A Little Bit of Music

                      C-     /Bb                     /Ab  /G

You think it’s /all so fine a little bit of music

                       C-     /Bb                     /Ab  /G

You think it’s /so divine a little bit of /sunshine

                C-       /Bb                        /Ab              /G

So carry /on uh-huh and sing that /sweet sweet song

                     C-                            C-

A little bit of /music, a little bit of /sunshine.

  C-                                        F

/Mama and the girls are upstairs/   /

   C-                                     F

/Jamming on some minor blues/   /

  G                                   Ab                       G                  C-

/Turning up the volume /drowning out the noise in the /walls

Can you /hear it?/

D-b5  G7    C- or Eb

/Doo Doo Da/   / So up jumps Marvellous Mama

D-b5  G7    C-

/Doo Doo Da/   / Just having had a brandy or two

D-b5  G7   Eb

/Doo Doo Da/   /  Playing the blues harp and slapping her hips

D- 5   G7   C-

/Doo Doo Da/   /  Singing her own special song.

Don’t think it’s all so fine that little bit of music

Don’t say it’s so divine that little bit of sunshine

Don’t carry on and on about that sweet sweet song

That little bit of music that little bit of sunshine.

Mama tells the girls to listen

Go home and bake 50 loaves of bread

And when they’re done come back and throw them against the wall

Can you hear it?

That noise

That noise

Such a noise

Please stop the noise

Solo

You think it’s all so fine a little bit of music

You think it’s so divine a little bit of sunshine

So carry on uh-huh and sing that sweet sweet song

A little bit of music, a little bit of sunshine.

A little bit of music, a little bit of sunshine.

 

March 2019.  She begins the story of her life: ‘In the early day 1907 my parents had a farm,’ and moves through memorable and major events in just 23 pages.  The approach, matter-of-fact, the last few sentences bringing us up to the present.  ‘As for myself, I have a small nursing home.  I still have a lot of paintings in my home.  I still read “Tea Cups”.  People come from other countries to see my Work.  They also like the books I have written and published.  On Sundays I have helped play the music for the Anglican Church, during the past thirty years.  I shall probably continue on.’  (I have left out some details.)

There is something about this last part of the book In the Early Days.   Something about the summing up of a life in just a few sentences.  A kind of poignancy that attaches to the word ‘still’.  As if, after a full eventful life, these are the remnants, the other bits cut away.  Disappeared.  And with these tiny markers Mrs GMJ reminds us once more who she is.  I have to say it’s upon reading her words here that I begin to feel something for her.  An affection born from a sense of her humanness.

Something I’d not picked up on earlier is her ability to read tea leaves…or cups, as she puts it.  If this is a practice she’s still engaged in, when did it begin and what were the circumstances?  Perhaps it’s something she gravitated to quite naturally as she seems to have been particularly gifted in the accuracy of her dreams.  The actor most often playing the part of Mrs GMJ comments:  ‘I went for a reading a number of years ago.  Mrs G told me my present relationship would fall apart and what do you know?  It did.’  A friend whom I’ve signed up as an extra can’t say one way or another:  ‘She got my tea cup mixed up with someone else’s and became quite flustered.  At some point she recovered and continued on as if nothing had happened, but I can’t remember anything of what she said.’  I would love to have been party to these small occasions but by now, the lady is gone and I must content myself with participating on stage.  Yes, it’s come to that.  Actors are most unreliable these days and I’ve stepped up to take the empty chair.  I’m sure I will get better in time but as you can see, I’ve forgotten to remove the tag from my Value Village hat prior to coming on stage.

I wonder about Mrs G’s style of writing.  This matter-of-factness.  I look up a definition.  There are quite a number of adjectives, many pointing to an absence.  Unemotional.  Unsentimental.  Unvarnished.  And that’s exactly how she writes.  I recall my surprise when she follows a three-paragraph account of her time in Saskatoon with ‘On October 8th of that year I married a man that had a ranch or homestead in the Cariboo.  That marriage lasted 42 years.’  There is no earlier mention of the man, no hint of romance.  No glimpse into how a young Miss G felt about this prospect.  I look back to see if I’ve missed something.  Apparently not, this sort of detail unimportant, unnecessary.  (More ‘un’ words.)  This seems curious to me.  This minimalistic approach, her account engaging with just the one stream.  The actual.  Active.  External.  A bit left-brain, don’t you think?  Without that other stream, it’s all so inadequate.  But of course.  Inadequacy is built into the definition.  It’s intentional.  Or more likely, the default.  The standard treatment.

If you think of this factual and minimalistic approach simply as a way of keeping track in an effective and efficient manner, it makes sense.  A journal is not necessarily the place to go on about feelings.  Especially one written with the public in mind.  And sometimes, it’s just the facts we want.  The action.  There’s a kind of truth there.  A tidiness.

As for Mrs GMJ, well, she’s a busy woman attending to both practical and aesthetic concerns.  She has enough on her plate and I doubt she’d even contemplate another kind of narrative.  Still, I can’t help but think there is a bit of seepage from time to time and I’m prepared to let it go at that.

 

 

 

 

February 2019.  She is born with the gift. Clearly.  Mrs GMJ.  Her father tells her she is and insists she play piano rather than milk cows.  And so she does.  Takes lessons.  Practises.  Teaches.  Performs whenever she has the opportunity.  On ocean liners, in hotels, churches.

All this I learn from her autobiographical writings.  Her journals.  I see pictures of her at the piano surrounded by smiling people.  There is no need to question her skill.  And why would I?  But I do.  Much later.  After listening to a story told by the current organist of a local church:  “I went to church one Sunday morning and the organist at the time asked me to fill in for him as he had a migraine.  I replied that I would love to help but as I’d not rehearsed I simply couldn’t.  The migraine sufferer then approached Mrs GMJ who agreed to play.”  At this point, the story-teller shakes his head.  “It was so bad.  So very bad.  But, I have to say that after hearing Mrs GMJ, I never again hesitated when asked to fill in.”

Whether or not Mrs GMJ is a skilled musician is questionable.  What’s certain?   That she is an entertaining musician.  A frequent house guest tells me:  “We used to go to her house.  After tea she’d often entertain us with a few tunes, some from Mendelssohn, or as she called him, Mendelhosen.  She’d gallop through two pages.  Stop.  Turn the page and start in again.”  He demonstrates.

I suspect the thing Mrs GMJ really loves is the performance itself.  Being in front of an audience.  Proficiency, perhaps not so much.  This is common.  The love, I mean.  I read an article about performance artists in a Canadian Art magazine where the writer talks in terms of an “unbridled desire for public exhibitionism”.  (Summer 2005 The New Exhibitionists)  My actors might not go that far but would certainly testify to something of a lesser degree.  As for their proficiency, I won’t comment but do admit to questioning their loyalty in regard to this particular project.  Only one shows up for Mrs GMJ Entertains and I reward her by giving her the starring role.  Happily a few music teachers, students and parents volunteer to sit in.  It’s easy work.

Am I wrong to wish for proficiency in the first place?  Here I quote the actor Isabelle Huppert who says something interesting to writer Simon Critchley:  “Of course, what theatre is about is aliveness, a certain experience of aliveness.  That’s all that matters.” (Tragedy, the Greeks and Us).  Could it be that simple?  But I am without a context at the moment and dare not assume a phrase like “that’s all that matters” to be a narrowing or eliminating sort of thing.  There may still be some room for proficiency.  At any rate, I will stop.  The play is about to begin.  Lights dimming, piano music fading in.  Nice.  A bit of Mendelhosen for you.  

 

January 2019.  In case you’ve not met, I should say a few words by way of introduction.  Mrs GMJ.  An eccentric woman.  Visual artist, musician, writer.  Entrepreneur.  Traveller.  Wife.  Mother of three.  Spent many years in small town BC.   None of late.

What I have here is a kind of narrative in the works, an ongoing collaboration with a small acting company.  And because it is a collaboration, I’m not at liberty to discuss my intentions or talk in terms of treatment just yet.  It’s early in the game and even if I could speak to these things there would be no guarantee my ideas would come to anything.  All this is becoming quite apparent as I encounter the realities of working with a team.

This acting company.  Did I tell you it was small town?  Amateur?  The actors fiercely competitive for parts?  It’s true.  All highly sensitive to injury but insensitive otherwise.  In a time, for instance, where identity is an issue of huge import and topic of conversations everywhere, these actors appear to be unmoved, oblivious in their portrayal of Mrs GMJ, the truth of her identity totally irrelevant to them.  Instead, well, you’ll see.  It’s burlesque.  Farce.  Every single actor inclined to come on stage as Mrs GMJ, not one okay with a supporting role.  And so they do, all generally wearing the Mrs GMJ wardrobe, masking themselves and clouding the identity of the character they’re each meant to represent.  How is the audience to keep track?  It’s all quite confusing to say the least. 

Here is the first panel in the series.  Mrs GMJ Remembers.   The woman in the foreground is clearly Mrs GMJ.  So far so good, but the actor playing her is very upset with the second Mrs GMJ in the far distance who has come early and placed rabbits in the yard instead of pheasants as directed.  As a result, the first Mrs GMJ compromises her lines in order to squeeze in a complaint and  William inevitably loses his lines as well.  And so it goes. 

At this point my response is something like it is to the lingering cold of spring.  At least it’s not minus 20.  And I cheer myself by choosing to believe that compromises of this nature, while not reflecting my intentions at all, might lead down some interesting paths.  I plan to sustain this belief as long as it’s practical to do so.

I think what I’ll do first is talk a bit about my motivation for working on this series, my intentions and the process.  And then open it up for some questions and comments before taking you on a small tour around the room and introducing you to the characters and pieces, also reading a few excerpts from the texts.  

First then, my motivation for doing a series on Christian art. 

My use of Christian imagery is nothing new.  For the past number of years I’ve used it occasionally in my work, but last summer when Lubos and I talked about a show, I was quite definite about wanting to do something that actually focused on the Christian images and themes. 

Part of that motivation is a result of my background which is loosely Mennonite.  That doesn’t necessarily tell you anything as there are so many different kinds of Mennonites.  My family wasn’t extremely conservative, not like the horse and buggy type.  I didn’t wear long print and floral dresses or  black head scarves.  Nor was it liberal like the Mennonites in Winnipeg who all believed in higher education and seemed quite unattached to the fundamental doctrines of the tradition.  We were very religious, my dad a minister and my mom the church organist.  While music was encouraged, art was not a part of our lives and I knew nothing about religious art, but at the same time, the imagery was present in the bible stories like the annunciation, the birth, death and resurrection of Christ and the Old Testament prophets. 

I suspect too, that part of the motivation to work with the imagery and themes had to do with needing to see how I felt about them.  See how I would treat them and how I would bring them into my present reality.  I’d left the church some time ago but while the leaving was fraught, I wasn’t interested in representing the Christian faith in a negative light.  Not interested in representing anything really.  Simply wanting to bring the images into the gallery context and in so doing, removing them from the isolation of the evangelical church and bringing them into the air of the broader culture. 

I have to clarify here as this last statement could be confusing.  Historically Christian art has been bound up with both church and culture.  It has not existed in isolation.  I’m speaking personally here.  The tradition I grew up in holds the Christian images and themes to be sacred.  They’re the given, the Word of God.  And to remove them from their place of authority, to tamper with them in any way is seen to be disrespectful and even blasphemous.  Even so, it was a necessary thing to do.   Necessary to take these images along with me and out of the evangelical church.  This in order to maintain a relationship with them.  After all, they did and probably still do represent home for me.

An aside:  I just came across an article in an old Canadian Art Magazine on Gathie Falk whose background is also Mennonite.  The article says that some of her early paintings were consciously religious works, in particular a series of upside-down crucifixions.  After being severely criticized, she left Christian iconography alone, or at least, became less open about it.

2.  In terms of process, as my work has been narrative these last years it’s been essential that I concern myself with the story, the setting and the characters.  Depending on my dreams for the narrative initially, the process became streamlined, the story a kind of ready-made.  I had only to find the right setting and characters.

Introducing text more recently has complicated things but at the same time given me an opportunity to range about, to expand on the images, to satisfy some creative urge to go if not deeper, wider.  So far, I’ve chosen not to insert text into the actual collage but to use it as an adjunct.  A companion piece that is in relation to the work, but not necessarily or completely aligned.  I’ve carried this practice into the present show, touching on the Christian themes but again, moving outside the immediate context in order to pull in other material.

When beginning each new piece, I start with the theme.  With the idea.  The pieta, for instance.  And from there a kind of conversation takes place between the actual composition and the text.  At times the composition comes together first.  I might find an item that is irresistible… like the image in a Life Magazine of an older woman trying out a mattress.  So…in No Rest for the Pious, I began writing the text after solving the composition although I’m quite sure I had a definite sense of the text already, that it would focus on the idea of piety and sacrifice, that I’d refer to Abramovic and would use Anne Carson’s Isaiah story.

3.  For this particular series, my intent was that there to be a dialogue between the Christian themes and artistic concerns.  Again, there is such an obvious link between the two, Christian art having dominated the western world for such a long time and even now maintaining a prominent place in the gallery collections.  But whereas art was in the service of Christianity, the icons originally helping to sustain the faith, that dynamic no longer exists.  Art has been freed up from that mandate and the images and themes as well.  The link, however, still exists and the images are now available to secular artists for their uses.  There’s Bacon using the crucifixion as a way of representing feelings.  Bill Viola beginning to integrate Christian imagery into his work, influenced by a 15th century painting of the crying Madonna.  “It opened up a whole new dimension of grief for me’ he said, adding that he found the icons to speak powerfully to his humanity and to his emotions.  Many others.  Chris Burden.  Andy Warhol.  Kiki Smith.  The Brits.  It’s interesting too.  In these old Canadian Art Magazines, I have read so many titles that come for the Christian tradition.  The Word of God.  Annunciation.  And there are artists even like Attila Richard Lukas whose work references these themes.  

Once I’d decided to move forward with the dialogue I needed to find some way to make it happen for me.  It’s one thing to say there’s an historical link, quite another to find the way in.    To find the thing that would make it work for me.  For that reason I was pleased when I came upon the likes of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, William James and Cieran who all believed artists, thinkers and heroes to be great and necessary human types alongside the saints.  Artists and saints…both in the same category.  Perfect.  Too, when I began looking into the life and art of performance artist, Marina Abramovic, I saw a definite connection between her attitudes and those of the saint and martyr.  Both keen on pain and its usefulness in opening the door to the other side.  Both believing Art and/or God to be life itself.  At that point I had my entry into the project.  A means of really linking the two.  Art and God.  The artist and the saint.  Marina Abramovic.

4.  As for the themes in this series I’ll read you a list.  The centrality and usefulness of pain and sacrifice for the saint and artist.  The simultaneous desire for relief from pain.  The hope for transcendence.  The absolute commitment to the Muse and/or God and its driving force.  Methods of performance.  The temperament of saints and artists.  The complicated life of Art in that it’s seemingly set up to fail and renew itself on a continual basis.  The various ways secular artists relate to Christian themes and images.  Misogyny in the classical, religious and artistic world.  The importance of connections in story-telling.

It’s become apparent to me that while I’ve engaged in a discussion involving Christian themes and artistic concerns, my interest is not so much in the themes themselves nor in a discussion about art.  Rather, it’s in that little knot at the centre.  The place they intersect.  (It puts me in mind of Diebenkorn’s paintings.  The huge color fields and then this tight little area of busyness. This area of electricity.)  One instance.. The Relaunching of Larry.  There are so many connecting points here.  Lazarus sits at the centre while Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Sylvia Plath and the question of the perpetual death and resurrection of art circle round. 

Or consider Meet Me at the Oasis where Abramovic, silent film star Theda Barra,  and the prophet Ezekiel are thrown together as performance artists, all making use of silence, melodrama and gesture.  All involved somehow with the other side.  It’s an unlikely trio but they’re pulled together by their ‘calling’. 

Aside:  Now…by looking at Meet Me at the Oasis, you won’t find evidence of any real connection between the three characters.  In fact, they don’t really figure at all.  There’s no Ezekiel, and Abramovic and Barra are only used as hair models.  Instead, the collage indicates a place of respite from all of that melodrama while the text tells the story.

5.  And that brings me again to the text, an integral part of this series.  The images could stand alone and work, but the addition of the text fleshes out the story or discussion, allowing for the kinds of connections I like making and in general leading to a larger experience. 

Writing the text for this series I see that my stance is somewhat aloof.  I maintain a distance unlike the saint and artist who are passionately involved.  I note, reflect, speculate, but only occasionally commit.  Instead I watch from the sidelines, marvelling at the depth of Abramovic’s dedication and horrified by the lengths she is willing to go for Art.  Appalled by Sebastien Horseley’s decision to be crucified.  And full of admiration for David Bowie as he makes his last music video, Lazarus, shortly before his death. 

Some of the writers I’ve used have been introduced to me by Eleanor Wachtel of the CBC program Writers and Company.  Here it is I crossed paths with Anne Carson, Karl Knausgaard and Colm Toibin.  And through them I found my Isaiah, Lazarus, Ezekiel and Mary.  I was so very pleased to find their particular versions of the bible stories as they injected some much appreciated humour and nuance into otherwise overly familiar bits of sacred text. 

Questions.

Tour Around the Room

1.  Such a Pieta.  This first image was, at the time, a kind of throw-away piece.  A way to get into the project.  Initially I wasn’t thinking of it as a keeper but changed my mind along the way.  It’s loaded up with pieta imagery.  The wallpaper, picture on the wall and the sad woman in the foreground.  I always think of a cheap hotel room when I see this piece.

2.  Confirmed Instances of Piety.  Here I continued with the pieta theme introducing Marina Abramovic to the series.  She’s the one in red, her eyes upward, seemingly moving into some kind of ecstasy.  This is a story of a chance meeting with her, recognizing her because of the way she holds me firmly in place with her eyes.  Also the red dress.  The floating pieta on the wall is my own version.

If you don’t know anything about Abramovic, she is Serbian, born in ’46.  Her parents were partisans in WW2 and later were employed in the communist government of Tito’s.  She found her medium when she discovered the power of performance, using her body as a site for artistic and spiritual exploration.  

3.  No Rest for the Pious.  I made two versions of this piece as I wasn’t satisfied with the first and smaller orange one.  It was near the beginning of the project and I was feeling some unease.  Constraint.  I’d never before worked to theme to such a degree and felt some kind of internal pressure to stay true to theme whatever that meant.  And after this first attempt I thought I’d do a second and have more fun with it.

I’ll read you an excerpt.  “In the Book of Isaiah Anne Carson writes:  ‘There is a kind of pressure in humans to take whatever is most beloved by them and smash it.  Religion calls the pressure piety and the smashed thing a sacrifice to God.’  Even God is susceptible to that particular pressure.  One time he smashed Isaiah.  Isaiah called him on it and they came to an agreement.  Performance artist Marina Abramovic is also susceptible.  She smashed her own body.  No agreement was required.

It’s evident that humans feel a lot of pressure.  A lot of piety.  I mean, there’s an awful lot of smashing going on.  A word of warning:  be careful about making yourself too beloved.

Michelangelo made a sculpture and named it for this pressure.  The Pieta.  Actually not so much for the pressure as its resulting sacrifice.  If the pressure is called piety, the result is called pity.  Grief.  Lamentation.  There’s the mother holding her dead son.  Her smashed son.  God’s son.

And to what end, all of this?  What drives a pressure named for such a thing as piety?  As duty?  This is not easy to understand unless there are high stakes involved.  Unless there is skin in the game.

Easier is the impulse toward expansion and transformation which Abramovic speaks of.  This expansion comes to her as she smashes her own body and moves through the door of physical pain to a higher consciousness.  Transformation also arrives for Carson’s Isaiah who is sweet-talked by God and given a new contract.  Suddenly ‘milk pours from his breasts.  He forgets about righteousness and as he feeds the milk to small birds and animals he thinks only about their little lips.”

In the collage, I used the Life magazine woman as a substitute for the dead-post-sacrificial object of pity.  Instead she’s a living object of care. Again… the image and text don’t totally correspond.  

3.  Laundered and Levitating.  Abramovic shows up once more in my version of her kitchen series  where she’s paying homage to St Teresa who was given to torturing herself because she wasn’t perfect.  After torturing herself enough God blessed her with rapture and with spontaneous levitation which appears to have been a rather mixed blessing.  In this piece Abramovic plays two roles:  that of the levitating Teresa and a Maytag washing-machine-saint attended to by three women.  This little bit I took from playwright David Ives Lives of Saints.  It seems that these women saints tended to eroticize pain.  Teresa found her excessive pain to be sweet and the Maytag likewise hysterically begs the repair man to break her so he could later fix her.

4.  Meet Me at the Oasis.  Here’s the piece I mentioned previously, the text containing the story of the prophet and the performers, the composition the relief from all the fatigue that must surely follow these excessive performances.  It contains some of the hand gestures used by the saints.  

The silent screen.   Exaggerated gestures.  A tinkling piano and the occasional sub-title.  Immediately you’re in,  captivated as Theda Bara begins her seduction of the rich businessman in A Fool There Was, one of her few surviving films.  You note the way she approaches.  Drops the rose.  Engages him with her eyes.  Of course.  It’s so obvious.  This visual short-hand.  And no matter what one may think of the technique, it does move the story along.  Gets to the point.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic also understands silence.  Gesture.  Hers too is the broad gesture.  The dramatic. Notice as she places instruments of pain and death alongside the mundane on the table at Studio Morra for her performance Rhythm 0.  This in the service of Art. ‘Art is life and death’ she says, ‘There is nothing else.’  And for her, this seems true enough.  Her body, expendable.  A kind of vehicle.  A means.  Medium by which to act and be acted upon.  To be moved through.  She wants that process.  Wants also the other side. Bara wants neither.  Just talks to the other side, ‘medium’ being a term used to describe her by the Fox spin doctors.

As Karl Knausgaard describes the experiences of the prophet in A Time To Every Purpose Under Heaven it’s apparent that Ezekiel too can be described as a medium.  And as with Bara and Abramovic, gesture is his language.  Silence.  His tongue paralyzed by God.  It’s an odd situation to be in.  He eats God’s honey-flavoured words and what follows is the loss of his own, his ability to speak limited to God’s words and these only at particular moments.  During the performances.  And perform he must.  But in the service of God rather than Art.  There’s Ezekiel arranging to get himself tied up in his own house, the audience outside waiting for hours and then days.  Finally his tongue loosened he speaks out:  ‘So says the Lord God, he who will hear, let him hear’ while people, having deserted their posts, collect once again, anxious to see what outrageous things Ezekiel will say and do.

While it could be said these artists own the broad gesture, successful TED Talkers know the value of  the somewhat subtler gesture.  Of quantity.  I read that the most successful TED Talkers are those using their hands an average of 465 times during an 18-minute talk.  Expressive hands rather than jazz hands.  There’s a difference. Expressive making sense and somewhat scripted.  Standardized.  Somewhat akin to the gestures of silent film stars.  And saints.  St Teresa’s open-palmed hands.  Abramovic’s.  The benediction hands.  The amazement.  The be quiet.  Listen.  Wait.  Jazz hands in contrast…think Ezekiel.  Knausgaard writes ‘his arms and legs beat against the earth, his head turns from side to side, eyes open all the while.’  Jazz body.  Inadequate.  Ineffectual.  The least successful.

5.  The Relaunching of Larry.  In this piece I’m using the death and resurrection of Lazarus to consider the death and revivification of art.  This with a view to an essay called Has art ended again? by Owen Hulatt.  At the end of his essay  Hulatt suggests that as a culture we’ve had an idea of art…what counts as art and what it should do… that no longer applies.  The choice:  to look at art differently, think in terms of many overlapping narratives or to wait for a new all-encompassing or grand narrative.

6.  Everyone Has a Cross to Bear.  Here I’m dealing with Christian art and using a group of British artists, all of whom drink at the Golden Heart Pub, to check out how they use the material.  They all happen to have dealt with the crucifixion.  Some politically.  Gilbert and George putting a Union Jack loin cloth on Christ and calling the image Christian England.  The Chapmans using Ronald MacDonald as a substitute Messiah, come to bring food to the poor.  Tracey Emin using the sense of the crucifixion autobiographically.  And Sebastien Horseley as a symbol of heroism.  He was extreme and actually sought out the experience of being crucified.  

7.  It’s All in the Headgear.  This piece is about the Romantic and Symbolist artists identifying with Christ as martyr.  Munch.  Gauguin.  Van Gogh.  Delacroix.  Gauguin paints himself as Christ in the garden.  Van Gogh as Christ in the pieta.  

8.  Annunciation in a Melian Boat.  Mary and the angel.  Misogyny.  Here’s part of the text.

 A show at the Mark Miller Gallery in New York with the catchy title Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women.  2015.  Has to do with Greek humor.  Or more accurately, the Greek theory of humors.  According to Hippocrates and Galen, our physical characteristics, temperaments, moods, behaviours are influenced by four bodily fluids known as humors.   Blood, phlegm, yellow bile, black bile.  A proper mixing results in good health; an improper, in disease.  Some years later the elements fire, water, air, earth with their qualities of hot, moist, cold, dry are introduced and combined, so to speak, with the fluids.  What you want is hot/dry/yellow bile.  Certainly not its opposite.  Cold/wet/phlegm.

I’m reading Anne Carson.  Dirt and Desire:  Essay on the Phenomenology of Female Pollution in Antiquity.  (Men in the Off Hours)  She writes that women are perceived as posing the greatest threat to social order among the Greeks. The reason?  Well, the assumption, with its ground in mythology, is that women are wet and therefore unbounded.  ‘They are formless creatures who cannot or do not or will not maintain their own boundaries and who are awfully adept at confounding the boundaries of others.’  ‘Pollutable, polluted, polluting.  Units of danger.  Unstable compounds of deceit and desire.  Prone to leakage.’   And here Carson calls up the image of a boat filled with holes, an image used by the Greeks themselves to signify an out-of-control woman.

Unfortunately for all those hot, dry men, women are necessary for some functions, procreation being one of them.  Even for the gods.  Women have a propensity to make trouble though, cheating on the gods or pushing them too far and often dying as a result of this mischief, the unborn child having to be snatched from their womb at the last minute.  At least, if it’s a son.

There’s the Hebrew god as well.   Wants a son.  Needs a woman.  Perhaps the women in his circle are warmer, dryer, less phlegmy.  I check.  Do a search starting with ‘Jewish humor’.  You can imagine.  No bodily fluids, no talk of elements.  Instead word play, irony, satire and comedy.  Changing directions I go for ‘pollution,’ finding plenty.  It’s complicated; women most often implicated.  Etc.

9.  So Where is This Divine Miranda and her Divinely Apathetic Athambic Aphasic Partner?

Or you could ask…where is her uninterested, self-assured and therefore having no need of us and unable to communicate with us partner?  The Betrayal of Babylon next door talks in terms of the inadequacy of language.  Karl Knausgaard portraying the prophet Ezekiel includes gesture in that inadequacy.   In this piece Samuel Beckett counters that with the fact that language is all we have even while agreeing to its inadequacy.   His character Lucky demonstrates this lack but at the same time is successful in revealing our dilemma.  If there is a God, God is arbitrary and erratic.  Not to be counted on.  So this is a kind of version of Waiting for Godot.  

Many of the faces I’ve used here are those of Ana Marie Pacheco, a Brazilian-born sculptor.  She understands torment.  Hers are the refugees, the ones that Lucky’s god has forsaken.  And if they’re hopeful as they wait for deliverance, for their Godot, I can’t tell.  Pacheco thinks they are but their faces are so full of fear and apprehension.

10.  Roadside Attractions.  It’s clear that life is suffering.  This piece is about the additional suffering people take on in order to help rid themselves of the original.  They do any number of things, a pilgrimage being one of them.  This is a kind of version of the pilgrimage to Compostela.

11.  Ms Abramovic and Miss Stein Discuss Stair Treatments.  I found the background first.  Wanted to use these two women but wasn’t sure how to put them into this setting.  I had one of Abramovic’s performance in mind but had no sense of Stein’s connection to stairs.  Happily there was one.

We find performance artist Marina Abramovic and writer/painter Gertrude Stein each sitting on a story separated by a staircase.  Abramovic on the second story, Stein on the first.  I am not aware of any particular power dynamic.  If there is an upper hand, I’d cast my vote with Stein as it’s her home.  As for their discussion on the topic of stairs, they’re in partial agreement about not using them in the conventional way, that is, as a means to move from one story to the next. 

As for the stories, here’s Abramovic’s:  It’s called The House With The Ocean View.  A performance piece in which she sits, stands, lies down, drinks water, uses the toilet and takes a shower on a raised platform over a period of twelve days and nights.  Three platforms actually.  All this in front of an audience.  There are three sets of stairs, well, ladders, one in front of each platform.  And if you look closely you’ll note the rungs are made of large butcher knives.  Immediately the connection between the ladders and their normal function is lost, the meaning subverted.  Instead of serving as a means for Abramovic to leave the platform or audience members to join her, they’re mocking the entire notion of access.  And of course, this is the point.

Miss Stein’s story:  It’s in the October 13, 1934 issue of the New Yorker and has to do with her daily routine.  Is called:  Tender Buttons.  So every morning Stein gets up at ten and drinks some coffee, her partner Alice Toklas already up for hours dusting and fussing around.  At some point Stein bathes and combs the poodle, brushes his teeth, and either before or after, bathes herself in an oversize bathtub made especially for her.  The tub is so large the staircase has to be taken out in order to install it.  Post bath she puts on a huge woollen  bathrobe, finally ready to write.  From this we gather that accessing the second story is not as important a priority as bathing for Miss Stein.

12.  Slow Down!  Big Themes Ahead.  Well…this is the summing up piece.  Similar to what I’ve been doing now I suppose.  I’ve used myself, in part because I was getting tired of trying to find the right images.  And I am the one driving this thing, after all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

June 2018.  I find a guy by the name of Slap Happy Larry, not to be confused with Happy Larry.  He likes drawing stairs and is a big fan of using them in picture books.  They’re useful as symbols.  As a device to show without saying.  And we understand this kind of thing.  Put the powerful guy at the top of the stairs next to the saint.  The weak and the bad near the bottom.  Stairs allow for transitions.  For connections.  Between stories, for instance.  Some people don’t like stairs for that reason.  Stairs insist on there being at least two stories and that can be a problem.   

We find performance artist Marina Abramovic and novelist/poet Gertrude Stein each sitting on a story separated by a staircase.  Abramovic on the second story, Stein on the first.  I am not aware of any particular power dynamic.  If there is an upper hand, I’d cast my vote with Stein as it’s her home.  As for their discussion on the topic of stairs, they’re in partial agreement about not using them in the conventional way, that is, as a means to move from one story to the next. 

As for the stories, here’s Abramovic’s:  It’s called The House With The Ocean View.  A performance piece in which she sits, stands, lies down, drinks water, uses the toilet and takes a shower on a raised platform over a period of twelve days and nights.  Three platforms actually.  All this in front of an audience.  There are three sets of stairs, well, ladders, one in front of each platform.  And if you look closely you’ll note the rungs are made of large butcher knives.  Immediately the connection between the ladders and their normal function is lost, the meaning subverted.  Instead of serving as a means for Abramovic to leave the platform or audience members to join her, they’re mocking the entire notion of access.  And of course, this is the point.

Miss Stein’s story:  It’s in the October 13, 1934 issue of the New Yorker and has to do with her daily routine.  Is called:  Tender Buttons.  (I love hearing about this sort of thing.)  Every morning Stein gets up at ten and drinks some coffee, her partner Alice Toklas already up for hours dusting and fussing around.  At some point Stein bathes and combs the poodle, brushes his teeth, and either before or after, bathes herself in an oversize bathtub made especially for her.  The tub is so large the staircase has to be taken out in order to install it.  Post bath she puts on a huge woollen  bathrobe, finally ready to write.  From this we gather that accessing the second story is not as important a priority as bathing for Miss Stein.

I plan to add one more story.  One more staircase.  Something to do with the Scala Sancta.  And three is a good number.  In some instances better than two.  But I come under the influence of singer/songwriter Bruno Mars who apparently does not approve of there being more than one story and certainly sees no need for stairs.    Consider then how disturbing three stories must be.  In deference to him I leave this last one alone, at the same time taking issue with his notion that one story is enough.  Is it even possible?  In some cases, I suppose.  Like in the homes of seniors, although my old dad made it up and down his staircase until about a week before he died.  On the second story.  But in terms of Ms Abramovic or Miss Stein it’s impossible to contain these women in just one.  They would each need at least ten.  And I say this because I read once that a person could be contained in or defined by the ten jokes they told most often during their life time.  Here’s one of Abramovic’s:  How many hours does a performance artist need to change a light bulb? Answer:  I don’t know. I was only there 6 hours.  She tells this joke 7 times before she gets it right.  Here’s one of Stein’s:  What makes the place settle and the plate distinguish some specificities?  I don’t know.  Tell me.  What makes the place settle and the plate distinguish some specificities?  The answer:  The whole thing isn’t understood and this isn’t strange considering there is no education.  

It’s time to end.  Slap Happy Larry talks about people who can’t end a story.  He suggests they move toward the end by letting the reader know what the main characters have learned since the story began and revealing something of how things will be different from now on.  My two characters will have learned how to tell better jokes and subsequently their friends and followers will laugh more easily and heartily. Abramovic will put away her knives and Stein will take even longer baths than previously.

 

July 2018.  There are lists, should you be interested.  The 3 most overused themes in films about WW2.  The 7 key themes in social psychology.  The 10 big themes in literature.  The 19 volumes of major themes in Economics.  If you go to MoMA Learning you’re advised to search by theme.  Under Abstract Expressionism there are 4 sub-themes.  Under Dada, 5.  Under Christian Art…well, MoMa Learning doesn’t register this category.

It’s been around for some time.  Christian art.  The major themes treated repeatedly throughout the years/centuries, the earliest dating back to around 70 CE.  Lots of changes over the years both in style and emphasis.  Production dependent on the current religious and political tone.

In the 19th century the line between Christian and secular art becomes more relaxed, or, if not that, the religious themes become more available, acceptable to secular artists.  This makes sense, the themes and the art such a part of our heritage.  Culture.  And naturally artists turned to these themes and continue to do so for many reasons, the material still relevant.

I’ve been following a number of these artists.  Delacroix, Gauguin, and Van Gogh all identifying with Christ the martyr.  Francis Bacon, drawn to the image of Christ’s crucifixion, stating:  ‘I haven’t found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feeling and behaviour.’  Gilbert and George.  Jake and Dinos Chapman.  All four, well, essentially all two using religious imagery politically.  Tracey Emin, autobiographically.  Sebastian Horseley using Christ as a symbol of heroism.  Ana Maria Pacheco focusing on the suffering and hope.  Marina Abramovic.

The artist I’ve spent most time with is Abramovic.  She is, perhaps, the catalyst for this show, so passionate, dare I say fanatical about her art, and identifying closely with Christian themes.   She seems quite naturally to straddle the line between saint, martyr and artist.  In the matter of pain, for instance.

Sacrifice, penance.  Pain.  Philosopher Emil Cieran makes fun of the saints who actively pursue pain, but while pain as a means figures prominently in, it does not belong exclusively to the Christian faith.  As an artist Abramovic talks a similar language in her quest for transformation and the creation of art.  For her there is no other way.  Sacrifice is necessary.  The body expendable.  At times it’s difficult to tell her and the saint apart.  If you didn’t know the one served God and the other served Art, you’d be confused.  And certainly she looks the part, levitating as St Theresa in her Kitchen series.

While noting how an artist like Abramovic enters the space and gives herself passionately to her chosen theme, I’m more of a voyeur.  Journalist.  In No Rest for the Pious I talk of being at some remove.  Even use the term dishonest.  That’s a touch extreme.  Rather, think theatre.  Theme as set design perhaps.  As context.  A place to consider something of what that context suggests.   Here’s a list:  The life and death of art.  The likelihood and look of a second life or narrative.  Performance in the service of both God and Art.  The temperament of the artist versus that of the saint.  Misogynistic tendencies among the Greeks and Hebrews.  The attraction of pain and its usefulness.  The hope also to be free of pain, to finally meet up with Godot.  

I’ve looked to writers who’ve worked with the biblical stories and themes, bringing to them perspective, nuance and quite often humor.  Have admittedly drawn on Anne Carson more than anyone else.  For her Isaiah and Lazarus.  Her discussion of female pollution.  Road trip to Santiago de Compostela.  I’ve read Karl Knausgaard and grabbed his Ezekiel, Colm Toibin’s Mary.  Turned to saint literature, to David Ives’ Lives of Saints.  To the somewhat anti-saint literature of Emil Cieran, Tears and Saints.  Owen Hulatt for his essay Has art ended again?  Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.  Abramovic’s Walking through Walls.  Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own.  

And in the end…well, I don’t know that there is an end exactly.  Not having set out to argue a point or make a case I feel myself to be at loose ends.  There has been no precise goal other than engaging with the material and seeing what comes of it.  And if art, by definition, must have a narrative and a definite goal which is either reached or abandoned, then what of the art narrative which simply ends?  Of course I’m confusing things.  Pretending I’m involved in Big A Big N Art Narrative.  Nothing of the sort here.  No Big D Death either.  And certainly, no worries about the Second…or Thirtieth Narrative.   A series simply stopping.  Coming to a timely and somewhat arbitrary end requiring no more than a lower case rip.  Hmmm.  Doesn’t look right though.  Some things you just don’t mess with.  RIP.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

May 2018.  It’s a border town.  On this side a colorful grouping of shrines.   A destination of sorts.  Pilgrims come.  Penitents.  The one in red:  I’ve become interested in penance.  The nearer one also in red:  Here is the spot we begin crawling.

Penance.  A second pain undertaken in order to alleviate the first.  A penitent might fast, pray, go on a pilgrimage.  Wear a hair shirt.  Whip themselves.  Might go as far as to stay away from fiction.  Alcohol.  Sugar.  As for the first pain, in The Anthology of Water Anne Carson talks of her inability to negotiate in a mad world.  Of feeling locked up.  Hitting the wall.  Starving.  Others talk of sin.  Of the rift between themselves and God.

Things fall into place for Carson.  She meets a man who tells her about a pilgrimage to Compostela.  And just like that, they begin the journey, the only rule:  ‘Don’t come back the way you went.  Come a new way.’  The way is 850 kilometres.  1250 steps to a kilometre.  How does the new compare with the old way?

At times Carson and the man take these steps side by side.  Mostly she is behind.  I’d like to ask her, them.  For you walkers is the pain in the steps.  In the many many steps?  And is this the pain you’re wanting?  Is this the one that will heal the other? 

In one account I find a reference to a 12th century guidebook.  It clarifies:  the pain is in the narrowness.   The thwarting.  Constraint.  ‘The pilgrim route is narrow because the road that leads to everlasting life is narrow.  The pilgrim route thwarts the body, increases virtues, offers pardon for sins, separation from Hell and the protection of Heaven.  It constrains the appetites of the flesh which attack the fortress of the soul, cleanses the spirit and leads us to contemplation.’

Lots of history here.  Plenty of it.  Pilgrims began walking the Way of St James late ninth century.  Recently, two women up my street joined them.  I ask the one:  ‘Physically challenging.  Spiritually challenging.  And I’m not even a Catholic.’  I don’t ask the other.  

After days and days of walking, bed bugs, bad wine the pilgrims reach Santiago de Compostela.  The woman.  Carson and her companion.  You’d expect huge magic upon their arrival and there is.   Fireworks.  Mass.  The crowds are blessed.  The woman feels her soul to be nourished.  Carson gets drunk.  You’d also expect people would want to stay.  Hang on to that delicious state.  They never stay.  A few days later the woman hires a taxi.  Carson rents a car.  They drive up the road.  To the end of the road.  Finisterre.  

What to do at the end of the road.  Keep looking.  Something else.  A path.  And when that vanishes climb the boulders.  And when the boulders drop into the sea.  And there is nothing but the sea.  Some jump in.  The woman gets a tattoo.  Carson turns back.  One inevitably turns back.

Parting thoughts:  Don’t throw away your guidebooks just yet.