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crowtrobotx · 3 years

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Tag 9 people to learn more about their interests!

tagged by: @le-cat-nipp ❤️❤️ Thank you, dear 😘

i’m tagging: I am literally so awkward about this lol if you’re reading this and want to do it, consider yourself tagged

MUSIC

fave genre? I’m a folk, alt rock, indie rock and classic rock gal. There’s a few modern/pop folks I’m hugely fond of as well. I’m not anti-any type of music tbh.

fave artist? Fleet Foxes, Of Monsters and Men, Lord Huron, Florence + the Machine, Hozier, Lorde, Simon & Garfunkel, Bob Dylan, Hozier, Janelle Monáe, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Billie Eilish, Old Crow Medicine Show, Lil Nas X, Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, David Bowie

fave song? Oh man of all time? Fugg. I am very partial to “Shake It Off” by F+TM but this answer could change daily lol.

most listened song recently? Long Lost - Lord Huron

5 fave lyrics? I am not sure if this means “songs with the best lyrics” or “favorite lines” …. I’m gonna go with the latter

“And it echoes when I breathe/Until all you'll see is my ghost/Empty vessel, crooked teeth/Wish you could see” I of the Storm, OMAM

“Words hung above, but never would form/Like a cry at the final breath that is drawn/Remember me, love, when I'm reborn/As a shrike to your sharp and glorious thorn” - Shrike, Hozier

“Oh, you fool, there are rules I am coming for you/Darkness brings evil things, oh, the reckoning begins/I tried to warn you when you were a child/I told you not to get lost in the wild” - The Yawning Grave, Lord Huron

“The fabric of your flesh, pure as a wedding dress/Until I wrap myself inside your arms, I cannot rest/The saints can't help me now, the ropes have been unbound/I hunt for you with bloodied feet across the hallowed ground” - Howl, F+TM

“Though I liked summer light on you/If we ride a winter-long wind/Well time's not what I belong to/And you're not the season you're in” - I’m Not My Season, Fleet Foxes

BOOKS

fav book genre? Sci-fi, fantasy, horror

fav writer? VE Schwab, Neil Gaiman, Ursula K Le Guin, Haruki Murakami, Patrick Rothfuss, Samantha Shannon, JRR Tolkien

fav book? “American Gods” by Neil Gaiman. I have a lot of favorites but that one wins every time.

fav book series? I really love The Lord of the Rings. It’s a classic but it’s so special to me.

comfort book? “Little Fires Everywhere” by Celeste Ng. It’s set very close to where I grew up!

perfect book to read on a rainy day? “The Slow Regard of Silent Things” by Patrick Rothfuss

fave characters? Sandor Clegane, Addie LaRue, Lila Bard, Gimli, Remus Lupin, Sirius Black, Thorin Oakenshield

5 quotes from your fave book that you know by heart?

“Every hour wounds. The last one kills.”

“There’s none so blind as those who will not listen.”

“Gods die. And when they truly die they are unmourned and unremembered. Ideas are more difficult to kill than people, but they can be killed, in the end.”

“I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it.”

“‘Hey,’ said Shadow. ‘Huginn or Muninn, or whoever you are.’

The bird turned, head tipped, suspiciously, on one side, and it stared at him with bright eyes.

‘Say 'Nevermore,'’ said Shadow.

‘Fuck you,’ said the raven.”

TV AND MOVIES

fave tv/movie genre? Similar to books, I love sci-fi, fantasy and horror - I also love documentaries.

fave movie? Spirited Away. Hands down.

comfort movie? Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. First hyperfixation 🥴

movie you watch every year? I traditionally watch “A Christmas Story” at least five times every holiday season lol. Fuck yeah Cleveland!

fave tv show? Black Sails

comfort tv show? Mystery Science Theater 3000

most rewatched tv show? Oh geeze. Either MST3K, Cowboy Bebop, Game of Thrones, Parks & Rec, Frasier, King of the Hill or X-Files

5 fave characters? Fox Mulder, Crow T. Robot, Captain James Flint, Dale Gribble and Catra

#about me #long post

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thotfuss · 5 years

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Exactly how many times do we have to have the “don’t romanticize serial killers and rapists” talk like...y’all. Ted Bundy was a piece of shit. He killed people. he killed a LOT of people! Notoriety and being a household name is exactly what he wanted. I’m not saying that an interest in true crime is bad, I get that fascination and it’s one of my favorite subjects as well but does it really not strike you as completely fucked that everyone can recognize a murderer’s name but his victims constantly go unnamed and unremembered? so yeah, watch the movie and the documentary if you want but please take a minute to remember the 30+ women whose lives he ruined and stole, purely because he was a misogynistic disgusting piece of shit. Spare a minute to remember all the lives he cut short before you go on and on about how “smart” and “charismatic” he was.

Take a minute for Karen Sparks, who he attacked in her own bed as she slept. Take a moment for Lynda Ann Healy, who he abducted while she slept. Take a moment for Donna Gail Manson, who he abducted as she walked to a concert, for Susan Elaine Rancourt, who disappeared after a meeting at her college, for Roberta Parks who vanished from her campus, for Brenda Carol Ball who disappeared on her way home from a tavern. For Georgann Hawkins who was abducted from her sorority house, for Janice Ann Ott who was abducted from a state park in broad daylight, For Denise Marie Naslund who was taken 4 hours after Ott, from the same location. for Nancy Wilcox, who was 16 when she was assaulted and strangled. for Melissa Smith and Laura Ann Aime, who were both 17, for Carol DaRonch, who was able to escape from his car. For Debra Jean Kent, a 17 year old who vanished after leaving a school play. For Caryn Campbell, who disappeared from a hotel hallway and was missing for 36 days before her body was recovered. For Julie Cunningham and Denise Oliverson, whose bodies were never found. For Lynette Culver, a 12 year old whose body was never found. For Susan Curtis, a 15 year old whose body was never found. For Margaret Elizabeth Bowman, Lisa Levy, Karen Chandler, Kathy Kleiner, and Cheryl Thomas, who were assaulted and bludgeoned in their sorority house as they slept. . For Kimberly Leach, a 12 year old abducted from her junior high.For the countless other victims who he will never take credit for because they were “too close to home,” “too close to family,” or involved “victims who were very young.”

tcc gremlins dont touch this post

#i didnt word this how i wanted to hmmm #mine #rape tw #tcc dont touch this #ted bundy

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skull-designs · 5 years

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Saddened and shocked.....

......By the Channel 4 documentary I watched last night about how the WW1 dead from Eastern Africa were treated by the Imperial War Graves Commission (now the Commonwealth War Graves Commission).

Yes, things were very different then but now we need to do something. I’m not sure what; I am aware the CWGC has a budget and possibly the East African situation is the tip of a horrendous colonial iceberg.....but we need to respect and remember ALL who were killed in these dreadful conflicts.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2019/nov/10/the-unremembered-britains-forgotten-war-heroes-review-david-lammy-condemns-a-shameful-history

https://www.channel4.com/programmes/unremembered-britains-forgotten-war-heroes

Today I am still going to post pictures of some of the various Crosses Of Sacrifice I have come across though as a mark of respect.

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foxhenki-blog · 5 years

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Decolonizing Lovecraft: Part One

This is, at its core, a chaos magic essay. As a librarian, one of the principal features of chaos magic that attracted me to the model was the ability to draw inspiration and tech from literature. When one connects literature and the occult, it is not a far leap to Lovecraft, but Lovecraft is sticky. Lovecraft, the author, is problematic and I suspect that he knew that and cultivated it to some extent. The worst of him is his overt racism, as a person, which on a few occasions (much less than is popularly suspected) leaks into his fiction.

This creates a situation for those that want to pull on the threads in Lovecraft for chaos magic purposes. The magic-users that I run with hold no quarter for racism, oppression, sexism, misogyny. Some who approach Lovecraft choose to ignore the full implications of his body of work. Much like those authors who he bestowed the Mantle of Cthulhu upon as he was ripped from the world with a stomach full of cancer, these magicians pick and choose elements from his work for use in their tech and ignore the rest. This isn’t helpful. In doing so the door is opened for white power, proud boys, and other occult-appropriators to latch onto their work as their own citing the facets of the author they resonate with as a connection to the tech the original chaos mages developed. In order to make Lovecraft useful to the twenty-first century chaos magician, his work (not his person, which is not ours to manipulate) needs to decolonized.

My approach to decolonizing Lovecraft is through the initial use of what I call ‘esoteric theory.’ Esoteric theory is a version of reader-response theory that deconstructs a text with 1) the intent to draw practical magical tech and 2) decolonize the text so that it is forever useful to animist, chaos magicians, and any others that would look to the body of work for similar inspiration.

Literary theory isn’t familiar to everyone, nor is decolonization-as-a-process, so I will attempt to jailbreak and synthesize the two here. Humanities theory in general and Literary theory specifically is different from scientific theory in a very straightforward way. Scientific theory makes predictions that the practitioners go about to try and prove through the collection and application of empirical evidence. Literary theory is a cartographic event, an attempt at mapping. (Iser, 5) If literature is to be used for the purposes of practical magic, then the further it is mapped, the more detailed the cartography of ideas, characters and meanings, the more effective it will be in practice. If literary theory is to be decolonized then it also has to have within its structure a model that is inclusive of a resistance to empire and an embrace of hybridity. (Loomba, 199)

Our brand of literary investigation, esoteric theory, seeks to piece together data pulled from the framework of occult teachings — those stretching back to Alexandria and beyond to Neolithic spiritual practices lost to working memory but encoded in our language and culture. These data points are then held up to the light of resistance and hybridity, purified by its heat. It is impossible to predict the relationships that any given body of literature will have with a model of resistance. It is also impossible to divine any practical outcomes when being inclusive of hybridity, for hybrids are by nature unpredictable in appearance and nature. We, therefore, can not put forth any ‘laws’ that govern the process of esoteric theory. This alone makes our approach highly compatible with chaos magic. (Iser, 5)

Esoteric Theory, when applied to a text or corpus of texts is an attempt to piece together the elements of the text to create a framework that is usable by the 21st. century magic-user. It begins with a basic presupposition and evolves as the text is experienced through an esoteric lens. Bringing the element of decolonization in from our overall theoretical approach to a text, we find ourselves using a hag stone to view the text for literature isn’t only the words on the page but it is also the other stories that the text works to exclude. (Loomba, 201) Lovecraftian fiction is not just the monsters and madness on the surface. Between the lines of the text itself are the ghosts of colonization. They haunt the books there on your shelf and the ones and zeros of his corpus as it is presented online. Using our theoretical hag stone, we view the author’s body of fiction and see it for what it is — an ecosystem of the seen and unseen, interacting in hidden and unremembered ways. Our hag stone is a representative of the primary idea that separates humanities theory from empirical theory. Empericism is interested in discovering the ‘immutable’ laws of nature and literary theory is the process of triggering associations from the text that are generated from the interplay between what the reader reads and the ghosts of colonization that have infected the text. (Iser, 6) Magic has been doing this since the very beginning through the use of symbols and correspondences between different magical systems and magically-adjacent cultures.

The act of applying esoteric theory, which owes much of its approach to reader-response theory, is in itself an act of decolonization. The analysis of literature is most often approached with the author’s intent and meaning in mind. This is particularly so with Lovecraftian Fiction. Picking up our hag stone and looking at this corpus, we no longer see the author or the attempts to derive his true meaning from the volumes of *evidence* he left in the form of his correspondences. Peering through the hole in our stone we see the characters, we feel our response to them, and we see the ghosts of time and place that haunt the white space of the page. Reading Lovecraft with the intent to derive magical tech from the themes and and events in the text is not an act of problem-solving — it isn’t a puzzle to be solved — rather, it is an act of approaching a context-related understanding of the text with our very chaos magic goal in mind. (Iser, 7) Evaluating Lovecraft through the lens of esoteric theory is necessary to derive whether it is useful or not useful as a source for the practice of chaos magic. Can we understand both the practice of magic and the text better through this enterprise? Is the context actually relevant to occult practices (as many modern critics assert it is not)?

One text I found great inspiration in is the 1998 series of essays entitled ‘Post-Colonial Shakespeares’. One of our principle implements in our interrogation of Lovecraftian fiction is comparison. Looking to the near-universal texts of Shakespeare it is easy to find archetypes that we can speak with about our investigation. Othello is one of these archetypal forms. Othello is a man out of culture, but of his time. He is a penultimate ‘Other’. His interactions with the other characters in the play are a method of self-defense and a survival narrative utilized to gain power. (Loomba, 202) His power and stature in the play are unquestioned on the stage. His presence there, amongst the epicenter of both Imperialism and Occultism — 16th century Venice — allows one to take many different directions when investigating how his Otherness connects to a Post-Colonial archetype. (Loomba, 167) His cultural isolation, his inner narrative, and the world he inhabits can be plugged into Lovecraft in as many different ways. The most useful for us at this moment is how this comparison further elucidates the approach of esoteric theory.

Esoteric theory is an aesthetic response to how a piece or body of literature impacts a reader. (Iser, 57) Lovecraftian fiction is not a documentary, although it contains many documentary elements of the time and space in which the author lived. The Lovecraftian corpus is a thing that was brought into the world, a thing that did not previously exist. The experience of reading Lovecraft through an esoteric lens is akin to wearing occult virtual reality glasses. Traditional criticism of Lovecraft searches for the intent of the author, as a man, or the meaning that the text is supposed to convey. This is problematic with weird fiction in general and (like so many other things) in particular with Lovecraft. The search for the author’s intention is a Romantic frame and as such, can be considered a tool of colonization. (Iser, 58) This view does not serve our purpose, for even with an author like Lovecraft it is highly improbable that he ‘intended’ his works to be read as a grimoire or to be used as source material for practical magic. Therefore, the traditional approach to reading Lovecraft in a search for the meaning he was trying to convey will have to be supplanted with one that speaks to our own intentions for the text that is rooted in our own context as 21st. century magic-users. In shifting away from the Romantic frame we are turning on back on the colonizers and are free to interrogate the text for the elements that serve the purposes of decolonization in a legitimate and integrous manner.

Lovecraftian fiction is visceral and cannot be said to leave the reader untouched. Reading Lovecraft through an esoteric lens is closer to an event that happens to us rather than an action that is taken by us. The structures, the tropes, the often repeated memes and well-lived in environments are processed by the reader on many different levels. Lovecraftian fiction is also, and most importantly, a gateway the magic-user can walk through to experience the interplay between her own sociohistorical context and that of the characters in the fictional world. This creates two nodes with an edge between the text and its own context and another between the text and the magician experiencing the event of Lovecraftian fiction in search for methods of expanding and decolonizing her own practice. (Iser, 60) In applying the framework of esoteric theory to Lovecraft we eclipse the author himself, we erase him from the formula. Instead, we look at the context of the world around the text itself as it was being written. Simultaneously we apply our own reactions and our own sociopolitical context to the text. It is through the tension between these two points that we are able to derive the truths we require to put the text to use in our practice.

Esoteric theory is a search for ‘blanks’ in the text. Lovecraftian fiction, aside from a few examples of long-form novellas, is famously fragmented and short. One cannot help but feel that there is more to the story than the couple of paragraphs given us to experience on most occasions. Not even the most voluminous body of fiction can tell a tale in its entirety, thus ‘blanks’ are negotiated by all readers of fiction. Esoteric theory actively seeks out those blanks, the patterns they form, how the blanks are connected to the text and to each other, and uses this exploration as a jumping off point for ideation. This is the power of the approach. As with the monsters and mythos of Lovecraftian fiction, the magical tech and the tools of decolonization are rarely explicitly seen. As we experience the event of Lovecraftian Fiction, we meander down different forest paths, sometimes losing the path when we encounter blanks in the text. (Iser, 64-65) The lion’s share of Lovecraft’s narrators admit (often openly, sometimes in subtext) that they are and have been materialists and are loyal to empirical and colonial systems that placed them in a position of privilege — in the course of every tale the empiricist is either converted to a view of reality that breaks the materialist paradigm or (in the absence of conversion) that individual goes quite mad. What the text says is that the world is material and that the immaterial is irrational and incomprehensible. What the text does not say, the blank that it leaves for the reader, is that the true nature of reality is magical and the materialist paradigm is wrong.

Lovecraftian fiction was written for readers that are not us. Our sociohistorical context is vastly different from the weird fiction audience of the 20s, 30s and 40s. It makes little sense for us to view ourselves as the audience of the author. Nevertheless, we are engaged in a dance with the fictitious reader — a three-way tango between the fictitious reader and the narrator who evaluates the events of the text from yet a different sociohistorical perspective than either us or the fictitious audience. (Iser, 65-66) Lovecraftian Fiction is driven by the narrator in almost all instances — and sometimes as Burleson points out, it is driven by narrators nested within narrators. When reading his corpus through an esoteric lens, it is important to understand that the narrator is an agent in the text and not the author speaking to the reader. The text-agent is evaluating the events from his or her own perspective inside the universe of the text and the reader is informed through the attitudes towards the event which are built between the fictitious read and the real reader. With works written and taking place outside the real reader’s own temporal frame of reference, this transformation should be especially intense. Shining this light on the racism expressed in Lovecraftian Fiction we have the following interaction: The narrator is an agent inside the fictional universe. This agent (overwhelmingly a materialist whose fortune and privilege stems directly from colonial ancestors) reacts to other agents and events in the universe in a racist way. We then have the fictitious reader — the only agent in the process that interacts directly with the author. The author might or might not have had the intent to speak to a similarly racist fictitious reader. Given what is known of the author’s own personal life outside of this interaction it is more likely that the author is either expressing a personal value system to the fictitious reader or he is reflecting elements of his own temporal station in an unconscious way. None of that matters because the author is gone and the fictitious reader he wrote for has gone with him. All that is left is the text, its agents, its events and the real reader. The work that is left to do is for the real reader to form and understand her own attitudes towards the text. This part of the process happens when the real reader negotiates what Iser calls ‘negations.’ Negations in the text are the dominant positions of the narrator that us, the real reader, question and challenge. Without these challenges, this comparison, there could be no growth towards the goal of decolonization. Further, these negations were originally posed to the fictitious weird fiction reader of the early twentieth century and require their deck of archetypes and hidden meanings be reshuffled and reinterpreted in our esoteric critical frame. (Iser, 66) When working with the Lovecraftian Corpus for the purposes of deriving magical tech in a post-colonial, animist-centric world - the dominant worldview of the author is negated and replaced with a perspective that centers more on the experience and power of the ‘Others’ in the corpus — rather than the materialist agents that primarily provide the narration. It is through these networks of blanks and negations, of bitextual discourse between ourselves, the typically reviled materialist narrators and the largely innocent but no less challenged fictitious reader that we map the territory that is the Lovecraftian corpus. (Iser, 172)

Now that we have laid out the circle of stones that frame the literary theory that is the foundation of esoteric criticism, let us take a closer look at decolonization and post-colonial thought before bringing the two together. It is my estimation that these terms are widely used but their nuances are not adequately understood.

Decolonization, as a global process, refers to the dissolution of empire as a political entity. This is manifested as a degradation of the racial hierarchies, ideologies and infrastructures associated with that entity. It is also expressed as the manifestation of new sovereign nations and an uncovering of the delegitimization of indigenous rulers in the area that existed prior to colonization. (Jansen and Osterhammel, 12) Decolonization, as an act — specifically in the realm of literature, is the articulation of the point of view of the colonized. (Armand, 77-78) We can use Shakespeare as an example of both sides of this coin (it is more like a twenty-sided die — bear with me). Shakespeare is widely considered to be the pinnacle of ‘Englishness’ and as such, is a representative of empire. The performance and spread of Shakespeare to the colonized is an example of literature being used as a tool of colonization. (Loomba, 1) On the other side of that multi-dimensional coin, we have the aforementioned Othello, the Moor in Venice, who can read as a penultimate Other embedded at the seat of empire. Othello’s narrative can be read as an articulation of the colonized.

As chaos magicians, as Lovecraftian magic-users it is a key part of our practice to understand the processes and acts of colonization and declonization. (Armand, 80) We are thieves in the houses of magic, and one of those houses is built of the world of words that is one of the human race’s greatest and most unique contributions to the universe. Colonization as a process where White Christians oppressed the populous of and subverted the indigenous rule of lands overseas began building over five hundred years ago, around the beginning of the 16th century. This expansion was largely not the result of an overarching plan but rather was the result of a systematic exploitation of new lands and people as they were discovered. (Jansen and Osterhammel, 14) This exploitation typically began through the use of physical force but then was extended through the use of religious and secular education. That secular education, in the instance of the English empire, used Shakespeare as one of its principal tools. The Bard, however, never one to shy away from new interpretations and re-assimilation into new forms, can and has been used as a counter-weight against the pressure of colonization that continues today — especially in those areas where colonization has gone ‘underground’ and is now viewed by many as the status-quo of thought, act and deed — without revealing its own history or original intentions.

According to the author of Post-colonial Shakespeares, the Cuban poet Roberto Fernandez Retamar [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Fernández_Retamar] has put The Tempest to work against its colonial parentage, in particular the character of Caliban. Caliban is the son of the witch Sycorax, and is often described as a half-fish, half-man hybrid (a form that should be familiar to the Lovecraftian Magic-User). Sycorax is traditionally seen as a syncretized form of Medea — the niece of Circe and the grand-daughter of Helios. Postcolonial critics view Sycorax as the archetypal mother of the colonized. In Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Medea joins her aunt Circe in her worship of Nyx, the consort of Erebos. Retamar pulls in Caliban as the symbol of the Mestizo America, an America of deep racial genetic diversity that continues to use the language of its colonizers (French, Spanish and English) and with language, many of the conceptual tools that inevitably go along with it. The archetypal Deep One, Caliban, with his fish and man parts, represent the racial and cultural expressions of the colonized as they are hybridized with the language and concepts of the West that were brought to them through the act of colonization. Retamar believes that ‘hybridity,’ as it is represented by Caliban, is an inherently subversive position and is in essence an appropriation of the colonizers culture for the express purposes of decolonization. (Loomba, 8)

Decolonization is the post-empire propagation of sovereignty; politically, culturally and economically. (Jansen and Osterhammel, 15) One way this growth is achieved through hybridization of forms. (Loomba, 9) The entire Lovecraftian mythos is populated with archetypes of hybridization, with Caliban being their ostensible king. When picking out magical tech from Lovecraftian Fiction, one nearly stumbles over spirit-forms that can be invoked and understood as representatives of a decolonized, hybridized world — just as Caliban can be extrapolated as the representative of a Mestizo America, born of his mother Sycorax who joins her aunt Circe in their worship of the primeval night. Decolonization through the vehicle of literature is achieved through bringing the voice of the oppressed to a place of power. As Lovecraftian Magic-Users we sympathize with the monsters and with those that live in their shadow - we align our sympathies with the Others and recognize through principles and practice that the true monsters in Lovecraft’s corpus are the materialists and those that still live on the fruits of empire.

Decolonization as a process is the shuffling of the deck of global power systems. It is the drawing a spread of reversals, laying down the card of institutional racism and the collapse of overt colonial rule. (Jansen and Osterhammel, 15) One would be forgiven for posing the counter-argument that by so strongly aligning those disenfranchised by empire with the monsters of Lovecraftian Fiction, that one is, in effect, calling the colonized monsters as well. In response, we can look again to our penultimate Other-Among-Empire, Othello. The Moor of Venice represents the epicenter of empires relationship with class, gender, sexuality, caste and colonial power structures (Loomba, 10). Othello, like Caliban, is perceived as a complex hero. When using the lens of esoteric criticism, it is understood that we see the hybrid forms in Lovecraft as a clearer representation of how the world is. We recognize that they are only viewed as monsters by the materialist ‘protagonists’ and narrators in his corpus. By using their tech in our practice we are aligning ourselves with the monsters and the uncaring cosmic entities on the deepest of levels. We see in them Othello, full of power and feared by the Venetians around him — we see in them the half-fish, half-man Caliban and we sympathize with him when he is on stage with Prospero, the true monster of the Tempest.

We are creating of ourselves the reversal and archetypally aligning ourselves with colonized and using our practice as a vehicle to further dismantle the intellectual and cultural dominion of a world infected with materialism.

REFERENCES

Armand, M. M. (2015). Healing in the homeland: Haïtian vodou tradition. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Iser, W. (2007). How to do theory. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publ.

Jansen J and Osterhammel J (2019). Decolonization: A short history. Princeton University Press.

Loomba, A., & Orkin, M. (2013). Post-Colonial Shakespeares. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

#Othello #Caliban #Hagstones

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oselatra · 6 years

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See yourself in the 'Delta'

Where art is about what we share.

Take a deep breath, Arkansas Times readers, and relax. This is not a harangue about our prevaricating president, though he certainly deserves one, or a story about the piteous state of Arkansas's political minds.

It's about art, which is something we can all come together over, or at least view together. Rare is the gallery fistfight: Should Jackson Pollock's splatters hang next to Margaret Keane's sappy big-eyed girls, fans of both would not come to blows. They wouldn't even Tweet.

[content-1]

In fact, we dare to say that for whatever courtesy is left in Arkansas we can thank the arts, and the Arkansas Arts Center's "Delta Exhibition," the juried show of works by regional artists that is now in its 60th year, is a big piece of that. Conceptual pieces that prompt as much head-scratching as admiration — always a feature of the "Delta" — get gracious receptions. See much in the way of gracious behavior outside a gallery these days? John Salvest's American flag (1994), made of matches tipped red, white and blue and packed into an explosives box, did not provoke a shouting match. Nobody suggested our moral fabric had gone to hell when examining Pat Larsen's sculpture that blew the viewer's skirt up if she got too close (and was wearing a skirt, 1997). Here, showing side by side in the Arts Center's galleries, have been Ginger Feland's live snails munching on a head of cabbage next to Warren Criswell's narrative painting of a woman carrying a naked man (1995), and still folks sang "Kumbaya." The 1990s, of course, were a happier time, but the 3D work in the 2018 exhibition — including a deflating and inflating 8-foot-tall faux fur bear — had no one Googling "how to emigrate to Canada."

Therefore, with the nation descending into us vs. them, this writer's recommendation is that people grab their worst enemy and head to the "Delta," for there is a place where you'll hold hands in awe of such works as "The Messengers," Marjorie Williams-Smith's copperpoint, aluminum point and conte crayon self-portrait with roses, and find common ground looking at Milly West's photograph of a White River bridge in fog.

Sixty years of peaceful relations, thanks to art.

***

As a show of regional work, the "Delta" has a welcoming intimacy, said retired registrar and Arts Center institution Thom Hall, and that makes it hugely popular to gallery-goers whether they can put a name on what they're seeing — New York School? Figurative expressionism? — or not. The work on the walls or on the floor or hanging overhead is made by people visitors to the show know, or have met, or with whom they share a cultural language. The exhibition "gives people immense permission to have an opinion" about what they're seeing, Hall said. Even if it's a Tim Hursley photograph of a two-headed calf (2016), they feel secure that they can say whether it's art or not. That's not always the case; it's that fear of "not getting" art that keeps some people away from museums.

Since 1958, the "Delta" has allowed artists in Arkansas and its contiguous states (and a few outliers) a chance to put their work before such big-name art critics as The New York Times' John Canaday (1970) and Grace Glueck (1986) and The New Criterion's Hilton Kramer (1982), and artists like Will Barnet (1974), Robert Gwathmey (1979), Graham Nickson (2000), Alison Saar (2001), and James Surls (2007). It has allowed the big-city folk to see that art is, in fact, being made between the coasts.

Three jurors waded through the record 1,424 entries to the "Delta" this year: Brian Young, gallery director at the University of Central Arkansas; Les Christensen, an artist and director of the Bradbury Art Museum at Arkansas State University; and Shea Hembrey, a native of Hickory Grove and a conceptual artist whose 2011 creation, "seek," a "biennial" of 100 works of art by 100 artists, all of whom were actually Hembrey, won him acclaim and a TED Talk appearance. The three winnowed the huge number down to 52 works made by 46 artists.

Conceptual art takes a backseat to more traditional work in this year's show. The conservative nature of the entries — a lot of portraiture and landscapes — was a surprise to the jurors, who expected to see more new media. Only three videos, for example, were entered.

As a result, Christensen said, this year's show "might be a show that would appeal to people who don't normally look at art, because it has a lot of work that is so traditional, accessible."

Perhaps the domination of landscape entries — making up as much as three-fourths of works submitted for judging — shouldn't have been a surprise, Hembrey observed, because of the region's natural beauty. "That really came across," he said. Young, formerly a curator at the Arts Center for several years, noted that work in the "Delta" continues to draw from the essence of place, though artists now are more traveled and, thanks to social media, aware of how their contemporaries on the east and west coasts are working.

Young particularly noted Hursley's work in the show, "Pine Bluff Mortuary" and "Comet Rice, Stuttgart, Arkansas," as proof of the continued aesthetic of regionality. Though Hursley is known internationally for his photography, from his work at the Museum of Modern Art, Andy Warhol's Factory and the brothels of Nevada, his work brings the Delta to the "Delta." "Tim Hursley embodies what the 'Delta' is about," Young said.

Hursley is not the only artist widely appreciated. Large-scale charcoal artist David Bailin, painter Criswell, woodworker Robyn Horn, photojournalist Benjamin Krain, printmaker and drawing master Aj Smith, and metalpoint artist Williams-Smith, to name just a few, exhibit nationally. But they still choose to compete for a spot in the "Delta."

There are strong installation pieces, but the strength of the 2018 "Delta" lies in two dimensions. Jurors noted the aforementioned self-portrait by Williams-Smith ("world class in technique" and the artist being "as good as it gets," juror Hembrey said) and described Aj Smith's large graphite portrait of a weathered woman, "Faces of the Delta: Geraldine," and Donna Pinckley's photographs of interracial couples — two men in one, a family in the other, titled with the insults they've received — as genre standouts (quintessential "Delta" portraiture, Young said). Hembrey was happy to see such psychologically challenging works as "Sticks and Stones," Anais Dasse's large oil-and-ink on paper of children dressed in a kind of weird camouflage tangling with fierce wolves, and Melissa Cowper-Smith's entrancing "Unremember" video in which paintings devolve into photographs and back again, the denouement an enormous fire. ("Sticks and Stones" won a Delta Award; this writer is sure that "Unremember" deserved one.)

A diplomatic Christianson declined to cite a favorite, saying only that she was "really impressed by and surprised by the number and quality of figurative and portrait pieces submitted."

This writer is under no such constraints, and would have given awards to Criswell for his oil "Eat Now (Again)," a scene of two hands poised over a plate of spaghetti with crows flying above — a work with two tops that can be hung both ways. Loren Bartnicke's meaty abstraction, an impasto creation with cactus leaves and drooping figures, was another work overlooked by the judges (at least this go-round, for all three stressed that their award selections could have been very different at another time, thanks to the vagaries of mood and current events). Spencer Purinton's "Peripatetic Terrine," in which hard-edge, hot-pink shards and blue feather shapes spill against a black background, is one of those works that bring you back for second and third looks.

But while the "Delta" may be shy on what you'll find in New York — none of the artists is sitting in the middle of the gallery and inviting visitors to sit silently before them, as Marina Abramovic did at the MoMA in 2010, nor are the rooms covered in Yayoi Kusama's polka dots — there are several worthy 3D pieces among the portraits and landscapes. With the exception of Max Adrian's "Solo: The Furry Divine of Fearsome Desires," that inflating bear of leather and fur, they are a bit more constrained than the conceptual pieces of earlier "Delta" shows, such as Jean Flint's stretched-acrylic mimicking flesh hanging from a steel rod ("Evidence of Passage," 1994), less incendiary as John Salvest's match-tip flag ("Flag," 1994) and less eyebrow-raising than Ginger Feland's aforementioned snail/cabbage work. But it's good work by artists the Times has not written much about before. Check out the work by the following:

James Matthews

A viewer might look at "Eviction Quilt No. 3, Green Medallion" and think of it simply as something to keep him warm. It's plain, made of rectangles and squares of denim and gray and green pieces of cloth, tied with knots rather than stitched together.

But there's a backstory to "Eviction Quilt," as its name suggests, and that makes all the difference. Matthews, the director of communication for the Episcopal Diocese of Arkansas, has for the past three years created quilts from clothing tossed to the street after an eviction. "There are lots of evictions in Little Rock," Matthews noted, thanks to Arkansas's notoriously draconic landlord laws. Yet, Matthews said, the project, which takes him to neighborhoods all over Little Rock, is more documentarian than social wake-up call. The placement of the green central square in "Eviction Quilt No. 3" recalls the green windows in a tin-roofed nightclub near where the clothes were found.

What should the quilt be called? Craft? 3D art? "To a certain extent, I don't care," Matthews said in a recent interview. As a graduate of the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, Matthews is both observer and creator. In addition to the quilts, he has constructed and then photographed assemblages of street-side detritus. He's trying to photograph all the churches in Little Rock. He blogs about historical places. He finds inspiration in Little Rock's pockets of poverty, places that he knows many people would be shocked to discover. Matthews is drawn to such sad areas perhaps because when he first came to Little Rock — it was 2006 — he was shocked by its homicide rate. His first project was to photograph places where killings had taken place: front yards, sidewalks, parking lots. They showed the surprising banality of the locations. He made postcards from some of the photographs, as if they were tourist shots: Welcome to Little Rock!

Matthews, 42, who sews at a dining room table in the front room of his home, is working on the final quilt in the eviction series. He was a bit leery of talking about what might be his next project — his wife warned him people would think he was a bit off when they hear of it — but he agreed to drive this reporter to what he calls a "dog dump" on Maryland Avenue beneath Interstate 630 and beside a railroad track to talk about his idea. Matthews travels here every other week or so and he always finds the weeds littered with the carcasses of dogs. A collar revealed the identity of the matted fur and bones of one deceased animal we saw on our trip. Why here? Matthews wonders. He is intrigued by the juxtaposition of the uncaring way dogs are being dumped in this place with the obliviousness of drivers speeding overhead on the interstate.

Matthews sometimes collects the skeletons and cleans them off at home. He has even collected carcasses for further decomposition in his backyard, beneath a bucket. Unfortunately his daughter, then 5, observed him at this labor, and later told some of her friends at school whose dogs had died that her dad would take them. He had to put her straight; he's not in the market for dead dogs.

Matthews won an honorable mention for his eviction quilt, which juror Young described as a perfect fit for the "Delta." Another of his quilts was also selected for the 2017 exhibition. You can see more of his work at asurplusofobjects.com.

Aaron Calvert

Henderson State University associate art professor Aaron Calvert's "Always Facing South Bear" is a cylindrical ceramic creation spelling out its title and depicting Southern-themed images. It's a departure from the older work shown on his Arkansas Arts Council's Artist Registry page: an intricately carved earthenware piece depicting a figure in a boat offering up a frog to a bundle, soda-fired cups, mugs, plates and teapots featuring stylized ants. He turned to whimsical, hand-built pieces in 2014, inspired by his love for the outdoors and the wild and a tad burned out on the wheel. "I've always been a real big surface person, whether I carved or drew ... and I wanted something really bright," Calvert, 44, said. Hence the vivid, highly saturated glaze under-painting of "Always Facing South Bear."

A native of Ohio, Calvert lived in Arkansas for several years before he realized that when someone said "Bless his heart" it was a put-down, not intercessory prayer, he told visitors to the "Delta" opening.

"Coming to the South was a bit of a culture shock," Calvert said. "Being from the North, I felt like what I was seeing was 'South,' no matter which direction I looked. ... I'm always facing 'South.'

"When I was working on the bear, that idea just kept playing over and over in my head and I ended up putting it on the bear." One of the images on the bear is what appears at first glance to be a Dixie flag, but the stars make a Y rather than an X. "However you feel about that flag, my goal as an artist was not to cram my thinking down people's throats, but just open the conversation," the artist said.

Calvert said he likes the "Delta" because the work in the show isn't nostalgic — its not all barns and chickens — but about contemporary life here, and he likes that. "The downside is there's usually not a lot of ceramics in there," he said. Jurors "can't make that mental jump from contemporary to ceramics unless it's a big, colorful bear."

Juror Young saw a bit of famed experimental ceramicist Jun Kaneko, whose high-gloss glazed and rounded cylinders were exhibited at the Arts Center in 2009, in Calvert's work. Calvert said that made a lot of sense: He is in the "lineage" of Kaneko, since the ceramicist he studied under — the iconoclastic Kirk Mangus — was a student of Kaneko's.

Calvert won an honorable mention for "Always Facing South Bear." It was his second "Delta" honorary mention; he won in 2017 with his gold-faced ceramic woman, "Giving Figure." He does not yet have a web page, but is working on it.

Dusty Mitchell

At the opening reception of the "Delta," people walked all over Dusty Mitchell's installation "Pressure," a checkerboard of square, flat black-and-white bathroom scales. Each square showed a different weight, some in pounds, some kilograms, some accurate, some way off.

Some people, however, would approach the artwork, but stop short of stepping on it. It's those people, said Mitchell, of Mountain View, that the artwork is for: those fearful of the number the scale might show, pressured to think their weight defines their identity.

Mitchell, 39, has the distinction of being the only artist in the "Delta" to have been on a Bravo reality show that, like "The Voice" and "Project Runway," put artists in competition. He watched the first season and successfully sought a place in the second, an arduous process that included waiting for hours in a line in Chicago to put his portfolio before "two kids going to graduate school at the Art Institute," being assigned an art project as another step in the application process, and having to undergo psychological and IQ tests. "It was pretty intense," he said. The show, which aired in 2011, started with 14 artists; he was in the top five. The top three got to make their own work, rather than work on assignment. "I feel like if I'd gotten to that step, I could have done some damage."

By then, the Michigan native — and now a school principal in Mountain View — had had work accepted into the "Delta" a number of times. Like "Pressure," Mitchell's work often addresses perception and societal quirks (his 2016 "Delta" appearance, "Home Sweet Home," at first glance appeared to be a cross-stitch but was actually flies placed sampler-like on stretched fly strips). He's made pointillist portraits made of crayons stacked on end; an exit sign that on closer examination says "Exist"; a bomb substituted for a globe of the earth; a flag made of toy soldiers, firefighters and policemen.

If that latter work recalls the work of John Salvest, there's a reason: Mitchell studied with the conceptual artist at Arkansas State University. He said Salvest was "the best thing that could have happened to me." In Salvest's class, Mitchell said, he learned "I can make whatever I want out of whatever I want. ... It's the opposite of abstraction."

Mitchell has two pieces in the 2018 "Delta": In addition to "Pressure" is his etched stainless steel "Diet Coke (From Trump Tweet Series)." If his messages are obvious, that's what Mitchell wants. "I have no interest in making a painting that people have no access to. I put it all out there."

Mitchell said the "Delta" was one of the first art shows he saw as a student at ASU. "That's when I first started meeting people I considered professionals, they were showing in that show. The first year I got in, that was a big deal for me."

***

One theory about why the "Delta" had a record number of entries is that anyone rejected from the show gained an automatic spot in the "Delta des Refuses" exhibition, which opens Friday, June 8, at the Butler Center. The show, in its third year, will feature the work of more than 100 artists. Read more about that show in the To-Do section of this paper.

The "Delta Exhibition" runs through Aug. 26.

See yourself in the 'Delta'

#See yourself in the 'Delta'

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