“Religion, ritual, and art began as one and a religious or metaphysical element is still present in al art. Art, no matter how minimalist, is never simply design. It is always a ritualistic reordering of reality… Art is a shutting in in order to shut out. Art is a ritualistic binding of the perpetual motion machine that is nature. The first artist was a tribal priest casting a spell, fixing nature’s daemonic energy in a moment of perpetual stillness. Fixation is at the heart of art, fixation as stasis, fixation as obsession. The modern artist who merely draws a line across a page is trying to tame some uncontrollable aspect of reality. Art is spellbinding. Art fixes the audience in its seat, stops the feet before a painting, fixes a book in the hand. Contemplation is a magic act.

Art is order. But order is not necessarily just, kind, or beautiful. Order may be arbitrary, harsh, and cruel. Art has nothing to do with morality. Moral themes may be present, but they are incidental, simply grounding an art work in a particular time and place… Particularly in modern times, when high art has been shoved to the periphery of culture, it is evident that art is aggressive and compulsive. The artist makes art not to save humankind but to save himself. Every benevolent remark by an artist is a fog to cover his tracks, the bloody trail of his assault against reality and others.”

–Camille Paglia, “Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art” from inside Sexual Personae, 1990

“My principle anguish and the source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, mercialess battle between the spirit and the flesh.

Within me are the dark immemorial forces of the Evil One, human and pre-human; within me too are the luminous forces, human and pre-human, of God –and my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.

The anguish has been intense. I loved my body and did not want it to perish; I loved my soul and did not want it to decay. I have fought to reconcile these two primordial forces which are so contrary to each other, to make them realize that they are not enemies but, rather, fellow workers, so that they might rejoice in their harmony –and so that I might rejoice with them.

Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and shortlived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death.

The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.”

–Nikos Kazantzakis, The Prologue to The Last Temptation of Christ, 1960

“What strikes me is the fact that, in our society, art has become something that is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialized or done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should… the lamp or the house be an art object…, but not our life?”

~Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”

(thanks to my collaborator Brendan Healy for making me aware of this quote)

The Broken Column

…even the most painful of the self-portraits are never maudlin or self-pitying, and her dignity and determination to “put up with things” is evident in her queenly carriage, her stoic features. It is this blend of directness and artifice, of integrity and self-invention, that gives her self-portraits their peculiar urgency, their immediately recognizable steely strength.

Of all Frida’s paintings, the one that most powerfully illustrates these qualities is The Broken Column (plate XXVIII), painted in 1944 soon after she has undergone surgery and when she was confined, as she had been in 1927, in an “apparatus.” Here Frida’s determined impassivity creates an almost unbearable tension, a feeling of paralysis. Anguish is made vivid by nails driven into her naked body. A gap resembling an earthquake fissure splits her torso, the two sides of which are held together by the steel orthopedic corset that is a symbol of the invalid’s imprisonment. The opened body suggests surgery and Frida’s feeling that without the corset she would literally fall apart. Inside her torso we see a cracked ionic column in the place of her deteriorating spinal column; life is thus replaced by a crumbling ruin. The tapered column thrusts cruelly into the red crevasse of Frida’s body, penetrating from her loins to her head, where a two-scrolled capital supports her chin. To some observers, the column is analogous to a phallus; the painting alludes to the link in Frida’s mind between sex and pain, and it recalls the steel rod that pierced her vagina during the [bus] accident. A disjointed entry in her diary reads: “To hope with anguish retained, the broken column, and the immense look, without walking, in the vast path . . . moving my life created of steel.”

The corset’s white straps with metal buckles accentuate the delicate vulnerability of Frida’s naked breasts, breasts whose perfect beauty makes the rough cut from neck to loins all the more ghatsly. With her hips wrapped in a cloth suggestive of Christ’s winding sheet, Frida displays her wounds like a Christian martyr; a Mexican Saint Sebastian, she uses physical pain, nakedness, and sexuality to bring home the message of her spiritual suffering.

Frida is no saint, however. She appraises her situation with truculent secularism, and instead of beseeching the heavens for solace, she stares straight ahead as if to challenge both herself (in the mirror) and her audience to face her predicament without flinching. Tears dot her cheeks, as they do the cheeks of so many depictions of the Madonna in Mexico, but her features refuse to cry. They are mask-like as those of an Indian idol.

(pg 76-77)

Two of my favourite quotes are from Martha Graham’s autobiography Blood Memory, DoubleDay 1991.

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. …No artist is pleased. There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

“I believe we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one’s being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes in some area an athlete of God.”

CLICK ON PICS BELOW TO ENLARGE.

(the following text is an excerpt from Holy Terror, Bob Colacello, HarperCollinsPublishers, 1990)

That was the day that Andy unveiled his latest series of self-portraits. He returned to self-portraiture as regularly as Rembrandt, though I never thought he was trying to find himself. It was more like he was trying to leave an image for history of the way he wished he looked. It was another revision, another lie, though lies in their way tell other truths. These were stunning: double and triple exposure of Andy’s profile in negative, white on black, red on black, black on black. He looked like a calm, neat, beautiful ghost. It wasn’t easy working for a ghost, especially one who wanted to be calm, neat and beautiful, and wasn’t.

But there was something else in these self-portraits too, in the eyes especially, and you only saw it if you looked long enough: the fear, pain, and sadness that were always there, no matter how much Andy tried to silkscreen them out. (pg 373)

I saw Taylor Mac perform at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s Rhubarb! festival last February. She was one of the most inspiring live performance artists I have ever seen. This queen is making the world a better place, one performance at a time.

Thanks again to J. Paul Halftery for introducing me to more inspiring video.

Spalding Gray

Thanks for including me in such esteemed company! It’s an honour I will try to live up to.

Other performers on the lost include Eric Bogosian, David Drake, Margaret Cho, David Bateman and John Leguizamo.

For the rest of the list cut and paste the link:

http://www.spaldinggray.com/monologuists.html

J. Paul Halferty showed this to me today. So beautiful. I’m getting really into queer video.