ABSTRACT
I - CONES:
VESSELS OF VENERATION
by
Victoria C. Vaughn
Master of Arts in Art
Every human culture has a tradition of myth. Evolving from an oral history, the inner-workings of the human consciousness are dredged forth in these - symbolized, personified and deified. These myths attempt to explain the great plethora of unknowns which we, as humans, endeavor to understand: the mysteries of who we are, where we came from, and why we are here. Each culture has its own creation myths, its death and rebirth myths, its rituals of costume, song and dance and its tales of superman and woman, god and goddess - archetypal parents, the symbolic visions of ourselves to the infinite. There is aspect in these of compensatory reaction to finding our individual consciousness housed in such a fragile finite human body and some aspect of the sheer joy of celebration of life and of the intricate beauty of creation.
Assuming were once apes who lived in trees, it seems reasonable to assume that much of our human neurosis comes from the fact that we have learned to separate ourselves from nature in our thought processes and in our life styles. As human animals we are egocentric and speciescentric because, for one reason, we have learned to control our environment in a few measurable ways. We believe we are no longer dependent on the sun to give us light, there are electric lights; no longer dependent on our proximity to a river to give us water, we have plumbing and faucets. We have moved away from the jungles and the plains or we have consumed them. Thus, many of the old myths and symbols have become disconnected from us and have lost their meaning.
We are now in the process of evolving a new world culture with instantaneous communication networks mixing and stewing the cross-cultural human subconscious. Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" and an abundance of new images are broiling up and blazoning through the media to chose from. People in third world countries listen to Michael Jackson and people in highly industrialized countries get nose rings and body piercing. Each country can soon smell the political dirty laundry of another and view it on the evening news. As this world culture evolves I believe that the single most important things to stress is our mutual interconnectedness - the Web of Life Concept: what happens to a part of the web happens to the whole, that we are all connected to the well being of each country, person, animal and plant. Between humans, I believe the single most important aspect to develop is education - not the rote inculcation of one political or religious institution's belief system but ways of thinking and ways of seeing which allow for the acceptance and integration without colonialism of the multifarious ways that life blossoms on this planet.
This new world culture has the potential of reconnecting us with our natural environment and with each other. As an artist I want to explore these new myths and mythmakers and share what I have discovered.
In the planning stages of my graduate exhibition I was thinking of it as though it were a performance or a ritual where one would be enveloped by a kind of virtual reality experience in which I could create a cave like environment. For example, I was thinking of ways that archetypal experiences can be recreated in a simulated environment and experienced at a personal level, triggering perhaps who knows what kind of species memories and inspiring a sense of cross-cultural unity. I think a lot of people on the planet right now are using this imagery as well and a lot of teachers are looking for ways to bring forth the next phase of human evolution. I want to be a part of this change and growth. I realized that while this cave setting might be easily manifested with Virtual Reality, I could only approximate this intent. I had been planning to create a room which was a cave so that I could recreate that in-the-womb-experience. I wanted to create a separate space apart, like a temple, library, movie-theater, or church.
When I am in my artist mode, I immediately think of how the first artists are referred to as "hunter-artists" in my Gardner college art-history textbook. I am a hungry tribesmember, constantly hunting for something essential that I can only just come closer to revealing through art and I seek to recharge the importance of venerative ritual and thanksgiving as an integral aspect of why humans make art.
The purpose of this exhibit, I-Cones: Vessels of Veneration, was to give homage to some writers, authors and philosophers who had, through their artistic endeavors, increased my understanding of a concept or group of people that I had felt little connection with before. So my homage to them is making them vessels that I feel would be appropriate for them. I now feel a kindredness with these beings.
The shape of the vessel is important because it illustrates the concept of meta-bowl, a bowl that is more than a bowl. Also, it is the shape of an upside down ziggurat. Bowls are shapes that hold things. People eat out of bowls thus they help give sustenance.
I wanted to ensconce these vessels in an environment where people would feel a sense of the sacred. I specifically endeavored to do this by controlling the environment of the CSUN North Gallery. By changing the shape of the room, lining it with a fine black gauze from ceiling to floor, the room became more circular than square. I painted pedestals black and arranged them in a circle. I changed the lighting in the Gallery so it was more subdued and focused on individual vessels. I played a tape which was hidden in one of the pedestals of Tibetan Bells, Songs of the Humpback Whale and English Meadows and a scent machine pumped out the scents of strawberry, vertivert, patchouli and orange. These last two devices were very subtle, but were especially evocative. I placed two crossed poles to break the visual reality of the person entering into the space and signal the new one, a symbolic blinking of an eye.
I believe that celebration is an important aspect of communal ritual so there were lots of yummy things to eat and Plaster Pie, a percussive band whose musical instruments are all made of clay, played while a bellydancer named Melissa danced for the participants outside the room.
I dressed in a black body suit and went bare foot and as people began to file into the room, I made a sandpainting in the center of the circle of pedestals of a giant flaming snake circling around the world - a prayer for world wisdom. The visual imagery represents humanity springing up like the tapered end of a snake or the corkscrew imagery of the DNA structure.
Following is an explanation of the imagery on the vessels:
1) Changing Woman: Vessel for Maria Sabina - (Maria is no longer with us so I will be giving her vessel to Kat Harrison). This has squiggly black patterns of glaze on an unglazed matt background. It is meant to appear hypnotic and indecipherable. Maria Sabina was a South American curandera, healer who sang people well and was responsible for giving mushrooms to Gordon Wasson who sent them to a Swiss chemist, Albert Hoffman. He identified the active components and created a marketable item which ended up being released in America, influencing a whole generation.
2) Keeping the Shamanic Faith: Vessel for Terence McKenna - Carved on the first level with plant spores and seeds are human hand prints, carved on the second level are animal prints, and carved on the top level are mushroom gills. I wanted this to appear to be a sacred vessel used perhaps by a shaman to mix some brew. It represents the reuniting of man with his natural birthright. McKenna talks about how human culture may have been influenced by plant consciousness - the proximity of cattle and deer to humans who were hunter-gatherers and the fact that psilocybin mushrooms grow naturally in the dung of these animals.
3) Blue Lotus: Vessel for Sylvia Plath - This vessel is also tiered and colored a vibrant shade of blue. In the center on the very bottom is an elaborate lotus blossom - This vessel pays homage to Sylvia Plath because she taught me the lesson of intensity of focus and when to know that you have gone too far. And there was a period of my life where reading Sylvia gave me indescribable solace.
4) Fear is the Mind Killer: Vessel for Frank Herbert - this vessel is supposed to represent a stylized sand worm - Frank Herbert taught me one of the most important and frequently used lessons of my life: "fear is the mind killer, I will let it pass through me and not let it cling to me."
5) Jail Break: Vessel for Eldridge Cleaver - this is a angry vessel, it is scorched and blackened and has part of the rim chipped. Circling the rim are several rows of black men squished tightly beside each other and stacked on top of one another. I wanted this to represent the inequality of the American judicial system in the sentencing and oppression of minorities.
6) Desert Flower: Vessel for Georgia O'Keefe - I named this piece for the desert because that is where Georgia lived during the later years of her life, and I admire her durability. I left it white so the shadows would create their own texture and shading and also because, with Georgia dead, it seemed more like a sacred flower. I also made it look really vaginal because, many of her paintings are look very feminine to me, although she is quoted as having denied this saying, "No, they are just flowers".
7) Chains Become Ladders: Vessel for Mary Daly - I made this vessel look like a female form with the ultraslim waist compressed by chains. On the interior it has very wide rim and sudden narrow neck. There are flames and crosses and they are going down the sink. This means that through education women can inform themselves to what has gone on in the past culturally and help transform the world to a greater understanding. Mary Daly writes about institutionalized violence against women: footbinding, suttee, witch-burning.
8) Cauldron for October Brew; Vessel for Ray Bradbury - This vessel was covered with what looked like rusted iron encircled by a blue lizard. I wanted it to look like a vessel that Poe would have given Bradbury because Bradbury said once that he considered Poe to be his crazy uncle. I honor Bradbury because he helped me through the worst time of my life, my adolescence. It is through Ray Bradbury's work that I learned to love books and love to read because with him I could go places that I could not go any other way.
9) Symbols; Vessel for Carl Jung - I kept thinking of both Jung and Joseph Campbell so the bowl looks like one thing on the inside and another on the outside. I had been very interested in reading about the experiences of monks in trance states, tantric information and the writings of people involved in the Psychedelic culture. Anyway, I saw that most cultures have a "creation myth" and most have a "resurrection myth" and a "flood myth." In researching a wide variety of cultures it started being pretty obvious that a lot of experiences are shared cross-culturally. This original interest led me to Joseph Campbell and Jung.
10) Zami Beach: Vessel for Audre Lorde. I wanted this vessel to look like sea foam on the inside and like one of those worn shells that one picks up on the beach all purple and worn nacreous on the outside. Audre Lorde was a young lesbian black woman growing up in the fifties. Her autobiography is called Zami, A New Spelling of My Name. It was the first time that I had read a female author and felt fully connected with her.
11) The Serpent in Winter: Vessel for Ursula Le Guin. Ursula Le Guin writes of worlds of magic, where dragons fly and people are pursued by their own shadows. I have read and enjoyed so many of her books over the years but I made Ursula a vessel because of Tenahanu. In this book there is a very competent and wise mature female character.
12) Virtual Vessel: Vessel for Jaron Lanier - This shiny black vessel reflects whatever it is surrounded by and looks like it is morphing into something new. It has a splattering of what looks like part of the cosmos on the inside rim. I-magine being able to relive the birth experience in a manner of your own creation. Virtual reality will change how we perceive reality, the lesson of a thousand koans. I read that with the goggles and glove sensory input it can already fool the mind up to 90% and with improved technology, full body sensor suits and perhaps a combination of olfactory input the reality quotient could be even more completely evocative. We could surf the matrix of dreams, peel back the veils of illusions and observe the core by looking past the image and into the source. School children could learn about the life of the cell by being a cell, let us say a red corpuscle floating through a vein. Everyone would be an artist as they became their own medium and present themselves in whatever combination of attributes they found desirable. The new frontier really is the frontier of the mind.
The thirteenth vessel was the sandpainting I
made on the gallery floor, the always not fully formed vessel.
Thirteen is the number of change since there are twelve months in
a year and the thirteenth month begins the new year and the new
cycle. There were thirteen original states in America.
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So far I have given Jaron Lanier and Terence McKenna their vessels. They were both very kind and very hospitable. It felt so good to meet these people who are helping to redefine and transform the shape of cultural values. I also wanted to make vessels for: John Lilly, Timothy Leary, Ina May Gaskin, Laura Huxley, and Aldous Huxley. Robert Anton Wilson, Noam Chomsky, Howard Reingold, Albert Hoffman, Marshal McLuhan, Colin Wilson, Albert Einstein, etc. |
TImestamp of Last Update: Sunday, January 15, 2006 06:59:54 PM
