….In Space, verily, are both sun and moon, lightning, stars and fire. Through Space one calls out; through Space one hears; through Space one answers. In Space one enjoys himself; in Space one does not enjoy himself. In Space one is born; unto Space one is born. Reverence Space.
Chandogya Upanishad*
The central focus of this body of work was the recovery of creative power and personal integrity through symbolic enactment within the context of the academic art world. The result of this work was not solely the culminating installation, Waveicles of Love (slide 6). The work as a whole occurred over a period of time, approximately one academic year, in which I as the artist committed myself to a series of acts of purification using my own life as the medium. These acts included cleaning, fasting, meditating, and walking. The work was a process of creation by delicate destruction. The authenticity of the process was guided by my own feelings and power of intuition rather than its physical manifestation. This presented a difficult challenge for me as the artist presenting the work to others and for those charged with judging the work. At the outset my intention was not to challenge the institution but rather to investigate my own truth and validity as an artist.
*Robert Ernest Hume, The Thirteen Principle Upanishads: Translated from the Sanskrit (Glasgow: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 257.
To Produce or Perform?
An Evolution
I asked myself the following questions: Is the work ‘real’ without sanctioned physical documentation of the process? To what degree does the work need to be witnessed/corroborated for it to be validated as a meaningful and significant art action? Is one witness sufficient? Can this work function within the context of an academic institution? Does it need to be validated in order to exist as a work of art? What sustains and supports such a process of seeking in art?
As an artist it became imperative to ask myself whether the production of objects was enough to satisfy my ongoing investigation of truth itself. During this period it became increasingly obvious that it was not. The next question was how to function as an artist when the art object ceases to be necessary. Performance seemed the logical answer, but how? Personal authenticity, intimacy even, became tantamount in my view. In general, I felt that performance relied too much on the spectacle, communication via the artifice of theatre.
Contemporary experiments in relational aesthetics seemed to offer another alternative direction for their interdisciplinary approach to the arenas of social action and creative problem solving in the public sphere. While Dada, Fluxus, and Happenings were also models for what I was looking for, none of these references provided the sufficient context for what I was attempting. The direct confrontation with issues surrounding the human spirit and spirituality in civic life seemed to be either absent or veiled by cool intellectualism. I was looking to restore the voice of the heart, the wisdom of emotions and of the spirit. I wanted to remove the distinction between artist and participant as well as the difference between the places of action and observation in order to uncover an intrinsic oneness. I was seeking to fuse two dualistic roles, that of the creator and the one experiencing the creation. What I was after was something quiet and still and interior, without direct physical manifestation.
I processed these questions initially by working with physical tangible space and the items housed in these architectural spaces. Subsequently the studio itself became my medium. I drew a dividing line down the center of the studio. One side was left unaltered. The floor and walls of the other side were scrubbed, scraped, primed and painted a glossy white. I created my own version of a white cube in which to contemplate my next move and to observe myself and others interacting within this space. I conducted conversations in the white room observing the effects of the transformation of space on the duration and theme of these conversations, often metaphysical in nature.
The white room required me to purge and release a lot of material goods, the kinds of things from which art is made. This act signified a break from traditional modes of art making. An intimate performance of sorts was enacted in the room, thirty words for thirty days (slide 5), the result of recordings made during a thirty day fast. Thirty days of recorded daily (rambling) insight about our culture of consumption were distilled down to thirty single words which were shared with a circle of guests in the white room. I in my white bathrobe held each of their hands, looked in their eyes, spoke one word and asked that the individual to whom it was spoken repeat it. The idea was to bring those present into my process in an intimate way by extracting words, describing a personal journey, and connecting them to a more universal journey, that of empowerment through self-realization. The action could have been seen as a sort of ceremony or rite, while in effect it closed the studio.
The Process of Negation
Fade to Black – Waveicles of Love
After releasing the white cube, I began to consider the black void; the womb of creation, the nothing from which something emerges. I committed to a deeper exploration, further purification-purification of the mind. I withdrew the still nascent work from the scrutiny of the institution for a ten day, ten hour per day meditation without speaking at the California Vipassana Center in North Fork. I spent over 100 hours in Vipassana (‘seeing things as they are’) meditation. I believed this was necessary to prepare for the final phase of the work, the thesis exhibition. Metaphorically speaking, I entered the void of creation. I had to be willing to risk losing everything, including my degree. I emerged prepared to turn the white cube into the black void. Inner, formless, of the void, the feminine principle met; the world of reason, convention, intellect, the masculine principle, the white cube, the container of meaning, arbitor of art. My creative conviction to persist in this work represented a fissure, a break from one guiding principle to the next. The black room represented the feminine principle like Kali, the Hindu black mother, both creator and destroyer. The white cube represented the masculine principle, the institution. A collision occurred when the status quo of the white became disrupted by the black. I was forced to negotiate the terrain. Waveicles of Love, the installation, revealed itself in a hostile environment, the gallery under the jurisdiction of the academic institution. My quest for authenticity as an artist and creative being was taken as an affront to the institution by some. I made a declaration to walk seventeen point three miles from my home to the gallery on the day of the opening, creating mitigating circumstances in which I removed a portion of the sacred act that was the creation of this work from the jurisdiction of the institution. The walk was a symbolic way for me to transport the true black room behind my eyes delivering my body to the space of my disembodied voice, it was a way to circumvent the protocol that would silence this voice, this act.
Physically, the gallery space was transformed into a black void concealing the architecture and absorbing the light, allowing the space to become an indeterminate space, an atmosphere of pure energy. The energy flow was illuminated by moving currents of air created by fans, the transmission of recorded voice arrangements (fragments of personal poetry), and the allowance of limited natural light coming in through the opening and closing of doors as one entered or exited the space. A singular black light bulb focused on a small pile of white sugar at one end of the room was the only static visual object in the space. The black light source lowered almost to the floor, looking at an abject pile of sugar as it were (although it could have been any accumulation of particulates) served the purpose of providing a point of focus and safety in a space which offered no clear indication of how one might behave in it. The piece was constructed with the cooperation of nine persons, including myself and eight volunteers, taking approximately forty hours to install over the space of two days. The white walls of the gallery were covered with black plastic shopping bags chosen for their electrostatic sensitivity, responding to wind currents in the room as well as human touch and the proximity of human presence. Plastic bags referred to the everyday detritus of a consumer culture and earlier works. The bags were slit open and hung in a layered and overlapping pattern much like feathers on a bird. The feathering of the walls along with the addition of the currents of air created by the fans breathed life into the space. The touch of each installers hand on each bag contributed to the imbued energy signature revealing itself in the subtle animation of the physical space. The concrete floor was covered with large rolls of black set paper. The offering of the room was convoluted by a series of barriers; the darkness, the hum of the fans, the disruption of the opening and closing of the door, and the muffled voices speaking over one another in the recordings. The voices seemed to want to communicate something and yet they could not be heard. Clear sentence fragments were audible intermittently but were soon enveloped by a cacophony of the whispering specter of voices. The undulation of the voices coming in and out of clarity, singularity and unity, nearness and far away, evoked a sense of traveling time and traversing distance. The Upanishad quote in the epigraph with a request to remove ones shoes, and “sit down, go in, and listen” was the only explanation of how one might engage the space. These postings at the threshold were most often disregarded and the piece itself entertained few visitors. Halfway through the run of the exhibition I decided to add another obstruction, of a waving black curtain of bags just inside the entrance to the space further obscuring the light coming through the doors. The ‘curtain’ was composed of individual lengths of bags tied together end to end like lyrical ladders waving in the undulating currents of air, further dislocating the sense of space.
Conclusion
As an artist I am most influenced by the often dissident voices of Christian Boltanski, Robert Irwin, Joseph Beuys, and Marina Abramovic. It is their conviction to speak their raw truth about universal human experiences, whether personal, political, social, or transcendent that continues to motivate me in my own investigations under the auspices of art. While Waveicles of Love was conceived in my ignorance of other works like it such as Yves Kline’s empty room and Joseph Beuys’ 1973 Documenta piece, in which he sat in the gallery discussing his views on politics and art for 100 days, I now find validation and a lineage.
In the end this work is about respect for the mystery of creation in all her forms. The creative act is an act of freedom, a means of liberating an expression that must be expressed regardless of the context in which it might find itself. This work was not complete until it was dismantled in that golden moment when the black void turned again into the white cube. The completion of this work is these words; in these words the truth of this work is liberated and let go.