Within and Beyond “Within and Beyond the Premises” – Unspoken Shamanism at the Henry Art Gallery’s Carolee Schneemann Symposium

Last month, I wrote a brief review of Within and Beyond the Premises, the Henry Art Gallery’s current retrospective of Carolee Schneemann’s work.  I said, among other things, that

It is not a stretch to declare Schneemann a sacred artist whose work is some 2500 years out of phase with the Western practice of the religion of life-giving feminine eroticism [...]

Carolee Schneemann. Meat Joy. Documentation of performance at Judson Church, NY, 1964.

This past weekend, I attended “The Mysteries of the Iconographies,” a slide lecture of Schneemann’s work with the artist herself, and “Streaming in from the Moon,” a day-long symposium aimed at rectifying the dearth of institutional coverage and support devoted to Schneemann and her work that persists despite her enormous contributions to the histories of art and gender studies.  The weekend was fascinating, surreal, and even disappointing on a few key fronts. But all in all, it was certainly one of the most important art events I have experienced in the 8 years since I moved to Seattle to enroll in the University of Washington’s MFA program, and I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to participate.

Friday night’s lecture was very well attended.  A roomful of artists, intellectuals, and interested folks packed into the UW’s Kane Hall to watch the grande dame of body art give a slide lecture in which she presented a number of visual themes that have made their way into her drawings since childhood.

One of the most memorable points made by the artist was the recurring appearance in her work of a vertical line comprised of faceted planes. This line, which she relates to childhood drawings of staircases, has notably surfaced as a broken stick that dominates the right side of the composition of the 1960 painting construction Quarry Transposed, as well as the isolated form of the Interior Scroll, a relic from the infamous 1975 performance of the same name.

Left: Carolee Schneemann, Quarry Transposed. Multimedia painting, 1960. Right: detail of Interior Scroll. Relic of performance, 1975.

The repeat appearances of the vertical “staircase” form are not, according to the artist, something she has consciously encoded into her work. Rather it is a coincidence she has only brought into focus in retrospect, a symbol she reads as emblematic of the fracturing planes of infinite possibility (à la Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase).  For me, the mysterious appearance of this form, which may be understood as an axis mundi, or umbilicus/ladder connecting the “upper” and “lower” realms (or nested dimensions) immediately calls for a contextualization of the work within the realm of shamanism, that oft-invoked, seldom understood hallmark of so many religious and cultural systems outside our own (and which even hides in the shadowy corners of Western Monotheism and its offshoots and successors if we know where to look for it.)

Drawing of a Siberian shaman's drum depicting the axis mundi uniting the upper and lower realms.

Shamanism first became a trendy word in Western intellectual circles following the 1951 publication of Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Mircea Eliade, the Romanian-born scholar of religion best known for his theories involving the experiential schism between the categories of the Sacred and the Profane.  Although the word “shaman” is Tungusic (Siberian) in origin, the word has long been applied by anthropologists to all sorts of indigenous sorcerers, medicine men and poets, many of whom are not considered shamans according to Eliade’s criteria. For Eliade, the shaman is, as implied by his study’s title, specifically one who engages in “techniques of ecstasy,” which in turn may be defined as a spiritually-induced altered state of consciousness characterized by dramatic shifts in perception and subjective experience. (It is almost a preternatural coincidence that Eliade’s study on this poorly understood, yet near-ubiquitous category of spiritual practice arrived at almost precisely the same cultural moment as Aldous Huxley and R. Gordon Wasson‘s earliest accounts of their experiences with mescaline, psilocybin, and other naturally occurring psychedelic drugs that had, unbeknownst to Westerners, been the secret stock-in-trade of indigenous shamans for millenia.)

Thoughout his writings on shamanism, Eliade distinguishes between the “cool” outward manifestations of shamanism—that which may be readily codified or communicated to those outside of the shamanic experience—and the “hot” subjective ecstasy at the heart of the experience itself, something that is notoriously difficult, if not impossible to grasp by anyone who has not personally had his or her sense of self utterly melted in the angelic bowels of the Infinite.  Indeed, even if Carolee Schneemann’s oeuvre was not utterly teeming with obvious shamanic emblems and devices (stairways! ladders! snakes! mirrors!) her artistic practice, with its insistence on the artist’s own subjective experience of altered states and generative-erotic ecstasy, would be sufficient to suggest such a reading.

Carolee Schneemann. Up to and Including Her Limits. Documentation of performance, 1976.

But the fact is that we know Carolee Schneemann thinks about her own artistic practice as a form of shamanism.  In a 1983 letter to Art Forum, a response to an article on shamanic performance art by Thomas McEvillay,¹  the artist contrasted her own form of artistic shamanism with that which was in vogue among her male contemporaries:

From a feminist perspective, a great deal of shamanistic male performance art has been centered on unravelling a repository of collectively unconscious guilt, and on desire for power or for contact with generally despised aspects of nature and body—the femaleness suppressed in our culture. McEvilley focuses on the critical neglect of these unconscious processes and on the sexual prohibitions which activated shamanistic performance art, but he fails to identify the denied ‘femaleness’ of ‘areas that were previously as unmapped and mysterious as the other side of the moon.’  What he notes as ‘behavior deliberately contrived as the most inappropriate and offensive’ (suggesting personal exorcism of social taboos and prohibitions) remains bound to the patriarchal psychosocial structures that it attempts to illuminate. [...]

The shamanistic performances of women usually relate to a historic tradition that is pre-Greek, pre-Christian in its inspiration. [...] Shamanistic mythology in women’s performance art must be acknowledged as what lies behind and is obscured by Greek mythology. Our performance of taboo acts is linked with an identification of our bodies with nature, with the celebration of the cosmic and the sacredness of the ordinary and the lived experience. [...] Our use of the body in ritual inculcates not male mysteries but female or communal ones, aligned with intuitions of ancient Goddess presence and investigating those integrations of body and spirit which masculist culture and mythos have torn asunder.

Carolee Schneemann. Eye Body #29. Photograph, 1963.

Indeed, much of the content of Saturday’s symposium was aimed at the divide between “feminine” sensuous subjective experience and the “masculine” categorizing, legitimizing impulses of the intellect that Schneemann’s work seeks to bridge like a shaman’s ladder between worlds.  An erudite presentation by Elise Archias, assistant professor of art history at California State University, Chico, anchored Schneemann’s early work within both art historical and popular representations of sexuality and the body relevant to a fuller understanding of the iconography. (The art historical references were great, but firmly rooted in the Western canon, a move which seems to me to overlook the unconsciously generated aspects of Schneemann’s work, which unite it with visual reference points far beyond the confines of said canon.)

The next presentation, given by Jeanette Angel, a current Ph.D. candidate in Creative Studies at University of British Colombia, seemed engineered to provide a counterbalance to the cool intellectualism of Archias’s offering.  Angel began by breaking a bottle of perfume in the back of the room and passing out apples, transgressing the rules of what is allowed in the Henry’s auditorium, while engaging the senses of her audience. She then proceeded to paint black stripes onto her body and strike yogic asanas onstage during her speech in an illustrative parody of Schneemann’s own early “performance/lecture” style.  Angel’s lecture culminated in a performative piece called “Walking the Scroll,” inspired by Schneemann’s strategy of “layering content and form.”

The climax of the afternoon occurred during the shared Q&A session between Archias and Angel.  The difference of dress, body language and mannerisms of these two female academics—the former in a very high-necked blouse, judiciously toeing the Post-Structuralist line that everything, even mind, “arises from language,” while the latter sat Indian-style, smiling comfortably in a crop top and yoga pants, calmly asserting that it is the BODY which gives rise to both mind and language—rather uncannily resembled a live-action tableau of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love. Indeed, it was as though a spontaneous, inadvertent work of art was being birthed through the circumstances of the symposium(!)

Titian. Sacred and Profane Love. Oil on canvas, 1513-1514.

The Q&A with Archias and Angel was immediately followed by another Q&A, this one a forum that also included several members of the UW faculty.  Despite the obvious talent and deep knowledge on the panel (Dr. Patricia Failing, in whose graduate seminars I first delved deeper into Schneemann’s work, was a member of the panel, as were several other smart and interesting people) the discussion eventually became rather tedious to my mind, mired in institutional/art historical concerns of painting vs. performance relics, commodification and art, and the current controversy over Marina Abramovic’s human centerpieces for a Los Angeles MOCA gala, none of which seemed to touch at all on the ecstatically experiential/spiritual dimension that I find so engaging about Schneemann’s work.  And so I asked a question about shamanism. Or rather, (perhaps taking a cue from the naughty cherub in the mental image of Titian’s painting I had yet to shake) made a statement in an attempt to reach into what I considered to be far deeper waters than the ones being currently navigated.

Right before I was called on, someone had just said something about the difference between paintings as and performance relics as art objects.  So I said something like this:

Me: I don’t see a significant difference between a painting as an object and a performance relic as an object, as both objects may be considered castoffs or snapshots generated by (and relatively incidental to) the process of artistic practice “grounded in a way of being” [as Ms. Angel had just put it].  I think this is a really good definition of Schneemann’s process, and I also think we’re dancing around the subject of—and pardon me if this is an art world cliché—SHAMANISM.  I guess that’s really not a question as much as a comment that I think might be a fruitful avenue of inquiry. Does anyone want to comment on that?

[SILENCE]

Me: Carolee, do you have any thoughts?

Carolee [motioning to the faculty on stage, with maybe a hint of mischief(?)]:  I think that’s a question for them.

[MORE SILENCE]

The silence ended when a member of the faculty panel changed the subject back to Lady Gaga’s Schneemann-inspired meat dress.²

Lady Gaga's meat dress. MTV Video Music Awards, 2010. via Getty Images.

Given her documented statements on the subject of shamanism as a model/context for her artistic process, I can only guess as to why Carolee Schneemann didn’t respond to my query (except that it must be an unbelievably disorienting experience to sit back and listen to a roomful of academics dissect your motivations for your work).  Even stranger, though, was the silence among the academics in the room, as though my comment was the most random, irrelevant statement that had been made all day.

But then, after the Q&A ended and people began dispersing into the hallway, something even stranger happened.  One by one, audience members started coming up to me (including one of the symposium’s organizers) and asking who I was and why I had asked about shamanism.  A couple of them thanked me for making that connection and wanted to talk more about it with me.  But apparently no one had wanted to comment during the awkward silence because (aside from perhaps the artist and myself), no one else had a particularly salient opinion about it.  One participant mentioned something about the problems with methodology when it comes to indigenous/non-Western cultural practices, as though the imperfections inherent in anthropological [indeed, all] research made the entire category of shamanic ecstasy singularly irrelevant. Another seemed fascinated but rather categorically bewildered, having apparently allowed an academic refutation of Madame Blavatsky that she had once read to curtail any curiosity she might have had about the entire notion of an experiential Sacred.

Still others, notably Joe Milutis of UW Bothell, saw where I was coming from and seemed both eager to engage in post-symposium conversation and poised to teach me a thing or two in my own areas of interest, a welcome combination.  But by and large, it seemed to me that this symposium, gathered for the purpose of rectifying a perceived institutional neglect of Carolee Schneemann’s work, was simply uninterested in engaging with the spiritual dimension so crucial to the artist’s process.

Carolee Schneemann. Ask The Goddess. Photo collage, 1988-2006.

Why the silence?  Is it because I asked the question awkwardly, or didn’t phrase it correctly?  Maybe so.  (I’m admittedly much better at typing than talking.) But here’s something else that may have happened:

(1) There is a general, palpable distaste for the categories of religion and spirituality within academic circles.³ This distaste is largely a reaction against the undeniable philosophical flaws in Christianity/Western monotheism, which posits a separation between spirit and matter, or between the Creator and the creature (among many other offenses). But ironically, academic secular humanism has inherited this flawed dichotomy and, despite casting off the outward vestiges of Christian worship, has actually done precious little to dissolve its flawed binaries or break free from its underlying logic.  Thus, whenever someone talks about the subjective experience of “the Sacred,” the academic secular humanist response is, all too often, to dismiss the experience as not-real, as it has deliberately chosen to believe in the “reality” of matter at the expense of [non-rational, experiential] spirit.

(2) Carolee Schneemann’s work, by addressing her own explicitly feminine subjective experience of a reality that is at once erotic, physical, and spiritual, reaches completely outside of the dualistic monotheistic/secular paradigm.  For Schneemann, the experience of Sacred both arises from the experience of the body and gives rise to the body, because the Sacred Feminine is not an immaterial abstraction but a symbol for the very real erotic driving forces behind biology.  The location of the axis mundi within the artist’s vagina in Interior Scroll is no accident.  The shamanic artwork is forged in the same secret space where the body is forged: an experiential plane that transcends the separation of the mind and body, just as it transcends the separation of Sacred and Profane.

Which brings us back to Eliade’s distinction between the “cool,” outward manifestations of shamanism and the “hot” experience of the ecstatic infinite.  To the uninitiated, the “hot,” inner core of the shamanic mysteries must seem impenetrably arcane.  And yet it is not at all unusual for an artist to categorize his or her subjective experience of creation as “sacred,” “shamanic” or “spiritual.”  However it is apparently quite unusual for an academic historian or critical theorist to personally cultivate or identify with—or even take an interest in—the spiritual category of subjective experience.  (If they did, they might run the risk of becoming artists themselves!)

Carolee Schneemann. Image from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963.

Carolee Schneemann and theorists concerned with her often lament a lack of institutional and critical support for the artist’s work. The reason typically given for this lack of support is sexism.  While I do not dispute that Schneemann’s work is undervalued, and that sexism probably plays an important role in that devaluation (no doubt even more in the past than it does now), I think the institutional discomfort with earnest, sincere expressions of spirituality in art—especially the biologically profound notion of a Sacred Feminine—may be an even larger factor.

I believe wholeheartedly and without a trace of irony that Carolee Schneemann is a true artistic shaman, because of the cultivated ecstasy inherent to her process and also her ability to walk between worlds. She fits in seamlessly with the academic ideal of a contemporary artist with a practice rooted in rigorous theory and art historical referents, yet she is able to navigate the unseen worlds with remarkable grace.  For that reason, I am sorry that I was unable to steer the conversation at Saturday’s symposium toward a serious conversation of the role of spirituality in the artist’s work.  It’s a shame, because I think the unconscious/unseen mind is the single greatest “Mystery of the Iconographies.” And so it is my hope in writing this post that my failure will spark future discussions of Schneemann’s work in a more spiritually literate direction.

Carolee Schneemann and Emily Pothast. Untitled performative self-portrait. November 19, 2011.

——————–
ENDNOTES
[1] Reprinted in Richard Drain’s Twentieth-century Theatre: A Sourcebook (pp. 136-139)

[2] A deeply ironic move, considering the oft-noted link between shamanism and rock/pop music performance. See Rogan P. Taylor’s The Death and Resurrection Show.

[3] See James Elkins, On the Strange Place Between Religion and Contemporary Art.

Troy Gua’s Untitled Madonna: The Opening at the Beginning and the End of Being

This afternoon, Seattle artist Troy Gua uploaded a pair of photographs of a found object assemblage to his Facebook page. I’m into it.

Troy Gua. Untitled. Assemblage of found objects, 2011.

The objects themselves are quite visually satisfying, and there is an obvious relationship in that both the icon and the cake pan symbolize very particular codified ideals of femininity, but the main reason I’m interested in this assemblage is because it opens onto my favorite topic of conversation: the strange, mysterious place where art and mythology map onto the phenomenological world of biology, cosmology, and psychology.

A mass-produced icon of The Virgin Mary, the mythological mother of Jesus, emerges from a funnel-shaped hole in the cosmos.  The action recalls both the emergence of the virgin goddess Athena from the head of Zeus and the convention of Venus Anadyomene, which portrays the perennial rebirth of Venus/Aphrodite from the sea in an act that perpetually restores the love goddess’s virginity.

Odilon Redon. The Birth of Venus. Painting, 1912. New York Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A cursory reading of comparative religion reveals there to be no shortage of virgin goddesses and miraculous virgin births across the world’s mythology.  But as integral as Mary’s virginity is to Christian—especially Catholic—theology, many scholars of the New Testament believe that this characterization is an accident of history. In The Origin of Satan, Princeton University religion professor Elaine Pagels describes how the author of the Gospel of Matthew consulted the Septuagint (a Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) in order to help him make the case that Jesus was the Messiah prophesied in Isaiah 7:14:

The LORD Himself shall give you a sign: Behold, a virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel—God With Us.

Matthew’s gospel has Jesus being born to a virgin. This is because in his Greek translation of Isaiah, the word “virgin” was “parthenos” (Παρθένος), which means exactly that. However, the original word in Hebrew is “almah” (עלמה), defined as a young, unmarried woman who may or may not be chaste.  (There’s a more precise word for “virgin” in Hebrew, “betulah,” that Isaiah could have used if he had meant it.)  Thus, we very well may have inherited our image of the Virgin Mary at least in part because large swaths of the New Testament were written by people who, despite their audacious enthusiasm for providing a sequel to the Jewish scriptures, were not even conversant in the original language of the Old Testament.

Nevertheless, Mary’s purported virginity becomes her, for the same reason it becomes goddesses like Athena and Venus/Aphrodite.  Symbolically understood, the “virginity” of these goddesses has little to do with their ostensible sexual history. Rather it underscores the wholeness with which they have issued forth from That-Which-Creates. The goddess is the primordial opening through which the entire world of biological forms emerges, and she is a virgin because she contains both the womb and the seed of Creation within herself.  Popular representations of Mary (such as Our Lady of Guadalupe) often portray her as simultaneously quite yonic and phallic, betraying her secret identity as the cosmic union of sexual forces.

Troy Gua’s art object has this androgynous tension in spades, and upon closer inspection, it is actually unclear whether Mary is emerging from or penetrating the cake form.  Indeed, she appears to be doing both.  It is worth noting the formal similarity between the piece and the Lingam and Yoni symbolism that reminds Shiva’s devotees of the paradoxical bifold unity inherent in the universe’s “male” and “female” energies.

Offering to a Lingam. Varanasi, India.

For most of human history, fertility cults that resonate with the biological facts of Creation dominated our mythological landscape.  But for a number of arcane reasons ranging from politics to Paul’s tortured sexuality, early Christians saw fit to do everything in their power to demonize and eradicate the nature-based religions they supplanted in Europe and the Near East, and continue to do so all over the world in the form of colonialism and evangelism. Yet even in an outwardly patriarchal, monotheistic religion like Christianity, the truth about cosmic, primordial androgyny is always there too, both hidden and laid bare in texts (like the so-called Gnostic gospels) and images.  

Especially images.  (Artists constantly recapitulate the process of Creation, and so they are often aware of some of its subtler facets, sometimes in spite of their cultural programming.)

The Madonna Enthroned. Unknown Romanesque painter, c. 1123. Catalonia.

In Medieval Christian art, the enthroned Virgin is often inscribed within a mandorla or vesica piscis shape, which of course formally resembles the vulva and also has multiple associations within the realm of sacred geometry.  Interestingly, so are images of Christ at the Last Judgment, which are often positioned in cathedrals directly opposite the enthroned Virgin. In such spaces, we are bookended by a form which represents the goddess, the threshold to the void of nonbeing on either side of life.  We all emerged into this life through the vagina of a female human, avatar of the goddess, and have assigned the point of departure into death the exact same shape.

As the Great Goddess, Mary is the opening at the beginning and the end of being.  She is the Virgin Mother, the beginning and the end.  But above all she is, like Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite and many others before her, a profound symbol for the mysteries of life itself.

(Which are, incidentally, more than a little sexy. )

Georgia O'Keeffe. Grey Line With Black, Blue And Yellow. Oil on canvas, 1923.

Love and Anguish + Headless Hunter TONIGHT

Tonight is the opening of Love and Anguish at FRED Wildlife Refuge, the art exhibition curated by Free Sheep Foundation for City Arts Festival.  The roster includes some of my favorite local artists, including Steven Miller and Amanda Manitach, both of whom I have written about previously on this blog.

From the press release:

Free Sheep Foundation present a visual meditation on the crossing of boundaries. Loosely based in the writings of George Bataille, Love & Anguish: Collected Acts of Transgression includes work from 13 local and national artists whose practices embrace acts, as well as images, of transgression.

Black Sheep Book Arts, the newly established publishing arm of Free Sheep Foundation is proud to partner with NYC-based Publicide for our first release “Headless Hunter,” printed in a numbered edition of 66, with an introductory essay by DK Pan and Nko, and including works from all participating artists. BSBA has also curated 4 works from Seattle based writers C. Davida Ingram, Amanda Manitach, Emily Pothast, and Don Wallingford. The first 13 zines be sold for $66, all proceeds going directly to participating artists. After the first 13 zines are sold, the rest will be available for free.

The artist reception at FRED Wildlife Refuge will feature a ritual reading, The Headless Occupation. Hosted by Black Sheep Book Arts, there will be 6 readers, special uninvited guests, Frenet Branca, and a very loud noise.

“The ultimate development of knowledge is questioning. We can’t endlessly defer to answers.. to knowledge… and knowledge finally opens a void. At the summit of knowledge, knowledge stops. I yield, and everything’s vertigo.” – Georges Bataille, ‘Guilty’

My contribution to Headless Hunter is a poem titled Song For Chhinnamasta, an invocation of the Hindu goddess who severs her own head in self-sacrifice and offers her life-giving blood to her devotees.

Chhinnamasta. 19th century Bengali painting.

The worship of Chhinnamasta—familiar to adherents of Tibetan Buddhism as Chhinnamunda Vajrayogini—is not something to be taken lightly, and is rare in India among all but the most hardcore, world-renouncing yogis.  Nevertheless, there is much to be taken from the image of this goddess for any artist who continually engages in the autoerotic ritual of creative self-sacrifice.

It is with the latter goal in mind that I will be invoking the Headless Goddess tonight at the reading, which begins promptly at 7:30 p.m. at FRED Wildlife Refuge.  There will be an opening reception from 6 to 9, followed by a party until 1 am.

Jamie Potter: Universal

A couple of weeks ago, David and I went to Portland to visit my sister and some friends.  I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to catch Universal, an exhibition of works on paper by Jamie Potter at Valentine’s, a bar and venue in downtown Portland.

Jamie Potter. Moon River (detail). Acrylic on paper, 2011. 22 x 30 in.

Jamie’s first solo exhibition since leaving Seattle for Portland last year, Universal picks up where his 2008 solo exhibition at Gallery4Culture in Seattle left off, with a series of abstract paintings that incorporate collage elements from comic books.  Isolated rocks, superhero hairdos and technological doodads are removed from their narrative contexts and presented alongside sensuous blobs of sugar-sweetened color, swept up in eddies that alternately resemble both metaphysical mandalas and the organic paths traced by the presence of shallow water in a landscape.  The resulting images fall somewhere between chaos and delicate order, characterized by a gentle, almost goofy dynamism whose surface-level innocence overlays a matrix of invisible forces that always seems to be simultaneously coming together and falling apart.

Jamie Potter’s paintings move with the ease of skillfully executed musical improvisations, and it is worth noting that he is also an accomplished musician in this precise vein. His best known project is Brother Raven, an improv-driven synthesizer duo with Gift Tapes founder Jason E. Anderson, and he has also released solo material under the monikers Million Mists and Father Sound and was a member of Bonus with Scott Goodwin and Matt Carlson. Jamie is also a video artist, whose experiments in light and sound have been featured, among other places, on Portland cable access show Experimental 1/2 Hour and at the 2006 New York Underground Film Festival.

Like his works on paper, Jamie’s music and video work often begins with thrift store castoffs as source material, with unwanted and undervalued synthesizers and VHS equipment taking the place of the comic books that seed his works on paper. He then proceeds to coax idiosyncratic, inharmonic spurts of data into compositions typically dictated by the confines of a semi-obsolete format, such as 2″ cassette tape.  Through the intuitive process of improvisation and revision, Jamie imparts his trademark organic dynamism to a diverse array of materials, somehow always arriving at a vaguely biomorphic, self-similar end result with more than a hint of the uncanny.  The ingredients might feel nostalgic, but the finished product is wholly other.

On a side note: Jamie is also a hell of a carpenter, and received his BFA from the University of Washington’s prestigious ceramics department.  While this tremendous set of fabrication skills does not go entirely untapped in the new work (he built gorgeous frames for each of the pieces by hand, and they are almost worth more than he is asking for the framed paintings), it still seems to me like his best work—or at least something that synthesizes and makes full use of his huge range of interests and abilities—is still ahead of him. Thus, my only criticism of Universal, if you can even call it one, is that it is not *quite* universal.  I only say this because I know there are plenty of things in Jamie’s creative universe that aren’t in this show, and if there were ever an artist whose Gesamtkunstwerk I am anxiously awaiting, it would be his.  (I have invited Jamie to come do something in the Portal at his convenience. If and when he does so, I hope it will be both time-and-object based; an eternally encrypted moment of indulgently performative image, sight and sound.)

Universal is currently on view at Valentine’s at 232 SW Ankeny in Portland.  I have no idea how long it will be up…their website is decidedly uninformative.  Go check it out if you can, and by all means, get into everything Jamie does if you aren’t already!

Midday Veil at City Arts Fest, Saturday Oct. 22

If you live in Seattle, you might have noticed a photo of me—along with 11 other artists, musicians, and curators—on the cover of the October issue of City Arts Magazine, the free glossy magazine devoted to local art and culture.

I’m in the photo because my band Midday Veil is playing this Saturday, Oct. 22 at City Arts Fest, on a diverse bill that also includes Seattle bands Witch Gardens, Tea Cozies and Seapony.  (Facebook event here.)  This show will be held at the Rendezvous Jewelbox Theatre, which, as you may know, is a super intimate venue that will very likely sell out.  Advance tickets for this show are currently available via Stranger Tickets, as are all-access wristbands, which get you into literally dozens of performances this week (full schedule here).

I was told by festival organizers that one reason I was asked (of the hundreds of participants in the festival) to grace the magazine’s cover is that I am a “double dip”: in addition to Midday Veil’s performance, I contributed a poem to a zine curated by the Free Sheep Foundation to accompany the festival’s exhibition of visual art, opening on Thursday at FRED Wildlife Refuge.  In the spirit of this double dip, I also responded to a Q&A for the current issue of City Arts about my experience of working in multiple media and the relationship between visual art and music.

See you this weekend!

Midday Veil at Chapel Performance Space, 10/15/11. Photo by Michelle Smith.

State v. Pan Launch Party at FRED Wildlife Refuge

If you are in any way involved with the visual or performing arts in Seattle, you probably know installation artist, Butoh dancer, curator and community organizer extraordinaire D.k. Pan.

Last month, when Pan was awarded  The Stranger’s Genius Award for Visual Art, Jen Graves called him “Seattle’s patron saint of collaborative art, the genius who never works alone.”  Among his better known projects are those he has staged as the co-founder of Free Sheep Foundation, an arts collective whose primary medium is that of collaborative architectural intervention.  Although no doubt flattered by the award, Pan was, as always, quick to deflect the spotlight from himself onto his vast network of collaborators.

D.k. Pan is the antithesis of the auteur.  His acceptance speech consisted of silence as he slowly opened his hand to reveal its contents to the audience.  It was empty.

Those of us who admire Pan and his work know him as a selfless organizer and tireless perpetrator of acts of senseless beauty.  The state of Washington sees things differently. It has, after a two-year undercover, er, collaborative artwork between the Seattle Police Department and the FBI, brought charges against Pan, claiming that his artistic practice is a front for illegal activity. (Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.  Brendan Kiley has chronicled the sting—which involved a shocking degree of taxpayer-funded surveillance of the activities of private citizens—in an exhaustive article for The Stranger.)

Pan has elected to exercise his constitutional right to take the case to court in order to raise awareness of the dirty details of the investigation and prevent the authorities from sweeping the incident under the rug.  On January 16, 2012, D.k. Pan will have his day in court.  The cost of the trial will be approximately $150,000.  Pan has established a legal defense fund trust to help him cover his costs.

More information about the charges against D.k. Pan may be found on the website statevpan.org, as well as information about donating to his legal defense fund.  A launch party for the defense fund will be held at FRED Wildlife Refuge this Thursday, Oct. 13 at 9 pm. (Facebook event here.) Consider it an opportunity to give something back to an artist who has given his all to Seattle’s art community.

Sex and the Sublime: Carolee Schneemann at Henry Art Gallery

As you may have noticed, I haven’t been posting reviews of art exhibitions on this blog for quite a while.  This is largely a function of my constant state of frantic working-on-the-next-thing and the unfortunate fact that spending a lot of time thinking and writing about someone else’s art often feels like a distraction from my own work.

Carolee Schneemann. Image from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions, 1963

Lord, how the opposite is true of Carolee Scheemann, whose every image feels to me like a universe of potential inspiration!

I first came across Schneemann’s work in the obligatory Canon of Important Artists in undergraduate art history, and received deeper exposure (pun oh-so-intended) to works like Fuses (1965) and Interior Scroll (1975) in a graduate seminar on sexual identity and gender performance with Dr. Patricia Failing at the University of Washington.  These works impressed me, both for their confrontational physical presence and for their brash, gendered audacity. Later, upon discovering her earlier series of photographic constructions Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions (1963), I felt  as though I had been punched simultaneously in the brain, the gut and yes, cunt by their dazzling, arcane eroticism.

Carolee Schneemann. Image from Eye Body: 36 Transformative Actions.

“So this is what a real connection to a work of art feels like,” I say to myself in my memory of that moment.  ”It feels as though I have been in possession of some obscure sensory power whose existence and purpose has been unknown to me this entire time, which has only just now been awakened; unlocked by this precise arrangement of dark and light in order to be able to take, for a fleeting moment in this life, true, transcendent delight in the dense worlds encoded therein.”

(Oh man, I love it when that happens!)

And so when I received an invitation to attend the press preview of the Henry Art Gallery’s Carolee Schneeman: With and Beyond the Premises, the largest retrospective of the artist’s work organized to date, and to have an opportunity to meet the artist, I leapt at the chance, even though it meant waking up before 11 am.  Carolee Schneemann is one of my heroes, one of only a handful of living artists to occupy such a lofty position in my personal pantheon.  (Sorry, it’s hard to talk about her without gushing, so I won’t try.)

Upon entering the exhibition, one is immediately confronted with an unexpected sight (at least, it was unexpected to me and to others there who were not familiar with the range of Schneemann’s work.)  A small group of bold, expressionistic paintings from the late 1950s establish, lest we forget, that Schneemann began her career as a painter. A good painter, who handles materials with the butch swagger of Rauschenberg while navigating abstraction with the winnowing dexterity of Kandinsky.  (My favorite paintings from the group, Animal Carnage and Kitch’s Dream, especially bear a striking resemblance to the synesthetic explorations of Kandinsky and some of his metaphysically-minded compatriots.)

Carolee Schneemann. Animal Carnage (top) and Kitsch's Dream (bottom). Burnt painting collage on masonite (diptych), 1960. 23 x 34 in. each.

Also included in the exhibition is Untitled (Four Fur Cutting Boards), a mechanized, 3-dimensional painterly construction that served as the background for many of the photographs in the Eye Body series. Eye Body marks the first insertion of the artist’s body into the form of her work, a move that would prove more-or-less permanent.  In the same year, Schneemann co-founded the Judson Dance Theatre, where she furthered her idea of kinetic theatre in which dancers would participate bodily in works of visual art with performances like Meat Joy (1964), a time-based human collage of semi-nude bodies, music, and raw meat that culminates in a frenzied, visceral climax that echoes the savage ecstasy once the exclusive domain of the maenads of Dionysos.

Carolee Schneemann. Meat Joy. Documentation of performance, 1964.

“I’m a painter. I’m still a painter and I will die a painter. Everything that I have developed has to do with extending visual principles off the canvas.” – Carolee Schneeman, 1993

Contextualizing Schneeman’s better known “body art” works as an extension of the expressionist concerns of her paintings throws a wrench in the overly politicized reading of her work that some academic types like to give it, but it doesn’t undermine the audacity or tenacity of their vision.  It simply places these works closer to where the artist intends for them to be, squarely in the visualist camp where the experience of an image always trumps whatever ideas might be encoded therein.

In retrospect, perhaps this is the most iconoclastic thing about her work from the 1960s. In an era where cold conceptualism was king, Carolee Schneemann not only refused to clean up her act, she consistently cast non-human forms of intelligence—her beloved cats—as voyeurs and subjects themselves, tacitly urging her viewers to see more and “think” less.  And yet to my mind, the result is some of the most conceptually insightful work by any 20th century artist.

Carolee Schneemann. Still from Fuses, 1965. 16mm film transferred to video.

For instance, Schneeman’s film Fuses (1965) is constantly heralded as among the first sexually explicit works of art to portray feminine sexuality from a woman’s point of view.  The creation of sexualized representations of women, we are told, from painterly nudes to hardcore pornography, had previously been the exclusive domain of men.  And yet Schneemann’s personal iconography revels in the visual and conceptual themes of neolithic/Bronze Age goddess worship; human artifacts from that oft-forgotten phase in our very own history when [Western] man’s mythological maps of reality overtly resonated with the actual biological, erotic logistics of Creation.

Snake Goddess (reconstructed) from Knossos, Crete, c. 1600 B.C.E.

So, let’s back up for a second and talk about the nature of God. (This is, after all, Translinguistic Other…what did you expect!?)

Biology is, quite literally, God. Which is only to say that we are all here because of it. Why? How the hell should I know? To be sure, we can unravel a good many of its secrets, but part of our biological God will always remain shrouded in mystery, even to its most diligent observers. Not because it contains anything supernatural, but because its contents are infinitely complex, and because of the paradox of observation changing the nature of the observed.

Some religious systems have done and continue to do a great job of helping human beings find meaning in life and establish a moral compass given the fact that we are all born, we all die, and our existence is not a static, monolithic given but a constantly evolving stream of highly intricate, evolution-driven happenstance.  Our dominant “religion,” on the other hand, fetishizes an infantile notion of God as a rigid, static certainty.  This belief system not only considers the teaching of evolution in public schools to be controversial, it considers feminine sexuality and the shapeshifting ubiquity of the Cosmic Serpent to be so threatening that it has cast the serpent in the role of Satan himself and blamed the fertile woman, [engine of evolution though she is!] for nothing less than the fall of the human race.

And so, in a hundred short generations, we have managed to reduce Mother Eve, whose name is synonymous with life itself, from supreme goddess to scapegoat.

Carolee Schneemann. Interior Scroll. Documentation of performance, 1975.

Carolee Schneemann’s work from the 1960s and 70s was shocking during its own time because of the sexual taboos it blatantly disregarded.  It remains shocking today because the nerve it hits runs very deep into the human psyche.  It is not a stretch to declare Schneemann a sacred artist whose work is some 2500 years out of phase with the Western practice of the religion of life-giving feminine eroticism, and indeed, this is where some feminists of a certain ilk like to put her and leave her. But let’s be clear about one thing: this is not to say that she was ever somehow above the mundane concerns of the narcissistic rat race that characterizes the institutional art world.

Case in point: I once mistakenly assumed, based on the ritualistic associations conjured by Interior Scroll, that the text Schneemann retrieved from her vagina and read aloud must have been some sort of darkly magical manifesto on cunts and creation.  Though the artist has fostered these associations with her own writings on the work, the text itself is not a key to the mysteries of the cosmos but rather an excoriation of one particular [female] film critic who refused to even look at her work because it wasn’t hip in the right way (framed for the sake of the piece as a fictional conversation with a male filmmaker):

there are certain films
we cannot look at
the personal clutter
the persistence of feelings
the hand-touch sensibility
the diaristic indulgence
the painterly mess
the dense gestalt
the primitive techniques

(I don’t take the advice
of men who only talk to
themselves.)

Yes, the artist manages to frame her vagina’s monologue as a screed against the left-brained, patriarchal assumptions of the academic and critical establishment.  But truth be told, Interior Scroll is exactly as much about an ambitious narcissist getting her nose out of joint for not getting the respect she deserves as it is about the primal authority of yonic wisdom.  And so it is precisely her indignant resistance to having her work relegated to a “feminist” ghetto that has yielded her most iconically feminist work, an irony that exposes the faultline of ambiguity that makes Schneeman’s work sublime:

“…it has to be rigorous. I have to feel that I’m…engaging with the dilemmas of my culture and then releasing that because I don’t want to do the programmatic, pedantic work, although there is often a subtle complex ambiguity in which contradictions of freedom and constraint, war and delicious dailiness, these kinds of contrasts move into the imagery.”

- Carolee Schneemann, interview with Emily Caigan, 2009

Although it is not quite as obvious at first glance, there is an awareness of the specter of death as strong as the erotic current running through Schneemann’s oeuvre.  Works like Hand/Heart for Ana Mendieta (1986), Jim’s Lungs (1989) and Vesper’s Pool (2000) explore the mortality of peers, lovers and pets, respectively, while Terminal Velocity (2001), a photo montage of jumpers falling to their deaths during the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, manages to provide a uniquely…aesthetic perspective on one of the most traumatic and politicized events in our culture’s history.

 

Carolee Schneemann. Terminal Velocity. Archival pigment print on paper, 2001. 96 x 84 in.

Her most recent work Precarious (2009) is also on view; a multimedia meditation on the gap between direct experience and perception.  Commissioned for the Tate Gallery, Precarious features footage of prisoners, animals, and Schneemann herself dancing. The dancing occurs in frames that are sometimes confined by cages and sometimes aren’t, depending on how we look at them.

Carolee Schneemann: With and Beyond the Premises is installed at Henry Art Gallery through December 30. All in all, it represents a tremendous, heretofore unseen range of work by one of the most important living American artists.  Tickets for a lecture on Friday, Nov. 18 and symposium with the artist on Saturday, Nov. 19 are currently available via the Henry’s website.

Ken Ueno (UC Berkeley) and Midday Veil

I am very excited to be participating in a special performance on Saturday, Oct. 15 with my band Midday Veil and experimental composer and performer Ken Ueno at the Chapel Performance Space in Wallingford. Facebook event here. Full press release info follows.

KEN UENO and MIDDAY VEIL
collaboration with rock instrumentation, extended vocal technique and live visuals
Saturday, Oct. 15, 8 pm.
The Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center
4649 Sunnyside Ave N, 4th floor, Seattle, WA
$5-15 sliding scale
http://kenueno.com/
http://middayveil.com/

In the summer of 2000, David Golightly of Midday Veil was a composition student at the University of Mainz, Germany and Ken Ueno was pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition from Harvard University. By chance, the two met at Stockhausen’s Courses Kürten, the annual summer workshops led by renowned German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen until his death in 2007. Ken and David immediately hit it off and began a correspondence and friendship that has continued for the past decade.

In the intervening years, Ken Ueno has forged a career as a world class composer and performer. He has been the recipient of the Rome Prize (2006-2007), the Berlin Prize (2010-2011), and recently received tenure at UC Berkeley, where he is currently an associate professor of music.

David Golightly’s life has taken a very different path. After receiving a Bachelor of Music Composition from the University of Louisville School of Music in 2002, he left academia and relocated to Seattle, WA, where he began working in software, stockpiling analog synthesizers, and applying his classical background to rock music, primarily as the cofounder of the band/multimedia spectacle Midday Veil.

David Golightly and Midday Veil are very proud to present this unique improvised performance and collaboration with Ken Ueno, featuring live video feedback with composer and artist Garek J. Druss (a Story of Rats, Tecumseh) at the helm.

This will not be a typical Midday Veil set. Rather it will be an intuitive collaboration with the physical environment of the Chapel Performance Space and the eternal moment of the performance.

Portable Shrines Escalator Fest III

This weekend marks the third year of Portable Shrines Escalator Fest, the multimedia art and music extravaganza that I co-organize with a shadowy cadre of my psych[edel]ic friends. Full lineup and info below.

Escalator Fest III. Poster by Aubrey Nehring and Steve Quenell.

PORTABLE SHRINES ESCALATOR FEST III

Friday Sept. 23  - Saturday Sept. 24 at the Lo-Fi Performance Gallery, Seattle, WA

Sept. 23: Performances by Midday Veil, Swahili (PDX), This Blinding Light, Lunar Grave (PDX) and The Fruiting Bodies + DJs Explorateur, Gel-Sol and Adam Svenson.

Sept. 24: Performances by Fungal Abyss, Diminished Men, Rose Windows, Macrocosm (PDX) and Ayahuasca Travellers + DJs Mamma Casserole, Papa Yod and Miss Clarita.

Doors at 8 pm, first band starts at 9 pm sharp. $10/night at the door.

Dave Segal wrote a handy compendium to all of this year’s Escalator bands for The Stranger, check it out here.

Hope to see you soon!

For The Ears Podcast #004 – The State of the Seattle Music Scene

Curated by Portland-based music journalist Robert Ham, For the Ears is a weekly podcast featuring interviews with musicians and music obsessives. A couple of weeks ago, I participated in a round table discussion on the current state of the Seattle music scene with Robert and a diverse group of local journalists and promoters including Dave Segal of The Stranger, Mark Baumgarten of City Arts, Nik Christofferson of Seattle Rock Guy and Chris Burlingame of Three Imaginary Girls and Another Rainy Saturday. (I was the token musician in the bunch.)

We discussed, among other things, the effect of technology on patterns of music consumption, the effect of Seattle’s scene-stifling liquor laws on all-ages music, the “cultural necrophilia” surrounding the 20th anniversary of Nevermind and the lure of Portland. Oh, and remember when that guy from The Head and the Heart tried to strangle a sound guy?  We talked about that, too. But the conversation wasn’t all negative.  As I have remarked often on this blog, the best stuff in Seattle is always creeping under the radar anyway.  Under every dead log, there is always something very much alive—an axiom that I just made up but seems extra true here in the Pacific Northwest.

The For the Ears podcast is FREE and always a fascinating way to spend an hour.  Download For The Ears #004 on iTunes now.