Takashi Murakami
Flame of Desire – Gold, 2013
Height: 187 inches
Edition of 3, 2AP
©2013 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Takashi Murakami
Flame of Desire – Gold, 2013 [detail]
Height: 187 inches
Edition of 3, 2AP
©2013 Takashi Murakami/Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Anselm Kiefer, die bösen Mütter

Douglas Huebler, from Crocodile Tears series

Cy Twombly: Untitled 1970. / Distemper and chalk on canvas, 345.5 x 495.3 cm.

Iva Gueorguieva,
Land Through Shoulders
2012; acrylic, collage and oil stick on canvas
77 x 105″

Urs Fischer, Untitled, 2011 Wax, pigments, wicks, steel Giambologna: 248 x 57 7/8 x 57 7/8 in. (630 x 147 x 147 cm) Weight: ca. 3500 kg Rudi: 77 9/16 x 19 5/16 x 27 3/16 in. (197 x 49 x 69 cm) Weight: ca. 160 kg Chair: 45 11/16 x 30 11/16 x 28 3/8 in. (116 x 78 x 72 cm) Weight: ca. 45 kg Installation dimensions variable

Urs Fischer, mirror boxes, 2012, installation view

Urs Fischer Untitled (Bread House), 2004-2005 Bread, bread crumbs, wood, polyurethane foam, silicone, acrylic paint, screws, tape, rugs, theater spotlights 159 7/8 x 146 1/2 x 165 3/4 in. (406 x 372 x 421 cm) Courtesy of The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT

Letter on Art Platform’s website, May 2013

David Robbins, “Talent”; 1986

Fritz Scholder, An American Portrait

Cary Leibowitz, Untitled (Be Faithful to your Dreams)

I’ve been thinking about your performance at CWC, and also thinking about the exhibition that exists around your performance. In fact – I’m trying to pin down where one begins and the other ends.

My experience of Raised By Wolves began when I made the appointment to attend. A number of things happened when I sent that email: I became aware of making a commitment, of entering into a sort of social contract with you. My failure to attend would have a disruptive impact on the outcome, and I feel like in that moment “you” and “I” (and any other members of that audience to be) were joined in an endeavor: to experience – and to create while experiencing Raised By Wolves.

I will tell you that I was nervous while climbing the stairs. Private performances are scary: there is a possibility that attention may be turned to me – the viewer – and any attention that is out of one’s control is… Well – you get the idea. What might happen? What if I were to respond inappropriately, or insufficiently?

I noticed your golden ladder while I climbed the stairs – it seemed mysterious, to my eyes it was a glinting, gossamer manifestation of Young’s burned stairs. It looked like a reverse shadow of the stair on which I walked – it was above me, and seemed made with golden spider webs. Feeling my own weight on the wooden staircase, I fantasized myself weightless – and able to ascend yours.

Julie Tolentino:

I love hearing about your disorientation, your thready weighted wonder – and your worry even…worry is righteously familiar, no?   I ventured into uncovering what is already present in the particular space of Commonwealth and Council (CWC) and within me – taking it (us) apart, making messes  while conscious of the kind of contact/contracts that were being proffered – both in the wish for/invitation to engagement between Viewer and Space, and the way I hoped the work dug behind and into the building’s body – and into the memory of the bodies which constructed the lives (art-lives and sustained-lives) of those where would be present.

Upon visiting CWC,  prior to Young’s invitation, I was always filled with a strange kind of seeing/remembering/intuiting – of stairs. (Intuition is a thing I love to hate, and love while aware of its danger; I rely on intuition as I fear it. Intuition is a precarious force for an artist.)  Present too in the performance, is the reflection of my noisy self-consciousness.  The leftover licks and patterns of Young’s burned stairs provide so much space (for all of us) it seems. Perhaps this is something I secretly crave, understand, and need: more width, more space, release. I too experienced the corporeality, the sensuality of fantasy, weightlessness, abandon. The sensation is tender and filled with palpable sexual tension too. A kind of falling.  Failing, too - of course. But then there is the riding the edge of the experience, the feeling of going terribly wrong–> maybe this is exactly where things (really) happen.

My recent travels around, and move to the West from NYC has also occasioned travels into Asia, namely Philippines, Myanmar, and Singapore. Each trip offered confrontations –including my fear of heights (of all sorts) and a very enchanted face-off with (Pigpen’s and my) secret obsession with gold (the awe, rarity, trappings, insidiousness, trace, privilege and gaudiness at once)…Many of the pieces in the show filter through this impulse.

This work was stretched me into new territories and I am grateful to Young/CW&C for artist-focused support. Hand-crafting the queer staircase, Pigpen’s death-defying action of drilling the hole, and creating physical objects that come from live action of performance and the ambitious aim to “continue performing” with and through objects – i.e. using the influence of the wind on the chairs or by activation of the smoke.  Then there was the challenge of putting my body in the line of fire multiple times a day, beholden to the scores of fifteen incredible artists   - offering back a “liveness” – invisibility/transparency, experience, age, loss, and, admittedly, my insecurity, as fodder.

Orienting the eye towards the west (the hole, the use of the windows in the performance activated spaces) reflects a kind of “still learning and orienting” my way around a new city, new people, places, and a new direction in making work. LA – this intensely race and class-driven city, reminds me how feral I really am….Surprisingly good and well, very bad, at once! Perhaps as I carve a place here, on this personal note, I come to realize how twenty five years of NYC seemed to shelter me from something while shoring me up at the same time.

Geoff:

Once in the office, I was welcomed into a social atmosphere, and I was unsure if the performance had begun. We all spoke casually, Dawn, Rachel, Young, you and I; and I do think that the conversation and shared drinks eased me into your space. Your presence became one of friend, and also colleague.

Raised by Wolves can be a phrase intended to excuse or to explain bad behavior, it is also used with pride by one who does not fit into society. Both of these are also the nature of the artist, of the performer. Does this fit with your own idea for the title? Will you me about your thinking behind the title?

Julie:

My parents (Filipino and El Salvadoran) were barely pre-teen when they met and had me…so it starts there – raw, base, first generation, misfit-ish, omni-sexual SF upbringing. I was street-learned, smart by accident it seemed, nervous as fuck, horny and pervert-oriented, awkward, energetic and shy, and distinctly queer to the bone (with gay siblings, trans-and sex-changed great aunt, bruja grandmother, bisexual mother; I was raised by faeries and leather-men, my world was informed by AIDS, PWAs and activism.)  The title also refers to the fifteen artists who contributed scores to the piece. Perhaps as artists we raise each other, are incited by each other – in productive, resistant and hungry ways. Independence also resonates – the way independence can bite and be fiercely protective.

I think of wolves as living off scent and wind – and then also, as living off those in/of her pack. There is something fierce and lonely too, in wolf-being. A super esoteric sidenote: As a long-retired dancer, installation and performance maker, I recollect that kind of raw-ness, perhaps I even mean specialness or something that represents the sense of being solitary while too, misunderstood, different and just one of many –> amongst many.  This is for me is something I remember from performing around the world, on/at various stages – this one particular moment: in the way that light hits my own eyelashes.  There is so much reference in Raised by Wolves to hair and fuzz, fur, electric lint, matted layers.  A kind of sharing of pelt hair, sharpness of scent mixed with deep listening. This became a way for me to express memory perhaps.

There is also the legend that wolves are averse to certain tones, including low minor chords, so including sound in the work was an important element to work with – and against. Going towards a slowing down, towards being more animal…  perhaps it all starts in these felt-language connections, ways of worrying or touching or offering knowledge, even if only mere in-the-moment minutiae, legend, fiction.

Recently I was asked what I have found has consistently been part of my process – and I replied: “non-monogamy”.   I think of Raised by Wolves as a offering where intimacies are illuminated, drawn out, cross paths, curious. The scores from each contributing artist offer their own kind of impermanent layering. It acts upon me, each other, the viewers. There is no clutching. The work’s precarious structure draws us into the open.

I am certainly open to what the title might bring to others of course.  Meaning constantly shifts — and after fifty performances and the post-show discussions and the morphing of the installations in the gallery, this (shifting) continues for me.

Plus, Pigpen and I, if you peruse our experience, might easily be the poster-children of a Raised by Wolves wild-child campaign.  What and how we know what we know – and our way with people. Close/Sensitive and Far/Ungraspable at once.  Perhaps we live our own workable fictions, but we exist pretty damn close to the bone. Boldly shy. All paws. Scrappy.

Geoff:

I don’t remember much of the performance; I did not take any notes (this would have been a distraction – for me, as well as for the group) and I was far to busy experiencing you. I was just ‘being’ in that time you created.

Julie:

I love this part of your writing because you say you don’t remember much but your description below is filled with recollection! Thank you for allowing me space here to recall too.

Geoff:

I do recall you holding the gold-painted stick, and leading yourself through the space with it. The stick might have been leading you, too. I thought of some blind angel, and that you were communing with the gold ladder in the Young’s burned stairs, channeling its energy.

Julie:

…also: gold-threaded magic wand, perhaps?  leading you, AND leading us? communing with another space? we take clues from each other. perhaps you realize that you too MADE the performance occur?

Geoff:

You sang, didn’t you? And you performed a serio-comic recitative. I wouldn’t have thought of your work as operatic, but that speech had a queer power in its foolishness. I thought of Don Giovanni, and you might have been a composite of Leporello and his Master – both recorder and seducer in your wolf opera buffa.

Tell me about the curious upside-down helicopter movement you made. It felt furious and cleansing. It was beautiful.

Julie:

This movement section you mention was actually my own score which was layered into the other fifteen scores.   I carved  a section into the piece while working with and through the scores that your group picked out. (As you know, each viewing group “chose” their own performance, their own dance, after bonding over scent and shedding another layer of our strangeness to each other. And yes, the performance began, of course, by sharing sips of things and walking around together, with the sense of being hosted by Pigpen or Young or me even sometimes. Colleagues, friends, artists-to-artists (who are always influencing each other – even if merely in revolt!), and/or strangers starting together on new (or other) footing to see where we might get to, what we might make.  Blurring the idea of the starting moment was important, and key.

The movement – you describe as “helicopter” – I am so interested in that!  I think that this is very typical of my pursuit in movement now that I am not really a ‘dancer’ anymore.  Intrigued with repetition, with minor shifts, ways of looking, being seen in this repetitiveness.  The same yet never the same way. It is a challenging movement to maintain – regardless of its simplicity - especially because I am trying to excel, master and destabilize at the same time (i.e., I engage and disengage my core; I try to maintain an impossible speed; I use my breath and hold it to show the transparency of the movement; I am working with an unsure self, body, and I am activating and deactivating control at once. This is like the art of hosting, of attraction, the act of touch, the best kind of fucking.)  This section has a small text “this is not a dance about giving up…”  My research for this included reading and re-reading The Making of Americans as a way to approach my own offering of choreography, as a way to keep renewing my commitment to this holistic piece, which acts not only as an installation but as a three-times a day performed work that must be offered both as a completion and also as a free starting place. Gertrude Stein’s writing helped me take my time – and she drove me slightly insane at once.  This is a sample of how I physically “embed” small pieces of influential texts (or people) into all of my work. It is a hindrance too.  Always moving is another kind of distraction, I know.

The scores which you were witness to, even from the first performance, immediately worked upon each other – as well as on me. And your (audience) participation, your showing up, presence, awkwardness and/or willingness shifted those scores and helped raise other approaches, decisions, directions. It was a way of setting them free – to act like bats or some other ungovernable mass, like a circulation-force or impetus inside and under my skin and with that, exporting and sharing experience(s) – and a bit of myself. The potential inadequacy, the nuggets of everyone’s genius and the impossibility of this project became a force. This is merely what the performance element of Raised by Wolves was – a collection of impulse, sights and desire laid into a body that was purposely accumulating exhaustion and a current rebellious fight with the rigors of physical discipline, the aging body.  (Running the technical elements, making it transparent too, offered other things that I have to offer as an artist. In this way, I offer a dance of care.)

[Movement capture from Cathy Opie's score:  Drum Cadence for Julie T]

I will never forget, in that very first performance, about 1/3 of the way through, I was taking a deep breath as I changed adjusted the sound level between movement sections –  and ended up having to cough out a hair ball, followed by Dawn’s deep laugh. Ah, for me, the carpet, our shared Venus in fur. (It all started as a series called Love, no?) (Geoff: This moment struck me with great power, too, Julie. It was as though you were choking on, and coughing up the matter of our collective memory…)

Possession is gift to conjure (and be overtaken by) but perhaps we may be all moving towards this in our own way (even if we are struggling with and against it) – whether we notice or not. The wolf is not only interested in a kind of innate and given beauty, expertise or spectator-worthiness. I feel more connected to how she might effect and be removed from (at once) the spaces around her, how she activates and isolates simultaneously. Helping to illuminate, being seeing, becoming invisible – in an instant.  I think this is all very awkward looking and awkward feeling. Desperate too. I am into this kind of always being wrong, out of time, on one’s own time.

Being possessed as with an ungraspable smell. The smell of sound?  The way memory reeks and sticks? A bleeding hole of tangled threads.

[The aftermath of one of the second or third week performances.]

Other thoughts:

Stagnation is still an action.

Stagnation is inaction.

(Maybe I mean fermentation. Or disintegration.)

Invisibility (and other states) work on/from/within me to illuminate deviant heterotopias – or the garden of leftovers that I call a misshapen life.

My performance seeks a distorted reflective other-space. Yes, like the body of artists, performers. Like CWC. Similar to what I want to give or to receive, it is too, what I boldly suggest that Young, Pigpen, and the artist contributors offer: our lives polluted by each other as an(other) way to live, flourish – and escape. This is both solitary/wild and congested/messy at once.

I and we can’t quite find the words or the movement to demonstrate, so we just etch, inch , haunt and hunt in our own way(s)…

“The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly, is to fill the world with fools.” Herbert Spencer

Raised by Wolves I wanted to suggest mirroring, interwoven experiences, reflections and spaces that are impossible, not simply imaginary. And perhaps this is where Raised by Wolves begins.

Ah, Geoff, did I mention something about fragility?  I think you did. Thank you for that, dear you.

Raised by Wolves is a performance and installation that took place at Commonwealth and Council from April 13, 2013 through May 4, 2013. Additional images may be found here: http://commonwealthandcouncil.com/exhibitions/raised_by_wolves/images.html

All photos are by Yongho Kim and are courtesy of Julie Tolentino and Commonwealth and Council

RAISED BY WOLVES artist contributors include: Rafa Esparza, Mark So, Catherine Opie, Taisha Paggett, Stosh Fila, Chloë Flores, Juliana Snapper/Miller Puckett, Jet Clark, Aliza Shvarts, Judie Bamber, A.L. Steiner, Zackary Drucker/Ellen Reid, Cyril Kuhn, and CW&C. 

Julie would like to acknowledge the supportive guidance and opening night performance of dancer/choreographer, Nicholas Duran and the enduring support, love and talent of Pigpen.

Geoff Tuck:

Your work’s sensibility seems to me very sweet, or maybe – since “sweet” has connotations that go elsewhere than I might intend – I’ll say very human.

Emily Mast:

I definitely do not like the term “sweet” but it would not be the first time I’ve heard that term applied to my work, along with “romantic” and “cute.” I much prefer “human.” I often speak in lectures about my interest in, and investigation of, what I like to call “humanness” or that which makes us human, beyond pure intellect. So by this I guess I mean vulnerability, imperfection, emotion and commotion (and by that I mean situations that invite the potential for failure) — all things that the art world tends to shy away from, I think.

Geoff:

I’m thinking for instance, of “Bread Subscription” for which you promised a collector (participant) a homemade loaf of bread for each month of the year…

Emily:

Funny — I see this as more of a (somewhat absurd) commentary on how value is established. I have yet to sell a single subscription. People are willing to pay $5 for a loaf of bread, but they are not willing to pay $100 for a loaf of bread just because it has been labeled “art” —  I’m not fooling anyone here!

Geoff:

…and your “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow”  - for which an unannounced actor whistled the Shirrelle’s song while visiting a group exhibition, all connect to an audience through the heart, though each work could also be accepted (received) by the audience members on their own terms.

Emily:

Actually, I see this as a somewhat insidious piece, albeit one with potential for connecting through the heart. The whistler “infects” the audience in a way by planting a contagious song in their subconscious. The idea came to me when I spent nine weeks at Skowhegan in upstate Maine in 2006. I tried to infect my peers with the popular Corona song “This Is the Rhythm of the Night” by playing it repeatedly at social gatherings and by singing it wherever I went. At the end of the summer I organized a concert on a lake in which a trumpetist and a saxophonist performed an improvised duet of the song in two canoes moving in opposite directions on the lake. This insistent attitude did not make me especially popular among my peers!

Geoff:

This way of presenting art contains pathos in the making (attributable to the inherent possibility of failure), and the works themselves can result in an experience of pathos by the audience.

Offending The Audience, 2011
With: Zane Amundsen, Amber Barbell, Mathew Davis, Bailey Garcia, Kaitlin Morgan, Gerald Orzikh & Talyan Wright
Image courtesy of Emily Mast

Emily:

This is key to my practice: framing human vulnerability and imperfection “on stage” so to speak so that the (imperfect) audience connects empathetically and not just intellectually to the work, or the experience at hand. This is perhaps best seen in my re-staging of Peter Handke’s 1966 anti-play “Offending The Audience” in which I cast seven kids between the ages of 6 and 12 to present a very sophisticated (i.e. adult) work of avant-garde theater. The goal was to remove the audience from the  artificiality of a critical discourse of artifice by introducing real play into a play that, for all its avant-garde seminality is, to a contemporary ear, far too self-conscious to be listened to. The childrens’ lack of pretense allowed the audience t0 experience the piece empathetically. This fresh take on Handke was not intended to resemble a conventional children’s play. Rather, it was a conceptual gesture that was staged in a conventional theater.

Geoff:

Bread is basic, it’s the stuff of life, and also a large scale manufactured product. Your presentation of this simple necessity brings bread back home from the factory…

Emily:

Yes, bread is a refrain in my work; it’s a reminder (mostly to myself) to remember to stick to the essentials, and to strive to create things and experiences that are hopefully as satisfying and gratifying as a mouthful of warm, homemade bread.

Geoff:

Similarly, the project also brings art back home. From what, in your mind? My thinking is that you remove art from the factory of production and direct our attention to the space of experience.

Emily:

It is indeed an attempt to re-focus attention on the space of experience and also on the space of exchange. I’m a pretty inwardly-focused person and I try to understand myself as a human being so that I can, in turn, better understand others. My work then becomes the avenue by which I am able to be generous, at least, that’s my hope. A community is often created in the mounting of each piece. It’s a collaborative effort in which we are all attempting to all arrive at a (hopefully meaningful) moment together in time.

Geoff:

In a separate conversation, this morning with Adam Feldmeth, he described experience of art thus:  ”Perhaps it is conducive to imagine that it (the experience of art) is not something that one physically moves in and out of so much as the way one recognizes (is reminded of) the atmosphere and also forgets that it is there so graciously. In this way, the art object becomes less important.”

Emily:

Yes, that’s nicely put. It’s true that I’m not really all that interested in the art object per se. My work is an attempt to produce meaningful moments through transitory situations rather than by transforming solid materials.

Geoff:

Your interest in making direct connections between people and art also comes up in the dance and performance works, such as in “Six Twelve One by One”, or in your recent series, B!RDBRA!N. These events required large casts of players, whom you choose from particular and disparate communities. Not all of them art-related.

Emily:

At the heart of my practice is a distrust of the ideal of truth, which manifests itself through collaborations in which the co-construction of knowledge is key. By working with a diverse range of people in a very personal way, we are able to create our own truths through collective experience. I intentionally work with people who have no affiliation with art because I want to experience and include all kinds of perspectives — while I respect it, I do not want to favor an art-world perspective.

My practice exists across and between disciplines. I attach myself to writing, theater, choreography, sociology, psychology and education and use them as tools in the territory of art. Every encounter results in the creation of a visual and physical language that is completely unique to the particular exchange experienced.

Geoff:

I have been revisiting your online archive, and – tonight – watching the clip of “It will never be known how this has to be told” and searching online to learn more about the title. Seeing that piece was an incredible experience for me.

It will never be known how this has to be told, 2010, installation with sound & artist book, 11’11”
Installation view, courtesy of Emily Mast

Emily:

Did you see it in person at Steve Turner? (GT: Yes – I did see it at Steve’s.) I see that show as a sort of failure in many respects, actually. I think the sound component was quite successful, but the sculptural component sort of flopped (in my opinion) because it felt like an unnecessary accessory. The sound was more sculptural in a way than the installation, and probably would have sufficed… what do you think? (GT: I think artists are their own worst critics. I’ll allow that you found the sculpture to be a failure, but for me it was successful in drawing me in, in occupying one part of my brain while the sound worked on another.)

It will never be known how this has to be told, 2010, installation with sound & artist book, 11’11”
Installation view, courtesy of Emily Mast and Steve Turner Contemporary

Geoff:

The piece was super emotional – but did not rely on emotion; the structure was smart in the way that I thought about it for weeks after – my mind  was bouncing around the installation, the text, the sound and also the exterior history – the newspapers had been full of the case when it took place.

Emily:

There was a very long article that came out in the New Yorker a few months before the show that spawned the idea for the piece. Initially, I wanted to present a children’s play that told the story of Cameron Todd Willingham (a man who was supposedly wrongly accused of murdering his three children in a house fire), but later decided to concentrate on telling the story through one child’s perspective. I wanted to focus on the process of attempting to understand and form an opinion about something that was clearly very complex, for anyone really, let alone a young child. Having a child tell a story that involved the death of children was a way of adding more layers of emotional and intellectual complexity.

Geoff:

I remember the boy’s voice. He was in the first person as a boy telling, he was the second person telling of the father screaming, and in his narrative he also spoke of the father and others in the third person. My heart was engaged by the horror of the situation – of children dying, of a man, a father, condemned to die – possibly guilty, and possibly innocent; but also my brain was intrigued. The boy as a character, as a child who died and was also the over-voice in the piece became my surrogate and also possibly the ”author” of the piece for me, because he spoke to me of his own experience in his own voice.

Emily:

Since the story was so grey, and so horrific – in that you could never really know “the truth” for sure, or whether the man was innocent or guilty, or whether he was even “bad” or “good” – I felt that it only made sense to retell it using the voice of someone who was truly unbiased, and someone who could be completely transparent about his relationship to the material at hand. I worked with an 8 year old boy named Alvin who was utterly charming. You can hear him forming his own opinions about what happened as he tells the story; you hear him revising his own reactions as he goes along. He was really amazing.

Geoff:

I bring “It will never be known how this has to be told” in because it is a striking, memorable piece, and because with it you make the audience look beyond easy emotion for some other understanding. I watched myself as the work captured me, I saw a glimmer appear in my eye as my brain caught up with and then outdistanced my emotions. This work did not happen to me – I participated in it.

Emily:

That’s great to hear, because that was really my goal (and continues to be the goal with the work I’m making now) — I want the viewer not to merely consume but to enter in, and engage with the work as well. I like to encourage my audiences to question the authenticity of their opinions. I use various methods to achieve this, i.e. plants, artificial audiences, canned laughter, etc. They are meant to manipulate, to some extent, the viewer’s reactions so that she is pushed to consider why she is reacting the way she is. I often set up situations in which the viewer has to compete with artificiality in order to retain an authentic point of view. Contagion, once again, is at work here.

Geoff:

Something you said earlier about “a space of continuous exchange” makes me wonder where you as the author of this piece fit in? I was able to imagine you as an artist, making – but I was so caught up that I forgot I was looking at art.

Emily:

All of my works are collaborative to some degree, whether I’m reacting to the work of another artist or working with a “real”person. I feel like I am continually redefining notions of authorship while affirming my role as an artist.

Geoff:

I think you must remain one of several “directors” of any of your pieces – right? Forgive me for using a word not in its typical sense – by director I mean one who gives, lends, direction to the work. In your work I think you create a structure, set it in motion and then let the parts have their sway with your design.

Emily:

I have no problem with the term “director;” however, I assume many other roles as well: instigator, producer, nurturer, editor, casting agent, choreographer, designer, builder, etc. I set up structures in which chaos (imperfection, humanness, idiosyncratic experience) can be framed — I encourage the performers I work with to inject their own individual experiences into any given piece. So, I guess you could say that I frame and direct reality, to some degree.

Geoff:

But on to B!RDBRA!N, and the show in New York. How did it come to be?

Emily:

B!RDBRA!N is a series of vignettes that form a “live collage” based on the juxtaposition of an accumulation of various, highly-aestheticized details that all relate to channels of communication in which language is problematic, challenging and/or inappropriate. Seven performers ranging in age from 8 to 68 years, explore language as a prop onto which we project meaning, language that hides or deflects meaning and all-out rebellion against words.

The performance was originally conceived of as a live response to the legacy of the historical French artist Guy de Cointet for the Getty Museum’s Pacific Standard Time Public Art & Performance Festival in January 2012. It was later developed and shown at the NOW festival at REDCAT and at Public Fiction in L.A. in August 2012. I set out to investigate and interrogate Guy de Cointet’s work while incorporating the true story of Alex, an African Gray parrot who was the subject of a thirty-year avian language experiment. What interested me was the curious overlap in the ways that both the artist and the experiment dealt with the imprecision of language and the myriad ways it can be delivered and understood.

In the piece we see a stuntman, a stutterer, a sign-language interpreter, a comedian, a child, an auctioneer and a theater director describing, transcribing, interpreting and gesturing within a landscape of vivid colorful forms that are reminiscent of de Cointet’s sets, elementary school classrooms and minimalist art.

Mark Allen of Machine Project saw the piece and was very enthusiastic about it. Machine Project is doing a residency at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation 19th Street Project Space in New York City and they invited me to present B!RDBRA!N there on September 5th, 6th & 7th to kick things off.

We are extremely excited about this opportunity because it gives the piece the rare opportunity to exist outside of LA. When you make performance work that is as ambitious (and therefore, non-portable) as this piece, it’s difficult to take it on the road. We’re currently trying to raise funds so the cast and crew can make the trip to New York. You can click on the link below to make a tax-deductible contribution. Many thanks in advance!

Geoff:

When I watched your film “B!RDBRA!N (Addendum)” at LACE, I thought of the actors as people who were trying to communicate something to me, something that they believed in the truth of, and yet also I recognized that they knew that we – they and I (and they among themselves) – speak different languages. Their efforts to communicate information would fail. I felt their earnest desire and I saw the passion in their struggle. I came away learning about communication itself, rather than learning about the purported facts as I initially understood them: Guy de Cointet, the African Grey parrot, etc.

Emily:

There is very little room for hard facts in this piece. It’s extremely grey and very subjective. It’s much more about miscommunication than it is about language or communication. I like to explore the potential in what is often considered problematic, imperfect or even uncool. I am compelled by Guy de Cointet’s stubborn obtuseness and his use of mystery, decoding and secrecy; just as I am compelled by Alex’s story and the questions surrounding the validity of his use and understanding of signs. I guess I’m into the unknown.

Information regarding B!RDBRA!N USA Projects launch may be found here:

http://www.usaprojects.org/project/b_rdbra_n_in_new_York

John Pearson,
Immediate Horizon
Installation view at Weeekend
Image courage of the artist and Weekend

Dear John,

Your show, Immediate Horizon, at Weekend is quite wonderful. The cyanotype photograms are like flags, and like paintings, and like curtains – curtains over doorways, perhaps. Remember the movement in 1970s painting that was called Support/Surfaces? Do you find in that work something that speaks of the earth, and maybe about landscape? Those artists’ impulse to let material find its own resting place, to allow a surface to be its own support seems so base to me, so not related to the glorification of a stretcher and frame; without pretense, I think, and thus grounded. (Maybe those 1970s paintings seem gritty to me because the catalogue that I have has only black and white pictures.)

Some of your photos look like slices out of the sky – and if this were true, their bodies would be fluttering in the very material out of which you snatched them: air. Light is carried through/on air, isn’t it? And light is the essence of your photography, right? I mean this not in the way of ”Well, duh, Geoff – everything related to visual art depends on light” rather I mean that your photographs document the effects of light – the movement of light over time, the way in which light outlines and splashes around objects. Many of the brilliant white areas have weight, even, and this is a new way for me to think of light that I really appreciate.

Thinking again of landscape, and of light, there is a specificity to the time and place that light hits the earth, isn’t there? Each moment and each site is unique. You have always been aware of this, place is always important in your work – whether it be a cave in Griffith Park, a patch of garden at your house, or a corner of one of Pam’s paintings. These new photographs, in their directness and simplicity, seem to exalt your love of the earth – not by recording a place, but by allowing place to impose on your making. You suggest landscape, John, rather then tell me about it, and this is the true generosity of the artist.

These are very dynamic photographs, too. Of course since I watched you at work, I can picture you running around the landscape, picking up rocks and pinecones, laying out the silk and covering it with a heavy light block, tossing and placing the rocks, folding and turning the fabric over the time of exposure. All of this is grand and comical and earnest, and I am grateful that I got to watch; but what is really exciting for me is to stand before the work, and then to look from one to another, and to recognize the effects of movement in the visual information. Again, I will use the word “weight” to describe the way motion is embedded in your photographs. For things so light as air, your silk banners with their azure and their bleu celeste have gravity, they have the presence of mass though they are surface only.

Like everything I love in art, your photos pay back my looking.

Fondly, and with respect, I am yours,

Geoff

John Pearson, Immediate Horizon closes at Weekend on May 26 http://www.weekendspace.org/home.htm

John Pearson,
Untitled (1), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Untitled (2), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Untitled (3), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Untitled (4), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Untitled (5), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Zabriskie Point, 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Untitled (7), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

John Pearson,
Untitled (8), 2013, Cyanotype on fabric with thread
Image courtesy of the artist and Weekend

Meteor, 2005, Sapporo beer cans and mixed media
Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

Eden’s Edge, installation, photo: Joshua White.
Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

Blue Installation, 2012, resin armhook, denim, glazed stoneware, cords, powder-coated steel, tissues. Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles

Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

Courtesy of the artist and Various Small Fires, Los Angeles. Photo: Michael Underwood

Meteor III, 2005, Sapporo beer cans and mixed media.

There was a book lying near Alice on the table, and she turned over the leaves, to find some part that she could read, “For it’s all in some language I don’t know,” she said to herself.

“Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this: ‘You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of this particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself — educating your own judgements. Those that stay must remember, always, and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.”

—The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing

“I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.

A little later, when we were living in north Wales, there was a mobile library that used to travel around the villages and came to us once a fortnight. I suppose I would have been about sixteen. One day I saw a novel whose cover intrigued me, so I took it out, knowing nothing of the author. It was called Balthazar, by Lawrence Durrell. The Alexandria Quartet – we’re back to Alexandria again – was very big at that time; highly praised, made much fuss of. It’s less highly regarded now, but I’m not in the habit of dissing what I once loved, and I fell for this book and the others, Justine, Mountolive, Clea, which I hastened to read after it. I adored these stories of wealthy cosmopolitan bohemian people having affairs and talking about life and art and things in that beautiful city. Another great gift from the public library.”

—Philip Pullman

links that i could find for the pictures (this long after downloading them), in no particular order:

http://boxwrestlefence.com/blog/2012/10/17/this-is-what-we-call-fun/

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/the%20golden%20notebook

http://jadeyumang.com/

http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/shaving%20my%20legs

http://paradise7.hubpages.com/hub/Gladys-Deacon-and-the-Revolver-Story

http://sexualityinart.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/amelia-earhart-flying-outside-of-the-boundaries/

http://allanmccollum.net/amcnet2/album/album.html

http://sonjabarbaric.tumblr.com/post/46506470321/lucian-freud-and-kate-moss

Geoff Tuck:

I remember our conversation Zach, and I appreciated then that you sparked off a fascinating hour. On the subject of religion and intellectuals, I find, looking back through history, that very often the fiercest intellectuals were also most dedicated to religion, to God. The Puritans and all their crazy, disparate, arguing friends come to mind in 17th century America, the American Transcendental movement, even up to the last century with Teilhard  de Chardin and Corita Kent. Sometime after those two, the intellectual crowd grew to disdain religion. An important exception to this rule is on the right, where (for example) Richard (Father) John Neuhaus exemplifies a right wing intellectual movement, centered around the journal he founded, First Things. I do not know a similar example on the left. Indeed, I think the left has abandoned religious thought and conversation to either the homespun vacuity of Branson level thinking, or outright to Fundamentalist Christianity, with its disavowal of tolerance of difference.

I will say that I find a certain intelligence in an acknowledgement of a higher power. I like the idea of God.

I think you have a history within the Fundamentalist world, where I do not. Will you tell me about how that experience has influenced your current work?

What did you hope for your film  A Very, Very Distant Fire? Maybe too, what did you feel watching the original with your family?

Zach Kleyn:

I too find the idea of God compelling. I think it can be a helpful ‘tool,’ regardless of whether it is attached to the ‘truth’ of reality or not.

When you talk about how the intellectual left has given up religion to “Fundamentalist Christianity, with its disavowal of tolerance of difference,” I agree. It is so frustrating to watch the richness of a complex religious tradition be so flippantly ignored, and yet I get why that response would happen: How else to address the rigid conformity and lack of tolerance? The problem occurs when the intellectual left begins to take on the same characteristics of the right – a kind of post-god, intellectual fundamentalism that says that anyone who has any belief in a higher power whatsoever can be outright dismissed. A 4-year-old once told me, “I asked my mother why we don’t believe in God, and she said because we aren’t stupid.” This blew me away! Dogma and fundamentalism exist within secular environments also, and what makes this especially insidious and dangerous is that it doesn’t appear as fundamentalism at all – the people who categorize anyone who believes in God as stupid KNOW they are correct, just as religious fundamentalists KNOW that homosexuality is wrong or that Jesus is the only way to access God. My job as an artist, and perhaps as a mystic, is to exist in a kind of limbo territory which is just as threatening to my liberal art audience as it is to Christians – because it is only here, in a shifting and uncertain and very human paradigm that continually turns over on itself, that any kind of transformational growth can occur. I am asking everyone who interacts with my work to perpetually rethink and reinvent who they are and the world they inhabit, and this is just straight-up uncomfortable.

I am relatively convinced that eventually, if an artist is doing exactly what they are supposed to do (work which comes from his or her heart, we could say, or at least work that is truly authentic), the practicalities and details of getting paid for this work will fall in place. Is this naive? Possibly. It is related to, and patterned from my religious background, a sort of protestant work ethic combined with a secular version of ‘pre-destination.’ Maybe it is my odd way of continuing to believe in God.

I’ve found that because of my particular interests, the content of my work and the forms of representation that I use as an artist, I have to occupy some kind of transient, in-between, interstitial no-man’s land. I don’t have a comfortable home either in the realm of Christianity or within the contemporary art world. Mike [Hernandez] makes good use of the term “exile” in his art practice. I really like this term also, because as a signifier it contains so much: the connotations of the Old Testament and the story of the Jews being exiled in Egypt; the current various geo-political issues of having to leave one’s country; a return to an ancient form of human existence – nomadic, hunter-gatherer tribal relations.

But I want to answer your question, “What did you hope for A Very, Very, Distant Thunder? Maybe too, what did you feel watching the original with your family?”

Zach Kleyn, A Very, Very, Distant Thunder (Screen shot), Single Channel Video, 50:00 TRT, Found footage and audio, 2012

My hope for A Very, Very, Distant Thunder, just as is true for all of my current artistic work, is that the viewer witness another human being struggling with coming to terms around who he is in relationship to the larger cultural forces that make an imprint upon all of us. I want the work to be an example of how any human creature can wrestle and respond authentically to the feeling (and the reality) of being trapped within a certain set of cultural restraints. The restraints never leave, they just shift over time. They evolve along with culture, just as humans are biologically evolving. Maybe an artist’s job is to be willing to risk exposure, exile and punishment by pushing the boundaries of cultural restraints – reaching for that which exists just outside of language and ‘acceptable behavior’ with the belief that what they do will move human nature into (and here I am tempted to use an idyllic or modernist term of hope, but I won’t) the realm of the new and the uncertain.

Zach Kleyn,
A Very, Very, Distant Thunder, 2010/2013
Screen shot
Image is courtesy of the artist

When I saw the original A Distant Thunder, it was in Sunday School as a 10-year-old. Because of the context, the film was presented as unequivocally true – it couldn’t be brushed off as just a made-up “horror film.” The original film rocked me to the core, and what I felt was a deep fear that stretched into my twenties. But I learned something very valuable about the power of context and how certain environments drastically change the ways content is digested. This is something that marketing researchers and branding experts have known for a long time, and it is why there currently exists a kind of capitalist hyper-control that is capable of manipulating the smallest details of human environment. Christians have been using the power of environment and context to make persuasive arguments for centuries – why not learn from this and turn a critically-curious laser beam onto the ways that pop-culture has learned and appropriated from Christianity? Norman Klein writes about the coercive nature of theatrical environments in many of his books.

I wonder what would happen if I did the same treatment (a complete audio re-make) to a film consumed and adored by left-leaning intellectuals. Would there be the same amount of heckling and laughing from an art audience if I were to fuck with a film that most liberal art people considered ‘sacred’ to their ‘fully logical’ and impenetrable worldview?

Geoff Tuck:

Is it something about the certainty of people that feels wrong? I mean on both sides, the religious AND the secular intellectual? What I recall from reading when I was a child is that religious figures always seemed to be wracked with doubt, the ancient figures describe a struggle to believe. Yet, in contemporary times, as when a youth Jesus movement swept around me as a child in the suburbs, it was all about certainty and judgment. Secularists, with science at their backs, are equally certain of all they know. 

I think I am not so in love with faith as I am with doubt, with questioning. 

In this conversation, I risk speaking only in generalities. I am not so good at big picture conversations – I become lost. I think this is why I write about art and not about art history and art theory. I can observe and question what is in front of me, and learn from the exchange; in talking and debating about ideas my tendency is to fall back on what I know – when I think about it, really I measure ideas against what I have learned and already believe.

Zach Kleyn:

I think that it is possible for a ‘person of faith’ to have as much skepticism, doubt and questioning as a secular individual. But the problem, as we’ve already pointed out, is that healthy doubt is so rare on either side of the divide. Or, the fact that there is a divide in the first place. I find it more intriguing to frame discussions around why it is that human beings demand certainty, whether religious or secular, rather than a discussion of which side is “right” or “wrong.” The second option doesn’t get us anywhere.

I am an individual who delights with speaking in generalities and “big pictures,” so I will try and bring that to our discussion, keeping in mind that we will might need to do some ‘translating’ between your tangible details and my abstract concepts.

Gregory Michael Hernandez:

I don’t think of myself as a fierce intellectual at all- but I do think I am fiercely trying to be intellectual in my viewpoints (as are most people), so I will accept the label as that!

Like Zach Kleyn, I had a strong religious upbringing. I was raised in a Southern Baptist church.  At seven years old I asked Jesus to come into my heart and forgive me of my sins. I was baptized, and therefore assured that I would go to heaven instead of hell. In my senior year of high school, I decided to pursue my talent in visual art for the “glory of God”. In other words, I wanted to be an evangelist through art. I attended Biola University (a Christian College in La Mirada, CA) for four years, praying and training the whole time that I could convert people to Christianity after college.

It is very common for students at Biola University to get married while still in college or immediately after school. That is largely because they are taught to save sex for marriage. Likewise, I got married at the end of my junior year. In my senior year I began asking harder questions, and that led to where I am today. The primary inquiry was based on the realization that if I grew up in a Mormon family, I would probably be Mormon. If I grew up atheist, I would probably be atheist. I concluded that I must be willing to suspend my belief (temporarily set aside what I think I know to be true) in order to think critically about all worldviews. Only through that process would I be justified entering the secular world telling people to reject their false worldviews and follow Jesus. It only took 2 years after college for this personal challenge to start deconstructing my entire life, leading to the slow dissolution of my marriage and what I refer to as my “dark twenties”. I entered a state of spiritual and intellectual exile. I didn’t speak to my parents, brothers, or most of my extended family for a couple of years because they heavily condemned what I was doing and thinking.

Zach Kleyn and I didn’t know each other in college. We both went to Biola University so I very distinctly connect to his story and artistic goals. While his Christian background is more directly embedded within the form and content of his work, my Christian background provided the foundation for the issues I still explore today. I think there are three types of people in the world: those who become what they were taught, those who rebel and completely reject what they were taught, and those who absorb and filter what they were taught to become a hybrid or something other. Obviously that’s a neat generalization, but the point is that Zach and I are not the first or second type.

I think this dialogue about “Art, Authenticity and Religion” is timely and necessary because I think our culture requires it. This conversation is already happening in unique ways all around us. If someone asks me if I still believe in God, I may shrug my shoulders and reply, “Sure, I guess, probably”, and that is because I am not very interested in God as a divine being in the sky. However, I am very interested in God as a construct. I actively think about and am compelled by “the idea of God”. The idea of God doesn’t depend on whether or not there is a God. The idea of God has always been a driving force behind human nature, desire, identity, politics, community, and so on. We may live in the 21st century and an age of vast scientific knowledge and discovery, but we aren’t done with the idea of God by a long shot- and the idea of God is not done with us (providing philosophical infrastructure to our ideas and beliefs).

I almost quit bothering with the idea of God completely, until I realized that it is way too important and complex to leave to the fundamentalists. They do not own God, and if there is a God I wonder how it feels about being “owned” in thousands of competing religions. If religions didn’t compete, that would be more conducive to the fabric of global community. But most religions evolve toward ultimate authority and competition. I do not mean to discount religion completely when I say this, but I think many religions develop structures that become idols in competition with the “God” they aim to serve. For Evangelical Christians (what I used to be), their idol is the Bible. In my estimation, they have made it so “God” can’t speak or move outside of anything that is forever sealed inside that book.

I think Geoff is right: when it comes to spiritual matters (things that can’t be proven beyond a shadow of a doubt) it seems wrong to have such certainty. Why is it that religious and secular intellectuals feel so comfortable fighting for their version of truth? Growing up as a Christian, I was taught that faith in God is the ultimate thing- that doubts will arise but they should develop into faith. Now I think of faith and doubt as two sides of the same coin, and the only thing you can buy with that coin is a small bag of dust from the land of “Who knows?”.

When I say that I think this conversation is necessary and critical for our culture, here are a few ideas I want to explore more:

1. What are the merits in promoting or thinking about the idea of God? I am not interested in asking what the values are in believing in God, because our culture has been hit over the head with those reasons already: some say there is no moral compass without God, that you can’t be a good person without God, and that there is no point to life without God. On the other hand, we have heard plenty about “The God Delusion”, and why belief in God is for the weak-minded. While those two sides continue to duke it out for superiority, is there fertile soil worth turning over in this bloody field of the idea of God?

2. The divide between left and right, religious and secular, is deepening and it is damaging. The levels of aggression, intransigence, and hostility between human beings (from street level to the intellectual spheres) are high. If there is one thing that the idea of God ought to elicit, it is humility and compassion. Humility is the opposite of certainty in this case, and it seeks common ground instead of difference and division. Compassion is the opposite of anger and hatred, and it recognizes equality and promotes transference (the ability to conceive in the mind how the divide between “us” and “them” is a construct of upbringing and perspective, not necessarily matters of right or wrong). Paul Ricour said, “People are not changed by ethical urgings, but by transformed imaginations”. The idea of God could operate at a level that stimulates the imagination and produces curiosity.

3. Perhaps authenticity is the new “edgy”. Artists and galleries are known for posturing, trying to play the right cards, gaming the system, and pumping themselves full of hot air just as much as the seediest politicians. It is hard to determine what is ‘cool’ and truly good in that kind of environment, and people may respond positively to heartfelt yet critical ideas.

4. The DNA of humans and chimpanzees are 99% the same, yet we are vastly different creatures. I think that most human beings are 99% the same in their beliefs and ideas, yet we differ on certain big ticket ideologies that make us look at each other as if we are humans and they are ape’s. Perhaps we need something “other” to evolve us forward without slaughtering each other. Perhaps we can evolve our collective skills for critical thinking and abilities to reason. It will help us get to the roots of issues faster, instead of bickering over the fruit.

5. Spiritual and religious issues are the source of much pain and inner suffering for people in our world. They also tend to be the source of intellectual blockage. There is room for healing and opening of the mind. Such weighty matters require careful handling, because the topics quickly become divisive and personal.

6. What does all this talk about the idea of God have to do with contemporary art? In the same way that I don’t think it is necessary or possible that all people can or should believe in God, I also don’t think it is necessary or possible for all art to have some deeper meaning or purpose other than for its own sake. At the same time, nourishing the idea of God can unclog certain arteries to increase the flow of creativity. It can be a slow-drip infiltration into contemporary art- both deepening the discourse and tightening the connections that network between values, cultures and identities. After all, one current criticism of art is that too many works are derivative and stale. It is increasingly difficult to find unique vision married to fresh form, yet the human capacity for translating experience is endless.

7. If the theological imagination was a driving force of the Renaissance beginning in the 14th century, perhaps the idea of God can be one catalyst for a 21st century renaissance. As artist’s, most of us are aware of the destructive tendencies of capitalism and market forces on the individual, society, and making good art. Our world is increasingly global and interconnected, and we need approaches to faith and civility that allow for the most common good. This idea of God is a very political enterprise, as it always has been.

I haven’t yet had the chance to see Zach’s “A Very, Very Distant Fire”, but I have seen clips and talked to him about it. The original film comes from a certain ideology, has a narrative that is specific to a brand of faith, and was intended as a marketing / propagandistic tool. However, Zach’s treatment of the film opens it up to operate as a case study with broader appeal and larger implications. I think similar things could be said about this discussion of Art, Authenticity and Religion.

A couple resources:

The blog of Barry Taylor, the only pastor-type person I could tolerate when I was in ‘exile’: http://superflat.typepad.com/

John Caputo, a smart guy: http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=9750

Corrie Siegel:

Religion and Art……we have some very interesting big, hairy, gorillas to contend with here. I like what Geoff said about getting lost in the big picture, because in many ways  having a conversation about the relationship between art, religion, following, and questioning  seems like a quixotic task, one where we are bound to get absurdly lost in search of invisible beasts. I suppose that’s where some of the interest lies for me. When we are all lost we are in neutral territory*. We  can construct some sort of understanding, which can be built and re configured in many forms, I’m picturing us like talented hamsters  running through an overlapping Escher maze thats dangling off the armpit of a giant.

* Though people get lost in very different ways so we may find this territory seemingly infinite… the vast 1% Michael spoke about

I’m fascinated by the  way individuals and groups also can hold structures as sacred, impenetrable and unchanging. I’m not from a family or community background that is religious in the same way as Zach, Amanda or Gregory, but I do find there are times when I realize I have strong, unmovable assumptions or feelings about what I am doing, what my purpose is or what is best for me, in much the same way. I believe strongly in the transformative power  humans have to connect, create, and relate to one another and themselves though navigating and reforming things and ideas.

Often, I think my self- identity as an artist often allows me to feel a kinship with very religious people. From the outside, without context we can both look rather absurd, the sacrifices we make, the way we structure our lives, the way we read the world around us for the symbolic, and the way we work to make those symbols tangible, or explore the tension between the tangible and intangible. Of course there are many kinds of religious people and many kinds of artists… and at this point I think i’m having a really fun time running though this little maze of generalities that I have created so I think its time to point to a few random  ideas and tell you where I am coming from so hopefully we can build a few bridges and mazes together.

Religion fascinated me when I was growing up. My grandmother converted 2 times in her life. She left this world a very devoted Jehovah’s Witness, I respect her tenacity and belief. I was raised in a Reform Jewish background. My mom converted to Judaism initially because it was important to my dad to raise me and my brother to be Jewish. I remember once, at a high holiday service( The holiest of Jewish holidays) ,our Rabbi said he was not sure he believed in god. I was unphased by this,  I grew up thinking that the most important part of being Jewish for my family was keeping a cultural identity.The part of cultural inheritance that seemed most essential was that of interpretation.. the spirit of debate that was reinforced by the clear  layers of meaning within judaism’s structure. Belief and doubt were not presented as opposites. The act of faith in some ways seemed to be the embodiment of doubt. Studying religion  was like reading  transcripts of the most inspiring and absurd argument. This early exposure to philosophy trained me to  question and delight in playing with ideas and structures. I use art as a way to engage with and describe these processes.

Corita Kent once said,

“ I see art as a search for integrity– for fulfillment as a means of integrating every act of our lives into a whole as nearly perfect and we, with the grace of God and our own constant searching and finding, can make it. Our lives must become, as Sister Magdalen Mary so aptly said, “ a constant solving of problems, for the solution of one problem always carries the germ of the next.”

I hold art as so sacred that I feel hesitant making any general statement about what role it plays for me or or how it should function, I don’t know if good art always has the kind of  integrity like Corita speaks of, but I think that most art that I consider to be good has led me to search or consider what integrity is. I also enjoy the way she alludes to the act of problem solving as something that is intertwined and perhaps indistinguishable from the act of asking a question.

Corita (at center) in silkscreen studio/ classroom, circa 1950′s, Courtesy of Corita Art Center, Los Angeles, www.corita.org

I had the pleasure of working at the Corita Art Center for 4 years. Corita Kent/ Sister Corita was a nun and pop artist in the 1960’s. She is most known for the pop art, text based silkscreen prints she produced, the flower child like happenings she organized, as well as her innovative teaching methods.

Corita Kent leading Mary’s Day Parade, 1964, Courtesy of Corita Art Center, Los Angeles, www.corita.org

Corita appropriated commercial slogans and imagery to make statements about civil rights, the war on poverty and spiritual in the every day. I could go on about Corita for a long time and maybe if Geoff is down I can write a post about her sometime.  Corita left her unsold prints to her former sisters when she died. The majority of this community of nuns decided to become an ecumenical religious community after pressure  from the very conservative archdiocese they were under the auspices of. Long story very short I had the privilege of working closely with a community of former nuns. These women are some of the coolest, most thoughtful, highly educated, and experienced people I know. A lot of people that came to visit the center and wrote about Corita would comment on how absurd it was that such contemporary work came from a woman that wore a habit for most of her life, but to me it was not despite wearing the habit but partially because of it that Corita was able to make such innovative work. Her spirituality gave her a structure to explore, question  and build upon.

Corita Kent with her serigraphs circa 1960, Courtesy of Corita Art Center. Los Angeles, www.corita.org

It’s funny how certain attitudes or subject matter can make people uncomfortable. It’s also interesting the unspoken distinctions and layers of reverence that can exist within artistic discourse.

I have been interested in working with a lot of traditional Jewish art forms and texts lately.Part of this line of inquiry and exploration is an interest in the viewers reaction to a work or series. The specific project I am speaking of  has become partially driven by an exploration of how the content  and context of  a specific art work or line of inquiry affects the artist and viewers relationship with the work as well as a solar system of ideas and concepts that surround it.  There is an interesting relationship between cultural or religious specificity and general mechanics  of  faith and culture. Will it close off a dialogue if people assume what I am doing is religious or culturally specific? What is the context and audience of the work, and is part of the identity of the the work  that it has a shape shifting relationship to its viewers? As a reaction to these questions I have become increasingly blatant and more specific with cultural reference points in the hope that there is a cross tension that acts as a catalyst.  What I have been finding is the more specific I get the more abstracted and accessible things are seeming to become.

Corrie Siegel, “Swastikas”, Cut Paper, 28x 23 cm
Image courtesy of the artist

Art and religion can be used as a point of exile, a place unfamiliar or familiar at a distance that the viewer must get lost to find themselves again.. its that wide 1% of difference we can wander, that little bit of information we can interpret in so many ways. Religion and art and our convictions and use of both are tools that we can use to navigate the desert, or tools we can use to find new deserts and points of exile once we find how fun and beautiful this wandering can be.

Corrie Siegel, “Star Maps”, Performance, 2012
Image courtesy of the artist

Geoff:

Zach – I have a thought about your comment that “if an artist is doing exactly what they are supposed to do (work which comes from his or her heart, we could say, or at least work that is truly authentic), the practicalities and details of getting paid for this work will fall in place. “ I suspect that what you will find when you do work that comes from your heart is satisfaction and (possibly) happiness. Economics works differently – otherwise many people we both know would be millionaires! I comment on this because I think that the conflation of happiness (and success) with financial gain is indicative of the attenuated spirituality we are discussing. Not to pin a tail on you about it –  it’s true that we have all internalized this expectation, to one degree or another.

In a recent conversation, a friend used a phrase that interested me and that seems pertinent to our discussion. Lindsay August Salazar and I were speaking about spirituality, as we are now, and I shared a sneering criticism of religion that I had overheard. “Well,” Lindsay said,  ”that person must have stopped paying attention years ago – as a culture, we discussed all this before. Everyone I know believes in something, or is able to discuss the possibility of faith without resorting to knee-jerk rejection.”  (I am paraphrasing.) I like this, and I appreciate Lindsay’s openness. She really seemed surprised by my dilemma. From this conversation with Lindsay, I began to consider whether my own struggle is one of locution and perception (aside from a few  experiences with narrow-minded people); and that maybe by phrasing my question in terms of “religion” I am insisting on something unnecessary and missing a point that others understand: that religion is separate from the spirit. The former is a tool for organizing society – about which we can have a conversation about  of all the absurdities,  the glories and the cruelties of civilization –  and the latter is something that most people accept as part of their lives. Spirituality is common to humans; we all have feelings of depth beyond our selves and beyond our ability to communicate.

Plus, on a personal level, it is entirely true that I most often need to feel like I am working against a tide. I need the struggle, and to narratize my life in heroic terms. Little, tiny Geoffrey against the big, cruel world, and all that. (yeah, it’s true. I want to be a hero. so  embarrassing)

I think this generalized and largely accepted spirituality speaks to things that Mike and Corrie have written here.

I like your Point No. 1, Mike, and I think we can find a way toward an open conversation by accepting that any idea of god is personal, and so is difficult to discuss – and even risky. I think that if people have difficulty discussing belief and the spiritual it is probably a good thing; it means we are close to that “authenticity” that we claim.

Do you think that as a culture, as a people, we have become unused to talking about our feelings? Our ways of communicating seem to have made us more comfortable with brief public statements where we profess a position, or that affiliate us with an established idea. I’m not only speaking of the recent Twitter, Facebook and social media constructed communication, I am including the long term influence on our culture  and conversation of advertising and political speech.

In a conversation with Patricia Fernandez, about her recent installation at Commonwealth and Council, she offered this: “My father once said to me something that his mother said to him (or at least it sounds like something she would have lamented): people don’t write any more, we don’t record our thoughts and our actions (and assume responsibility for these by writing them down). He was referring to letter writing. Handwriting. “ I like this. It know that I often talk myself out of extreme language and positions when I write down what I think.  And I do think that her stressing of handwriting versus keyboarding is important. My fingers tend to fly ahead of my brain, and certainly ahead of my sensitivities, when I type.  I become invested in an interiority that builds walls. When keyboarding, I become fascinated by my own skills with language as a weapon, not so much as a tool.  Handwriting is slow, and for me slow is good. I started a year ago writing all my posts for Notes on Looking first in cursive, in long hand (I can pinpoint the date: it was  at Eileen Quinlan’s Constant Comment show at Overduin and Kite, in January 2012. I walked from my home to the gallery with a notebook and I spent two hours writing before I returned home to post my thoughts.) I think my writing has improved  since then, and I also think I understand more about the work and more deeply. Laboring over a text allows me to see where my own self-regard gets in my way. Defending my ideas to myself in real time helps me refine them.

Now I wonder if communication (in general, and especially private communication) has become directed at a public, imagined or real, rather than to a self or another? Most of what we experience now is public communication of some sort, and this must influence us.

Corrie mentions Sister Corita Kent. In the early 1960’s Sister Corita appropriated the then burgeoning public language of advertisements and used the symbols  of  their persuasion to explore social and economic justice and equality. Kent used advertisements as texts, and she encouraged housewives and immigrants to look for and dissect the messages, and  to make signs and posters of employing the symbols. Basically, Corita Kent was acquainted with semiotics  and the study of linguistics and also with the work of Andy Warhol; she used what she learned to empower her audience and to challenge the structures of exploitation.

I think we can have an inclusive conversation about these subjects by offering a direction, or directions to explore and by avoiding limitations of  religious and spiritual definition. My god is personal; he (I guess because I’m male) “looks” in my imagination more like the god of other people than he looks like me. Does this make sense?

And Corrie – I encourage you to write about your experiences with Sister Corita and the former sisters of her Order. Notes on Looking would be honored and thrilled to host such writing!

Corrie:

I’m especially fond of footnotes, or the Wikipedia link system since they seem to mirror the tangents and points of inspiration that big  thoughts contain. Writing to you like this reminds me of a text I have been particularly interested in lately. I have included a picture of the Talmud below. Basically, the Talmud is like the second bible to Jewish people and it includes commentary by thousands of Rabbis over the period of many years. The central text is oral law starting from 10 BCE-200 CE  and then the outside text interprets this inner text. On one page there a many voices spanning time and place from 10 BCE until 1500 CE. I like that this text is a visual manifestation of debate- external and internal, dynamic and concrete.

Talmud, Berakhot, Venice, 1520-1523, Printed by Daniel Bomberg, BM499 1520-1523 v.1, Fols. 46v-47r.
(image source is linked)

I like the idea of appropriation and internalization you bring up Geoff, because I think it’s an ongoing theme in religion and art. I’m thinking you could parse out many artist’s and theorists works using this criteria, though of course there are infinite categories and themes.

We come from a long line of artists and thinkers who have appropriated and internalized religious themes. Most of the things I know about the New Testament I learned through art history and philosophy classes. Since I don’t come from an evangelical or particularly religious “in the god sense” background my interest in religion is mostly in the way things are said and communicated and how they are reacted to. I  care about Renaissance painting even though most of it has to do with a god that I don’t believe in. I see a higher power present, I see an artist that is exploring something awesome, and trying to convey  both immaterial and material.

Right now i’m thinking about Bernini’s Ecstasy of St Teresa.. This is an artist showing mastery of form to make a statement about spirituality and what it feels like to have a body.

Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, marble, gold, mixed media; 1647-1652
(image source is linked)

The artist makes a marble nun into a sensual  figure and then sets it glowing through technical genius, working with natural light that runs down gilded beams and illuminates the figure. Its crazy for me to imagine an artist making a work like this today, I doubt it would be accepted by the religious establishment. I wonder what kind of art Bernini would make in 2013, would he be a light and space artist? An Andre Serrano devotee? Would such an artist give Kinkade a run for his money? Who would commission this work today?

Even though Corita’s text based work may be different in appearance from the stereotypical devotional art work that preceded her, I think what she was doing was not very different in mission from previous artists who depicted religious scenes. For the longest time religious art was the forefront of innovation, it was a way of involving the populace, establishing power, creating divinity, connecting and disconnecting with social realities. One of Corita’s missions was to use commercials as allegories, to show the sacred in the vernacular, she saw the aesthetics and power of marketing and she was using it just like Bernini used the light, as a tool to reveal and endow the idea with irresistible presence.

Corita Kent, “song about the greatness”, Serigraph on pellon, 30×36″ 1964, Courtesy of Corita Art Center, Los Angeles,
www.corita.org

I’m thinking about when I first encountered Zach’s “The Gingerbread Lesson” It was the predecessor to “A Very very Distant Thunder”. The piece  was screened on a loop in Actual Size, and since I gallery sat a few hours during the run of the exhibition I had the chance of watching people’s reaction to the film. I found that after a point in time I was able to eerely imitate Zach’s overdub of part of the film. If I concentrate I can still hear specific sentences from that work.  It’s interesting to think that through a few gallery sits I now have this memory implanted, and I internalize this voice and religious statement that’s not my own. I was alone in that dark room with the tv and Zach’s voice, and then there was a transformation of the piece every time a new person came in, some snickering, some in rapt attention, and some very uncomfortable. I remember at one point a couple of Zach’s former classmates from Biola came by. It seemed that they were still religious, they watched the video, said something about how determined and interesting their former classmate was and left.It was fascinating to see the way the work changed, The way it meant something different to each person that encountered it, that it was a point of dialogue and also of strange wonder and amusement. Zach’s work has an appeal because of the curious and potent subject matter, but its well made, and thats what enables it to be approached in many ways.

We continue to talk about the works by artists that were commissioned to create portraits of Jesus even if we don’t worship him. The artists have a way of transfiguring the specificity of the subject matter, so that it can become a universal symbol.

Zach Kleyn:

Corrie, I agree with your statement “When we are all lost we are in neutral territory.” Part of the thrill of being an artist is the freedom to get lost, and I think the willingness to be lost is what (for me) most clearly separates art that takes me somewhere (or lets me lose myself somewhere) and art that does not. But I also think that being lost is difficult and uncomfortable for the majority of humans, and that many people are deluding themselves about not being lost. In order to receive the gifts of being lost, one must first admit that it is true. Embracing the lost-ness of human nature is hard for individual humans, and almost impossible for established institutions, religious or otherwise. Much of the purpose of established institutions is to help human beings cope with the fact that uncertainty exists in the world.

When I was in the midst of questioning my religious background, I kept returning to the ways in which most Fundamentalists are unable to exist within a space of uncertainty. I felt at my core that questioning, uncertainty, is essential for being not only an authentic artist, but also a quality human creature. The space of being an artist provides me with just enough structure and freedom to bravely ask the questions that I want to ask, even in the face of the unknown. And as Corrie has already pointed out, being a contemporary artist can look as absurd to an outsider as someone of an esoteric faith. My colleague and conceptual confidant Adam Feldmeth once asked me how my artistic practice had replaced my religious faith, and I had to admit that he had a point.

Zach Kleyn, Self-Self-Portrait (Found Portrait), Pencil on Paper, 9”x12”, 1995–2013.
Image courtesy of the artist

I like how Mike describes “humility [as] the opposite of certainty.” We usually think of the opposite of certainty as uncertainty, but if certainty doesn’t actually exist, and we always have uncertainty, then perhaps all we are left with is a way of being; in this case, humble. Humbleness is something that Christianity knows a lot about, and this is just one example why it isn’t always helpful to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Giving Christianity the finger is counter-productive. Religions of all stripes need to be looked at, poked, prodded, turned over, criticized, snuggled, and kissed.

One of the reasons that I love handwriting is that it can’t help but betray the frailty and uncertainty of the human condition. To me, even “confident-looking” handwriting has a desperate quality, as if it were perpetually unsure of itself. Whenever I read a critical text that I want to understand on a deeper level, I always print the text out and proceed to fill the margins with a myriad of half-baked possibilities, ideas, and connections.

Geoff, I admit that I employ a kind of “magical thinking” when I state that eventually an artist working from his or her heart will be paid. This world doesn’t have those kind of guarantees, another example of the lack of certainty at the core of the human experience. And yet I choose to tell myself this when I get up in the morning and face another day of art-making; this small act is just one of the many strategies that I employ in order to continue the often thankless task of creativity. It helps me continue to make things during dry spells, when inspiration is completely lacking.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg outlines a curious trait that is absolutely required by a person who is attempting to change a habit in their life (and this is well-documented in the research): This person must believe, from the beginning, that he or she is capable of change, that he or she will change. A kind of magical thinking, or faith, or trust, is required before an individual is able to go through transformation. This is also why I have the opinion that people who believe in a higher power have a leg up on people who don’t – it is a lot easier to function as a human being when you believe that you are taken care of, loved, and that your life fits within a larger master plan. It almost doesn’t matter whether this is true or not, because the belief itself is what makes the difference in a person’s life. Belief enables an individual to become a better person.

I say that it almost doesn’t matter whether it is true or not because it is also clear that certain beliefs, particularly interpretations of religious theologies, are and have been an ongoing source of unthinkably large amounts of suffering on this earth. An artist must be able to occupy the no-man’s-land between extremes, and to be adept at bringing a balance between diverse camps of thought. An artist must be a trickster, a fool, capable of flipping anything sacred on its head, including the Richard Dawkins-esque belief that all religious or spiritual thought is harmful.

Zach Kleyn, I’ve Got A Mind of My Own, Performance at Monte Vista Projects, November 2012.
Image courtesy of the artist

Mike is right: “the human capacity for translating experience is endless.” Not only is it endless, it is necessary, because we as human creatures have a knack for developing systems of thought that eventually would destroy us (and have often gotten very close to doing so). When I was first considering whether to attend CalArts, a current student told me: “We question everything.” This still sounds to me like the ideal position of any artist – nothing is sacred, everything is an experiment, and every moment contains critical curiosity. It is in this humbling and profane space that uncertainty can finally be embraced.

Amanda Leigh Evans:

I have been thinking about humility throughout our conversation, both how the quality is valued in religious institutions and how it fits in the art world.  It would seem that the opposite of extremism might also be service. In my work I have been looking for ways to “lose myself”, as Zach mentioned, and it seems that when I lose myself the work is at its best.  This reminds me of something Madeline L’Engle said in Walking on Water, “The work comes to the artist and says ‘Here I am, serve me’ and the artist’s job, no matter great or small is to serve.”  This resonates with me.

I spent a year working in close collaboration with people who have extreme developmental disabilities.  For me this work was one of the most successful, rewarding, and difficult experiences to date and I think it was only successful because I focused on losing myself to the work.  When I forced an agenda or trajectory, the work suffered.  When I gave my collaborators the room and resources to express their ideas, I was able to create a platform for their thoughts, set my own ego aside, and allow the work to grow beyond myself.  It was important that I lost a sense of where our work was headed so I did not force it in a certain direction.  Now as I reflect on that experience, I look for ways to continue making work that is both intellectual and compassionate at the same time.  I like how Shea Hembrey works by what he calls the “three Hs:” head, heart, and hands, which is essentially that in order for him to see his work as a success it should be intellectually stimulating, have passion behind it, and be well crafted.    I want to know how my work can work nourish human intellect and the human spirit in a way that is both honest and conscious of its shortcomings.  More importantly, I want to make work that is fed by love and not an agenda.  I want my work to ask important, unanswered questions rather than force ideas.

This way of working for me somehow seems to relate to religion in the context of our conversation.  My background is very similar to that of Mike and Zach (similar fundamentalist childhood, same school, similar doubts), and I’m aware that my way of thinking is forever tied to those experiences.  I mention this because it I can only speak first hand of experiences from this specific strain of religion.  Today it is difficult for me to accept the solid, simple answers I received to complex issues as a child and it’s clear in “A Very, Very, Distant Thunder” that legalistic fundamentalism has a dehumanizing agenda that seeks to win souls by fear.  In that circumstance souls become objects.  But I think that even within evangelical culture there are many today who would acknowledge that legalistic fundamentalism is misguided and ignorant (and probably those who acknowledge the ignorance are somewhere toward the middle of the spectrum we keep mentioning).  This fundamentalism objectifies people, seeing their souls as trophies rather than seeing the human spirit as the most precious and mysterious thing in existence.

I think that truly valuing a person, truly regarding each person as worthy of love and belonging is a deeply religious idea and one that I want to see incorporated in my work.  Additionally, I want to make work that is not sentimental but intellectual.  I think Sister Corita is a great example of this type of work.  Maybe social practice is also a great example, but doesn’t social practice sometimes have its own agenda?  One criticism of many social practice artists is that ultimately the artist “uses” a specific group of people to build a career or success, and while I won’t mention names I can think of several artists working in social practice who seem to “use” people to feed their career.  That brings me back to L’Engle’s quote and ask myself, “Does my work ultimately serve my ego or am I serving the work?  Am I letting this work reach beyond myself?  Am I stretching it its intellect, compassion, and craftsmanship in order to make it work I believe is interesting and honest?”  Similarly I want to continually ask myself in my spiritual life, “Am I seeking to serve people or am I ‘manipulating’ souls to serve my own insecurities of how some legalist told me a ‘good’ Christian behaves?”

Last week a friend I have been mentoring came very close to killing herself.  When I met with her later that week, she told me she just wanted to understand why she felt so low and asked me to answer that question for her.  While there are a lot of factors in why someone might feel the way she felt, I don’t know if a simple answer to the “why” really answers her question or give her the comfort she needs.  I am not convinced there ever will be a perfect answer, or even a complete answer to many questions about life and our humanness with other humans.  In my search for answers I am learning to be okay with sometimes (most-times) not having answers.  I agree with Zach, “Embracing the lost-ness of human nature is hard for individual humans, and almost impossible for established institutions, religious or otherwise. Much of the purpose of established institutions is to help human beings cope with the fact that uncertainty exists in the world.”  Years ago I gave up on the kind of fundamentalist evangelism/proselytization that gives easy answers to complex issues- it’s sort of like putting a band-aid on an amputated limb.  However,  there are core truths in Christianity that still resonate with me.  I think there is an authentic spirituality as well as a way of artmaking that can somehow be comfortable with the mystery of lost-ness. My hope is that the action of asking difficult and important questions throughout my life and in my work will somehow be helpful in navigating this uncertainty and might be helpful to others.  If I believe God is omniscient, then he of all beings should understand that I don’t have answers.  I don’t think he expects that of me because to pretend that I have all the answers is dishonest religion.

I realize these statements make me unpopular with fundamentalists and probably some people in the art world, and that’s okay.

Gregory Michael Hernandez:

I think Corrie Siegel’s anecdote about the skeptical rabbi is fascinating. I recently heard someone say that Judaism is possibly the most atheistic religion on earth (outside of Buddhism). I don’t know if that is remotely true, but it seems that Judaism is more about historical text, meaning, and interpretation, and “God” isn’t necessarily needed to do those things. Debate and refutation, piecing together then taking apart, seem to be part of the very nature of Judaism. And of course it continues to exist in order to give form to a rich history and culture of people. I would say this is one reason why most religions won’t die: religion is a survival mechanism.

Corrie reminds me that both religion and philosophy are equally concerned with representations of truth. One difference between religion and philosophy is that religion usually has an authority (God or scriptures) while philosophy is free to roam and ask any question. However, there is a rich tradition of thinking about religion that is free of authoritative restraints, does not answer to the confessional community, and does not promote rigid doctrine. John Caputo wrote a book called “The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion”.

Geoff introduces the related terms religion and spirituality, and I do think the terms are hard to distinguish and need clarification. After deconstructing my childhood faith I became skeptical and less interested in “religion”. Yet recently I have become more skeptical about the word “spirituality”. Something about “spirituality” strikes me as too vague and easily appropriated to refer to a mishmash of personal feelings/beliefs without requiring the need to tackle more difficult questions. I think the word “religion” is more appropriately weighty, requiring a prolonged and deft philosophical handling. I think spirituality is a word people are more comfortable with, while religion is difficult to suss out.

Beyond being an institutional tool for organizing spheres of society- religion is also a personal tool for organizing one’s intellectual universe. It becomes a grid that we look through- a grid we cannot easily escape. As theologian Paul Tillich put it: “Culture is the form of religion, and religion is the substance of culture.” Sister Corita Kent bridged the gap (or perhaps showed that there is no gap) between religious thought and cultural context. Amanda Evans brings a deeply meditative and thoughtful approach to her art that attempts to wed the religious, spiritual, intellectual and psychological, all with an awareness of responsibility to the community at large.

This brings us full circle to Zach’s original instigation: fundamentalism exists on the right and the left, within and outside of religious structures. One need not be religious to have religious-like zeal, intellectual blocks, and assumptions. As artists willing to attempt authenticity and intellectual conversation, we can embrace the hard questions about religion. After all, Zach did not make a light-hearted, affirming film about spirituality- he made a biting, double-edged sword of a film about religion. “God” was famously declared dead in the 1960′s, but the “God” archetype/idol has merely been reconstituted within other, equally dogmatic, structures.

By probing religion, we may find that religious thought is underneath every sphere of culture, because theology is never done in a vacuum, and culture is nearly impossible to do without religious thought. If we try to avoid religious limitations, we may find ourselves doing the very thing that fundamentalists do, and that is create systematic ways of compartmentalizing religion in single color boxes. That would only reinforce the divisive stereotypes of “religious” vs. “secular”.

If we are having this conversation about art, religion and authenticity, we do not have to worry about whether or not it is inclusive. By simply cracking the nut I think the directions to explore have been made manifest without our having to try. If this conversation were read aloud in a crowded room, I bet most people would have quite a few comments, questions, refutations, ideas, stories, points to make, and bones to pick. In that imaginary scenario, it would be great if people walked away energized and enlightened instead of merely having their preconceptions reinforced and unshaken.

“In the process of decay, and in it alone, the events of history shrivel up and become absorbed in history.” Walter Benjamin¹

And then further in the same exerpted text:

“…I have come to think of the land as being an enormous historical archive. I am interested in revealing the narratives contained within the landscape, especially those places where the land reveals itself as being both an agent of change and the field of human endeavor.” Mark Ruwedel (ibid.)

Mark Ruwedel,
Untitled, 1997,
From the series Report on Lake Bonneville
(The words GREAT SALT LAKE are hand-lettered in pencil on the photo matte.)
Image is courtesy of the artist and Gallery Luisotti, Santa Monica

Looking at Mark Ruwedel’s untitled photograph, I recognize that the artist is not asking me to think about what the dirt and the wind and the cold might feel like to touch, he is not showing me what they look like; rather, by including as secondary titles the modern, specific name for this place – the Great Salt Lake – as well as the epochal, encompassing name – Lake Bonneville – he is asking me to consider the land itself, and to think about the distance between the two names we have given it.

I know from reading an article by the artist (available in the gallery, and from which I have quoted above) that Lake Bonneville is the name geologists give to the pre-historic Great Basin depression that formed as a lake during the Ice Age (the most recent one, that is). Mountain ranges, climate-scale wind patterns and shifts in earth’s temperature all have played roles in the slow dynamics of geology at Bonneville, and so this photograph, and the series, offer evidence of what Ruwedel calls “land as an agent of change” and specifically, land as an agent of its own change.

Of course, man has wrought changes on this landscape, too; for example, the automobile in the photograph alludes to the history of auto racing at Bonneville Salt Flats, and the Great Salt Lake is home to several celebrated works of land art. Both these activities have left their marks on this place.

I think again of Mark Ruwedel’s use of the word “report” in his title. A report is not a thing, a report is the telling of a thing, a report offers evidence – documentation from which one is encouraged to draw conclusions. A report is also evidence of itself, of the medium used for the telling.

I appreciate the surprise the artist inspires in me by his use of such a technical term, I like that it makes me wonder. As a signifier for art, report challenges me to consider the artist’s intention, and to read his material beyond what I can see, toward what I can find. I am encouraged to draw on what I know and can learn about the subject, and to combine this with the evidence artist presents.

The art and the science of photography are in perfect balance in this picture, and in perfect tension; Ruwedel’s photograph of the spare and debased landscape captures the facts on the ground, and it also evokes the very human mythology of the West. In this way, Ruwedel’s “report” expands to include his thoughts on photography (the facts and the mythology of that art) in his essay on the American landscape.

Off the Grid is on view at Gallery Luisotti through May 4, 2013. The exhibition includes work by Lewis Baltz, John Divola, Christina Fernandez, Frank Gohlke, Ron Jude, Simon Norfolk, Mark Ruwedel and Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. http://www.artnet.com/galleries/home.asp?gid=684

¹ Ruwedel, Mark. “The Land as Historical Archive.” American Art 10, no. 1 (1996): 36-41.

Christian Tedeschi, Molasses Happens Rather Quickly, 2009/2013, polyurethane, stucco brush bristles, steel, wood, 82 x 81 x 90 inches
Image is courtesy of the artist and Western Project
Photograph is by Erin Kermanikian

It comes from a dark place, this sculpture; not as though its making was sad or depressing, but as though light doesn’t get to where it was created – the place is too deep. This dark object is inscrutable, not horrible, and I’m more inspired to wonder than to fear. This ur-thing I am looking at is Molasses Happens Rather Quickly, a sculpture by Christian Tedeschi that is in a group show at Western Project. Cliff Benjamin has just told me that, “Christian has more like this – one is ten feet tall and another is, like, knee high… He builds sheds for them in his backyard!” The idea of this is unsettling and powerful, like housing Jungian archetypes in your garden.

Molasses… is made with black resin and yellow plastic brush bristles. The resin is massed at the center (a center of gravity, as well as of origin?), and it drips to the floor, where the black liquid puddles; these drips lead me to believe the sculpture is self-supporting. The skinny plastic bristles are melted together at their tips, and, repeated, these unions form lovely arcs across and around the shiny resin mass; the effect is of a hazy, frenetic halo. To the touch, this aureole is soft, the way I hope a halo would be.

I recognize that color is a function of materials here. Where yellow plastic meets black resin, shadowed greens and oranges appear; these new colors are aqueous, like the resin, and appear to flow.

I imagine this sculpture being borne of heat, and of resolve, and maybe despair. I imagine also that its foundry was in hell – not in the Christian Hell, which is devoted to failure and condemnation - rather in the hell of the soul, an internal space of trial, fear, fury and, ultimately, of possibilities.

The exhibition Big Mess is on view at Western Project through May 4, 2013. http://www.western-project.com/2013/03/14/big-mess-margaret-griffith-kyla-hansen-christian-tedeschi/#1

P.S.

I notice now, two hours later, that I focused on the darkness of Tedeschi’s sculpture without mentioning its humor. Humor is there. Go see.

Geoff

Big Mess,
Installation view
Image is courtesy of Western Project
Photo is by Erin Kermanikian

Big Mess,
Installation view (Front: Tedeschi’s 400 Years, 2012, toilet paper, polyurethane resin, 39 x 40 x 9 inches)
Image is courtesy of Western Project
Photo is by Erin Kermanikian

Big Mess,
Installation view (Front: Christian Tedeschi, Suspended Animation, 2012, Superman costume, steel, polyurethane resin. 156 x 8 1/2 x 9 inches)
Image is courtesy of Western Project
Photo is by Erin Kermanikian