more of the same

reality and the imagination, take four hundred fifty nine

Actually, I’ve lost count.

By now, I’ve explicated all the themes I originally set out to incorporate into this blog, and am flying as blind as most of the bloggers out there, not to mention the rest of humanity.

Given that our notion of what constitutes reality is shaped, but not mechanistically determined, by what we experience, I am struck by how bizarrely diverse that set of experiences can be, among a set of people who know one another, and who all live in the same putatively all-encompassing advanced postindustrial society. I am especially struck by how many of them live in the last possible place where you would expect to find them.

In other words, most of the people with whom I come into daily contact have as little to do with the presumptive concerns of most Americans as would some Alpine villager or dweller on the Bolivian altiplano. Given the ubiquity of American popular culture across the planet, some of them have rather less in common with mainstream American concerns than the Bolivian or Central European would be likely to have.

This is why a novel like Against the Day is such a vertiginous, doubly refractive experience for improbable readers like me. Viewing its subject matter through the prism of serial burlesques of all the forms of fiction prevalent circa 1908, as updated for twenty-first century usage, and containing offhand references to obscure controversies of that day that only odd folks such as I and the people I seem to encounter frequently would know about, the novel nonetheless deals with types that seem quite related to my everyday experience. It’s kind of realistic, in other words.

Not quite as precisely as John Crowley’s Aegypt quartet, but enough.

One of the dilemmas of my unwillingness to upgrade my LJ category to allow me to post photographs (I gather that all I have to do is be willing to look at ads on my LJ pages to accomplish this) is that occasional visuals are relegated to the status of userpics. Such as, for example, the one entitled “Sarai and I,” showing me in conversation with a belly dancer whom I first met in 1988 when she was showing assemblage artwork at the gallery where I later curated my first show, “Angels and Erasures.” (She was then many years and a couple of creative careers distant from taking up ethnic and tribal dance.) She hails from New Orleans, from the family that operated the famed Napoleon House, if I recall correctly. She was performing at an art opening at the Lowe Gallery when the photo was taken.

For the record, we were discussing the different medical problems of early versus extremely advanced middle age.

I bring this up because I began Friday afternoon with the first of my two posts on Louis Monza’s septuagenarian ventures into visionary socialist California culture circa the end of the sixties. This chain of associations led me into a never-quite-completed comparison between the multimedia traditions of that decade and the digitally informed multimedia spectacles of the present.

One of the points of Friday afternoon’s post was that between 1965 and 1970, painting and sculpture and all the traditional media from Art Nouveau prints to Tibetan tangkas were as like to be found in the midst of carefully organized surround-sound chaos as in the quiet of a museum. People found it not at all anomalous to experience them in the museum one day and slide-projected on the wall of a performance space the next day. The art could and did produce altered states without requiring any chemical enhancement.

So of course at day’s end on Friday, I unexpectedly found myself at yet another of the Caren-West-organized spectaculars wherein the simultaneity of sensual immersions and intents of spiritual enhancement….

Oh, hell, let’s stop trying to explicate the deliberately conflicting emotional stimuli, and just say this latest Lowe Gallery opening included flamenco performances as counterpoint to Michael David’s paintings and photographs, the largest of which featured images of male and female semi-nudes in the posture and cape of Manet’s dead toreador. Related bodies of work included provocative transmutations of Christian and Buddhist iconography that were neither flippantly cynical nor particularly given to piety. Michael David comes out of a history of mostly abrasive New York aesthetics, though his art doesn’t resemble the reflexively jaded work of the decades from which it springs. He kicks you in the ass in order to point you in a direction. You, however, have to figure out where you are going.

The gallery operates with conscious, controversial exactitude on an edge of multisensory seduction (Bill Lowe has used some fairly direct sexual metaphors in discussing what it takes to get people to see the art in front of their noses), and has its own heterodox visions of other realities. So somehow, the rose petals piled up beneath Michael David’s earlier work, which incorporated actual roses into built-up mixed media wall pieces, seemed no more excessive than the flamenco dancers. Which is to say, wretchedly excessive in a more reticent decade, but vaguely appropriate for this one. Caren West is a savvy producer for the crowd Lowe wishes to attract, and perhaps alchemically transmute into a more reflective species of contemporary consumer.

There is room for debate about the motivation and the method, as there so often is with the folks I discuss in this blog. Many of life’s most interesting characters combine the features of guru and carnival barker in near-equal measure. (The ones who particularly fascinate me are the ones who tell you this right up front. One particularly unsettling individual effectively announces, “I am now going to exploit you in a particularly blatant manner. There we go, you reacted just exactly like I explained that you would. Wanna see me do it again?”)

The trickster figure in world mythology (about whom Bill Doty has written a particularly excellent book) is a spiritual guide who seems to be, and in fact is, anything but spiritual.

Clement Greenberg, could he have been resurrected for the occasion, would have run from the room screaming, but it occurred to me that the Lowe Gallery’s event was effectively a 2007 version of an Allan Kaprow happening, with the gallerygoers an essential part of the performance. The art on the walls, as I’ve said, is a semi-retrospective of a painter who had his first show at Sidney Janis a quarter-century or so ago at age 26. It ranges from subtle and understated to bluntly confrontational, rather like the millennium and the milieu in which the event in question occurred.

Flannery O’Connor said of her Southern-grotesque fiction with a Catholic subtext that when dealing with the nearly blind, one had to draw pictures with very broad and cartoonish strokes. Bill Lowe believes that when dealing with a generation accustomed to flash and hype, it is necessary to stage a spectacle in order to bring them face to face with something else entirely, something that they may eventually find themselves seeing with a rapt, silent contemplation that they never knew was possible.

I don’t share all of Lowe’s assumptions, or all of his aesthetic, but his basic point is well taken. One of the techniques of Peter Brook and other venerable figures of the experimental theatre is to begin where the audience is, perceptually, then lead them little by little into a state of consciousness that is quite other than the ordinary one in which they began. When it doesn’t work (and the techniques I’m thinking of involve the withdrawal of our usual mile-a-minute stimuli), the audience gets incredibly bored and walks out midway through. When it does work, the audience member walks out with a temporarily altered sense of time and level of perceptual sensitivity.

I’m not sure that enough rose petals to recall the feasts of Heliogabalus are the way to accomplish such a goal, but the idea of trying to reach contemplative stasis by way of sensory overload is a more hallowed tradition than a Lowe Gallery opening would make it seem.