Having just collaborated on a collection of his own writings, the renowned pianist talks to us about the writing that’s inspired him

By Erich Christiansen

Matthew Shipp is one of the leading figures of the downtown improvisational scene that came out of the 1980’s and 90’s, along with frequent collaborators William Parker, David S. Ware, Whit Dickey, and Daniel Carter, just to name a few. His piano style has expanded the radical vocabulary established by sixties giants like Cecil Taylor, establishing a fresh voice all his own. He experiments restlessly and works tirelessly, having released more albums than I can count. And as artistic director for Thirsty Ear’s Blue series, he also works to bring similarly innovative artists to the world’s attention. His latest album is 2007’s Piano Vortex, on the Blue Note Continuum label. He has also collaborated with Steve Dalachinsky on a new book, Logos and Language: A Post-Jazz Metaphorical Dialogue, available from Rogue Art.
This conversation is part of an on-going series that seeks to make connections between the arts. On this leg of the journey, I’ll be talking to musicians about the books and literature that have inspired them. This led us into a discussion about Shipp’s view of music in particular and creativity in general as a kind of spiritual practice, a way of exploring the inner and outer universe. And it was fortuitous that this would correspond with Matthew’s own foray into publishing with Logos and Language.

E.C.: Is there anything in particular that you’re reading right now, or that has been particularly important to you, that you’d like to tell us about, or that the world should be aware of?
Shipp: Been reading some pretty heavy mysticism stuff-Sri Aurobindo- Jacob Boehme-and the Tao Te Ching.
E.C.: There’s an interesting balance among the texts that you listed, in the sense that you have one from the Eastern tradition, one from the Western, and one who’s known for drawing on ideas from both (Aurobinda). What do you think that the two sets of traditions can teach each other? Or is that a false dichotomy– when you get below the surface of institutionalized creeds, are the different religions, especially their mystical traditions, really exploring the same kind of territory?
Shipp: Truth is truth- all religions are just symbols and surfaces or constellations of energy- once you break through the surface you are dealing with the same light or energy-whether you come from the east or west.
E.C.: You probably already knew this, but I just learned today about how Stockhausen discovered Aurobindo’s ideas in May of ‘68, and how that was the beginning of a shift toward overtly mystical themes in his work. And that got me thinking about the spiritual paths of a number of other experimental musicians of the last hundred years– Scriabin, Coltrane, Stockhausen, Cage, Dolphy, Sun Ra, David S. Ware, Albert Ayler. Is there something about twentieth century free music that lends itself to mysticism, or a mystical kind of experience? Or is it just that people who aren’t dogmatic about music tend not to be philosophically or religiously dogmatic either?
Shipp: I never knew Stockhausen was into Aurobindo- but anyway, I think music being an abstract language has always been involved in mystical thought-I mean, Bach was a religious mystic and music has always been involved with transcendental experience.
E.C.: You mentioned the Tao Te Ching. An interesting aspect of that is that a certain concept of “flow” is so central to Taoism– as it is to music, especially in regard to improvised music or highly rhythmic music, or both, in terms of something like your album Nu-Bop, which adds hip-hop elements to your repertoire. And of course, you played on an album with the David S. Ware quartet called Tao. The liner notes of that record talk about the dynamic of that group in terms of wu wei, translated there as “creative quietude.” That is, getting the conscious, deliberating mind and its constant commentary and evaluations out of the way so that a kind of naturalness and purity can emerge. Maybe you can talk to us about some of these ways in which understanding the flow of creativity helps us understand Taoism, or some ways that understanding Taoism can broaden our musical horizons?
Shipp: To me Taoism and Zen are the greatest religions just because they are not religion-I mean in Zen they have taken all the abstruse metaphysics and got it down to a few propositions like-when hungry eat-when tired, lay down, and when you have to take a shit, take a shit. In the Tao we know everything is interconnected because the universe obviously comes out of a single matrix so there is some principle that we cannot see or grasp that holds everything together. Enlightenment means letting go and living in accord with that principle. Can you think of a better way to think of music? If someone could truly make music in accord with that principal they would be in ecstatic inspiration all the time-because of a naturalism they would embody.
E.C.: Is there a specific piece of music, that you composed or played on, that was directly inspired by something you read, that you’d like to talk about?
Shipp: I don’t usually do anything where a particular text is the genesis for a piece. I usually work off an overall framework of my own cosmic vision which pieces come off. The closest I’ve come to where a particular piece is inspired by a particular writer and/or text is the CD I did on the French label, Rogue Art, named Declared Enemy, which is based on some pieces that Jean Genet did when he came over to America during the 1968 Democratic convention.
E.C.: Yeah, I know the Declared Enemy album very well. Your engagement with Genet’s work brings up some interesting questions for me. First, in the interview you did with Steve Dalachinsky that’s included in that album, you discuss how your artistic vision parallels Jean Genet’s, in that he rejected the ugliness of the world as it is by creating a universe of characters and symbols that were transformed and transfigured, in a subversion of Christian symbols, like transubstantiation. How you both reject and protest against the world through the creation of an alternative reality.
One thing that it seems to me that you share with Genet that reflects that is a certain element of ecstasy in both your styles. Even though he’s ostensibly a “prose” writer, his work has such a poetic quality, that seizes you and transports you. In other words, let’s you transcend your given, reified, taken-for-granted reality. And your music has that same quality, that surges ahead and carries you with it.

Shipp: I agree with you on the ecstasy element in myself and Genet-there is not much more to say than what I said in the liner notes to Declared Enemy but I would say about our shared sensibility and my music is that growing up in an Episcopalian household and having gone to Catholic school the Eucharist looms big in the underground in what I do-or the idea of a subverted abstraction of the Eucharist-I am obsessed with the idea of taking in the body and the blood of the godhead so the abstract language of the music is food to feed the mind in a sense and the language –musical language – becomes the logos or the godhead.

E.C.: In that interview that I was just referring to, you seemed to be pessimistic about a political solution to the state of the world, relying instead on preserving one’s own soul through art. Yet, on that album dedicated to Genet, you seemed to focus on Genet’s most political period, when he was in the streets fighting for very militant causes. And that same thing seems to resonate in your interest in Sri Aurobindo, who was a political activist and militant before, and in addition to being a spiritual teacher. (And the fact that Stockhausen discovered him in a very political time, May of ‘68) Isn’t there kind of a paradox there?

Shipp: no- the texts I used on the CD where what the producer, who was French, wanted to use-and when Genet came to America in 1968 to cover the Democratic national convention in Chicago, he started hanging out with some Black Panthers and these writings stem from that period. The mystical and political branches can coexist-the reason I do not see any political resolution possible is because I do see greed as the root of just about every problem and don’t see any political solution to greed that could work- the metaphorical kingdom of god is something that could come to earth if each human discovered it in their own heart and decided to live on earth like it was here.

E.C.: Again, in that interview, you refer to yourself as a “Christian-American mystic” but then later say that “… god is just a word. I have no use for that word.” And you’ve also mentioned a current interest in Jacob Boehme, another Christian mystic. Could you talk a little about this seeming paradox? What can the path of the Christian mystics say to those of us who don’t believe in what William Burroughs calls the “One Big God universe” of an anthropomorphic, authoritarian personal God, which I’ve always understood as being central to Christianity?

Shipp: That is the thing- a one big anthropomorphic god is not central to Christianity-it is central to institutional Christianity-Jacob Boehm deals with the god as the great abyss-which sucks in space and time and all partials and the great abyss is some integral whole that is beyond all opposites-this godhead is impersonal and personal at the same time-it is impersonal but personal in the sense that it is the ultimate gestalt so it would contain all personality

E.C.: In a conversation you had with Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) that’s on his website, you talked about Mallarme, and how what you liked was “that his poetry is just so dense, and I never understand exactly what he’s saying, but I always walk away with 2 or 3 images that are just somewhere out there in space and I really get something out of it.”
For one thing, maybe you could talk about Mallarme a little bit more. His vision seems complimentary to your in some ways, like this sort of alchemy of art, in his case, the word specifically.

Shipp: Boulez had put a couple of Mallarme’s pieces to music; that’s where I know him from.

E.C.: And more generally, I notice you refer to poetry a great deal: Whitman’s vision of America, quoting Blake in the piece with Spooky, Mallarme, doing an album backing Steve Dalachinsky reading. Who are some of the poets who have been most important to you and why? And that seems to go along with your interest in mysticism. Many of the mystics have expressed themselves through poetry or poetic writings, and many poets have tried to gain a mystical experience through their work.
Shipp: Poetry is a big part of what inspires me- I aspire to the purity of language that poetry can get to. T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” are my favorite and I actually consider them on the level with the Tao Te Ching as far as a great mystical text. Blake’s whole theory of the imagination. Whitman’s cosmic sweep. The psalms – I like a lot of images I’ve seen in Wallace Stevens especially one image I remember-the garbage can at the end of the world.
And of course, Emerson’s essays are the bible to me.

 

Joseph Nechvatal is a very interesting contemporary artist-cum theoretician who has read Baudrillard’s take on the thought such as « everything is a virus » and listened to Howard Devoto’s song « there’s no answer- everything has a cancer »… I have met with Nechvatal in his French gallery « Jean-Luc and Takako Richard »where he has just shown

his most recent work, beautiful and educational – both!

Question: When and how did you decide to become an artist?

Joseph Nechvatal: This might sound a little strange Nina, but I made the
decision to be an artist rather suddenly: in one night and in a split
second.
I was a sophomore at University pursuing a degree in Sociology, deeply
involved in the political/social issues of the early 1970s; i.e. the
anti-war, woman’s liberation and equal rights movements. I was home in
Chicago for the summer, working at some shit job to pay for my University
expenses. Art had been a hobby-interest with me up to that point. Anyway,
I was riding around downtown Chicago on a motorcycle, somewhat in a
psychic funk. As I zoomed pass some cathedral, a large illuminated
stain-glass window caught my eye. It was an intense moment of color in a
black night. Something told me then and there that the way to social
change was the way of art - in that art addresses the inner unique
individual rather than the group, the sociological statistical. In that
sense I saw art as a means to foster social change from the bottom-up,
rather than top down, if you will.
So bing. That was it. I felt compelled to go around the city and
photograph stain-glassed windows for the rest of the summer. I wanted to
try to understand what had happened to me. Back at University I changed my
major to studio art and never regretted it for an instant.

Question:Where does your fascination with technology come from?
Why this particular genre - electronic medium - and not something else?

Joseph Nechvatal: As you can tell Nina by what I just told you, I see art
as a means of practicing politics on one level. In the mid-1980s I could
already observe the coming rise of electronic media (computational media,
more precisely) as the controlling, organizing force of social power. I
felt that to adequately address this topic I should approach it from
inside of electronic medium, and not from an artisanal pre-electronic
practice.

Question: Could you elaborate on your idea of using art as a
means of practicing politics?

Joseph Nechvatal: The key political notion for me concerning art is
omnijectivity, which is the concept stemming from the discoveries of
quantum physics which teaches us that mind (previously considered the
subjective realm) and matter (previously considered as the objective
realm) are inextricably linked. It is a political concept for me because
omnijectivity is possible only with the conflation of polarities; a stance
which recognizes the mutual interpenetration that unites apparent
opposites (specifically the subjectivity and objectivity). For me art
which takes seriously such scientific understanding supersedes the tabular
space laid out by classical political thought. A new sort of political
art then may promote a non-teleological noology that makes use of the
mutual interpenetrational and rhizomatic nature of the thought process
typical of the art experience - multiplicitous and heterogeneous.

For me, the basic function of a new sort of political art is to create
mental spaces that allow unaccustomed creative situations and sensations
to connect socially. My idea of a political art is where the particular is
seen as part of an accrual total system by virtue of its being connected
to everything else. The strategy of hyper-anything includes principles of
networked connections and electronic links that give multiple choices of
passages to follow and continually new branching possibilities. The
total-hyper-being model for a new connected political art is the
self-re-programmable internal function that explicitly offers a
furtherance in envisioning anti-hierarchical models of political thought
to ourselves.

Question: How do you relate your art to contemporary performance
and theater, such as Pina Baush’s? What does it mean to you - and to your
work, to your inspiration, to see such giants of performance?

Joseph Nechvatal: An early formative experience I had, in this respect,
was the time I attended The Jimi Hendrix Experience concert December 1,
1968 at the Chicago Coliseum and sat in the very last row – far far away
from the stage. Hendrix appeared miniscule, however the speakers were
located just behind my head and the sound was earsplitting; an intensely
pleasant, if disjunctive, experience. This experience of technologically
pulling things apart was stunning for me as it suggested an explosion that
collage implosion implies.

Working as an archivist for LaMonte Young, meeting John Cage, and learning
of the famous “9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering” of 1966 that Robert
Rauschenberg helped organize with the engineer Billy Kluver was salient to
my formation in this regard. Rauschenberg understood that through the
mediation of chance and machines, the technological built-in can be
contorted, thus changing our awareness of what technology is or can be.
Surely I have a great appreciation of Merce Cunningham’s dance company. In
the mid-1970s I moved to New York City into the Tribeca area. I was dating
a dancer at the time who’s prior boyfriend worked for Bob Rauschenberg and
one day we went to Rauschenberg’s studio on Lafayette for a visit, but he
was not in. Still he soon came to represent for me an exemplary artist,
one engaged in political concerns tied to technological means. He seemed
to me capable of harnessing both the forces of explosion and implosion
that manifested a new hyper-rhizomatic era in the making. This was an era
in which the new technologies of media distribution, virtual systems,
computer networks, and information processing began supplanting industrial
production and the gold-based economy as the organizing
synthesis/principle of society.

Question: You’ve worked with theory a lot. Is it important for
an artist and what did this theoretical approach do for you; for your
creative expression?

Joseph Nechvatal: I can say that it has been important for me. When I read
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe non-hierarchical networks of
all kinds in their seminal book A Thousand Plateaus, my mind was liberated
and this fostered a wave of creativity in me. Through my reading (and
thinking through) of Deleuze-Guattari I came to hypothesize (and hopefully
demonstrate through my art) a counter-mannerist approach to life based on
principles of latent excess. The idea was to establish a new critical
distance via viral excess, a critical distance which Jean Baudrillard
pessimistically had claimed was no longer possible.

Through latent excess I wanted to establish an ambiguous private critical
distance: a distance achieved through the challenge of (and disparity
between) pleasurable frustration. This means an art that demands of
society an active visualizing participation in private interpretations -
and thus is a legitimate metaphor for contemporary art as a form of
simulation-shattering engagement.

During the time I was engaged in these ideas, the notion of the simulation
was prevalent. I chose to argue for the contrary (de-simulation); that is,
a post-pop art that would be fundamental to free thought by demonstrating
how an art of counter-mannerist latent excess (produced in the
Baudrillardian milieu of image superabundance and information
proliferation) is an art that can problematise the pop simulacra and hence
enliven us to the privateness - and unique separateness - of the human
condition in lieu of the fabulously constructed social spectacle which
engulfs and (supposedly) controls us. My idea was that this private
separateness could offer us a personal critical distance (gap), and thus
another perspective on (and from) the given social simulacra.

My hope was that such an art of latent viral excess (circuitous,
extravagant and décadent) might provide us with two essential aspects
relevant to our lives. First, it can provide a private context in which to
suitably understand our simulacra situation. Secondly (but more
importantly) it may then undermine this understanding of the simulacra by
overwhelming our immersion in the customary simulacra – along with our own
prudent pose as observer and judge. Through the destructive-creative
bacchanalia at the root of an art of latent excess we might be prodded to
lose our position of detached observer, as it is a style of art that
demands our engaged intellectual and perceptual production. For me that
meant that I had to develop a viral style which takes us from the state of
the social to the state of the secret distinguishable “I” by overloading
ideological representation to a point where it becomes
non-representational. It is this non-representational counter-mannerist
representation which I think can break us out of the fascination and
complicity with pop information and the mass media mode of communication.

Question: Can art be taught in school - to an artist? If yes -
Is it important?

Joseph Nechvatal: I think it can be taught, and it is, but that does not
mean that it is the only route to becoming an artist. As a teacher at the
School of Visual Arts in New York City I stress passing along knowledge
about radical art ideas and dada art techniques. I tell the students about
what some notable recent artists have done - and expose them to the work
directly. I intentionally avoid suggesting to the students what kind of
art to make or how to make it. That is their own personal quest, in my
view. What is important is for the pre-artist to be inner driven to become
an artist regardless of the fact that it is a frustrating way to lead a
life.

Question: What do you think about contemporary American art
scene? Any movement you admire?

Joseph Nechvatal: Yes I admire greatly certain American artist who work
primarily digitally, such as Bill Seaman, Frank Gillette, Victoria Vesna,
Robert Lazzarini, G.H. Hovagimyan and Michael Reese. Of course artificial
life art is one of my keen interests, the basis of my computer virus work.
For me artificial life is a way to do magic by any means necessary. The
sculptor Ken Rinaldo is a very good artist in this realm.

Also there are what I might call digital conceptualists in the USA that
interest me, such as Jenny Holzer, Patrick Lichty, Suzanne Anker, Kenneth
Goldsmith and Matthew Ritchie. I also have a keen interest in audio art
that deals with noise and/or ambience and have been following the career
of Phillip B. Klingler (PBK), Minoy, Randy Grief and others over the
years. Some painters as well hold my interest, like Benjamin Edwards,
David Reed, Carl Fudge, Chris Finley and Shirley Kaneda. But can we really
speak of art in terms of nationality any more? What about fantastic
European and Asian artist that sometimes work in the US, like Carlos
Casado, Gilles Barbier, Merzbow, Pascal Dombis and Matthias Groebel? It is
only a certain quality of thought and sensibility that I admire. Not their
passport.

However, I’m not very interested in artists that use capture technology
anymore (straight photography and video). What engages me is the meeting
of art, science and technology in the virtual land of the digital -
because I think that digital technology allows and facilitates changes in
consciousness by primarily allowing artists to act differently with new
tools. For example, digital painters, like myself, work and think much
differently from traditional painters through their mastering of digital
tools.

This digital realm connects to a new sensibility that I am feeling which I
have called Cybism. It is a sensibility based on my observation that art
and science, after centuries of separation, are becoming entangled again
through the discredidation of the concept – one might say presumption – of
objectivity. Richard Rorty writes persuasively about this as does Manuel
Delanda; particularly in his book Intensive Science and Virtual
Philosophy

Question: Any tendency you despise?

Joseph Nechvatal: Yes. The “bad painting” (or “MFA outsider art”) movement
disgusts me. It is both ugly to behold and stupid to contemplate. It seems
blatantly a creature of top-down marketing to me (think pyramid scheme)
and as such it, or any market driven art, will not stand the smell test of
time.

Question: How is it different from the French scene? Advantages
of the French?

Joseph Nechvatal: Oh la la! Though there are elements of globalized
marketing in Paris, the French scene is much smaller. It is marginal by
comparison - and this can be a good thing. For example I have experienced
in France a wonderful sense of collaborative community and have
established important relationships, like with my artificial life
programmer Stephane Sikora. The philosophy and music scenes here are
superior to those in the USA, in my estimation.

One feels in France a sense of preservation of artistic ideals, such as
the idea of art performing a visionary function, which at this juncture
seems increasingly important given the homogenization of thought and
perception that has been taking place

Question: Disadvantages?
Joseph Nechvatal:

No baseball.

Q: Sound Unbound contains thoughts from a wide array of people, and
brings together names I would never have expected to see in a single book.  What were you looking for when getting this compilation together?How did you know that this mix would work?

A: The whole idea, right now, is that we need eclecticism more than ever. In a world driven by playlists, and “collaborative filtering” that tells you every song and every book you might like, what happens to material that is hyper diverse? The answer is easy: it slips beneath the radar. I have a passion for championing voices that let us know another world is possible. It is so important to not be trapped by the false binaries of the 20th century - good/bad,black/white, old/new, original/derivative etc etc Everytthing is connected. I really wanted to put together a collection of voices like I’d put together a mix CD. You read the CD and listen to the book. Switch modes!
Q: This book is clearly about now, even though everyone is concerned with
the way in which now has developed.  Do you think any of the ideas
have a staying power for the future?  Did any lasting truths of music
and creation in a digitized reality come to the surface which can
guide us for at least a little while?
A: Time is elastic. What was true a long time ago, might not be relevant now. What’s relevant now might not be relevant in the future. Everything is non-linear, impact dynamics. “Sound Unbound” embraces that kind of non-linear thinking and uses it to foster a milieu where alot of people with alot of different perspectives can have a space to dialog. So many anthologies and books make everything locked into categories - web searches, amazon.com collaborative filters, last.fm etc - they all look to culture itself as infinitely controlable, with no hidden connections. Where anoynymous posts, hidden identities, and a drive towards privacy held sway over the internet 1.0, the net 2.0 turns everything inside out. People don’t want privacy - they want to put their entire life online! Sound Unbound looks at digital culture as a nonlinear process that makes alot of this kind of stuff explainable as part of every day  reality. That’s hip-hop, that’s current storytelling…that’s the way we live now.

Q: In the middle of the last century, both Boulez and Cage theorized the potentials of technology for the sampling and synthesis of new sounds for music.  Their ideas were closely connected to their wider, very much modern, philosophies of musical creation (and their philosophies in general).  How do you see these two composers in the light of your perhaps more postmodern musical creation with all of its mixing, sampling, and participation in our larger sonic reality?  Do their ideas still have significance now that technology is surpassing their early comprehension of it?
A: I think composers like Varese and Boulez (that rhymes!) set the tone for unapologetic experimentation. That was a good thing. On the other hand, as we’ve seen with so much of the experimental scene, is that people then go on to set up other rules. Most of which bore me… I really think it’s amazing that experimental hip hop gets such short shrift in the sound art scene (that was one reason I didn’t include any of the “normal” sound art people like Christian Marclay, but did include people like Carsten Nicolai. “Modern” composition is a really complex realm - ideologies like Communism (!!!?) and stuff like individual initiative were inspirations for alot of the modernist composers (look at people like Prokofiev!), but we also had to think about how Wetsern composers responded to other parts of the world - like Debussy’s fascination with Javanese Gamelan music or Steve Reich’s interest in West African percussion, or Phillip Glass’s interest in Asia. This is to be celebrated - but I wanted the dialog to be a 2-way street. Too often it was Europeans appropriating from “Others.” “Sound Unbound” seeks to create a kind of equilibirum, and that means things get non-linear. There ain’t no grand progress to the end of history in this book!

Q: One theme in Sound Unbound seems to be giving a response to

contemporary legal concerns about sampling/mixing and intellectual rights.  Those issues aside, do we still have other ethical boundaries which might make certain sounds, perhaps that of the sacred, off-limits to a public sphere?  Are there still bounds to sound?

A: Daphne Keller is the Senior Legal Counsel to Google. She’s a rockstar lawyer! That’s why I asked her to write some of the pieces about the legal aspect of sampling. To me, when you look at sampling, you should go back to the original idea: it was a mathematical construct meant to be able to give you a solid picture. “Statistic modelling” is a process. You take a small fragment of a population (this could be the Census, or it could be atomic measurement of gas particulates etc etc) and use the sample to create a mathematical picture of a larger situation. The law as we know it in most Western countries is still based on physical goods - i.e. stuff that can fall on your head or clog mail box (letters, books, boxes, tractors, airplanes, machines etc). Software is dematerializing the whole scenario. Suppose you need something but just download a blueprint of it and have it made. You’re violating some kind of law. On the other hand, if you need a nuanced view of things like “fair use” or “public domain” - Sound Unbound is a partisan shot about that kind of thing.

Q: Along those lines, it seems that mixing in itself has the danger of decontextualizing certain information which ought to be connected with its historical truths.  How should we continue to remember when sounds and images become unfettered from larger contexts?  How do you think we should perpetuate and propagate history in this digital age?

A: Sound Unbound is all about the un-announced tension between context and content. Radically different essays are put one after another. On the audio companion, you have crazy rare material from Joyce Joyce mixed with, oh I don’t know… Wu Tang Clan type hip hop. That’s OK. Your average person now understands the “logic of addition” that the mashup invoked. You hear some kind of remix, and you get the point - all meaning is relative. All creativity is essentially a conversation between alot of components of the imagination. Sound Unbound celebrates that kind of hybridity. Everything you see - from a photo shop edited image on a subway train, to sliced and diced, sequenced newsreels from Fox TV to Al Jazeera all have this in common: collage based narratives are something we all in the 21st century, know and understand.

Q: Technology has always been a tool for our use.  In many ways it seems that musicians today, and music technology today remains within that very old concept of techne.  But it also seems that something has changed fundamentally.  What did change?  When/how do you think it happened, and how should we describe it?

A: Naeem Mohaimen’s article on Islam in hip hop resonates with this question. I really think that it’s not about tools at all, but the culture of perception that surrounds how we think about the tools. Software is a tool. It carries certain contexts built into its code - you have to be literate to understand what it’s about, and what you can do with it. What “Sound Unbound” does is posit a different kind of literacy that can move between the ever shifting roles of digital media’s relationship to physical objects. What Mohaimen did was talk about Islam and hip hop. I positioned his essay as a response to the kind of “cultural superiority complex” the West has at the moment. Islam was ahead of the West for many centuries. I like to put that kind of paradox out there for people to think about why terms like “algorithm” or “algebra” are Arabic, or even composers like Halim El Dabh (one of the first Arab electronic music composers. The audio mix that accompanies Sound Unbound has all sorts of “hidden connections” - Jean Cocteau, Kurt Schwitters, Iggy Pop, Gertrude Stein, etc etc All of these people have only one thing in common: they were interesting to sample. The same kind of “logic of selection” applies when you look at any interaction with technology. What kind of attraction impulse drives the imagination when you’re coding software? What kind of impulse drives a jazz saxophone solo. I posit that somewhere in the creative act, there’s a common denominator.

Q: Does our participation in this digital culture change what we are as humans?  It seems the notion of ‘the self’ that most traditional music/cultural studies use is insufficient, but it is not clear what the next formulation requires.  Do you have any requirements for a new form of humanity, the new idea of the self which is emerging?
A: Sure - I guess it means that everything is “flow.” I can’t get too deep into whatever current direction people think humanity is going. If you look back at the 20th century, you had people who thought the Soviet Union would be around for a long time, or that Hitler would have some kind of 1000 year situation. History is littered with the debris of people who thought in one way or another that they could shape or direct history. Sound Unbound posits that there will always be multiple paths of entry and exit onto the world stage, and that sampling is a tool that we can use to “deconstruct” alot of the media landscape that surrounds and innundates anyone living in an information based economy.

Q: Your recent Antarctica project is premiering this summer at the Democratic convention.  Is it an overtly political statement, or does it simply contain material which naturally fits in with environmental concerns?

A: The world is changing. That is almost the only constant we have right now. I wanted to go to Antarctica and do a project that would be an inquiry into how to look at the environment itself as a kind of record. Guess what? Scientists use what they call “core samples” to measure the changes in the ice. I don’t want to give away the project just yet, but the basic idea is to figure out some “resonant issues” out of the ice’s transformation.

Q: You mention in the trailer that Antarctica is itself information of sorts, a meaningful articulation of the Earth.  Do you make an effort at decoding Antarctica yourself, or are you presenting it as a pure enigma still to be figured out?  How do you see your work interacting with the political?

A: For me, Antarctica is a kind of geological clock. It measures the tempo of the world. So does dj culture.

Check the trailer for the film at:

http://www.djspooky.com/art/terra_nova.php

Francis Powell comes from England (he always says jokingly “he’s neither Scottish nor Irish, but simply plain English”)- however, for the last ten years or so he’s been residing in Paris on a permanent basis. He has made a name for himself as a brilliant musician and a composer of electronic music, known as ‘DJ WISE’ and meanwhile he has been painting beautiful, sort of ‘Art Nouveau- Klimt meets Aboriginal Art’ paintings, all coupled with printed samples of his own creative writing and steady journalism. He often says that he belongs to a certain eclectic British tradition of visual artists who often turned musicians and then turned something else.
The first legitimate question that one can ask at meeting this interesting, Renaissance figure, is – how does he find time and energy to attend to his respective and multifaceted talents.The fact is that he does not attend to any of them superficially or half-heartedly which means that he has a tendency to be equally good in all of his fields of interest. However, this time we will focus on his painterly talent as he has just showed his visual art at the Collective-Coop Gallery simply called L’Usine (the Factory).

Question: What made you attend an Art school? What was it like, what kind of Art College?
Did it do you a lot of good in terms of developing your inner calling and, if yes- in what ways? Did the school do any diservice to yr original talent (stifling it, for instance, and so on?)

Powell: I went to an oppressive English boarding school, where my only retreat was in the art room. The biggest encouragement I received was from my art teacher in this hard institution, so when I was of the age when I needed to choose a career, art school seemed the only natural progression. It is hard to say what I gained from art school. When I was doing my degree in painting, the tutors tried to curtail my ardour for painting. They were restrictive, maybe with some reason, I was trying to let out all this energy I had bottled up, from going to this oppressive school from the age of 13-17 and I wanted to translate this into paintings, while they wanted me to paint basic still lives, in monochrome colours, so we were far apart in this respect. It was not until towards the third year of my degree, I was allowed to let rip. Art school gives you a state of mind, in the way you perceive the world, it teaches you to notice things, others might pass by and feel things others might not feel. It drew up lots of emotions, including frustration, rebelliousness. I learnt things not only about art, but also society, as we had some art-related studies to learn, because the course also had to be part academic to justify it’s status. It was also the period when Mrs Thatcher was vehemently against any course that she perceived as being non-profit making for the country (as opposed to science and business courses). There was a dismantling of the art school, which was an insane move on her part, as English art schools have been very productive and have a fine tradition.

Question: At that time, in England- if I’m not mistaken, and you confirmed that I was not,- interdisciplinary approach was big in art colleges (John Lenon, Eno etc). Who in particular influenced your thinking in an interdisciplinary sort of way- meaning, you’ve been doing music, painting and writing, all at the same time, right?

Powell: I don’t think the tutors at Art colleges, or at least at my one, encouraged students to do any other activities other than painting and drawing and taking photographs. The only piece of valuable advice I ever received from the tutor at my first art school, was to go and a see a film, at least once a week, because films have so much visual information you can feed off. At my degree course, quite a few students had a strong desire to form bands or be part of bands. I discovered a band via friends called “Pigbag” who played this fusion of jazz and punk. One of the members Chris Hamlyn had been a student of fashion at my art college and when I went to see one of their early concerts it just blew me away and I was introduced to a new style of music. I was given one of the first copies of their single “papa’s got a brand new pigbag” and wasn’t just a disciple of their music, I wanted to make similar music to them ,which involved buying a saxophone and learning how to play it. They went on to do world tours and their music received acclaim and their first single can still be heard today and people who love the eighties are still nostalgic about them.
I was part of a band for much of my degree course, and then much to my surprise the band was selected to be part of week of concerts featuring bands connected (supposedly) to Art colleges, which went under the witty banner “Pop goes the easel” On our night we supported The Mekons and Strawberry Switchblade, but on one of the other nights the Smiths played. As to writing, when I was at my first Art school, I was fortunate to meet through a friend a writer called Rupert Thompson, who was in the process of writing his first book “dreams of leaving” having been signed to the well known publisher Bloomsbury. His writing style just really grabbed me. I have not seen him in years, but whenever I see he has a new book published I buy it immediately. His style is so dark and often disturbing but full of imagination and invention. I liked his personality and humour.
He has lived in many countries, which means he has a strong and diverse backgrounds to his stories. I think it is more the like-minded people you meet inadvertently via Art school, than the art school itself that encourages a different range of disciplines.

Question: Tell us the truth- which one of the three is your favorite activity, and why so? How did you construct your DJ Wise personality?

Powell: It is hard to say. All I can say….painting drives me crazy, it is such an intense activity, I get paint everywhere, not only the target canvas or object, I can be in a wild frenzy…. Writing is calming and needs reflex ion. Writing and composing music is calming, but doing concerts/Djing can be tense and you are conscious of the audiences reaction to what you playing. But if the concert goes well, there is no comparable buzz or feeling. You put your head on the block, when you play music live, but if you get it right it is brilliant. Dj Wise personality just grew by chance. I had not Dj-ed for a long time, some people thought I was a Dj in Paris, and asked me to do an event, so I thought, why not and- things evolved from there.
Question: How do these different arts intercept one another and where do they merge?

Powell: I am not sure how they intercept, other than the way time is devoted to each activity.
I think my art and music merges on the account the fact that I love different ethnic cultures. There is a strong African element in my art and I have also used African rhythms/vocal chants in my music. Maybe in terms of my short stories, they are very visual and descriptive and surreal with a dark edge like some of my paintings.

Question: When it comes to visual arts, how come that you choose painting over sculpture or any other genre? What attracts you to painting, color? Drawing? what’s your “kick” or primary attraction to it?

Powell: I would not dismiss any other Art medium or say one is better than an other. At Art college we were given the chance to do sculpture and in a way there are elements of sculpture in work, I love finding discarded objects in Paris and using them in my paintings. My paintings are not flat and two dimensional and I have also used a lot of pieces of broken mirrors. I love the spontaneity of painting. I did an MA at Wimbledon School of Art in printmaking and I sometimes see a printerly quality in my work, despite the fact I have not used any printing process in years.

Question: You live in a foreign country and you’ve traveled a lot- how did your living in Austria enoble yr artistic expression? And what did France did for you? Can you name some of major influences in both places?I can see some great predecessors in your paintings, Matisse in terms of color etc..but I am sure there are some others..Can you elaborate?

Powell: I found Austria, a beautiful country, and Vienna a remarkable city, but the people very restricted and with a small country living in the shadow of German mentality. I did try to get some music out and distributed but there was not the same passion and music industry as in the UK, where there are many record labels. France, on the contrary, after just a few years of living there, has creatively proved to give me almost a second life I could never have imagined. In the UK in the early nineties, I was lucky enough to work with some well known Djs, to get records released and to do some big “raves” as was the fashion in those heady days.
However, I had some terrible managers who gave me terrible advice. In France I have been lucky enough to realise different activities. To have a one man show in Paris, means a lot.
Paris has re-ignited me, it is such a visually stimulating place, there are so many minute details you can see as you walk down the street, such carvings and gargoyles. I have met a lot of interesting people and done some interesting events. The city, rather than invidual painter, is the strongest influence.

Question: What attracts you toward original, aboriginal or so called “primary, primitive forms” in your art , that is, painting? And where does that use of gold leaves come from? Byzantine influences?

Powell:Who knows ? Maybe it was one of my previous lives? There is so much mystery, but at the same time wisdom in so called primitive art. I want there to be spirituality in work and for the element of a painting being a precious object hence the gold leaves.

Question: What are your projects for future, any projects in particular? Meaning, this is the inverse way of asking : how do you see your art developing, in what direction?

Powell: Sometimes with my projects, they seem to come to fruition a long time after my original conception. The idea of making soundscape installations appeals to me a great deal. I hope to work with another artist to create a “bande designe” (cartoons) for a short I have written. Last year I started to get involved with making short videos and this is something I hope to develop, but this is something very time consuming and not as immediate as painting and music.

Question: You are also a writer and a critic, journalist, correspondent… How does it feel to live a language without reference, meaning to listen to foreign language all the time? Nourishing or a reductive experience for you?

Powell: It is strange but sometimes I walk out of my apartment (if my mind is immersed in some creative pursuit) and it takes me a bit of time to take in the fact that I am in foreign country. Sometimes I am tuned into the foreign language, sometimes I am so immersed in m my own world that I don’t even hear it!

Question: Is there any other form of visual art that interest you, that you’d like to explore in future (such as film, video, etc…) Or, have you already worked on it and I am not aware of it?

Powell: Yes, principally video, as it offers another dimension combing the visual information of something I have filmed with my music and also poetry/video combinations.

Question: What is it in the French art world that you like, and what is it that you’d like to change? How different is it from the British “art market”?

Powell: I have a friend in the UK, who is a talented artist/printmaker Andrew Tyler whose work I really have admired, and he was in year above me at Art College. I feel he should have received a lot more attention, because his work is so special. Maybe if he had lived in a different place he might have been in a different situation. It is very hard in the UK, to gain gallery recognition and to make a progress as an artist. I was left in limbo for many years after leaving art college, frustrated at the lack of opportunities. I am not a great networker.
Of course in Paris, you have to be persistent, but if you can find a galley where you find a niche, it is a good place for Artists. I have also heard that Berlin is the place to be, as it offers cheap studio space for artists and a lot going on.

 

Inopportune: Stage I

Inopportune: Stage II

Visionary, rabble-rouser, contemporary artist, Cai Guo-Qiang is the first Chinese artist to have a major retrospective at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. In his artist’s toolbox are explosives, gunpowder, yak skin, live snakes, wooden arrows, real cars, life-like replicas of tigers and wolfs, and trenched up sunken ships. Witness the spectacle created by this modern day alchemist. Born in 1957 in Quanzhou, Fujian province during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward and trained in stage design in Shanghai. Cai moved to Japan in the late 80’s where he was a part of that country’s Avant Garde period, and then eventually settled in New York City in 1995. Cai lists among his influences, Taoism, Buddhism, 9/11, mythology, Feng Shui, utopian idealism, Maoism and military history. He is currently in Beijing serving as Director of Visual and Special Effects for the 2008 Olympics and was thus not available to be interviewed. Instead, I caught up with Alexandra Munroe, Senior Curator of Asian Art, and head curator of “I Want to Believe” Cai Guo-Qiang’s Mid-Career Retrospective.

Project to Extend The Great Wall of China by 10,000 meters

Borrowing your enemy’s Arrows

I asked Ms Munroe to describe Cai, the man and his art, and tell us what it was like to work with him.

AM

Cai is a very innovative and ambitious artist and it has been quite extraordinary to work with him. I have learned a lot about his working methodology, for which I have great respect. Everything in Cai’s world is process. He is an artist who is dedicated to change, for whom nothing is ever static, but rather in a constant state of motion and evolution. I also learned a lot from his approach to exhibition making. He ensures that every aspect of the show, its planning, its catalogue and its public program is a manifestation of the project, interconnected, and related back to the core ideas of the show. It was a privilege to work to with him.
“I Want to Believe” is indeed an appropriate title for this large-scale exhibition, which fills all levels of the Guggenheim’s impressive Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda. When viewers enter the museum, they are instantly griped by Inopportune: Stage 1. Nine cars spiral upwards, from floor to ceiling. The white cars with colorful lights spraying out of them represent a car bomb, yet they are almost cartoonesque and reminiscent of Pop art. They appear more attractive than frightening. Although a clear reference to 9/11, this work according to the artist also alludes to the glamour of Hollywood’s car obsession and should invoke a dreamlike beauty.¹ This is the essence of ‘wanting to believe,’ approaching horror with hope, matching destruction with rebirth, curiosity, and a persistent spirit. It also alludes perhaps, to wanting to believe in the promise of Western democracy, although faced with its many corruptions.
Cai frequently represents this opposing duality in his art, “Often people will ask what ties my works together, because sometimes they seem so different from each other. Among other things, conflicts and contradictions embodied in the work is one tie. The very fact that I make little attempt to offer solutions is characteristic of my work. Some artists try to offer resolutions, but I only point to the argument.” He elaborates, “If you don’t attempt to resolve everything then it is possible to talk about contradictions, difficulties, and obstacles. You can bring these up and address them, but you don’t always need to have an answer.”²
Americans have been saturated with images of real destruction through the news media and depictions of faux-catastrophe in film. Cai’s re-interpretation of these images allow us to look again, without being bombarded with one scene’s definitive meaning. Instead of: photo of an accused terrorist = evil, clip of the US president = Good, we can refreshingly remember to think for ourselves and to view the inherent contradictions in an image’s meaning, holistically.
Jonathan Shaugnessy elucidates this concept concerning Inopportune Stage I and II. Stage II depicts nine tigers, who appear to have just a moment ago been impaled by a barrage of arrows. He explains that,

” By playing with the contemporary viewer’s reactions-is this bravery or cruelty, beauty or ugliness?-the work attempts to restore a sense of primal balance between the forces of revulsion and seduction in regard to violence, forces that are often repressed as a matter of social order and conformity.”³
Cai also applies this concept to his gunpowder drawings and explosion projects. He first experimented with gunpowder in the mid-80s, wanting to use unpredictable materials. He has said that his favorite moment in the work with explosives is the time after the fuse has been ignited but just before the explosion. Cai explains, “There is a brief moment where energy is moving together before it finally goes in all different directions.”⁴ One of his larger scale explosion events was Project to Extend The Great Wall of China, in which he laid 10,000 meters of fuse in the Gobi desert, beginning at the edge of The Wall. 100,000 people came out to see the explosion and momentary extension, by smoke cloud of this artifact of ancient Chinese Civilization. I asked Alexandra Munroe to elaborate on the significance of Cai’s experimentations with gunpowder.
Robyn

In Cai’s work employing gunpowder and explosions as mediums and in Inopportune: Stage One, by simulating a car bomb, he melds destruction, beauty, fear and release. I would like to hear your perspective on these unorthodox approaches. Is there a reference being made to Hegel’s theories, and Maoist ideology? What does his approach achieve?

AM

I don’t think Hegel; I don’t think that he is so aware of Hegel. Cai is not an intellectual. He is not a scholar or a philosopher in that sense of having read modern philosophy. He is definitely not. But Maoist ideology yes, because he lived through it, intuited something from it, and is replaying that through his art. The core idea there is no destruction, no construction. You have to destroy in order to create. In Cai’s world, the actual methodology of his art making is destroying in order to create work. It is also, on a much bigger scale taking Mao’s idea to destroy an existing order of cultural practice in order to reformat a new one. Cai, again doesn’t take anything for granted, he is not literally destroying modern and contemporary art lineage, but he’s ignoring it, which is almost as bad as destroying it. he ignores its inevitability. Instead of assuming its inevitable, he picks and chooses freely from the lineage of modern and contemporary art and intersperses through it a new lineage with factors from ancient and modernist china, popular science and anything that strikes his fancy. In that regard, my interpretation of his work is that it is deeply embedded in Maoism.

I also asked her to elaborate on my favorite piece in the exhibition, Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows. A large wooden boat is floating just below the ceiling. It has been excavated from off the shore of Quan Zhou, pierced with 3,000 arrows, and adorned with a Chinese flag. The title refers to the story of a Chinese general aware that he is about to be attacked by a superiorly armed neighboring enemy. Rather than accept defeat the general loads his boat full of decoy soldiers made of straw and under cover of night sails to the enemy camp. At dawn, the opposing army just glimpsing the boat, attacks it with their great store of arrows. The general is then able to return home, with a stock of the enemy’s arrows, which he will use to defeat them in the next battle.
AM

This is a very important early work of Cai’s that dates to 1998. It was shown in an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art that was presented in New York, at an Asia Society/Ps1 exhibition called Inside Out: Contemporary Art from China. This work like so much of Cai’s is based on an ancient Chinese tale. Cai conjures that tale and presents it to the west, as if the west could be threatened by China’s overcoming the west, because of garnering Western know how. Just as the Chinese general overcame his enemy by using the enemy’s own ammunition to overtake the enemy. So, in a typical and witty way this work is provocative and challenging of the core assumptions of Euro-American supremacy. It is a very typical Cai gesture, that is, highly post- modern, representing a global- era perspective and an agitation against the status quo and presumptions that the West has had about its own position in contemporary affairs.

Another highly interesting installation in the Guggenheim retrospective is the piece New York’s Rent Collection courtyard. This is a collection of sculptures that was first presented by Cai at the 1999 Venice Biennial, but that is an appropriation and reinterpretation of a piece called Rent Collection Courtyard. The original was made as a public art work in 1965 by a team of students at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. The original sculptures and the newer versions both depict peasants being forced to work inhuman amounts under the pressure of oppressive pre-Revolutionary Chinese landlords. One of the students who worked on the original, Long Xu Li also worked to recreate the pieces in both Venice and New York. In discussion with Cai and Thomas Krens, Director of The Guggenheim Foundation, Ms Monroe spoke about the meaning of the work, interpreting it as a questioning of the qualitative value that is put on certain styles of art. I asked her to elaborate on this concept.
R

I liked the way you spoke about the question of whose art is counted. I think that connects to what you were saying earlier in our conversation about the assumed supremacy of western art.

AM

You have it, What you have said is perfect. To relate it back to what I said a moment ago, it operates on many levels. It is a profoundly conceptual piece, which really has multiple meanings. One meaning, by presenting this work in a contemporary museum setting in 1998 in Venice and in 2008 in New York at the Guggenheim, is to challenge the west and again our assumptions. During the 1960s, certain styles of contemporary art were dominant, conceptual art, minimalism and pop art for example. Our art world was entirely geared around those three movements critically, in terms of what we were exhibiting and in how are tastes were formed. Cai is saying that during that same period half the world was deeply moved and 100 percent engaged with this propaganda form of art based on Soviet Socialist-Realist styles. They were deeply moved by this particular work that was reproduced in hundreds of cities throughout China. It was consumed at a level that Andy Warhol could never even conceive of in terms of his ideas about appropriation in pop art. In that sense, it is a very characteristic Cai work. He is constantly reminding us of other alternative systems of thought that operate in the world. He does not want to replace our systems with those systems but he is constantly reminding us of the multiplicity of perspectives and the multiplicities of histories.
R

You have mentioned that process is very important to Cai as an artist; I think that there is real relevance to that approach. His work is provoking thought. It is affecting people on many different levels, which brings me to the next question. I thought it was mischievously appropriate that the yak-skin boat and the river were built at the Guggenheim. When I visited the exhibition, it was amazing to see little children and men in Business suits competing for a chance to ride on the boat
AM

That’s great.
R

It was very peaceful, a break that one could have from the city, just by being on this little river. I wanted to ask you on a more personal level, did you ride in the yak-skin boat? How would you please describe your experience?
AM

Yes, I did and it was a very beautiful experience. It is a beautiful work. I love that work. It is completely an unusual way to operate in the museum system, so the shock of that is incredibly wonderful. It is an experience that no one has ever had before, riding a boat in a museum! Just contemplating water and movement as aesthetic elements, process is again referenced. I think it is all very beautiful and a very powerful artistic experience. It was a very popular piece.
The last work I want to consider is Reflection-A Gift from Iwaki. This piece consists of a boat that was excavated from the bottom of the sea in Iwaki, Japan by Cai and a team of locally based artisans. It has been filled, and is overflowing with broken ceramic sculptures of a Buddhist Goddess, which were rejected from their intended role as prayer idol, because of their slight imperfections. It confronts the intersection between religion and culture and was made as a collaborative project, again reinforcing Cai’s commitment to an interactive art making system.

R

In an interview with Jonathan Shaughnessy, Cai responds to a question regarding Reflection: A Gift from Iwaki as follows:

Shaughnessy: “Reflection and the focus on Iwaki in the Exhibition certainly reveal your collaborative and holistic approach to art making that encompasses the local and specific-by engaging directly with a certain community- in projects aimed at fostering relationships that go beyond geographic and cultural lines.”

Cai: “You have to be very careful though, there is a fine line. You want to avoid doing a cultural exchange or some kind of Environmental activism or whatever it is that concerns you in the work that it references. After all, you are an artist, and in reality art does very little to change the world. If you understand that and proceed with caution, then you don’t fall into the pitfall of all of a suddenly trying to fulfill a function that art does not have.”⁵

In conversation with yourself and Thomas Krens, also about the Iwaki work, Cai comments that he, “Likes people who don’t understand contemporary art.”⁶ Part of the appeal of Cai’s work is that it does reach those uninitiated into the world of art and art historians alike. What do you make of the aforementioned quotes? Can art change the world?

AM

(she laughs)That’s another big question. Yeah, I think art can change the world. Art changes the world by changing the way people think about the world and progress is made in part by intellectual advancements and by expanding people’s minds to comprehend perspectives that they hadn’t even known existed before. In that way Cai is presenting us with perspectives, ideas, that I think do reflect a contemporary, geopolitical, psychic and cultural reality that is new to both the Chinese and Westerners. I think that elements of that vision do reflect specific shifts in the world today. Understanding those shifts through art makes as more interesting people. If you are a more interesting person, you can change the world. You think differently, more scopically, and with bigger dimensions. I think art can change the way people perceive and that, in turn can change the world. I don’t think it’s the purpose of art to do that, but I think art has the capacity to reflect. In that capacity, in that process, things happen.

Cai Guo-Qiang has challenged the perception of both Chinese and Western contemporary art and uplifted our senses, challenging us to experience viscerally the contradictions embedded in the process and product of expression. In his own words:
“For me the central thing about my work is having the freedom in which to make art. That’s what I discovered early on when I first saw the vitality of Western contemporary art, and that remains the most important point for me- to maintain that freedom from the East, and from the West. For me, above all, no law is law, no method is the method. This is my guiding principle.”⁷

New York’s Rent Collection Courtyard

An Arbitrary History: River

Shirin Neshat is one of the leading contemporary artists in the world. She was born in 1957 in Iran. In 1974 she moved to the United States where studied art at the University of Berkeley. The Islamic revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeiny had introduced many changes into the Persian society which fell under the yoke of the Fundamentalists. All the liberties were restricted, the moral rigour was imposed and the condition of women worsened. It was only in 1990 that Shirin Neshat was able to return to her native ground- what really shocked there was the dramatic evolution of the situation of women. A recipient of many international awards, she began a series of photos called Unveiling in 1993. For these self-portraits, she wore the chador and exposed only body parts (eyes, hands, feet) which women are allowed to reveal in public according to the Islamic Law. Neshat wrote on the surfaces of the photographs, covering the exposed parts of the female bodies with Farsi script. Soonafter, in 1997 she began her video creations while continuing with her photography. Primarily inspired by the great Persian tradition and culture, Neshat shows the foresmost interest for the universal approach to concepts of society, identity, asylum, refuge and utopia.
In her recent work which we were lucky to see at “Jerome Denoirmont” gallery in Paris this past spring, Neshat took a more cinematographic approach to her work – the bold metaphorical imagery of her early films and videos has given way to a more narrative approach bringing in the current dialectics of the binary oppositions such as man/woman, east/west, and oppressor/oppressed. Her recent work has drawn its inspiration from Women Without Men, a novel by the Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur which describes the lives of 5 Iranian women who lived through the history of the CIA’s regime in Iran, supported by the Pahlavi royal family. Through the exploit of the themes which she had already explored in photography and video, Neshat gave us her reinterpretation of the Parsipur’s novel in a double-sided project which encompases cinema and art. There is a feature film, shot in Morocco, due to be released in 2008 along with 5 videos depicting the lives of these five women during the summer of 1953. As her name in Persian means “sweet” and cultured, we were not surprised to find her answers open and responsive to the media while interviewing her at Gallery Denoirmont in Paris last spring.

Question: Shirin, are you a feminist, in the largest sense of that word?
Yes and No. Yes, because I’ve devoted my entire body of work to the subjects relating to women. I believe in the female power in emotional, intellectual and biological terms. No, because I’ve always fallen shy of claiming to be ‘feminist’ because at least in my culture, it has a very concrete meaning, seemingly someone who is involved in an organized movement, something that I don’t belong to and have no interest in.

QUESTION: What idea made you create 5 videos dealing with Persian women such as Mahdokht, Zarin, Munis and Faezeh?
When I began to re-adapt the novel of “Women Without Men” written by Iranian author Shahrnush Parsipur, into a feature length film, which essentially evolved around 5 female characters; I knew that I would develop an art component of this project. I quickly became interested in making a series of short videos that related to each one of the five female characters. I was very interested in how in a museum or gallery setting the audience could walk from room to room, visiting each women and at the end, they could put the story together. The audience in a way becomes the editor of the film, in the way that they could put the puzzle together. This approach indeed was very different than a film made for a theatre setting where the audience is quite passive seated and the narrative is linear. So at the end I managed to make the five installations and have just finished the feature too.

Question: You left your original country a long time ago. How do you relate to the images of these women now, when the Persian reality is so far away from you. How do you connect?
This film of course takes place in 1953 before I was born, so it does not directly reflect the life that I experienced in Iran. But of course each woman in one way or another symbolically embodies obsessions, issues and problems that has continued to this date to haunt Iranian women, whether stemming from religion, political reality, sexual taboos.

Question: What made you draw, make photography, create art in your life to begin with? Do you remember your earliest stages of interest?
Art has been a wonderful escape from the banality of everyday life and more so a way to find a meaningful engagement with life and people around me. My life since active as an artist has been an exciting one, not always easy but wonderfully full and adventurous. Also, for me making art is a way to face my own emotions and anxieties. I consider my first serious attempt in art began in 1993 with the “Women of Allah” series, a group of work that brought me back to my home country, if not geographically, spiritually and emotionally.

Question: I almost called you “female Jean Luc Godard”…What draws you towards film and video as medium, and - do you prefer that medium to painting, sculpture ? And if yes, why so?
I’m very touched by what you say! Of course I don’t believe I deserve it! I developed a love affair with the moving image back in 1993, with my first video attempt for a small gallery show at Franklin Furnace. There is strong potential of poetics in this medium that I don’t believe is as tangible through mediums of painting and sculpture. At least I found myself right at home with video and film.

Question: What are its advantages and what are the limitations of these media (such as video, film) for you?
For one thing with film and video, an artist can incorporate elements of photography, painting and sculpture by the way she or he visually constructs the picture. More so, with film one can be a story teller, and can experiment with music, sound, choreography, performance, and more. As for myself, making videos and films have become an incredibly challenging and ambitious creative experiences. The limitations are that the process is often tedious and complex as it takes a lot of preparation and organization, so it’s not as spontaneous as medium like painting, where you can simply pick up your brush and paint. Furthermore, once you begin to experiment with the language of cinema, one has no choice but to gain the tools, by studying its tools, and history.

Question: How do you chose your subject and themes in your work? Do you search for them or they come to you?
It changes from time to time, but most often my ideas are inspired by literature that I read by various authors. Otherwise, there are times that I become obsessed with certain themes, often existential ones which eventually find their way into my art.

Question: Given the fact that your subject is often political (social commentary etc), Would you call yourself an “engagé”?
I am not sure exactly how you use this term, but if I understand it right, the question is how engaged I feel in relation to the socio- political subjects of my work. The answer would be that, I feel extremely connected to all the topics that I depict, as they are all topics that have and continue to effect my personal life. Sometimes I see myself as an activist, not the type who marches into the streets but one that is constantly preoccupied by political issues and is quietly confronting them by engaging in the community.

Question: A committed artist or just a human being who observes injustice? How do you see your work?
I see my art as a vehicle for dialogue and this is something I take very seriously. The subversive nature of my art is often my form of objection against any social and political injustice, in particular in relation to my own country. Of course, I can’t help but express myself not in the form of propaganda but in the form of poetry and aesthetic.

Question: What’s the situation like in the American contemporary art scene? Closed, open? How do you see your own place in it?
America is usually qualified as ‘melting pot’ so it’s the best place for a ‘nomadic’ artist like myself. I do however feel that I live in my own bubble in the way that I don’t follow any particular models, groups or trends. Also my subject matters (in a healthy matter) tend to pull me away from the what I consider the ‘glossy’ art world and closer to reality of everyday life.

Question: What’s your experience with the Iranian contemporary art scene? Are you familiar with it and are there any outstanding artists, in you view?
I’m very happy to say that I’m extremely active with the Iranian community particularly with the artists and filmmakers. I regularly try to educate myself in what’s going on culturally inside and outside of Iran and there are always fascinating talents around. Next week, a show will open at the Asia Society in New York that I’ve curated with another Iranian artist Nicky Nodjoumi. This is a very powerful show of an older Iranian artist, political satirist, Ardeshir Mohassess who was once a legend in Iran, but sadly neglected for decades due to illness. I take great pride in being involved with such magnificent event.

Question: You covered your recent photographs of men and women with letters, writing. What role does literature and writing in general have for you and your work?
Literature and words are suggestive of emotional and intellectual minds of the writers that deeply inspire me. Having been obsessed with Iranian female writers, in a way, I feel my visual work are embodiments of these ladies’ strong expressions. In earlier work for example I often used poetry by Forough Farokhzad, a heroic figure in Iran, a writer of enormous talent and imagination. Later, for the past five years for example, I’ve been devoting my time to the novel of “Women Without Men” by Shahrnush Parsipour whose imagination is equally extraordinary and beautiful. So literature for me is food for thought and inspiration

Faezeh & Amir Khan
2008
Ink on C-print mounted on aluminium
223.5 x 178 cm / 88 x 70 in.
© Shirin Neshat. Courtesy Galerie Jérôme de Noirmont, Paris Shirin Neshat
Copyright Linda Bertucci, 2006
Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York

Anne Van der Linden comes from a wealthy middle-class French family
who allowed her at an early age to launch into an artistic adventure
which he has never returned from afterwards. She was born in England, in 1959, but she was raised in France. She started drawing in the
stream of conscioussness manner age seventeen, only to trasfer
her interest to other genres while studying at the French Academy of
Beaux-Arts. Perhaps it was this negative experience of the art school
that prompted her to work all alone in her studio. She understood that
the joy of contemplation and a challenging emotion could also serve the language of figuration and that these could be equally expressed
through an expressionist drawing. Her drawings thus became at the
same time serious and reminiscent of those ancient echtings of Dürer
and Bosch and also critically charged and merciless somewhat like
those caricatures of Otto Dix and Max Beckmann.The artist’s drawings challenge those ‘dangerous’ or socially (un)acceptable topics– she often asks a question whether all our relationships, including the family, sexual and the ones at work - are just a simple exercise of power ? The artist always answers this question in a brave and humorous manner as she reaches for the heritage of her great predecessors, notably authors such as de Sade, Bataille and Frida Kahlo who, in their turn, refused any given socal norms that stood in their way of being creative. The drawings of Van der Linden’s are more than provocative- they are often ladden with the ‘erotic’ symbols as exemplified by the beautiful females resembling the top models placed on the torture table of the Great Inquisitor who, in splashing their sex with boiling oil represents, perhaps, common reason and consciousness. There are also in there the fallen angels who descend from Bosch’s inferno and who devour penises in the red houses of Amsterdam and Antwerp.The constant themes of the artist’s obsession are the following: the terror of racism, neocolonisation, consumerism and an overall industrialization of the society staggering both under the social regulations and family norms as well as under an influx of the pseudo-scientific and technological consciousness. And in an ancient expressionist manner her drawings also criticize the sanctum of motherhood, as they are critical of the Virgin and the Saint and of our new Holy father who hides a knife, an animal and a telephone in his pants instead of the penis. We could surely say that the girl who makes love to a phone receiver evokes more a naif symbolism of the neo-technocrat world than that she leads us to the erotic connotation of Van der Linden’s image.

The artist complains that despite the fact that “all that she has always wanted to do is to be a painter” she gets sollicited by the publishers only as an illustrator. This is mainly due to her painfully precise analyses of the contemporary society, that is her drawings which often decorate the texts that are serious textual analyses of such. She treasures that painterly approach to color and the painter’s material which often does not reveal itself to draughtsmen. Van der Linden had been visiting for some time psychiatric wards- an experience which left an impact on her; after such an experience she conceived the painting “Total peeling” on which a patient tries to peel off her own skin and flesh. In a certain way, the whole oeuvre of Van der Linden’s enters the category of “peeling off” of the conscious as the paintings evoke the reality peeled off and penetrated to the bone. Her palette is very heavy and sombre resemling a bit Diego Rivera’s, although her overall sensibility belongs to the European art history.

The artist has also got involved in theater (through 1990s), performance and film, earlier with her legendary partner Costes. Her short films such as the “Ironing” and the “Well”, 1999,treat cruel subjects: the problem of an alcoholic mother and life of a cleaning lady who gets literaly ironed by her boss. And although these films are both committed and heavy just like the artist’s very painting they are also capable of keeping our attention on them- the phenomenon which surpasses many a contemporary artist and his work these days. If we were to ask about the number of Van der Linden’s group or solo shows in the world we would learn that such number is big; and if we wanted to inquire about the importance or a scope of the places where she showed her work we would also learn that it has been very present in many prestigious places in the world. However, when we start thinking of the artist’s work, this particular thing is not something that we begin to think of. The important thing is that her art approves of thinking, so to speak, and at the moment when she flashes her art like a gun or a glove , to the face of the spectator, he takes a good look at it- and starts thinking about it.

Her work is to be seen most recently at Les Singuliers Gallery in Paris.

1. Question: What made you draw and paint in your life to begin with? Do you
remember your earliest stages of interest?

Anne Van der Linden: As a child I had access to art books and art pieces as my mother managed a small art gallery in Paris - she sold contemporary prints.
My first drawing experiments happened in the 70’s. At that time
everybody smoked pot and I did the same for a while, so in that sort of context I started drawing the improvisations, free association figures, objects and shapes, all of which were very distant from the academic type of artwork, meaning that they appeared very spontaneous. Then I went to art school and lost that manner, but in a way I kept the “free association” mood until now.

2. Question: I called you a sort of “female Durer”…What draws you towards drawing
and etching as medium, and do you prefer that medium to oil painting ?

Anne Van der Linden: In the beginning drawings and etchings were the skeleton on which I had built my painting skill (isn’t that a classic one?!), that was the place where the idea materialized, nothing
more or less than that. Then a friend suggested that I just show my drawings
as he thought them very good, and I followed his advice.
However, the truth is that I still prefer painting (mix of oil and acrylic) to any other tehnique. Painting is really the cult object for me…maybe because the painting material makes the object look like a corpse, as it smells, shines, and appearing sometimes repulsive and at some other times
attractive, it is more ambiguous, and interchanging according to lightning etc…

3. Question: What are its advantages and what are the limitations of that medium?

Anne Van der Linden: Drawing is easy to be reproduced, you hardly get bad surprises, also you can draw everywhere, you don’t need much room.
Drawing is the place of research, and by using the line you try to bring out
ideas, and you can throw away the sheet if you are not satisfied with the result, thing that you cannot do so easly with painting, because it is so sticky and wet it
becomes quickly fused and saturated with color. Plus, you don’t want to run through the canvas too quickly because of the high price of the material!
But drawing -the way I conceive it - is a very austere technique, I sit at my table
for hours and sometimes I get hand cramps. Also it can take me quite a long
time to fill the blank space and « kill » the paper sheet, unlike the medium of painting where you use a few brush strokes and that’s it, the space of the canvas is conquered in no time- it becomes my space!

4. Question: How do you chose your subject , your themes in painting? Do you search for them or do they come to you?

Anne Van der Linden: It comes from varied sources, some images come from what I saw and that particular experince then influenced and inspired me to paint it, or also, there are ideas which I am not fully aware of and which come to me from the ‘back room’ of my mind…
Most of the time things appear to my mind as set choreographies, and then the
action becomes more precise from one study to another. The idea
develops simultaneously with the shape, and after a few aborted attempts at legitimate existence it reaches the state of harmony, I mean I experience it as such when the image starts “talking” to me.
Sometimes I take over the subject from one image to another, developing the so called ’small variations’ of the original version.

5. Question: Given the fact that your subject is often political (social commentary etc), Would you call yourself an « engage »? A committed artist of a sort? How do you see your work in a larger context?

Anne Van der Linden: My art talks about mankind and doesn’t avoid any aspect of humanity, I use obscenity, violence, sexuality and all our orifices as means of
expression, and automatically that makes a committed artist out of me, as I have to account for the choices I make.
A Feminist? It is a questionable tag for me to get- sometimes I can adopt a feminine point of view and explore some subjects that have been unexplored because they belong specifically to women’s domain of work. Sometimes these are themes which women have not dealt with much until now,
so it is interesting to use certain paths to explore them.
But in general my position as an artist is the one of “transgender”, meaning being beyond sexual determination, just like an animal is,so that I could feel more free in such an operating space.
Also I happened to be rejected by so-called feminists, who thought
that I was presenting a degrading image of women. I thought that their opinion was so unfair and boring! Such a mental sclerosis!

6. Question: What’s the situation like in French contemporary scene? Closed or
open? Likable, or rather dislikable?

Anne Van der Linden: Well, viewing things from my personal experience, the French scene is quite shy, at the same time full of the inferiority complex and conservative, always looking up to foreign countries art scene and deciding what is good in art or not, and the result of such a process is disastrous as we all know. Also the institutions have been adamant for decades that their rôle con sisted in promoting the old conceptual art, and all of us painters sculptors etc…could just go and die elsewhere.
However, on the other hand, here in France I can make and broadcast pieces of
art that could easily put me in trouble if I ‘d shown them in other parts of the
world. That lack of censorship here IS good!

7. Question: What’s your experience with film, video? Do you like working with
that media?

Anne Van der Linden: I have made 3 short films some years ago (2000-2001), and I used to develop and extend the themes of my paintings into film, in order to make them move into action, and this sort of experience was interesting. What I mean is that these films were close to performances, with a more material, everyday life aspect to them than my painterly images had before.
But the filming of these images hasn’t been an easy process- Ii had conflicts with the technicians I was working with and this problem has been blocking me and my filming process eversince.

I first met Ben Ruttner (DJ B-Roc) through my sister at our high school in New Hampshire. He was a freshman who wore big t-shirts and sold mix tapes out of his backpack. At the time he was the only DJ in our school. He was also probably the only serious entrepreneur. (All the drug dealers I knew smoked way more than they sold, and everybody else mostly just worked at a bagel shop or hung around the parking lot at the video store.) From his personal mix tape circuit, to packed talent shows, to being a junior DMC finalist, Ben had way more hustle then your average 14 year old dude. He’s 21 now, and living in New York City. The hustle hasn’t stopped, and the music has only gotten better. B-Roc is like Rick Rubin and Russell Simons all at once, a gifted music maker with a mind for the business that I know must go way beyond his years. If in 20 years we’re all downloading Chinese Reggae to an invisible chip in our third ears, I bet B-Roc will have something to do with it.

You just opened up a studio in Chinatown, right?

Yeah. It’s exciting, man. “Heavy Roc Music.” I’m in here every day, and the place is fully operational now. My production partner, JPatt, and I (together “The Knocks”) work out of here now, but we also rent out time to other people to pay the bills. I actually just started doing DJ lessons out of here too, which is fun.

On the production side, tell me about your current project.

It’s called SAMUEL. He’s a singer and a New York kid born and raised. Then it’s JPatt and I doing all the production. Ww’re about to drop our single, “Say Goodbye,” which features Wade, the guitarist from the band The Virgins.

How did the Samuel project start up?

I met him through a friend. The two of them used to sing in a band called Ghost Town Symphony. Samuel had some really rough music, recorded on Garage Band in his laptop. JPatt and I heard it and thought there was mad potential. Now we’re about to blast off that single, “Say Goodbye.” Mark Ronson is going to play it on EVR soon.

Doing this pop singer stuff is different from a lot of your other work, which is mostly hip-hop based.

Yeah it’s really different. I still do some hip-hop stuff though. I have a Sheek Louch track coming out - featuring The Game and Bun B - on his new album, “Silverback Gorilla.” But I’m steering away from hip-hop. And now with the studio it’s been dope because I can bring in people playing violin, guitar, or whatever. I feel like I’m actually producing and not just making a beat and trying to sell it.

Should we look out for a Samuel EP dropping soon then?

Yeah, but right now we’re not sure if we’re going to do it independent still because we got some serious label interest. They see him as the American Lilly Allen.

(Laughs)

I mean the New York, male Lilly Allen. That’s how labels talk. It’s pretty funny.

The Samuel stuff kind of sounds like a Justin Timberlake / Timbaland kind of thing.

Yeah. It’s a real fusion between our normal sound, which is strictly hip-hop and then Samuel’s emo-hipster vibe. We definitely try to make the beats still knock.

Last summer you were on the road touring with Sean Kingston all over the U.S.  How did you like that?

It was an ill experience, man. Something I’ll remember forever. We went all over the country, rode in private jets, and shared a stage with Beyoncé, and played huge arenas.
I’d typically come out on stage first to get the crowd hyped, and that feeling when people scream in response to your voice is crazy. I mean it’s one thing when it’s an auditorium in high school, but 200,000 heads is different. Now I want to go on tour with Samuel. I feel like things will be peaches and cream.

Have you been DJing in the city at all?

Yeah, a lot. Spots like Gold Bar, Marquee, Runway, PM, but I also throw parties with my dudes weekly where all our people can come and chill while we DJ.  And I’m about to go to Virginia to DJ with Benny Blanco at Virginia Tech. That’s going to be fun.

What type of stuff do you notice going over well in the clubs these days?

If you go to the nice places, it’s all dance music obviously, but a lot of oldies too.
MIA is big. All the hipster stuff really kills it. Justice is big.

What do you think of Justice?

I like them but that genre is getting really saturated now. My dudes come up to me with new music all the time. Some weird producer from Sweden or something, that makes Justice-esque shit. It all starts to blend together for me and sound the same.

Yeah, I know what you mean. With that kind of stuff so big these days do you think there’s still room for hip-hop? Where are the raps going?

I think hip-hop is actually finally taking a turn for the better. I mean there’s always going to be the bullshit - the Soulja Boys and the snapping - but then people like Mark Ronson are doing really well. He just got a Grammy. He just beat Timbaland! Hip Hop is just so oversaturated, but that’s why people like Will I Am and Kanye and Mark are standing out. Because they’re switching it up and bringing in different aspects and new sounds. Like I was in the studio with D.O.E. the other day and I was playing him beats, and once I played Sam’s shit, he flipped out. He was like, “I need some shit like this. I need him on my tracks! This is what the bitches listen to!” Rappers are realizing that and putting people like Mathew Santos or the homeboy from Coldplay on a track. People who they think are going to stick around, not who spits the hottest 16, because Tupac and Biggie already spit the hottest 16. I mean I want to make the kind of music that’s going to be in jukeboxes in twenty years, stuff that makes you remember an era, stuff that you can party and drink 40s to - or drink a glass of wine with your grandmother.

So you want to make music that can crossover as much as possible?

Yeah, man. If you want to sell records and have a real impact, it’s got to cross over.

Is it harder to produce for singers than it is rappers?

Only if you can’t play. But that’s why we have a serious advantage. JPatt can play anything. When we make beats it’s dope because I might have an idea in my head and all I got to do is hum it to him and then he’ll tweak it or something.

You’ve worked out of Vermont and Boston among other places, but how has New York been influencing your work? What’s this city like for you?

Being downtown in the music scene is really dope because you’re surrounded by creative people, whether it’s clothing lines, artists, musicians, whatever. And everyone around me is still very young. Most of the kids I hang out with grew up either in New York or L.A. It’s kind of funny for me having been in Vermont. Everyone’s like, “Yo, where are you from?” But it’s cool because it kind of gives me an extra edge coming from the middle of nowhere. We had a show the other week at 205 and we packed it without even rally promoting it. That felt really good.

That’s a good sign.

Yeah, kind of makes you feel like you can take on the world.

Alicia Ostriker has published 12 volumes of poetry and is one of America’s most prominent poets and critics. Her scholarship on Women’s poetry has long been acknowledged with the publication of Stealing the Language; The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America and Writing Like a Woman. In 1986, The Imaginary Lover won the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is also the author of The Crack in Everything published in 1996 which won the Patterson Poetry Award and the San Francisco State Poetry Center Award. She has twice been a finalist for The National Book Award. After reading a series of Alicia’s books including, The Little Space, Poems selected and New, 1968-1998, No Heaven, Dancing at the Devil’s Party, and Stealing the Language, I recognized what others had long since recognized – here is a unique writer, never afraid to wrestle with what interests her, whose body of work has stood the test of time, and has the power to transform and change the way one see’s. In her most recent collection of poetry, The Book of Seventy, Alicia writes, “We have almost escaped the rule of reason/we have almost returned to the rule of beauty.” Her new book celebrates writing and living in that return toward beauty, (daring her fellow citizens in the nation of money to mock her) in a down to earth and highly courageous style. Alicia graciously agreed to talk with me and share her thoughts, life and work for A Gathering of the Tribes.

FM: What is the poetic process like for you?

AO: I wish I could say I had a handle on this, but the truth is that every poem is like starting from scratch, groping in the dark. Usually there’s a first draft that gets written quickly—so quickly that I have no real idea where the poem is going, what it will do. If I am very lucky, the poem is finished or nearly finished in the first draft. This was true of the volcano sequence, a book I basically channeled. At that time, some poems came to

tell me some unpleasant truths about myself and my history. My impulse was to turn away, but instead I made a deal with the poems: “If you agree to keep arriving,” I told them, “I agree not to tell you what to say.” Then I channeled that book, intermittently, for a year.

Mostly, however, there is revising to do, and I am willing to revise endlessly.

At this particular moment, for example, I have over a dozen versions of a poem in the voice of Persephone speaking to her mother Demeter, and part of the problem is that I don’t know what the mix of love and anger should be, in her voice. She is telling her mother to leave her alone, she’ll make her own decisions, she’ll come back from Hades when she is good and ready. Snarky adolescent. But does she really want to be left alone? I don’t really know, and the poem doesn’t know either—so it wobbles. But the companion poem, Demeter talking to Persephone? That got done in two drafts.

What I look for in revising is getting at the underlying emotional truth of a situation. And so much of this comes across only through shades of tone and music. Emotion can’t be stated. It’s always what’s under the statement. So for example, does Persephone say

don’t follow me

I’ll come back when I’m ready

Or does she say

don’t follow me

I’ll come back when I’m good and ready

–a difficult choice, because the first possibility is gentler, more ambivalent, the second is more dramatic, and it has that nice play on “good,” but it makes the whole poem harsher than maybe it should be.

FM: What do you think is the project of poetry in the 21^st century?

AO: I see many important projects, areas of potential growth, for poetry in America. More translation, to help Americans understand that we are not the only people, or the most important ones, on the planet. More work by “marginalized” people, and that still includes women and blacks, but also includes GLBT poets, working-class poets, incarcerated people, Spanish-speaking, Asian, every kind of immigrant group. And this work shouldn’t be ghettoized, as if a Black poet could speak only to other Black people. Mainstream poetry journals and journals like the New Yorker should be looking for excitement in their poetry, not same-old same-old, and excitement is often going to come from the margins, because that’s where the energy is, that’s where the drive is.

More editors should do what Marilyn Hacker did with Kenyon Review. She discovered Reginald Shepherd and Rafael Campo, for example. And she published a sequence of my Mastectomy poems when nobody else would. What else do I look forward to? There should be more contact, less mutual suspicion, between traditional kinds of poetry and spoken word, hip-hop, slam, and so on. A great age of poetry happens in times of synergy.

FM: What sparked your scholarship on the history of women’s poetry?

AO: In the mid-seventies, I had been editing the Penguin edition of Blake’s Complete Poetry, which ended up with 200 pages of notes that I’d written to try to make Blake—the most difficult and revolutionary poet in the English language—clear and readable. Blake was my hero, and the work was all-consuming. But when it was done, I looked around and realized, belatedly, that there was a women’s poetry movement happening all around me.

So I started reading women’s poetry voraciously, I was on fire with that. I knew that what women were writing would change my life and my art forever. What I did first was write a set of essays on five of the poets most important to me—H.D., Plath, Sexton, Adrienne Rich and May Swenson. These were published in my book Writing like a Woman, in 1982. But just writing about a few big stars left me uncomfortable, because there was a collective voice in the air, we all could hear it, and I wanted to be able to define it, really understand the things it was saying, and make clear how earth-shaking it was. So that’s why I wrote Stealing the Language.

The research for Stealing included over 200 individual books of poems by women, and I don’t know how many anthologies. I wrote it formally, in scholarly form, with a first chapter surveying the history of women’s poetry in America from the 17^th century onward, then five chapters organized thematically but also talking about esthetic issues, like the importance of what I called the exoskeletal style in poets like Plath and Atwood. Heavy research, tons of footnotes, because I wanted to make damn sure that I knew what I was talking about and that every reader would see that I did. At the same time, I wanted to make it reader-friendly, and I think it was. I meet women poets all the time who tell me my book changed their life, and I am incredibly grateful that the book went out into the world and did the job I hoped it would. It helped free women poets to be themselves.

FM: How did your interest in midrash and the Bible come about?

AO: The last chapter in Stealing the Language is on revisionist mythology—women re-writing classical myths and fairy tales from their own points of view. Anne Sexton’s Transformations is a prime example. But I didn’t include any poetry using the Bible. Then one day I found myself thinking about Job’s wife, and wondering how she felt about the “happy ending” of that story, when she gets ten new children to replace the ten that god let Satan kill off on a bet, at the beginning of the story. That did it for me. I wrote something imagining what Job’s wife would/ will say to God when she gets up the courage—and what she will ask for as reparation. By the time I finished writing that, I was captured, and I have been wrestling with the Bible ever since. As a feminist, my task is somehow to wrestle a blessing out of that deeply patriarchal book. But at the time, I had never even heard the word “midrash.”

Midrash has many different meanings, but the main meaning today is that midrash re-tells, re-imagines, Biblical stories, in ways that are meaningful to us, in our time and our society.

FM: Why do you feel that is an important thing to do?

AO: My book The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, mixes poetry and prose, midrash and autobiography. It’s got my own slant on all the stories in the bible. For example, there’s a poem in the voice of the prophetess Miriam, who is mentioned only briefly in the Bible, but she’s a central character for me—as she is for many feminist women—both Jewish and Christian. The Book of Judges, which is full of horrible war stories, I deal with in a piece that takes place in a women’s shelter. I’m just playing my part in the ultimate transformation—I hope—of patriarchy and its religion, and the creation of a more egalitarian and compassionate world. A tiny part, but better than nothing.

FM: How would you describe yourself at this point in your life?

AO: Good question. American Secular Jewish woman, daughter, wife, mother, grandma, poet, critic, teacher, with a lefty working-class background that shaped my values and dreams.

FM: how does your interest in art fit into your work as a poet?

AO: When I was young I wanted to be an artist. I drew all the time. As it turned out, after taking many art classes, I had to admit that I didn’t have the talent. But this left me with a lifelong love of every kind of visual art. And I’ve written many many poems based on painters and paintings.

FM: do you have any advice for younger poets?

AO: You bet. Read, read and read—poetry from the past , from now, from other languages. Just read as widely as you can—and follow your own taste, not what someone else says is good. Don’t read what doesn’t give you pleasure. You might change and like it later. Let your taste grow naturally. Discover what you love. Learn how to write by emulating what you love. Your own voice will emerge naturally.

Another thing I advise is to kill the interior censor. Write what you’re afraid to write.

That’s where the energy is.

THE SONGS OF MIRIAM

And Miriam the prophetess took a timbrel

in her hand; and all the women went out

after her with timbrels and with dances.

–Exodus 15.20

An exile, strange to every wind,

may I be given field and fallow land. . .

my silent soul howls like the jackals

and cries out like the sea.

–Yocheved Bat-Miriam

I’m a young girl

My periods not started yet

Up to my waist in Nile water, I push

The baby basket through the bulrushes

Onto the beach

Come on, I say to myself, let’s go

And they see it

And come running

My brother cries like a kitten

In the arms of that princess

Her painted face fills with the joy

Of disobedience, which is the life of joy

When she is hooked I walk

Out of the river

Bowing and bowing

I am Miriam, daughter

Of Israel

We gather the limbs, we gather the limbs

We gather the limbs of the child

We sing to the river, we bathe in the river

We save the life of the child.

If you listen to me once

You will have to go on listening to me

I am Miriam the prophetess

Miriam who makes the songs

I lead the women in a sacred circle

Shaking our breasts and hips

With timbrels and with dances

Singing how we got over

O God of hosts

The horse and his rider

Have you thrown into the sea–

That is my song, my music, my

Unended and unfinished prophecy–

The horse was captivity

And its rider fear–

O God of hosts

Never again bondage

Never again terror

O God of hosts.

Call me rebelliousness, call me the bitter sea

I peel the skin off myself in strips

I am going to die in the sand

Miriam the leprous, Miriam the hag

Miriam the cackling one

What did I have but a voice, to announce liberty

No magic tricks, no miracles, no history,

No stick

Or stone of law. You who believe that God

Speaks only through Moses, bury me in the desert

I curse you with drought

I curse you with spiritual dryness

I spit on your promise

But you who remember my music

You will feel me under your footsoles

Like cool ground water under porous stone–

Follow me, follow my drum

Follow my drum, follow my drum

Follow me, follow my drum

Follow my drum.

I who am maiden

woman and crone

I who am

Miriam.

From The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions, Rutgers University Press, 1994

FIX

The puzzled ones, the Americans, go through their lives

Buying what they are told to buy,

Pursuing their love affairs with the automobile,

Baseball and football, romance and beauty,

Enthusiastic as trained seals, going into debt, struggling–

True believers in liberty, and also security,

And of course sex—cheating on each other

For the most part only a little, mostly avoiding violence

Except at a vast blue distance, as between bombsight and earth,

Or on the violent screen, which they adore.

Those who are not Americans think Americans are happy

Because they are so filthy rich, but not so,

They are mostly puzzled and at a loss

As if someone pulled the floor out from under them,

They’d like to believe in God, or something, and they do try.

You can see it in their white faces at the supermarket and the gas station

–not the immigrant faces, they know what they want,

Not the blacks, whose faces are hurt and proud—

The white faces, lipsticked, shaven, we do try

To keep smiling, for when we’re smiling, the whole world

Smiles with us, but we feel we’ve lost

That loving feeling. Clouds ride by above us,

Rivers flow, toilets work, traffic lights work, barring floods, fires

And earthquakes, houses and streets appear stable,

So what is it, this moon-shaped blankness?

What the hell is it? America is perplexed.

We would fix it if we knew what was broken.

From No Heaven, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005

Kirila Fäh is an unusual, almost un unorthodox artist- although she comes from an Orthodox Christian background (her family was based in Croatia and in Serbia), she has lived and worked across many countries and continents. In 1980s she had surprised New York’s bohemian artistic community with her innovative approach to photography. As she moved back to Europe (in 1990s), she had enriched her expression with her new artistic challenges as exemplified in her sculptures, notably her work in glass and then her wooden totems.

We find Kirila Fäh at one of the biggest Swiss artfairs, so called Kunstszene Zürich of 2007 where she has exhibited her sculptural objects along with 600 artists, natives of Zürich.

Q: You come from the turbulent territory of former Yugoslavia, but you spent your formative artistic years, so called the 1980s in New York. At that time you were mostly making a sort of Surrealist and surreal photography and at that time I called you « a Cindy Sherman without recognition gone wild ». How did New York of that era influenced your work and why did you choose photography as genre?

Kirila Fäh: In NY I was doing something which I’d call “dejavue compositions” , the work I made by collaging portraits of my friends onto the reproductions of old masters and autoportraits. It happened that many of my photos which I had taken in clubs, or in the streets of New York appeared to me like the follow up of the work that some old masters had already realised. Photography was the media that suited the ambiance, the atmosphere and speed of that high-energized city. Otherwise I have never considered myself a professional photographer although it is a part of my a heritage: my grandfather, grandmother and my mother were all professional photographers.

Q: And was New York of that day a rather closed or an open city to new and upcoming artists? Once you said that the rules of the game involving the artistic competition had already been decided for everyone in it even before you moved there. Could you comment more on this?

Kirila Fäh: It seemed both open and closed. It was an open city for newcomers, with great number of new galleries that were opening in East Village on a daily basis; these galleries were offering artists to participate in a race in which the winner had been already chosen. Most of those galleries had favored the local artists. They felt at home there; they all came out of New York art schools and had already been on the road to recognition when some other, foreign artists, joined the club. In general the newcomers need to wait longer in order to obtain recognition, as they show a stronger involvement in conquering the territory : simply they have to work harder than the local ones. It is rare for any newcomer to climb the top as fast as domestic artist does, even if they are of the same age and have the same amount of artistic experience.

Q: For one reason or another you decided to move back to Europe, more precisely to Zurich in 1992 and that move drastically changed both the form and content of your work. You started making unusual glasswork, that is, small sculptures in glass but also some larger graphic prints. How did these changes come about? Were they a product of the newly-redescovered external environment or were they an outcome of your inner transformation, your inner outgrowth?

Kirila Fäh: In Zurich I resumed oil painting, which I’d still call “my first love”. I instinctively started painting abstract shapes in primary, vivid colors. I’ve experienced an enormous cultural shock and got almost to the “point zero” where I felt that all my previous experience was no longer valid. I had to learn a new language, master a new culture, and new ways of living, in other words I had to recreate my life literaly from the start. This process of personal investigation presented itself in colorful abstract shapes, which probably and in a very symbolic way, represents my soul’s very search for the roots of its own existence.

Q: In this particular phase of your work coinciding with your arrival in Zurich, did your art undergo any particular influence? Did you acquaint yourself with some of those great Swiss predecessors, that is, older peers such as Nikki de Saint Phalle, for instance?What I have in mind here is the particular form of your glass sculptures and mobiles.

Kirila Fäh: True, I was looking for approval of my new shapes in other artists’ work and found the similarity in shapes in respective work of Kandinski’s, Gaudi’s and Nikki De Saint Phalle’s. Sooner than later I changed my own technique while making a serial of screen prints. This particular media was more adequate to the color drawings I was doing at the time. As a follow up, I engaged a Murano glass artist who turned many of my conceptual forms into small three-dimensional glass objects.

In Zurich I encountered myself again and experienced a different artistic process from the one that I underwent in NY. In NY all information were coming from outside, you know, one is under the attack of external stimulations all the time. In the quiet surroundings of Zurich, which is at the first glance a “noting is happening place”, I had a chance to explore changes within myself and express my inner world out of. I felt being ‘a reversed glove’ in comparison to how I felt in NY.

Q: What was the art scene in Zurich that you found at that time? You associated yourself with a group of artists around Tumb Gallery, a cooperative space for alternative, anti-establishment art. Who are they and what did they mean to you in terms of your own work?

Kirila Fäh: As soon as I arrived in Zurich I met with a group of Swiss artists gathered around Claude Steiner and Radovan Hirsl, calling themselves Art Visionaries, Psychonauts, Psychedelic or Phantastic painting artists. I found my people among them and felt at home as an artist and as a person. This was a group of artists who didn’t belong to any particular movement nor any big gallery corporation. We’ve organized together many shows in Switzerland and abroad. The collaborating fuel of enthusiasm lasted for several years; it was like we all fell in love with each other, stayed together, got married and got divorced after having explored all sources of collaborate work. Then we got exhausted. Today each of these artists does his own work and moves forward .

Q: From 2003 and on, you started working on what I’d call organic, small sculptures and mobiles which are basically the found objects further decorated and worked on. Where did you find inspiration for this sort of fragile work?

Kirila Fäh: Twiggy Twists are small objects made of wooden branches, sticks and twigs that I started producing in beginning of last year. The idea was present for few years waiting for its moment to be realized. Last year I was invited to take part in a group show in ‘Gallery Incontro’ in Zurich and then had a one-artist show in Bremgarten. As I hadn’t had anything new to show, I started working with a new material, applied new ideas to it and new opus was produced. Instead of “accidental” I’d rather use a word “spontaneous” in explaining the process or the inspiration that urged me to pursue this work. Spontaneity includes an openness to all sorts of possibilities; it follows the intuition and inner instinct that work with given circumstances and leads us to the exact results. “Accident” and rules that stand by it are loaded with mysticism and are harder to explain.

Practically I start my day by taking a walk in the forest, and this soon turns into my collecting all sorts of twigs, seeds and leaves. As I collect them, I constantly make a choice which varies from the acts of “seeing” or “recognizing” a certain shape and/or a color, to the envisioning the final object. At the same time as I am aware that I am in a special environment, in a deep wood surrounded with high trees, bushes, songs of birds, visible and invisible forest spirits, I still manage to concentrate on broken branches fallen from the trees, on the roots sticking out of the ground, on dry leaves, calcified mushrooms, seeds, bird’s feathers, and oak apples, armors, dried forest fruits. Right there I make choice in chosing shapes that I liked “on the first sight”. I recognize in them my future objects. I take the material home and start the reconstruction, reanimation if you like, of what was seen at the first split second of impression.

This process reminds me of reading the coffee grounds, you know when you drink Turkish coffee and then turn the cup upside down and the grounds imprint all different shapes and drawings on the inside… We see them at the very beginning only as some abstract, unrecognizable forms which slowly turn into visible shapes of birds, male and female figures, numbers, objects and signs soon to be defined as symbols. Now they are connecting us with reality, which was deeply hidden before.

In this way my Twigs are gaining a new meaning, that was hidden and invisible before, and I feel like a discoverer who knows that there was some mysterious existence and presence in the brunches prior to me finding them in the forest. For me this is a magic moment: I feel that good, little forest spirits are at work.

Primitive art of Native American and African tribes have the same sort of spontaneity, as they have that creative drama, intrigue and closeness, or playfulness that we find in children’s handwork. Each of us, back in his childhood had a similar experience in primary school, at the times when we would make a field trip and then make all sorts of figures out of the branches, seeds and acorns that we came accross.

Q: How did you find it working with wood? Was this an awarding experience or on the contrary? Some of your work is colored, painted. When did you start painting on wood and how did you arrive at coloring it?

Kirila Fäh: Work with wood for me is not a brand new experience. For many years I was painting on old chairs and different peaces of furniture. I like to work with all kinds of materials. Making of Twiggy Twists involves of the use of many other different materials such as the modeling clay, paper, glue, metal, thread etc. which I use in order to connect all parts of the figure and arrive at its final shape. Sometimes I feel like a surgeon reconstructing a broken brunch, gluing some parts together, adding dried leaves to them, and sticking together parts that normaly do not belong together.

In the case of Twiggy Twists a material such as wood, does not present such a challenge to me as is the shape that triggers the idea or inspires me. Color is important element in my work as much as are line and shape. I use colors to paint the objects, but sometimes I leave some of their parts in natural color with rough surfaces, when I feel they need to remain that way.

Q: Some of these figurines look like the funny 21st century totems made for our contemporary society in dire need cure their contemporary problems. How did the ancient tribal cultures, such as the African or the Native American one influence these figures?
What did you take from these cultures, in terms of their ancient tribal use of them, and what part did the heritage of Western contemporaries, Giacometti for instance, play in them?

Kirila Fäh: I think that all sorts of shapes have already existed in us eversince and that we simply try to pool them out to the surface in using them as a language that explains and expresses various emotions, and motions within. My Twiggy Twists are funny, twisted, joyful and humorous magic sticks that should reach you with an ancient human message that life is glorious and a joyful creation. Again, as soon as the shapes start materialising as objects, they remind me of the Native Americans, Africans and Gypsies. I haven’t thought of Giacometti, but you might be right that he’s in there as well, especially when you see some twigs in shape of long legged figures, the legs being disproportional in relation to their bodies.

Q: Humor is a very important element in your work. Can you comment on it ? Do you start with irony or do you arrive spontaneously at the humorous comment and statement in your work?

Kirila Fäh: Humor is a very important part of my life. The battles either against ugliness, or injustice, inappropriateness, inadequacy, stupidity, unfairness, lies, corruption, cheating and the fake, can be won through the application of the twisted caricature and humor. Humor is also the way to tell the truth without hurting the other. We can laugh at our mistakes, so that we could remember them better and avoid repeating them, or in order to reduce pain caused by the mistakes that we had made. So, we should be constantly reminded of them, in one way or another. I feel that humor is the powerful weapon in this case.

Q: Can you describe some of your future projects as well as a direction where you ould like your work to develop? Are you likely to deepen the existing forms that you have already worked with, or rather explore new genres, and new media possibilities?

A: I don’t know where this opus is going to bring me, sure to a certain ending which implies a certain change. I presently work in this way. As I’ve already stated here I change medium voluntarily depending on what I’m trying to say or in what mood I am in. It’s like using different languages to say different things. Somebody has said that singing a love song sounds the best in Italian, praying to God sounds good in Spanish, talking politics in English, and explaining working methods sounds the best in German. Sometimes the media I use is photography, sometimes print, oil painting, sculpture, or a written story. I might start singing one day.

BREAKING OPEN HIS HEAD

An Interview with Writer DANIEL PINCHBECK

interviewed by Sarah Ferguson

“I wanted to solve a mystery, to know why certain substances are revered in tribal societies throughout the world, but repressed as well as ridiculed in contemporary Western cultures.”

– Daniel Pinchbeck

You could say Daniel Pinchbeck was born to be a psychedelic cosmonaut. His father, Peter Pinchbeck, was an abstract expressionist painter, and his mother, Joyce Johnson, was an editor at Dial Press who helped publish Abbie Hoffman’s first book, Revolution for the Hell of It, and whose memoir, Minor Characters, details her affair with Jack Kerouac.

Still, Pinchbeck didn’t give psychedelics much thought when he left college to pursue the life of an intellectual dilettante, freelancing for magazines and helping to found the literary journal Open City.

A self-professed “crisis in nihilism” propelled him to set off on a quest for higher consciousness, guided by the most powerful hallucinogens he could find. Breaking Open the Head (Broadway Books) documents his journey –from an iboga initiation with the Bwiti of Gabon to ayahuasca ceremonies in Ecuador, a DMT trip at Palenque, and a scary encounter with an evil analog called DPT that left him seeing bugs in his silverware for weeks.

Far from bugging out, Pinchbeck uses these experiences as a launching pad to plumb the nature of consciousness, while reporting on the terrible threat faced by the tribal cultures that first honed the use of these remarkable plant substances. Part travelogue, part cultural history, part advocacy, Breaking Open the Head breaks new ground in discussing the relevancy of psychedelics and their potential to help reawaken the “spiritual warrior” within.

Q: How did you get started on this quest?

A: First I took ayahuasca in a ceremony in New York. Then I got [a magazine] assignment to go to Africa and take iboga. It was originally for Vibe, and they never ran it, probably because they got freaked out that they’d sent a white guy to Africa to go do this totally tribal thing.
But that experience ultimately had very far-reaching effects. It began to open me up to what they call the spirit world. I felt like there were possibilities of relationships with people who had died. All sorts of things that I never had imagined were possible began to manifest themselves to me, slowly over time, after that experience, which I describe in the book.

Q: What was the most profound experience? Do you have a favorite substance?

A: There were several that were very, very profound. The iboga experience was incredibly profound. I went through my whole index of childhood memories. And I really had this sense of how there are these social forces that act upon you to make you into something, and yet once you can see beyond that, you realize that you also have this incredible freedom to change yourself.
And the ayahuasca experience gave me an incredible sense of connection to the planet and to the natural world. I did that a few times, and I was really lucky to do it in the Amazon. That was also very devastating because I saw what’s happening to the Amazon.
Since then I’ve felt that there’s this incredible race against time. We have a very short window of time to understand these other kind of knowledge systems, to integrate them into our own way of being, and to make some sort of transformation of consciousness that hopefully will have ramifications throughout our whole society.
We obviously tried to do that in the ’60s, and it didn’t work. The way it’s happening now, I think, is much more organic. We’ve had time to sort of think about and reintegrate the experiences of the ’60s, why that didn’t work. We have more people who have been studying shamanism, Jungian analysis, alchemy, the occult-all these different modalities of reaching different parts of the psychic.

Q: What was the most frightening experiment? Did you ever get really freaked out?

A: The most frightening was the experiment with DPT, dipropyl tryptomine. But, you know, I’ve found that sometimes the bad trips you have, a year or two later can turn out to be the best trips, because those are the things where you learn the most or have the most profound experiences. So the DPT experience turned out to be one of the most useful ones in the long term. I think it actually was some kind of shamanic initiation. It had far-reaching consequences…. I felt like I was being visited for a while because I had dreams of this certain kind of entity.

Q: Do you still feel visited?

A: I feel that, you know, that they stay in touch. People say that the iboga spirit, once you’ve had the initiation, is permanently with you. And I’ve definitely felt in dreams that there’s like a remanifestation. The iboga is always a stern, protective, almost patriarchal presence for me. .

Q: And the DPT spirit?

A: That was almost like a consciousness upgrade…

Q: Consciousness upgrade? I don’t get that from the book. It seems more of a malevolent force to watch out for.

A: I don’t think it was malevolent. I think actually if I were rewriting the book, I would probably think about it a little differently…. But I wouldn’t recommend that people take DPT. What basically happens is you go through a kind of process of transformation in which synchronicities happen and other stuff…. I think in retrospect that I was being prepared for this experience. I kind of allude to that in the book, that it had a kind of nocturnal return feeling to it. It felt like something that I’d been through before, I would say in another life.
I would never have believed in other lives four years ago. But now it seems to me very likely that there’s a kind of system of incarnations, and I may have been involved with this spirit or a similar entity at some previous state.

Q: Are you still questing? Because the piece in the New York Observer made it seem like you’re not.

A: My hope is to take [drugs] in the shamanic context. I would definitely like to go back to South America and do some journeying. But I’m kind of eager right now to do some other kinds of exploration. Doing the book, I got really interested in dream yoga, trying to master the art of dreaming. That’s something that seems really basic to alchemy.
I think past certain points, [these] substances may actually be obstructions to moving forward, to evolving. It’s sort of like a consumerist approach to higher consciousness. This is what they discovered in the ’60s also. You’re getting a kind of instant access, but you’re not doing the work that maybe is required to get there. Ayahuasca may be different, because that may turn out to have incredible medicinal benefits. I’m still thinking that through.

Q: If you were going to pick a favorite substance, what would it be?

A: I think it would be ayahuasca. It has a lot of base to it. It really feels like it roots you to the earth, And that’s an experience that people really need to have right now. You really have a sense of yourself as a simultaneously spiritual and biological organism. So you’re like brought up, and you’re brought down. That’s really an amazing double-whammy.

Q: Brought down, as in bummer?

A: Yeah, because it makes you really nauseous. You vomit, you puke your guts out, and you see these incredible visions, and they’re connected. So you’re realizing that it’s through the biology that the glamour of the spiritual realm is able to manifest itself. And that’s just really interesting.

Q: And that’s a bit different from the sudden flash of DMT?

A: DMT is almost like a technological experience. But there again, a lot of people have explored that more than I did. I really only had one major DMT shooting-through-the-tunnels trip, and that’s just because I’m a chicken. [Laughs.]

Q: In the book you talk a lot about the potential healing power of psychedelics and other ethneogens. Can you talk a little more about that?

A: What they discovered in the ’50s and ’60s is that they’re incredibly good deconditioning agents. That’s important. And some of them clearly have healing powers when they’re used carefully and ritualistically. That’s what shamanism really is all about.
[Psychedelics] offer a vast opportunity for us to have almost a definite awareness that there are a lot of other things going on in the spiritual realms, other ways of looking at reality.

Q: You also talk a lot about Prozac and other pharmaceuticals … Do you think these plant substances could be used as alternatives to Western forms of drug therapy?

A: First of all, if you go to a tribal society, living in a traditional way, most people are not depressed. If you read about early colonialists coming to the native populations, they didn’t find a bunch of depressed people sitting around. They found very happy, engaged, people who were not working all the time. Their culture was not about work. They were telling stories, they were having visionary experiences, they were decorating themselves. They were running around — and I think it was in many ways a better life than what we have now created. Depression, the kind of systemic depression that we have throughout our society, is a product of this society — a society that’s based on completely false and dehumanizing principles. And what these antidepressants are doing is they’re allowing people to kind of subsist. They’re keeping their seretonin levels boosted. And you can kind of feel the rigidity of people that are in this kind of SSRI thing. And I find it really unfortunate because if you look at psychoanalysis, or Freud or Jung, the real way to heal is to go back to the trauma and to go back through the trauma. That’s what Stan Graf was trying to do with LSD. The antidepressants, it’s more like you keep people in this permanent artificial state. I’m not even a huge fan of Freudian psychoanalysis. I just feel the approach we’ve picked is a typical fast-food approach to these problems. If you just sort of keep people stimulated at the proper levels they can vibrate along with the system.

Q: So you’re saying psychedelics have the potential to heal by opening people up to consciousness and opening them up to a way of dealing with past trauma?

A: Yeah, um, we really have to look as hard as we can at the way the traditional shamans used them. They’re really interwoven with a lot of ritual practices and a whole belief system.
Basically what I said in the book is that as Westerners, as moderns, we’re sort of renegotiating our relationship to these kind of substances. And it’s not a finished project at this point. Somehow it didn’t work psychoanalytically, somehow we can’t quite become shamans in the same way. Or maybe we can, I don’t know…

Q: You’re also kind of cautionary about advocating the use of psychedelic substances. You call Timothy Leary a “central villain” in the downfall of psychedelia.

A: Leary was a brilliant guy. I love his writing, I have quotes from him in the book that I still think about all the time. But he was also very opportunistic. Even though he was ejected from Harvard, he somehow transferred the kind of game manipulation system of the Ivy Leagues to become some sort of psychedelic avatar. And he was just very quick to tell 16-year-olds to drop out and blow their minds on a lot of LSD and leave the system. And I think that was very bad advice.

Q: Because they hadn’t established their lives in a way in which they could move to the next step?

A: Yeah. Basically what we learned from the ’60s is that people had no shamanic context, no real background, no way of understanding these alternate realms of consciousness. So they would go out and they would disintegrate. And then you’d be left with like late Pink Floyd or something.

Q: Is there a price for visionary states?

A: Well, according to Gurdieff, the higher level you reach, the greater burden you have to bear. I mean, you’re like pushing energy further and further up hill, and it can come stronger and stronger back at you. So the price is that you have to be willing to go the distance.
I would say that’s really key to my whole concept. When you look at our whole situation right now, if we’re going to evolve and not just kind of collapse, on an individual level, I think we have to somehow come around to taking responsibility for the entire situation that we’re in as a species. Which is in many ways a very dire one at the moment.

Q: So what does that mean, taking responsibility?

A: I don’t know exactly (laughs). It’s up to each person, but they have to feel that they’re part of the stream of human evolution on this planet, and they have to care about and feel compassionate for the whole situation, and work as best they can to manifest something positive out of that.

Q: I think that’s a central point of your book: that by taking these plant substances, they bring a sense of empathy for the plant world and our participation in it, but also an empathy for the plants themselves.

A: According to Steiner, plants like to be cut, but they hate to be torn out. Because they’re being used for a benefit.

Q: You talk about Leary, but people could say that you’re being a sort of nouveau-intellectual version of Leary in terms of proselytizing these things or their potential.

A: They could say that (laughs). I really just tried to do the job that I felt had to be done here. The book is just the outcome of my own personal investigation. And I say up-front that it’s subjective and incomplete. I don’t claim to be any kind of expert. People can do with it what they will.

Q: But you’re also critical of the sort of New Age psycho-questing… There’s a tendency to just paint these drugs as good angels, or something like that.

A: Yeah, on many levels we have to have a more authentic assessment of what our situation is and what our potentials are. To just have this sort of Pollyannaish view of the spiritual world is not going to be a good thing. There are all these channels… There may well be beings in the astral plane that have their own agenda which is not positive for human beings… On a lot of levels, we have to learn to be very discriminating about what’s going to be good for us, and what’s going to lead us to a positive evolution.

Q: Where was it that you were working?

A: I worked in a post office for 30 years. I’m retired.

Q: In the book you take issue with Jonathan Ott’s view that so-called Yagé tourism is bad for indigenous peoples in the Amazon. Can you explain?

A: I think he’s wrong. From what I saw, these tribes are very, very threatened. Some of them are really on the verge of extinction. And the shamans and the shamanic culture have been discredited in lot of cases — by the missionaries, by the oil companies, etc. So they’re losing their ground. That’s what I saw in this tribe, the Secoya, in Equador.
So to have what to them look like magnificently wealthy white people come down and be really fascinated by their ancient traditions — that suddenly turns the thing around and allows them to see their culture in a different light. Especially the young people of the tribe. A lot of them are about to lose contact with their old traditions. They’re all wearing the Western clothing, they’re getting hired by the oil companies as they come through. So I think that first world folks, or rich Westerners with good intentions, can actually be a positive influence at this point. That may not have been true in the ’70s, because maybe then you felt it was more unclear which way things were going to go. But to me it seems pretty obvious that these tribal cultures are not going to be able to maintain some pure tribal situation at this point.
And also, in the last 10 years, a lot of the shamans have been getting a message whenever they take their medicine that now is the time to share their knowledge with the outside world. They know the knowledge is very important.
I remember when we were driving on this bus out of that region, and I saw the oil pipeline along the road, coming out of Lago Agria in Equador. The oil pipeline was like a snake, and everyone talks about ayahuasca being the snake. And I was thinking that just like the oil’s getting out of the jungle, ayahuasca is trying to get out. I mean, ayahuasca is trying to get to us now.

Q: You really believe that?

A: Yes, for sure. I have no doubt about it.

Q: It’s not just simply the idea that the shamans or the elders are saying take this, we need you to help us?

A: My hypothesis is that it’s true what a lot of people have been saying–that ayahuasca is a sentient spirit of the natural world. A kind of sentient intelligence of the green nation. And it is definitely ready to get talking with us right now. It is eager to give us information and to work with us.

Q: What is your mission now then?

A: I think it’s to alert people to the fact that there are many other levels of consciousness involved in our situation. That there are consciousnesses that are super-sensible, that are like elves and elemental beings, and I kind of think that all of that stuff is for real now.

Q: And you didn’t before? (I’m shocked!)

A: And also that there are consciousnesses in nature. And that human beings are not these sole entities at the top of the whole hierarchical structure. In the chronology of Gurdieff, we’re like transformers of energies and transmitters of energy. And we have a sort of purpose. We’ve sort of lost the sense of why we are here, the sense of…

Q: Which is to be part of that creative process…?

A: Yeah, according to Gurdieff, it’s to transform higher and higher energies through deeper and deeper acts of will and consciousness and self-exploration and evolution. And he was very concerned writing in the early part of the century that humanity was not evolving at that point. And I think what we’ve mainly seen… It’s complicated. I kind of feel like, you know, everything that’s happening now was in some weird way totally meant to happen.

Q: To you?

A: I’m talking about the whole situation. I mean, it is very possibly a fulfillment of a lot of prophecies; the Hopi prophecy, the Mayan prophecy, the Book of Revelations.
This is an occult situation we’re in. We’re no longer in a rational situation. The kind of rationality that we believed in for the last 30 years is no longer functioning. So we need to use our empirical egos, our common sense, our discriminative faculties. And we need to realize that there are these forces at work very powerfully right now.

Q: Where did you get the strongest sense that these forces were at work?

A: It was an evolution‚ definitely after the DPT experience. I really felt like — I write about this in the book — looking at signs or corporate logos I just understood that they were kind of seals for forces that were working on us.
Crowley has this idea that in some ways, ideas are beings, thoughts are beings that actually move through reality.
So yeah, right now we have our work cut out for us. And I really think it’s beyond the point where people can continue to either respond ironically, or respond passively, or respond by stoning themselves out. I don’t think those are good responses any more. I think that people need to adapt a gesture of fearlessness here. The whole machine we’ve created in the media level is all about creating fear. From an occult perspective, we would think that fear may be a kind of energy that certain beings eat. Those beings now are really, really hungry, so they’re just absorbing these incredible amounts of fear energy into them. And we shouldn’t be feeding them fear.

Q: The refusal of fear is a radical stance right now.

A: We’re coming to a hard end with the whole dominator culture and worldview. It’s going to come to a hard and fast conclusion. And those people who are going to be left more or less in touch will be the people who are in traditional and tribal societies, in mountains and forests where they haven’t found oil. I think it’s quite possible that that’s a literal prophecy.

Q: You think that there will be some actual natural environment left? That’s a hopeful sign.

Interview with Jessica Hagedorn

(via email)

Nizhen Hsieh

8/8/04

Introduction

 

      Jessica Hagedorn

 

 

Jessica Hagedorn is a widely acclaimed novelist, poet, playwright and screenwriter, as well as a National Book Award nominee. Born in 1949 and raised in the Philippines, she moved from Manila with her family to San Francisco as a teenager. It was in the late 70s when the San Francisco artistic scene began to plateau that she moved to New York to seek an artistic jolt in perspective. She is the author of three novels, Dream Jungle, The Gangster of Love, Dogeaters and of \Danger and Beauty, a collection of selected poetry and short fiction. She also wrote the theatrical adaptation of Dogeaters}. She is the editor of the first and second \work{Charlie Chan is Dead}, both anthologies of contemporary Asian-American literature. Ishmael Reed has described her as a “vanguard artist,” a writer at the forefront crossing not just the boundaries of culture and race but of artistic mediums as well.

 

In Dream Jungle, you manipulate the linearity of colonial conquest by rendering history and space, tools we use to locate ourselves with, monumentally ambiguous. Moreover, in the updated anthology of Charlie Chan is Dead II,} it is also emphasised that being “at home in the world” is no longer a comfortable reclamation of cultural heritage as it is expected traditionally. The possibility of choice has now entered a new phase, the competitive necessity of choice. In other words, being “at home” in these times brings with it discomfort and confusion on an individual level. How do you think our definition of identity has changed since the turn of the 20th Century up till now?}

 

You answered your own question in the introductory commentary above … when you state that “being at home in the world is no longer a comfortable reclamation of cultural heritage as it is expected traditionally … ” As you can see from many of the stories in the new Charlie Chan 2 anthology, being in the world can be both beautiful and unsettling. I don’t think it’s an either/or situation, ever. I think it’s always a balancing act.

How do you think it shifted particularly after 9/11?}

 

Well, it’s become even more complicated and messy. For example  –  what does it mean to be an American and a New Yorker at this point in time? Does it mean I am pro-Bush, or anti-Bush? Does it mean I am part of the liberal elite, that I applaud Michael Moore’s documentaries? And so on, and so on. But life, as we know, is full of murk and moral ambiguities. 9/11 forced us all to think about gray areas.

 

In talking about Asian-American representation, there is always the underlying danger of obsessing over a politically correct cultural conception. How do you think we can change that rigid viewpoint?}

 

“Correctness” and rigidity in anything are attitudes which have never interested me. Life is not simple, and people can’t be boxed into being either heroes or villains. I don’t know how you can change a reader’s rigid mode of thinking, but you can certainly challenge it by continuing to present art and literature that is provocative, nuanced, surprising, more complex and profound than perhaps they are used to encountering. Hopefully, their eyes open up to a whole new world of possibilities. Humor is essential. And a sense of irony.

 

 From a cross-cultural perspective, how do you think these issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now, as you say “beautiful and unsettling?”}

 

I don’t know what issues concerning identity have helped contemporary fiction evolve to what it is now. All I know is that the range of voices that are being heard and published is a lot more diverse than when I was coming up. Finally, we are reading all sorts of stories being written by different kinds of writers! American publishers, who can be very myopic about this, are realizing that there is, indeed, a broad audience for our work.

 

 

{What are some of the non-fictional and fictional contemporary books you are currently reading? }

 

I have just finished Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin,” a brilliant, moving, and hugely entertaining novel. Am skimming through Dale Peck’s “Hatchet Jobs,” a collection of his literary criticisms. Some of his essays are right on target and very funny.  I have also read Han Ong’s latest novel, “The Disinherited,” which is wonderful.

 

{In your experience with Asian-American Writers’ Workshop and Basement Workshop, who were some of the writers you encountered that were exceptionally inspiring? And why?}

 

Both Basement Workshop in NYC and Kearney Street Workshop in San Francisco were important to my growing up as a poet and fiction writer. I met a wonderful community of writers such as Shawn Wong, Oscar Penaranda, Serafin and Lou Syquia, Al Robles, Geraldine Kudaka, Russell Leong, Kitti Tsui and many others in the Bay Area; at Basement, I met Fay Chiang, Richard Oyama, and a slew of actors, dancers, musicians and choreographers like Teddy Yoshikami, Jason Hwang. Tzi Ma, and visual artists like John Woo. At Asian-American Writers’ Workshop, I have encountered some of the best and the brightest young Asian-American writers, poets and playwrights who are working today. Folks like Quang Bao, Derek Nguyen, Christian Langworthy, Meera Nair, Monique Truong, Timothy Liu, Philip Huang, Joel Tan, Gina Apostol, Bino Realuyo … And we can’t forget writers from Hawaii like RZ Linmark, Lois-Ann Yamanaka, Darrell Lum, Marie Hara, Cathy Song, Wing Tek Lum, and Eric Chock, just to name a few. My goodness, I could go on and on. It’s inspiring because the community has grown and matured, and I think we are in an exciting place in time.

{Are there any specific foreign writers that especially appeal to you, particularly those who write about the neo-colonial experience?}

 

I am looking forward to reading the Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, … I love Garcia Marquez, Manuel Puig, Arundhati Roy, J.M. Coetzee, Cabrera Infante, early Rushdie … my list of favorites is quite long.

 

{What is your perspective on your own post-colonial experience?}

 

I don’t think that’s for me to ponder. But I wonder if it’s possible for me to write a novel that is entirely set in the U.S. and deals with the aftermath of 9/11. How post-colonial is that?

 

{What other mediums of art such as dance and musical performances, plays, photography/video installations and art exhibits have influenced your approach to writing?}

 

Music is very influential to my writing, as are theater and film. I love writing dialogue, and I think a lot of my writing is visual and very cinematic.

 

{Why has music been so influential? What particular genre of music and which musicians? }

 

From the Art Ensemble of Chicago to Sly Stone, Prince, Bjork, Macy Gray, The Roots, and what is going on today. The music of the world.

 

{What plays have you seen recently? }

 

A contemporary adaptation of “Antigone” with an Asian-American cast, and excerpts from a new play by Tony Kushner with Laura Bush as its main character, called “Only We Who Guard The Mystery Shall Be Unhappy.”

 

{Who are a few of your favourite film directors?}

 

Pedro Almodovar is god. I love the Godard of “Weekend” and “Breathless,” Wong Kar-Wai, Jim Jarmusch, Michael Mann. American film noir from the 40s and 50s. Also Alfonso Cuaron and the guy who directed “Amores Perros”  –  I believe his last name is Inarritu.

 

{You describe your writing as being both aesthetically “visual” and “cinematic.” What is your purpose? Is it to provoke a more immediate and visceral response in the reader?  }

 

Probably. But I don’t give it much thought. It just happens.

 

{Where did the idea for \work{Dream Jungle} come from?}

 

From an actual historical event which occurred in 1971. A so-called “Stone Age” tribe was discovered in the Philippine rain forest by a man named Manda Elizalde. Then, of course, there was the filming of “Apocalypse Now.”

 

{Being of mixed parentage where you describe your roots as being “dubious,” hybridity has always been one of the essential aspects of your art, how has that also influenced your writing? }

 

Hybridity keeps me from being rigid about most things. It has taught me to appreciate the contradictions in the world and in my life. I scavenge from the best.

 

{Why do you think it is important to utilize other mediums of art to express oneself?}

 

It opens you up to different ways of expression and the endless possibilities of creation.

 

{Do you ever consider returning to the Philippines, to impart the tools and skills you have learned here in America in crafting your art, back to the community  (specifically the youth), so that they may learn how to empower themselves through artistic expression?}

 

Your question makes me cringe. If people want to invite me back to share my experiences or writing skills, then fine … I’m happy to share what I know. But the thought of going back on my own, to “impart the tools and skills” that I “have learned here in America” (as you put it) seems somewhat condescending. I try to resist that kind of missionary zeal.

 

{Let me rephrase the question. Having moved to the U.S. from the Philippines as a teenager and having acquired a cross-cultural artistic experience as a result of that transition, do you ever return to the Philippines to conduct writing workshops for young aspiring writers over there as you have done here? }

 

I’ve done readings and informal talks, but I haven’t yet been invited to conduct a writing workshop.

 

{Name one comfort and one discomfort. (Explain.)}

 

Comfort: food. Food as cultural memory, food as sensory pleasure.

 

Discomfort: money. Never having enough. Anxiety.

 

{Do you think all this has bridged or deepened your own identity conflict? }

 

I have no idea.

 

{Has becoming a mother changed the way you express your cultural attitude? }

 

Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer. Everything matters. Time is precious.

 

{Is there anything else you would like to add? }

 

Nope.