So Where is This Divine Miranda and Her Divinely Apathetic Athambic Aphasic Partner?

April 2018.  Samuel Beckett has little confidence in language.  In Texts for Nothing #11:  ‘No, nothing is nameable, tell, no, nothing can be told, what then, I don’t know.’  Still, he writes, his language often a kind of nervous breakdown.  Take that of his character Lucky in Waiting for Godot.  Ordered to speak Lucky begins:

‘Given the existence of a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged in torment plunged in fire.’  Etc.

It’s rather disjointed.  This language.  This image of God.  On the one hand, a benevolent white-bearded grandfather.  On the other, a being who, if he exists, does not care and cannot be made to care although if he does care, it is only for some, the rest plunged in torment.

Torment is something Ana Maria Pacheco, a Brazilian born sculptor, is acquainted with.  Her installation Shadow of the Wanderer embodies it.  Hers are the refugees, the fleeing, the fearful.  The god-forsaken.

I’ve used some of these faces.  They’re haunting.  Anxious.  There’s a sense of something pending.  Pacheco speaks of hope.  Perhaps.  The figures exhibited in the Norwich Cathedral and seen against a backdrop of stained glass might suggest as much.   But the faces never soften.   Never relax.  Beckett faces.   If they’re waiting, hoping for deliverance, it’s with more fear than faith.

The thing about waiting.  It’s not really anything.  Just time passing while one is in the grip.  Moment after small moment subsumed into that big awaited thing.  For Pacheco’s characters there’s only waiting.  For Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon there are at least a few distractions, Lucky being one of them.  

The thing about the awaited.  Well…if Godot is a no-show and the mysterious Miranda remains in the shadows, what then?  It’s back to the waiting.  And how long does the waiting go on?  How long is long enough?  What happens to all that waiting?  And finally, when the show is dismantled, the curtain down, what is there to be said about all this?

God doesn’t say.

Perhaps he doesn’t trust language any more than Beckett does.

Beckett doesn’t say.

Miranda:  ‘It’s been such fun….or has it?’

Lucky:  ‘Alas alas abandoned unfinished.  Unfinished.’

Godot:  ‘I won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.’

Estragon:  ‘Well, shall we go?’

Vladimir:  ‘Yes, let’s go.’

Turns out there’s not much to be said.  Certainly not much that has been said.  We simply have to let it go.  Abandon the unfortunate Lucky.   Shift our gaze away from the faces of the Wanderers.  The last words belong to Estragon and Vladimir:

‘Let’s go.’  ‘We can’t.’  ‘Why not?’  ‘We’re waiting for Godot.’

Annunciation in a Melian Boat

March 2018.  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.

The theory takes hold, spreading throughout classical Rome and the Islamic World, dominating western thought during much of the Medieval and Renaissance periods.  Its appeal related in part to a general concern with human order.  Civilization.  This, at least, in the case of the Greeks, so very worried about matter being out of place, transgressing boundaries, causing pollution.

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.  And similarly attitudes toward women most disapproving.  When the man has his morning prayer, he thanks God he’s not a woman.  If the man and a woman are drowning, the man is saved.   If the man talks too much with a woman he unleashes evil upon himself and quite possibly hell.

Returning to New York I see the title of the Mark Miller show is named for a book written by art professor Zirka Filipczak.  Hot Dry Men Cold Wet Women:  The Theory of Humors in Western European Art 1575-1700.  Like the book, ‘the show asserts that although the Humors are now seen as obsolete science, their long-standing hold on Western society and art history has left residual archetypes still held today.’  Reviewer Lori Zimmer.  I feel an impulse to see the show.  It’s long over.  A desire to buy the book.  Temporarily out of stock.

The archetypes continue to persist during Virginia Woolf’s lifetime.  (1882-1941)   She worries.  Perhaps as a woman.  Certainly as a writer.  ‘Whatever the value of unmitigated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon the art of poetry.’  She reads that the Italian men, the famous, the financial, industrial and corporate are hoping the Fascist era will soon ‘give birth to a poet worthy of it.’  Her response:  ‘We may all join in that pious hope, but it is doubtful whether poetry can come of an incubator.  Poetry ought to have a mother as well as a father.  The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some country town.’ ( A Room of One’s Own)

Woolf understands there are times when it’s conducive to turn away ‘from the surface with its hard separate facts.’  To reject the ‘masculine point of view which governs our lives, sets the standard.’  Insist on a ‘world without professors or specialists with the profiles of policemen.’  This in a short story called The Mark on the Wall where her narrator resists investigating a mark on the wall.  Resists knowing.

Very near the end she:  ‘There is a vast upheaval of matter.’

Still closer to the end he:  ‘I don’t see why we should have a snail on the wall.’

The very end she:  ‘Ah, the mark on the wall!  It was a snail.’

It’s All in the Headgear

February 2018.  The term comes from the Greek and refers to one who bears witness.  Renounces.  Or refuses to renounce.  Resists.  Goes against the grain.  And once a person take this route, they become involved in a kind of inevitability.  Their action met by a counteraction.  A corrective.

It’s the martyr I’m talking about.  Funny the definition has to do only with the first part.  The resisting.  No one thinks of it like that any more.  The term only makes sense when coupled with the result.  And if people are ambitious for martyrdom, there’s little question about the end.  Only about the degree perhaps.  

Apparently some desire the ultimate martyrdom.  Sophocles’ Antigone is in love with the idea.  Obsessed.  Others fall into it because of circumstances.  Joan of Arc.  She hears voices advising her to lead the French against the English.  This pits her against the religious authorities and she’s duly punished.  Burnt at the stake.  She, unlike Antigone, is not anxious to die.

And then there are the artists.  The Romantics.  Symbolists.  I’m reading bits from Rebels and Martyrs:  The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century (National Gallery Publications).  No talk of death here but at the same time a definite identification with the suffering and martyred Christ.  Delacroix.  Feeling rejected, his work criticized, he begins to paint and identify with those who suffer:  the poets, saints, martyrs and Christ.  Gauguin.  Identifying so entirely with Christ’s agony in the garden, he paints himself as Christ, the doubt and pain he feels as an artist his own particular agony.  Van Gogh.  He works from a print of the Pieta by Delacroix.  Gives Christ his own features.  The red hair.  Occasionally he believes himself to be Christ.  There are others.  Munch.  Goya.  Ensor.  And it is all these artists whom critic and writer Albert Aurier references when he writes:  ‘the accursed..of the tribe of Christ and Homer/knowing what it is to be spat upon, knowing Crucifixion.’  This in his poem L’Oeuvre Maudit.

While it is clear these artists consider themselves martyrs and little  Christs, I am a touch worried.  Do they qualify?  And who decides such things?  Perhaps the National Gallery.  They note that Delacroix was an apostle of modernism, one whose techniques and ideas fuelled the movements that followed.  During his career he went against the grain, emphasizing the physicality of paint.  Of color.  Moved away from the status quo.  The classical style.  Art critics were unhappy with him.  The art establishment opposed him.  His punishment…bad reviews and an inability to get into the Academie des Beaux-Arts until late in life.

Paul Gauguin also experienced rejection during his life-time but later was recognized for a number of things including his experimental use of color and what was known as a Synthetist style.  His innovations influenced those who came after him.

As for Vincent Van Gogh, his work was dismissed as amateurish and he sold only one painting during his life-time.  Later it was said he invented a new kind of art called Expressionism.

While appreciating the contribution these artists made, the commitment each had to their particular vision,  I remain uncomfortable with their identification as martyrs and Christ-like figures, suspecting them of making a meal of it, forcing a connection where there is none.  I’d prefer them to leave it alone, to let history called them martyrs if it will.   And it does…at least, in the title of the exhibition at the National Gallery in 2006 and the publication written up by Alexander Sturgis.

In his installation Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), artist Bill Viola pays tribute to that ‘human capacity to bear pain, hardship and even death in order to remain faithful to one’s values, beliefs and principles.’  I’ll have to concede.  Give that to those nineteenth century artists.  And if they got a touch carried away with the label, they were, after all, Romantics.

Everyone Has a Cross to Bear

January 2018.  Seems I’ve assumed Christian art to be long gone by now.  Done.  Dead.  That having dominated the western world for a very long time it’s history.  Well, it is history.   But lately I’ve noticed quite a number of artists calling up the imagery in their current practice.

Take the patrons of the Golden Heart Pub in London’s East End.  Gilbert and George, two middle-aged and eccentric artists living in the neighbourhood.  Tracey Emin.  Jake and Dinos Chapman.  Others.  Before going any further I should point out that while these people are neighbours and drink at the same establishment, they are by no means friends.  Gilbert and George are very clear on this.  

Context:  In the eighth century Christian art gets the nod.  The council of Nicaea legislates in favour of icons, the idea being that icons will help sustain the faith.  I suspect they do.  Art moving in step with faith, reinforcing the changing attitudes of the community.  Attitudes toward the crucifixion for instance.  At a relatively early point in the history of Christianity, the crucifixion is taken to signify triumph more than anything else, pointing to the fact that Christianity is now the state religion.  Later suffering is emphasized, the paintings serving as a kind of manual on the how-to of suffering.  This for the monks and others given to inflict pain upon themselves.  Still later the point is made that people are responsible for Christ’s suffering, that they must now become responsive to others’ suffering.  And with Otto Dix in 1932 it has to do with the horrors of war.  It’s no longer Christ on the cross, it’s everyman.  All this I learn from Seeing Salvation, a series put out by the National Gallery.

It’s apparent that Christian art has gradually moved away from its original intent.  Has become a kind of archival collection that can be accessed and used by individual artists for their own creative purposes.   There’s British artist Francis Bacon, well known for his triptychs of the crucifixion.  His take on the image:  ‘It’s a magnificent armature on which you can hang all types of feeling and sensation.’  He is emphatic:  ‘I haven’t found another subject so far that has been as helpful for covering certain areas of human feeling and behaviour.’

As for the East Enders, Gilbert and George are no fans of the Christian faith.  They would ban it if they could.  Gilbert says:  ‘It has caused too many deaths…we don’t believe in damnation.’  At the same time, they use religious imagery and language in their art where it serves a political purpose.  In a series called Jack Freak Pictures which has stirred up debate about religion and patriotism, you’ll see the crucified Christ.  In the piece Christian England, Christ is sporting a Union Jack loincloth and halo, Gilbert and George on either side of him dressed entirely in Jack.  They love the title.  ‘Up until the war people would say to someone who was being awkward to you on the street or offensive in some way, Excuse me, this is Christian England. You must behave yourself.’

Neighbours Jake and Dinos Chapman used to work as studio assistants for Gilbert and George near the beginning of their art careers.  Perhaps that has something to do with  Gilbert and George’s current rejection of their friendship.  I doubt this bothers the Chapmans in the least.  They seem to court rejection, their art meant to offend, ‘iconoclastic, full of violence and aggression.’  Art historian Jacky Klein.  Their crucified Ronald McDonalds, for instance, even brought on a criminal investigation for blasphemy some years back.  According to the Chapmans:  ‘One of the reasons we’re interested in Ronald is that he has this messianic value to him.  When Ronald first appeared he existed in a world that was motivated by the idealism of industrialization.  He was messianic in that he was offering cheap food for people who couldn’t afford to be fed.’

Tracey Emin’s work is autobiographical.  Emotional.  Her tone more neutral, references to things religious limited to ambiguous statements:  Art is like god.  Art is the church.  Art is like a religion.  Limited to titles:  Only God Knows I’m Good.  I Need Art Like I Need God.  Perhaps the strongest reference is to the crucifixion which comes up in a number of her works.  On a blanket she’s stitched a cross together with these words:

Come unto me

Every time I feel love I think Christ I’m going to be crucified.

So I close my eyes and become the cross.

So beautiful.

The one artist in the crowd who really takes on the crucifixion as a project is Sebastian Horseley.  When asked by writer Aidan Campbell why he chose the motif of the crucifixion, Horseley replies that he’s drawn to Christ as a symbol of heroism.  ‘He embodies the triumph over what men fear the most, extinction and death.’  Too, he’s interested in using the ‘traditional image of the crucifixion to illuminate the present in a different way.  To take something that has been done beautifully before and give it a modern twist’.  And in order to do this, he feels it necessary to undergo an actual crucifixion.  ‘How can a person paint the crucifixion without being crucified,’ he asks.  And how can a person move toward anything of value without pain?  Or know they’re alive if they don’t suffer?  And he does.   He pays his money and flies down to the Philippines.  Next morning three Marys in blue and white silk robes appear and together with the villagers they all float up the river towards Calvary.  Horseley is crucified.  Goes home and begins his series.  Sometime later he calls the experience a grand folly, but believing existence to be meaningless suggests ‘we might as well make a grandeur out of it.’

Indeed. A grandeur.  Not being into more suffering than necessary, I’m not keen on Horseley’s move to hang himself on that magnificent armature.  Seems indulgent.  Melodramatic.  Rather Bacon’s.  Using an image that is powerful to begin with.  Recognizable.  Emotionally charged.  Filled with associations.  And then hanging feeling and sensation on that.  What Horseley seems to be doing is taking the power out of the the symbol, overloading it with his own narcissism.  Perhaps this is intentional but I somehow doubt it.  

Sebastian Horseley survives his crucifixion as he is meant to.  Doesn’t survive an overdose about ten years later.  How to read that.  From left to right.  Simply moving from one grandeur to the next.  To the final.

The Relaunching of Larry

December 2017.  I’m reading an essay by Owen Hulatt, a teaching fellow in philosophy at the University of York.  The title:  Has art ended again?  He uses up 3100 words considering the death of art.  I am using fewer by a long shot.  The thinking is that art, by definition, has a narrative and goal.  A structure.  Line of development.  When the goal is reached, the task accomplished or perhaps abandoned, the narrative ends.  Dies. 

A short account:  The philosopher GWF Hegel understood art’s narrative to help shape and reflect our common culture, to be about freedom and self-awareness.  For a time it was perfectly embodied in the classical art of ancient Greece.  Later in romantic art.  As self-awareness became increasingly complex and abstract, art stalled.  Couldn’t keep up.  That is to say, died.  1835. 

Years later Arthur Danto, an American art critic, weighed in.  Art’s task was the making of images that achieved a likeness to their objects.  When this task was usurped by the camera, art had to come up with a new task.  It did.  An inquiry into art itself.  What it was.  What its limits were.  And when those limits were exceeded, as they were with Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes, the narrative ended.  Art died.  Again.  1964. 

There’s an inevitability about death.  That’s understood.  A life, a narrative ends.  There’s a sense too that death ought not to be tampered with.  Rather, that it needs ‘time and silence.’  As Colm Toibin’s Mary believes, ‘the dead must be left alone with their own gift.’  She’s thinking not of art.  Rather and specifically of Lazarus, a man whose story begins pretty much with his death and kind of stalls after he’s brought back to life.  And there’s the problem.  The starting up again.  The Lazarus Take 2. 

People get it.  They empathize.   Writer Anne Carson does, knowing how ‘nausea overtakes (her) when faced with the prospect of something simply beginning all over again.’  In TV Men she tells us plainly, ‘Repetition is horrible,’ and draws attention to poor Lazarus realizing ‘his own epoch of repetition just beginning.’  Sylvia Plath also, in Lady Lazarus explaining:  Even after dying three times ‘nevertheless, I’m the same identical woman coming back to the same place, the same face.’  And finally Lazarus, complaining to Christ on the road to Christ’s death.

Lazarus: 

For four whole days 

I had been dead and I was lying still 

In an old mountain cavern 

When you came climbing there with a great crowd 

And dragged me to the light. 

Christ: 

I called your name, 

“La-za-rus come out,” I said and you came out 

Bound up in cloths, your face bound in a cloth. 

Lazarus: 

You took my death, give me your death instead.’ 

(Yeats’ The Road to Calvary)

It’s not a simple thing, this business of a second narrative.  Lazarus may have been called Happy Larry by a few, but not by the majority.  Reports are he didn’t do so well.  Never smiled again.  Sighed a lot.  Lived out his days in a darkened bedroom.  Ate only bread soaked in water.  Some of this according to Toibin’s Testament of Mary. 

Fortunately art doesn’t have to return to the same place, the same face.  It can hit the open road looking for the next narrative.  The next task.  One would think.  But according to Hegel and Danto, once art dies, there is no next.  No new narrative.  No direction home.  Fine.  But it seems odd to think of art as a thing that could die.  Although if it’s a proper noun.  Like Lazarus.  Christ.  Sylvia Plath. Andy Warhol.  Proper nouns die.  

Andy Warhol, responsible for delivering the final blow to art, went on to do his fair share of dying.  June 3rd 1968 he was pronounced dead at 4:51 pm.  About five and a half hours later he was alive again.  A kind of Lazarus who never really got a second narrative together.  This according to JD Ebert in Dead Celebrities.  In 1969 he was confronted with artistic death, portrayed as drowning in a can of tomato soup on the cover of the ’69 issue of Esquire as it announced the ‘death and final collapse of the American avant-garde.’  Eventually the artist really died.  1987.  And as far as we know, managed to remain dead.

As for art, Hulatt proposes 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.

I’ll go with the first option in its advocacy for an open and flexible approach to art, inclined as I am to steer clear of the upper case.  Imagine.  No big A Art death.  No drama and the ultimate disappointment of those second and faltering big N Narratives.

As for Larry, well, by now we can rest assured he’s back in that mountain cavern.  Finally got his wish.  He ended.

Meet Me at the Oasis

October 2017.  While checking out some old art mags I come across a photo of the British artist Georgina Starr posing as Theda Bara.  Unfamiliar with Bara I learn she was a silent film star.  Having acted in more than 40 films during her brief career from 1914 to 1926, she was extremely successful in her capacity as a vamp.   During the late 20’s films began transitioning from silence to sound.  From melodrama to psychological realism.  Stylized to restrained acting.  Bara couldn’t make the transition.  Her voice bad, her gestures too broad.  She got married instead.

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 O 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.

So here’s this beauty salon.  After all…’Art must be beautiful.  Artist must be beautiful.’  Abramovic’s words.  And she is.  Young.  Naked.  And brushing her hair in the performance.  Vigorously.  Painfully.  No pain at the salon though, pinned up as she is on the bulletin board behind the dryers.  Theda Bara also with her lovely head of hair.  Kohl-rimmed eyes.  Ezekiel doesn’t make it into this particular club.  He’s not beautiful.  Emaciated.  Most definitely filthy, especially after being trussed up in his house for days.

The salon is a clean place.  Contained.  The clients fully clothed.  Gesturing at a minimum.  Drama non-existent.  A true oasis and respite from too much life and death.  Ezkeiel might do well to book a shampoo and cut.  Set that jazzed and jangled body down for some sweet mundane.  Come to think of it, I may just have to book an appointment myself.  

Laundered and Levitating

September 2017.  Truly I’ve never been big on saints.  More accurately I’ve never been anything on them.  Not even ambivalent.  They simply haven’t  registered and consequently, I’ve never cared to read Butler’s Lives of Saints or any other saint literature.    Others have.  St Teresa of Avila.  Writer Patti Smith.  Playwright David Ives.  Poet and scholar Anne Carson even tried to eat the pages.

At one time philosophers like Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and William James thought a saint to be one of the great and necessary human types along with the artist, thinker and hero.  Nietzsche changed his mind about the saints along the way but the others didn’t.

Who are they?  These saints?  And why consider them?  If it weren’t for performance artist Marina Abramovic I probably wouldn’t.  The thing to be noted, says Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran, is their predisposition toward suffering.  In Tears and Saints he inquires as to whether there isn’t ‘enough suffering in the world.  It seems not’, he continues, ‘to judge from the saints who excel in self-torture.’  He goes on to inform us further that saints ‘never miss a single opportunity among the many varieties of agony.’  The payoff?  And there has to be a payoff.  After ‘voluptuous pain’ comes a ‘voluptuous feeling, as of infinite happiness.’ 

Two things about Cioran:  He and Nietzsche think similarly about the saints.  He uses the term ‘voluptuous’ a lot when writing about them.

Playwright David Ives was headed for the priesthood when he swerved from the path in order to write for the theatre.  Lives of the Saints is the title for a series of his short plays.  One called Soap Opera features a Maypole washing machine as a saint of sorts.  She is very good.  Pure.  Perfect.  But perfection, especially the negative form saints pursue (check out Cioran) can be a problem.  Witness this poor Maypole admitting to wanting to be bad and later crying out hysterically for the repair man to break her so he can then repair her.  ‘Break me.  Agitate my agitator.  Make me suffer.  Break me.  Do it.  Do it.’

St Teresa of Avila also wishing to suffer, believing she was not perfect, experienced pain through various sorts of self-torture and during visions.  In one such vision her heart was repeatedly pierced by the fiery point of a golden lance and she writes:  ‘The pain was so great it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain that I could not wish to be rid of it.’  Her prayer:  ‘Lord, either let me suffer or let me die’.  The lord, in turn, gave her spiritual delights, raptures, union with God.  He caused her to levitate, a gift she seems to have viewed with some ambivalence.  While she did enjoy rapture during the event, the timing was off, and on the whole the experience was rather violent, frightening and unfortunately impossible to resist.  At some point in her life she confessed, ‘I’d rather the earth swallow me up.  I ask God constantly to free me from this.’  An aside:  she levitated a foot and a half off the ground.

When Abramovic was asked in an interview if divine forces ever took her during a performance she said yes.  ‘I couldn’t turn it off.  I felt so pure.  I didn’t want to eat.  You get this illumination, this energy, but what do you do with it afterwards?  It can kill you.’   A further aside:  She levitated about three and a half feet off the ground.

I find myself thinking about saints and artists.  Abramovic certainly seems saint-like.  She’s well acquainted with self-torture, pain and payoff, renunciation.   And yet she’s not really a saint.  She’s an artist.  Another of those great and necessary human types.  Artists saints.  Saints artists.  If there’s a difference, it’s got to be in the context.

My collage is part soap opera, starring a Maytag, and part Abramovic’s kitchen-series homage to St Teresa.  The story has it that St Teresa being hungry went into the kitchen to make lunch.  Just as she was stirring the soup,  the Lord raised her up and the mundane pleasures of preparing and eating had to wait until the presumed ecstasies passed.  I’m hoping the soup wasn’t burnt too badly.  The ecstasies first-rate.

No Rest for the Pious

August 2017.  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 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.’

Someone asks Isaiah the question:  ‘what is an idol?’

Isaiah answers:  ‘an idol is a useless sacrifice.’

The nation responds:  ‘how do you know which ones are useless?’

Good question.  Consider God’s sacrifice of Isaiah on behalf of the nation.  Centuries later Isaiah is rolling around the nation talking to people and scaring them, nothing left of him but a big forehead by this time.  (Puts me in mind of Philip Guston’s big eyeball.)  The nation calls a secret meeting and votes him out.  So much for that.

And how do you know which pressure is piety and which impiety?  You might intend to perform your duty to the gods, people and country but get it wrong.  Socrates did.  Antigone.  They were smashed.  Became sacrifices, not by being beloved but by aligning themselves with the wrong pressure.  I suppose in the end it doesn’t make much of a difference to the sacrificial victim.  Right or wrong, beloved or not.  Smashing is smashing.  I doubt that God’s son had a good time arriving at his last moments.

My collage contains three pietas.  They’re all at some remove.  All dishonest.  Arranged.  Theatre. There’s no real piety here.  No lamentation.  Instead, a kind of representation that’s open-ended.  Or more likely emptied out.  I‘m fine with that actually.

At the same time, there’s something in this business that delivers, say, for a person like Abramovic.  According to her, in order to achieve a goal you have to give everything until you have nothing left.  And then it will happen by itself.  For her a kind of smashing seems essential.  Sacrificing inevitable.  As for Isaiah, I suppose the fact that milk poured from his breasts is impressive, and according to the scriptures a sign of prosperity and peace.

Carson ends her book.

Isaiah sleeps.  

God obsesses.

Abramovic starts an institute.

Develops a method.

I’m off to buy some wallpaper.

Orange and yellow floral.

Perhaps blue.

July 2017.  I happen upon the Floating Pieta, a small pub on 6th ave close to where Cafe Ino used to be.   It’s hot and I’d like nothing better than a glass of white wine with ice.  Entering I see there aren’t many tables.  All occupied.  Ah, there is a woman in a long red dress and I approach asking if I might sit down.  She looks up and nods, her moist eyes holding me.  I sit, politely submitting to the dynamic she has imposed and return her gaze.  After what seems an interminable length of time I break away.  Signalling the waiter I order and offer to buy her a drink thinking she could use something cold, clearly sweating in that thick gown of hers.  Water with a squeeze of lemon.  Introducing myself I say you look familiar.  Marina Abramovic, she replies.  Of course.  So odd though, here in her red gown and doing a kind of repeat performance of what she’s already done so many times, in fact 700 hours worth.  I suppose it’s automatic by now.

I glance around the room.  It’s well lit.  Doesn’t seem like a pub at all.  Maybe it isn’t, the religious imagery more suited to a church.  A version of the pieta dominates, takes up an entire wall.  Come to think of it, Abramovic has also done a version of the pieta, dressed as she is today and cradling Ulay, her creative partner from long ago.  By now I’m curious.  I gesture toward the image but Marina is somewhere else, eyes rolled upward in some kind of ecstasy or devotion.  What about that pieta, eh?    You must identify with Mary.  Feel yourself to be her.  Do you?  Even a little?  And your name..it’s so similar.

I’m becoming the interrogator.  I feel it.  She does too and wanting nothing of it prepares to leave.  Watch my TED Talk.  Buy my book.  Come to my institute.  And she’s out the door.  Turns left.  I don’t buy the book but watch the talk later in the privacy of my room.  A long gown, green this time.  Moist eyes.  Face made up.  And very calmly and matter of factly summarizing what performance is.  An energy dialogue between the performer and audience in real time, with real actions and real consequences i.e. real knives, real blood.  As she speaks her arms occasionally move slightly out from her sides, palms opening to the audience.  I am watching for this, ready to pounce and pronounce.

She tells the audience all human beings are afraid of the same things.  Of suffering.  Pain.  Mortality.  I am staging these kinds of fears in front of an audience.  I‘m using your energy and with this energy I can push my body as far as I can.  Then I liberate myself from these fears.   I‘m your mirror.  If I can do this for myself, you can also do it.

All this sounds too extreme and admittedly I don’t like people setting themselves up to be my mirror or example.   I quit watching TED just as she begins talking about the institute.   Wanting some air before heading for bed I take a walk through the streets, returning to the Floating Pieta once more just to check, unreasonably hoping to see Marina, long black braid, red gown presiding at her table.  The place is closed for the night.