Posts Tagged ‘Art’

SF by Way of D

Thursday, January 21st, 2010

(D for desire, doom, debauchery, deviancy, depression, drunkenness, degeneracy, depravity, despair, disorder, destruction, disintegration, dissolution, death…)

Clouds blowing through dark sky as I cross the Bay Bridge. The lit skyline rises before me. It is approaching midnight. I stick my head out of the car window and howl. The school is silent under the moonlight and the stones are cool. It is the first stop I make and I pee on the outside walls thinking “this is my new home.” In front of the hotel where I will stay strut half a dozen big-legged whores with thickly made-up faces and numb looks. I buy cheap scotch, find a place in the park, listen to Seventeen Seconds, and fall asleep in my car. When I awake a Chinese man stands before me swinging a chain around his body and blowing a flute. I check into the hotel, meet my future roommate, a nice, cute and tough girl. At nighttime I go out, towards South of Market, looking for something to eat. Police cars are interspersed between hookers, pan-handlers, street people, and thugs. Later, I feel that a sinister presence is trying to get into the room through the keyhole in the door. The next morning I see small burn marks around the doorknob, and a cloven footprint on the carpet just before the door. This is a bad omen, and I feel fear and strangeness moving in. My car is broken into and the stereo is stolen. The signs are clear to me: if I am to succeed (or even survive) here I must swim with the current and embrace the craziness head on. I walk up Haight street, look for freaks, and score some acid…

The drug-induced, sensory-overload, subconscious plundering tactics are a way to establish inner necessity, to discover what’s meaningful by deconstructing previous notions of art (sacrificing previously held notions of identity). Pulling out that which is hidden. A questioning by contradiction  of various conventions I have concerning painting, myself, and society. Looking for something in the repressed, the hidden.

I drink from a bottle of beer wrapped in a paper bag sitting against a wall and watch the prostitutes down around the corner. I‘ve never seen any this close before and I’m fascinated. They call to each other, get into cars which take them away, get driven back and emerge from the cars gesturing and calling to each other again. I watch for a few nights until one of them approaches me. She tells me she’s seen me watching her night after night, and that she knows what I need. She asks if I have a car around, and without thinking I point to it—it is sitting only fifteen feet away—she gives a big grin—her two front teeth are missing—and says, “let’s go.” I can’t think of any reason not to, and soon we are in the car. After she asks me to put my money on the dash, I place the fourteen dollars down that I have, and she swipes the bills away, she leans over me, supported by her knees on the passenger seat, gets my seat reclined and my pants down, and lowers her round, black face down into my lap. Her cool mouth slides around my stiffened flesh. I pull up her skirt and run my fingers over the warm, dark skin that’s bare underneath. She moans and gyrates, sticks ass out, her cheeks press up against the passenger window. Formally dressed, elderly white people leaving the theatre walk by, trying to look away and keep composed. The street seems to glow and my mind spreads tingling outward…

*

San Francisco struck me as an enchanted city. It was small enough to walk across, and yet packed with interesting architecture, people, and energies. A year or two before this I had gone to the city to visit a friend, and he had taken me around and showed me some sights. I had hung out and gotten loaded with some neo-hippies on Haight, seen a beautiful, tough tattooed goth chick fetch a huge snake out from behind an apartment off Market, went to a trippy, dark and dreamy party full of sexy, made-up people moving in slow motion through dim, colored lights, and wandered around the halls and studios of the Art Institute. The whole place seemed exciting and alive, and I started to think about the idea of moving there and going to art school. It seemed to be the perfect environment to creatively rearrange oneself and encounter something inspiring.

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Perceiving the Surreal

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

I became interested in the ideas of surrealism, and its aim of enabling practitioners to escape the control of reason and the imperatives of the moral order, to become mediums of a wider self. Surrealism suggests using the experiences of dreams, automatic texts, playful and unrestrained investigations, and questioning the prevailing social standards and tastes, in the attempt to minimize and heal the fragmentation of consciousness and to restore more of the totality of a human being’s lived experience. It proposes that the true function of thought can only be attained in the absence of control exerted by reason, and beyond moral and aesthetic preoccupations.

It was revolutionary for attacking and attempting to overcome the crude and restrictive divisions and barriers of Western thought and logic, which operates in dutiful procedures according to clock-time and social conventionalism and protocol. It wanted to lay waste to the ideas of family, nation, and religion, and stated that “there is no room for compromise.” The subject in these previous sentences not only refers to surrealism, but also the thinking of Andre Breton, the main proponent of surrealism. Andre Breton was calling for a widening of the notion of reality, so that our concept of the Real would not suffer a logical reduction down to the simple and mundane, the practical and observable, but rather so our conception of the Real could expand to include the dream, the subconscious, flights of fancy, musings of the absurd, and other strange and marvelous imaginings. If we understand this then we are filled with the knowledge that reality is permeated with imaginative, transformative power. The Real is always open to what is unknown, mysterious, and not commensurate with rationality, and it offers outlets to the marvelous, to dreams of love, ecstasy, revery, to parades of bizarre superstitions, to a space that can be explored with the fanciful play of thought tracing the extraordinary and inexplicable movements of fantasy and dream.

Surrealism calls for the reassertion of Imagination, and a transformation of the World. A practitioner of surrealism or a surrealist is one who makes a piece of writing or artwork or related artifact, or performs an act of some kind, which can cause a kind of surprise, a convulsive shock between the piece/work and the spectator. This convulsive shock (which may, I think, be very subtle, almost imperceptible) originates from the perception/reception of a current of transformative power, a transformative power which moves between the piece and the spectator’s consciousness and enables her or him to see beyond some barrier, to imagine a larger realm. The current or charge of the piece is borne from a kind of desire or turmoil on the part of the surrealist to change or enchant, to affect, the spectator and the world. And the larger realm that the charge points to is surreality or the surreal.

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Thought on Shamanism

Tuesday, October 13th, 2009

I was to be attracted (or lured, compelled) down a path of creativity and expression, a path of art. In many ways I felt that the role I began to explore as an artist had connections to that of a shaman. Some of the aspects of shamanism, as I understand them, are:

The shaman serves a vital role in the community or social group, but lives on its periphery. He or she is a link between a tribe of people and the surrounding, occult forces that the social group dwells within. These forces are part of an All, an encompassing primal unity that provides a net of power or flow of knowledge and support for the people, but go mostly misunderstood or unperceived because of their hidden/occult nature. There is great risk and inevitable hardship when a person or people stray too far from these forces, because being in ignorance or at odds with these forces means being ignorant or going against the major guiding forces in life: this is a self-defeating and destructive way. The role of the shaman is to provide a link between the tribe and these forces, to access some of the power in these forces for the people, and to keep the people in a harmonious relationship with these greater, immersive forces so that they may be connected to a source of health and well-being. Their function is not necessarily one of the pragmatic and empirical tasks which satisfy the daily needs of the tribe, but a way to provide ecological stability and meaning, and to keep the people connected to the larger sphere of life and the forces pervading the environment.

To understand the tribe as an element under or within the umbrella of the world and its guiding forces, and the role of the shaman as the handle/pole connecting the umbrella to the tribe, is to understand the importance and significance of this function. It may be easy for a society that situates human production and intelligence as the pinnacle of nature, and science and rationality as its supreme methods, to dismiss these ideas or talk of them as superstitions of primitive peoples. But for a people who feel they exist within nature and that forces in nature are more powerful than themselves, great value will be placed on one who has a special or intercessory relationship with these forces.

It should also be noted that in order to achieve these aims of providing a link to a greater natural source of power the shaman must undergo a dissolution of his or her own separate and autonomous ego, and a commingling with other outside spirits and unseen forces.

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Undercurrents

Tuesday, September 22nd, 2009

There is always a Movement with Counter-Movements.

If we look at dance music, for example, we find this in the rhythm of all the groove oriented or funky forms. There is a dominant movement described in 4/4 time on the One, Two, Three, and Four; and, there is also an alternative, counter-movement, which both conforms to the dominant rhythm as well as works against it in a relationship of tension. It may for instance start on the One, but then proceed by increments of 3/16’s, landing on the 1.75, 2.5, 3.25, and 4. The Four will get it back into conformity so that it can start again in unison on the One. This is more than just random syncopation; it is a counter-rhythm proper.

We might extend this principle, in an even more crude, simplistic, and basic way, if that can be tolerated, to the sphere of politics and the authority of the state. There will always exist a dominant authority, and there will always exist an element of intolerance or dissent to this dominant authority. Let’s call the state of authority Control, and the movement of intolerance and dissent Anarchy. Control cannot be absolute and will always give rise to accompanying movements of Anarchy. Anarchy will always be in tension with Control, but will also be subordinate to it, will be conforming and reacting to Control. It cannot displace Control, because if it ever did it would suddenly take over the role of Control, while all of its opposing movements would become the new Anarchy. The rebel challenger kills the king, only to become a new king, with all the king’s duties, including defending himself from rebel challengers.

In the realm of thought, since the age of reason, through the enlightenment and the industrial revolution, there has been a dominant movement for the restructuring of society and methods of science and production under the banner of Reason and Rationality. And, there have been the attendant counter-movements. These counter movements have not been completely anti- or unreasonable. More often they have questioned the conception or constitution of reason, provoking it to try and define itself, and critiquing the range and method of its application. I was always attracted to elements in these counter-movements to reason, especially in the arts: Romanticism, the Gothic revival, Expressionism, and Surrealism. It is interesting that in addition to being somewhat antagonistic or critical to Reason, or perhaps because of this, these movements have also been considered Experimental or Avant-garde.

Some elements of these movements have been: the mystery and wildness of nature; the sublime; the supernatural and occult; intuition, imagination, emotions (including trepidation, angst, anxiety) and subjectivity; the psychological and psychic structures; melodrama; uncontrollable subconscious play; the fantastic; the primitive; the atmospheric and hidden; the crazy and revolting; horror, terror, and awe…

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