to take the next step in one part of the house, so I work on something else, and more often than not I ignore the whole idea entirely for weeks at a time, or threaten to tear everything down and start from scratch. (My partner, bless him, has developed a wonderful, silent face of patience with which to meet my temper tantrums. His room I do not touch; it is a pleasant messy office full of poems, and he likes it that way. I envy his satisfaction.) I would like each room to be transformed according to my sense of the most creative and meaningful ways to fulfill its function, bound together by themes of earth, reverence, reverie, sensuality, playfulness and wonder; I would like it to be the house of a happy, rambunctious, rambling, daydreaming kid with her feet in the mud and miniature worlds in her mind, a place that inspires and sustains the spirit, a home of the heart built for cheap out of cardboard, housepaint, brown paper and wallpaper paste and the old-fashioned magics of illusion and elbow grease. And sometimes it feels like it might be just that, and sometimes it feels like I am an idiot thrashing around in a kindergarten's supply closet. Slowly, slowly.

The major transformations are in the most frustrating rooms -- rooms frustrating in the utter stolidity, the immovability, of their functions. A kitchen is a room of immovable function, but the cooking and sharing and eating of food still hold a sacred place in us, I think, even in this poor frenzied culture of ours; there is still a recognition of the act of breaking bread as good and meaningful and spiritually as well as materially satisfying. Bedrooms...well, I don't know about bedrooms. They are often profoundly personal spaces, and usually we take the most pleasure in making a bedroom "ours;" the idea of an artistic or creatively made room seems most easy to understand in the context of the bedroom. No, my real fights are other rooms...and here is what I am trying to do with those, and why:

The Night Garden (previously known as The Living Room)

What it is: Basically blank. Living rooms are collections of furniture that we perch on; rare and wonderful is the living room that is actually alive, that does more than obediently contain. They are most often plain boxes we don't attempt to alter beyond the brightening of pictures or a coat of paint. Strange and wonderful is the living room we don't think of as essentially neutral, but rather consider an ally, a friend, an embrace, a space that talks to us or helps us dream...

What I imagine: One part garden, one part poetic hallucination.If only my little box could be thought of like this:

"Thus, and thus only, the whole place had properly to be regarded; it had to be considered not so much as a workshop for artists, but as a frail but finished work of art. A man who stepped into its social atmosphere felt as if he had stepped into a written comedy. More especially this attractive unreality fell upon it about nightfall, when the extravagant roofs were dark against the afterglow and the whole insane village seemed as separate as a drifting cloud. This again was more strongly true of the many nights of local festivity, when the little gardens were often illuminated, and the big Chinese lanterns glowed in the dwarfish trees like some fierce and monstrous fruit..." (The Man Who Was Thursday)

the byzantine bathhouse of joseph cornell

(previously known as The Bathroom)

What it is: It's an amazing fact that no matter what color you paint a bathroom and how nicely you decorate it, it remains recognizable as one of the most appallingly functional rooms in our lexicon of spaces. The West is culturally still somewhat horrified by the needs of our own patient and persevering bodies, and despite our earnest attempts at aesthetic improvement we still tend to perceive even the most artfully appointed bathroom as a more bearable version of an essentially unwelcoming and unpleasant niche born(e) of necessity. (The practice of installing enormous and fanciful bathtubs for long, luxurious, scented soaks is sort of the exception that proves the rule: none of us gets into such a relaxing tub when we are actually dirty. Such a bath is not a cleansing ritual at all, but rather closer to a massage in function. It is a luxury, not a right, and does nothing to diffuse our vague and basic fear that the body is fundamentally and irretrievably unclean.)

What I imagine: There are places in the world where the rituals of cleansing are considered not a regrettable need but a graceful, thoughtful and meaningful practice. The undespised body, free from the tyranny of pictures of flowers and padded toilet seat covers desperately trying to distract you from your real and divine relationship with dirt, can go about the ordinary and marvelous business of simple purification without shame or squeamishness. The Bathhouse, therefore, ought to be a room that considers how we might shift even a tiny square box in an American apartment into a space where the body is still seen as a mystic apparatus, a proud house for the soul, so ablutions may come closer to blessings again...

Now, as to how such a thing may be accomplished, well, I'm still working on it, okay? My thoughts run to surfaces the body loves to touch, things like earth and clay and wood (utterly unlike the sleek chrome and and china of our bathrooms; sterility may signify cleanliness, but of an wholly inhuman kind); in the face of the fact that my bathroom is a minute box without much room for, say, graceful wooden soaking tubs or fanciful adobe molding, I shall have to find other ways to be glad to be in there. What would a tiny garden be like, or an enormous painting of happy naked people splashing about in unashamed childlike glee? A wall-sized reproduction of the fountains in Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights? Look, if I could make my bathroom feel for a fraction of a moment like this, I would feel that I had succeeded beyond my wildest dreams, and indeed probably even Dr. Seuss's.

Oh hey, and you can check out the genesis of the Byzantine Bathhouse on a blog I used to keep back in the day...which might also help you understand a little more my obsession with the hamsa and just what the hell Joseph Cornell is doing in here anyway. And I will keep you updated on my bloody struggle with myself, my motivation, my schedule, my budget and my belief in the beautiful...please, wish me luck. I may need it.

Kicking Ass & Taking Names

2011-05-13T21:34:00.003-04:00

Kicking Ass (amulet, front view) - May 2011

Kicking Ass (amulet, back view)

Taking Names (amulet, back view)

Taking Names (amulet, front view) - May 2011

Kicking Ass & Taking Names (front)

Kicking Ass & Taking Names (back)

Kicking Ass & Taking Names: miniature vintage print collage, ink, reclaimed pendant picture frames. Dimensions: Kicking Ass 1 1/2" x 1 7/8" x 3/16"; Taking Names 1 3/8" x 1 3/8" x 3/16". Graduation gift to friend, housemate, circus lady & all-round ass-kicker Thea Henney.

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the poetics of space (i): On Building Kaleidoscopes

2011-05-11T13:12:00.002-04:00

Somewhere in me lives a certainty that creativity is desperately, excruciatingly important to living the kind of life that swells you full of gladness for having had a chance to live it, but why does creativity matter, exactly?

My father writes:

I'm trying to get away from the fetish that there's a thing at the end of the creative process. Creativity isn't mere manufacturing, not at all. There doesn't have to be a thing at the end (difficult as that is to face in our capitalist universe). No, but I think every creative act does need to include something like this: I glimpse some aspect of the world and I try to imitate that aspect, with my body or my words or my music, or with extensions of my body like paint & paper. As if the essence of creativity is some kind of mimesis. If I'm Shakespeare, I have to walk like Prospero before I can write the speeches of Prospero. To paint a buffalo on a cave wall I have to be the buffalo. When I write a poem, I believe I have the whole poem wordless inside me; the act of creation is copying out the wordless into words, skillfully unfurling the unmanifest into the manifest.

So what's so great about being somebody different (the wordless muse, the buffalo, Prospero....)? Well, there's this tremendous relief in transcending my one limited paltry existence. A kind of ecstasy in breaking out of the finite and into unlimited possibility. It's ecstasy, "standing out from oneself" in Greek. I see something that is or could be, and it's beautiful or powerful or different. I let myself embody it, become it; give up being me for a moment, give up being sure and defined. There's a taste of infinity in the process. And the thing that I make, in the creative process, the gesture or poem or circus poster or piece of music - if it really has the breath of the infinite in it, people will recognize that, and they'll be inspired with the beauty and the urge to create, all over again.

He wrote this to me, and I thought: yes. But there's more to it than that, I think. I wrote back to him:

What I struggle with most is a sense that all my creativity is inwards, making of me a kind of hermetic museum inside of which all is dancing and alive but what good is that if I can't return it to the outer world that brought it into being? Only by bringing forth that energy can I feel the world around me to be as miraculous as it is within me. And the great conflict is the certain knowledge that I am full of a sense of powerful and living magic, and the utter fear that it will stay locked in me forever. So this is my great and only work: to make real the essence within me, to know absolutely that the outer world and the inner world flow together, a fountain of cupped hands in the glorious gladness of the rain --


A staircase in the kaleidoscopic Sagrada Familia

And then I went away and thought about it some more, and wondered about that creativity locked away inside me, the thousands and thousands of tissue-fine layers of images and fragments and snatches of daydream: city streets, moonlit gardens of quiet fountains and freesias, the round stone room I built in my head when I was a kid full of cabinets of dolls, spice markets, rain on the roof of a kitchen with stone floors and wood beams and herbs in blue pots in the windows...minarets, mouths on my breasts, my lover's body transformed into a stream full of sunlight, teacups I have never seen. There are worlds inside me that have never known a home beyond the chambers of my heart. The outer world, this world I'm plunged like a fish born underwater, seeps into me, sometimes tears me open and shouts into me, sometimes shines in like the sun in the morning. And it gives me the language, in colors and scents and sometimes in words, of the worlds within me: though they are all made within, I can only dream of the fragrance of unknown streets because of the streets I have seen, shaped by words in my mind or in my eyes by the light, the cardamom and ginger that has been put on my tongue, the knowledge of color, of warmth, of a winding alley, all born inwards on the wings of the senses.

And this inner life, in turn, can find ways to spill back out -- wants to spill back out, wants to become part of the world. The worlds within me are luminous, shivering, iridescent, marvelous. How to let them out? How to make manifest the unmanifest, how to give back to the world around me the shining shadows it has taught me how to weave behind my eyes? I think the answer to this is art -- but not only the simple act of making. Creativity, in the spiritual sense I am giving it, is not about creating a thing but rather about living in the strange swirling space at the boundary of the self and the universe, where the world pouring into me meets up with the worlds that surge and foam only in my understanding. I mean I want to live like a kaleidoscope.

A kaleidoscope is literally an "observer of beautiful forms," from the Greek kalos "beautiful" + eidos "shape" + skopion, from skopein "to look at, examine" -- except that it is not, in fact, a passive observer at all. A kaleidoscope takes in the world and tumbles it through mirrors and glass and remakes it in intricate, magical, chaotically ordered patterns that shift with your breath like light on the water. One half world-as-is, one half the changing assortment of things-in-the-viewer, the result is a kind of living mystic vision. What I am afraid of is living with either the world or the glass beads fixed in place, of seeing only the outer or the inner and not the transcendent dance between them. The ecstasy of breaking out of the finite.

There are acts that are particularly good at reminding us just how thin the borders of the body really are: I would call them eating, dancing, sex. They are not creative acts in the sense of a thing being made. They can easily be boring. But putting onto your tongue something truly delicious, whether flavored by star anise and honey or salted by hunger, especially shared among friends or else prepared lovingly, thoughtfully for oneself -- dancing because the music pouring down into your bones has made it impossible for your hips not to move -- your body moving into another, taking up one another's space, blending in warmth-- in moments like these inside and outside tend to flow completely together, and this we call joy. And here is a poem about that:

By the time I decide to write love poems it's Spring

and the stalks in their green have bloomed to fire and gold

and their fibers are in a language of joy,

and a woman, with hair like the back of a honeybee’s jacket

combs, the comb moves in a language of joy.

There is a gardener, who's thought a fool for tending to dirt,

and his trowel was forged in a language of joy.

- Kevin Devaney

Hammer & Anvil

2011-05-11T12:46:00.005-04:00

Hammer and Anvil (collage box installation) - May 2010

Hammer and Anvil (box detail)

Hammer and Anvil (collage detail)

Hammer and Anvil: cedarwood box, found objects, salvaged paper collage, installed in bookshelf of The Room That Resembled A Reverie. An evocation of the emotional resonances of sound, after the marvelously named bones of the human inner ear.

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work in progress: The Night Garden

2011-05-08T22:13:00.008-04:00

As with The Room That Resembled A Reverie, the basic skeletal structure of The Room That Was Thursday: A Night Garden is made of recycled cardboard boxes wrapped around carbon-fiber tentpoles, strengthened and articulated with cardboard beams and branches padded out with newspaper and then fully covered in papier mache. Thanks to the tensile properties of the tentpoles, the skeleton is completely free-standing and required no hardware whatsoever to build.

the unpromising beginnings...

The room being transformed is a plain rectangle without windows, intensely, almost peculiarly plain, a kind of essential distillation of the bland square spaces in which we spend so much of our time, and therefore clearly ripe for a fantastical transmogrification. My word for the process of additively altering a space without actually damaging or changing the initial dimensions is inbuilding: shapeshifting plain, boxy shapes into strange and marvelous dimensions without so much as a nail hole in the wall.

mache slowly moving upwards...

Papier mache is a really phenomenal medium for this, because it's great for just holding stuff together -- in this case it turns a basically rickety cardboard-and-duct-tape construction into a strong, unified network of arching branches and beams. Although I started with brown butcher paper (Reverie is entirely made from this stuff, bought cheap at the local discount shop), the donation of an old roll of white mural paper turned out to form a much tougher, sturdier shell with a smoother, finer texture. (This means painting it will be simpler, as the slightly crackly texture of the brown butcher paper required several coats of latex paint to really hold a nice finish.) The mache is made with wallpaper paste, not that flour-and-water goop they teach you about in kindergarten -- it is much cheaper (a few dollars for a box that covers 400 square feet at your local hardware store) and wipes up easily instead of making heinous, gloppy, permanent paste spots on everything. It has a strange and pleasant texture to it, rather like a really good smoothie, only a of a rather disconcerting translucency...

Next: Paint!

cardboard skeleton for sunburst ceiling boss

view of paper-padded beams ready for mache

detail of paper-padded beams before and after the mache

Other Spatial Works

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The Ossification of Alchemy

2011-04-21T17:55:00.003-04:00

The Ossification of Alchemy (box) - April 2010

The Ossification of Alchemy (detail)

The Ossification of Alchemy: wood frame box, found stones, found coral, gifted nautilus charm, tiny box of mouse bones from dissected owl pellet and tiny brass telescope from my father both from around the age of eight, gin bottle, plundered cuttings from The Golden Game and Taschen's Alchemy & Mysticism

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Abundance

2011-04-21T17:52:00.003-04:00

Abundance (windowsill altar) - September 2010

Abundance (detail)

Abundance (night detail)

Abundance: night-blooming jasmine plant, coffee plant, fittonia plant, found bottles, painted city charm from my sister, hamsa from Jaffa, glass hummingbird, opalescent glass egg, miniature wood frame, wooden sill

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The Heart Is A House...

2011-04-21T17:49:00.002-04:00

The Heart Is A House You Can Hold In Your Hands (nightlight) - October 2010

The Heart Is A House... (illuminated)

The Heart Is A House You Can Hold In Your Hands: low-wattage LED nightlight, acrylic sheeting, rayon paper, ink, acrylic paint. Gift to Emily O'Neill, friend & traveler, a wandering, wondering, wonderful writer.

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Perpetual Calendar For Pops

2011-04-21T17:40:00.004-04:00

Perpetual Calendar for Pops (component detail) - November 2010

Perpetual Calendar for Pops (moving parts assembled)

Perpetual Calendar For Pops (box assembly)

Perpetual Calendar For Pops (final box)

Perpetual Calendar For Pops: cardboard, acrylic paint, ink, brads, reclaimed watch face. Gift to my father.

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The Owl Series

2011-04-21T17:34:00.004-04:00

Simka's Owl House (watercolor & acrylic) - December 2010

Simka's Owl House (detail)

Owl Babies (watercolor) - November 2010

Owl at the Seaside with an Ice Cream (watercolor) - November 2010

Owl Series: watercolor and acrylic paint, metallic ink. Family gifts.

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works archive: The Room That Resembled A Reverie

2011-04-21T17:23:00.008-04:00

"To tune reverie and dream to usage - to design a new domestic arrangement to accommodate and foster the complexities of interior life, to shape kitchen, living room, and loft in accordance with the dictates of beauty and magic, was an exercise that is both ethical and life affirming to a rare degree, and has wonderful future implications. To embed imagination in the locus of daily living seems, in conclusion, a superb and exemplary ambition, not to say an alchemical one." - Robert Seydel on the room that resembled a reverie

"That we find a crystal or a poppy beautiful means that we are less alone, that we are more deeply inserted into existence than the course of a single life would lead us to believe." - John Berger

The initial room, floor partially laid

The Room That Resembled A Reverie is an architectural installation that first and foremost functions as an assertion that a deep engagement and connection with the sensory richness of the world around us is not only a pleasure but a fundamental human need. Though anything from a hike in a state park to a mass in a Gothic cathedral may provide us with vital moments of sensory exhilaration, the fact is that the most of us spend most of our time in spaces that were not designed to afford us joy or pleasure. Truly sensually immersive spaces are restricted almost exclusively to the public sphere and the luxurious homes of a privileged few, and thus are only accessible to the average citizen on an occasional basis. Further, as we grow increasingly preoccupied with our little square screens (whether on a computer, a handheld device, or the back of a camera), the emphasis in the sensory experiences we do have grows more and more heavily visual, forcing our more complex and evocative senses into the background.

First tent poles in place

Together with our limited access to sensually immersive space, this puts us in danger of losing touch with the emotional, spiritual and cultural value of unmediated and responsive interactions with our surroundings. This is especially true in those places that we relate to in primarily functional ways, the places where we spend the greatest proportion of our time. Though we decorate the inside of our homes, for example, the vast majority of housing is built according to the principle of function over form; we look instead to occasional experiences of the outdoors to provide a physical experience that stimulates our sense of beauty and immersion in the world. And so the question underlying the installation is this: how might we create a modern interior that brings into an ordinary, everyday, rented apartment or house the richness and loveliness of our experiences of walking, touching, and breathing in evocative environments such as gardens, vast wild spaces, bookshops, spice markets, old cities, cafes, the sacred spaces of cathedrals or temples, and other places that provoke and excite our senses?

Poles wrapped & partially papiermached

Painting the wood grain in the floor

Working from the themes and theories of writers and artists from the 1850s to the 1930s, as well as architect Juhani Pallasmaa's more recent call for an "architecture of the senses," the space is constructed to convolute notions of interiority and exteriority so that an ordinary living room is opened up into a layered, engaging and evocative place. To bring a sense of the sublime and beautiful world around us right into the room, Jericha relies not on expensive decor but rather the potential of what Gaston Bachelard calls "intimate immensity": a daydream state in which the dreamer is transported to an internal landscape marked by its sense of vastness and unboundedness, its meditative depth, and its spiritual or mystical richness. To this end, Jericha created a simple, low-impact, inexpensive construction that can be adapted to any home and easily taken apart for those who rent or lease their living spaces.

Awaiting more fabric

The construction adapts a standard rectilinear room into a space whose design fully takes into account the power of our senses to create transcendent experience. Curvature rather than straight lines are primary in the space, speaking to the shape of our own bodies and inviting us to relax and soften, so that the room seems to fit around us. Curtains, hangings, and shifting light and color further make the space mutable, so that the shape of it in our vision is always changing. The idea is to disrupt the primacy of the gaze, transforming the dominating act of looking into one element of a much more integrated, immersive, and interactive multisensory experience.

On a rainy afternoon.

In this particular model, the room becomes a kind of indoor courtyard, consisting of curved walls suggestive of eggshells; these form nooks and hollow spaces that invite us to sit together or apart. This fulfills the function of living space as a place to gather or do work, but the windows, shadowboxes, and shelves set into the walls also suggest a street of little shops that sell nothing, dream houses, giant books, life-size Cornell boxes, elaborate armchairs, nests, temples, magical workshops. The space is made to curve around them, so that the eye is always drawn along sinuous shapes and in and out of shadow where concavity becomes convexity; the light changes, shifting slowly through the colors of dawn to bright day to the coolness of a rainy afternoon to a violet twilight and into a starry night. The use of inexpensive fabrics, reclaimed architectural elements such as old windowframes, simple lighting elements such as Christmas lights, and cheap, locally available construction materials further underlines the point of the project: space that speaks to our senses can become something that we can construct for ourselves. Our dwelling places, too, should insert us more deeply into existence, so that we may all be less alone.

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2011-04-20T11:04:00.001-04:00

...to the website of Jericha Senyak, dancer, artist, organizer and maker of crazy, magical, mystical daydream spaces. Here you may find all my work and all my wanderings as my mind moves from inspiration to adulation, through the creative process and out the other side into wonder.