my heroes died of syphilis

Xanadu: A Stately Pleasure Dome

Erin Shafkind has curated what may be my favorite show of the year so far. Of course, my judgment is clouded by anticipation and the fact that I'm contributing a piece to the show, but there's no denying the compulsive splendor of cacophonous neon lights and roller-skate-glam that also underscores dialogue about utopia and the artistic process. I've previewed a few of the works in person: Troy Gua's ethereal, prismatic portrait of Olivia Newton-John as Kira is breathtaking; I can't wait to see Klara Glosova's crumpled clay skates or the Alpert/Arkley video.

My piece is a drawing called Glory, Utopia (the head of Samuel Taylor Coleridge on the body of Terpischore). In a world where there's nothing new under the sun, this may be the world's first ever six foot tall scratch 'n sniff drawing of a hermaphrodite. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The Prime Minister of Poland died in a plane crash the week I began working on this piece. I'd intended to approach the subject of Xanadu with something of an ubuesque, dystopian eye, so when news of the smoldering Prime Minister of Poland (that is to say, Nowhere) arrived, I felt I was perhaps not on the wrong track. This Rubenesque hermaphroditic unicorn is at its worst/best an Ecclesiastical vanitas, at its best/worst the incarnation of a nonsense-spewing hydrocephalic baboon, bubbling over with genital excess and blue areola. In far darker times (Foucault suggests in his preface to Herculine Barbin) real hermaphrodites were summarily executed for their duplicitous, shifting identities, grotesque sexualities, and ineffectual reproductive organs. The blue-nippled fantasies of societies and artists alike are less frequently executed, but perhaps as consistently ineffectual at producing mature, virile fruit (having short vaginal cul-de-sacs that lead to Nowhere).

Christ's wandering uterus

"[Big] Christ's wandering uterus"
graphite & vellum

I recently finished a new piece that's been gestating in my mind for a while. It hadn't struck me to make a visual depiction of Christ as a hysteric until long after I'd written a handful of "meditations" on Christ's wandering uterus. The concept for the text (as stated in the title) derives primarily from Huysmans' florid description of Grünewald's Crucifixion in his novel Là-Bas, and secondarily from his narrative of Saint Lydwine of Schiedam and his musings on syphilis.

It's hardly a stretch to situate Christ at the center of this decadent pathography - at the center of a triangulation of syphilis, hysteria, and mysticism; it's even quite natural.

Here's a sample; if you want the rest, you can find them here.

Meditations on Christ's wandering uterus (or Christ as hysteric), based on Huysmans' writings concerning Matthias Grünewald's Crucifixion.

mardi
Mardi: On Tuesdays, the Greek physicians believed, the uterus lodged itself in the throat, which accounted for a sense of choking, or globus hystericus. When the doctor pushed a finger into Christ's throat, he could feel the uterine wall pushing back, warm and firm.

(The doctor has placed a fetid herb on his tongue and asked him to swallow it. Supposedly, to inhale the aromas of this plant would effect a movement of the uterus downward from the throat towards its normal position, above the testes.)

new works: Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière

If one image dominates my imagination as a quintessential icon of the grand hysteric and also sits squarely (if suggestively) at the intersection of a hysteric, mystic, and medical theater, it's this one, a picture found in a volume of Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière. An involuntary spasm of the tongue stimulated aurally. Lately I've been obsessively processing this image and its variants, scaling them to larger-than-life iterations. (The little thumbnail on the left-hand side of this blog, for example.)

"Chez une hystérique" & "Jeune possédée"
(from Iconographie Photographique de la Salpêtrière)
mixed media (vellum, pastel, charcoal, acrylic), 76 x 114 cm

J.B. Murry: drawing in tongues

I confess I'm not very familiar with much Outsider Art beyond super big names like Darger or Wolfli, but my sister and her boyfriend recently visited the Folk Art Museum and told me about the art of John "J.B." Murry, which is part of the Approaching Abstraction exhibit on view right now. Needless to say considering my history with and interest in the spiritual "gift of tongues", I am fascinated:

Murry was a sharecropper and a preacher from Georgia who experienced visions and “wrote in the spirit”: the fervor of his technique and the abstract passages that only he could translate are like painted versions of the experience known as speaking in tongues. The artist would hold a water-filled glass bottle up to his artwork to interpret the meanings of his private alphabet, which is composed of squiggles, splashes, and dashes, and conduct a sermonlike reading. As Murry became more comfortable with his material, he modestly increased his scale—from cash-register tape to sheets of stationery to drawing paper—and expanded his medium from ink to paint, applied by brush and finger.

(text and images from the online exhibition catalogue)

First Thursday, May 2010 (in photos)

The Molorazzi wasn't out this month to pound the pavement on First Thursday. Unfortunately for the camera-shy, I was shooting pretty incessantly throughout the night:



Julie Alpert and Amanda Ringstad at SOIL at ACT


Susanna Bluhm at SOIL at ACT

Sharon Arnold and Shawn Zeiger at Some Space Gallery


+Damon Mori


Joey Veltkamp, Cable Griffith, and Sharon Arnold: guest judges
for this month's Best Of Art Walk Awards


(were NOT messing around)


La Familia Gallery


Amy-Ellen Flatchestedmama Trefsger at Gallery 4Culture


Mimi Allin, Flatchestedmama Trefsger, Darla Rae Barry





Shaun Kardinal and Erin Frost


Jana Brevick (who is showing in the SOIL backspace)


Erin Shafkind


Last but not least, my electric blue boots,
which made it onto the CAB yesterday!

Chauney Peck at SOIL (A Powerful New God is Coming)

In some corner of my brain, Bataille is continually rattling around or whispering marginally profane subtexts.

For instance, a few days ago at a bar lounging on an overstuffed couch with mixed company, I could be found fervently discussing with my husband the possibility of assembling a piece of household decor combining an egg holder (the kind you find at certain French bars that look like wire candelabras for hard boiled eggs) and the up-turned bottom half of a mannequin. An homage to the solar anus and other Bataillean white rounds.

So today while listening to Chauney Peck discuss her recent works on display at SOIL, I couldn't help but draw Bataillean points of reference around themes of fetishism, gift-giving, and displays of atomic destruction.

Rather than begin from the concept of limitedness or scarcity of supply as a universal economic motivator, Bataille suggests an overabundance of energy, from a solar scale to a social and economic one, as the driving force behind biological life, lived experience, and culture. Excess - that accursed share of feverish, effervescent energy which must be disposed of or wasted - is spent in numerous ways, including gift-giving, the production of spectacle, non-productive sexuality, the destructive violence of war, and so forth.

When Chauney discussed her fetish objects, she mentioned a fascination with Marxist commodity fetishism and her pleasure in dispensing her works as gifts, when possible. For her the act of giving without lucrative exchange creates an emotional or spiritual reward that's unattainable through commercial transactions. The time and labor invested in these objects translate into a substantial and pleasurable sacrifice in their being, in Bataillean terms, wasted (see note below). Her interest in this kind of gift-giving economy of course called to mind the tradition of the Potlatch ceremony, something which Bataille addressed in his economic theory and which seems compounded in its relevance to Chauney's work considering the tradition originated in the Pacific Northwest.

If we are considering Chauney's work in terms of energetic excess and its colorful, euphoric expenditure, it isn't at all surprising to find images referencing total atomic demolition, like A Powerful New God is Coming, juxtaposed to the fetish/gift objects. As depictions of gratuitous, blinding expenditure, these violently colorful collages teeter between celebrating the awesomeness of a spectacle which, for its creators, entailed an unparalleled game of chance (for all they knew, the bomb might obliterate the whole planet) and acknowledging the enforced displacement of individuals from a piece of earth that was snuffed out in a single, deific stroke. The aggressive, vertiginous cheer of the blast is enthralling, and in terms of Bataillean economy, suggests and celebrates the volatility and potential beauty of excess.

*

*Emily Apter Feminizing the Fetish:

If Kant, Marx, and Freud gave [fetishism] infelicitous ascriptions, then Georges Bataille and fellow members of the Collège de Sociologie, intent on shattering the complacencies of bourgeois civilization, recuperated fetishism as a form of transgressive idolatry. Strengthening its status as a perversion (more than the surrealists ever dared) Bataille and Michel Leiris transformed fetishism, along with a host of other depressed pathologies, into a "good" theoretical praxis. Leiris, who according to Clifford renewed the Real by seeing "'facts' as performances, tropic productions, or heightened cut-out elements (fetishes)," fabricated what he called "true fetishism" out of a kind of self-reflexive, narcissistic "thingification": "In the domain of art we seldom find any object (paintings or sculptures) able in some measure to respond to the needs of this true fetishism, which is really the loving love of ourselves," itself placed, like a freestanding object in an uncannily "foreign" space of the subject, denotes the schizoid, liminal eroticism of this "cut-out, true fetishism."

Troy Gua & The Collaborati : Meet Greet Rinse Repeat

glyph in progress

Yesterday I handed my glyph over to Troy Gua to be photographed and resined and eventually hung at Monarch Contemporary for the show he's orchestrated and curated, "Troy Gua & The Collaborati : Meet Greet Rinse Repeat". You can sneak a peak at some of the pieces that have already been documented . . . it's a host of fascinating and sometimes surprising conceptualizations by an impressive group local artists. My glyph came with a hole in the center that called to mind a #/pound sign. The pound of flesh association couldn't have been more fortuitous (the fact that I have a grandmother named after the heroine of The Merchant of Venice might have something to do with the association).

The show opens on Thursday, April 1 at 6:00 pm at Monarch Contemporary in the Tashiro Kaplan Building and runs through the end of the month. Considering the number of artists involved in the collaboration, I expect the opening to be quite a fete, let alone a location of pleasurable visual overload.

with camera

Scenes from another studio group meeting, this time at Margie Livingston's studio, which was brimming with all kinds of ensorcelling grids and dripping, marbling plastic and complicated, organic geometry. Her ability to patiently amass incredibly dense objects out of acrylics is impressive. Also snapshots from Joey Veltkamp's studio, Kiki Smith's recent lecture, and Daniel Carrillo's exhibit of ambrotypes at Gage Academy (hey, there I am, happily hanging between Troy Gua and Gala Bent!).

Elle a chaud au cul.

tongues (lamb)

On Catherine Clément's theory of creative ecstasy: "Escaping into syncope was, for them, a scandalous escape from rationality. But this removal from time and space can bring a great joy, an unlocatable but generalized elation which Clément, borrowing the expression from the British psychologist D. W. Winnicott, calls, "an orgasm of the self," different from but related to the physical orgasm....It is thus normal for the artist to be schizoid, to be aware of and open to an 'entre-deux syncopé'." (Michael Finn in Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Sciècle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde)

(When a tongue, the physical organ in all its complexity and simplicity, is overtaken and even annhiliated by a superfluousness of nonsensical decoration, does this connote a beginning or an end, or is this diving right into the midst of the precious, baroque syncope? The same might be asked of a life theatricalized, aestheticized, and suppressed/expanded by excess, which contracts and expands with limited regard to history and its liquid, shifting politics.)