Charles Winstead

Adventures in Mysticism

ATHICA: Athens Institute for Contemporary Art
Saturday, April 12, 2008 - Sunday, June 1, 2008
Curated by Rebecca Ray Brantley & Mike Calway-Fagen
This article originally published at Athica.org

Throughout Stephen Spielberg’s film Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), characters touched—often literally burned—by the bright light of a spaceship compulsively and repeatedly create mounds out of whatever material they could access, including, most memorably, dirt or a serving of mashed potatoes on a dinner plate. In the film’s finale, the mounds refer to a plateau-like mountain (Devil’s Rock) that an alien spaceship lands on amidst a special-effects spectacle of lights and music. But the simple mound itself is evocative and mysterious, recalling ancient temples and tombs. Ultimately the obsessive need to create these strange, but otherworldly-inspired forms can be extracted as an allegory of the role of mysticism in art: the need to repeat in form or line an intangible experience with something believed to be meta-human, whether it is a deity, nature (or, more appropriately Nature) or, as Spielberg suggests, an alien life form. Indeed, the representation of that which by its very nature cannot be represented underlies the notion of mysticism in art. Etymologically, “mysticism” is based on a Greek term that translates to “seeing with the eyes closed,” indicating that any attempt to recreate the mystical in art is thwarted from its very outset. Nevertheless, the visual symbol—imagined as less concrete and more universal than the spoken and written symbols of language—is often employed to depict an experience, an idea, or that which is simply unknown. The range of art represented in Adventures in Mysticism is best thought of as a survey of various means of dealing with this elusive concept, whether it seeks to undermine and undo the notion of the supernatural or displays a Platonic faith in the image as an object that can access a separate, supernatural realm.

ALL THAT GLITTERS

Nate Larson’s growing body of work reveals his interest in exposing the persistence of mystical belief in contemporary culture. It is relevant that photography is Larson’s chosen medium, since its presumed veracity has been used for well over a century to trick viewers into believing that a ghost, spirit, fairy, UFO (the subject of another of Larson’s series) or other supernatural creature or phenomenon exists. (For a discussion of Larson’s representation of what he terms the “supernormal,” see Benjamin Genochinno’s 2006 review “When Pictures Lie and We Gladly Believe” from the New York Times reproduced on the artist’s website [natelarson.com/ images/ny_times.jpg]).

Included in this exhibition are two of Larson’s projects that document separate “miraculous” phenomena. Miracle Pennies (2006) is shown in the format of a small book whose pages chronicle the artist’s experience following instructions from a dubious letter written by a man calling himself Reverend Peter Popoff. The detailed instructions include a ritualistic process that involves several pennies—such as pouring oil over one in order to anoint it or hiding another in with a secret stash of money. The Reverend promises that a series of miracles will take place, particularly if the recipient of the letter sends back whatever he or she can afford (the suggested donation is $20.00). Larson goes through every painstaking step described by the Reverend, even tracing his foot (which has been washed with special water) onto a piece of paper onto which the Reverend has already traced his own foot. Each has recorded his presence, therefore suggesting remote contact between the Reverend and the artist through the two traced images, resulting in a relationship as sham as the flimsy promises included in the letter. Larson ‘s deadpan aesthetic, reinforced by his stylized design, showcases the falsity of miracles for sale—whether via junk mail or other means—that prey on the vulnerable.

Larson’s How I Came to See the Virgin Mary (2005) is a more straightforward photographic essay chronicling the sighting of the Virgin Mary on the wall of an underpass in Chicago. Noticed by a woman driving along the highway, the image, whose blessing gesture and almond-shaped mandorla are suggested by white and yellow stains on the cement wall, appeared the same day that the Catholic Church was selecting a new pope after the death of Pope John Paul II. Our selection of six of the twenty photographs from the full series shows both the spectators around the apparitional stain and the objects these modern-day pilgrims leave behind, including countless lit candles. In contrast to the dark, nighttime shadows of this otherwise neglected cement cavern, the flickering candlelight reflects back onto their faces. The light from the candles at the foot of the makeshift shrine indicates that the light, which may be read as the image’s divine presence, is of the viewers’ own creation. Two of the photographs depict a personal relationship between visitors and the image of the Virgin Mary: one of a single figure contemplating the scene from a reverent distance and the other a close-up of a man touching the stain, as if to bodily absorb its holiness.

Larson’s documentation of contemporary instances of mystical experience often, as in Miracle Pennies, unveils the phoniness and profit-driven nature of such enterprises. Documentation as a photographic term belies the intentionally contrived nature of many of his projects—underlying his crisp, glossy images is usually a critique of the phenomenon he has focused on. Yet in How I Came to See the Virgin Mary—which does little more than simply document reactions to a stain on a cement wall—he creates a more subtle dialogue, allowing the viewer to search for the Virgin’s vague outline.

Commenting on a specific contemporary American religion, Adam Taye has created what he calls a “secular Mormon artifact.” Referring to Taye’s own religious upbringing, Dime Jersey (2007) is a glimmering basketball jersey coated with hundreds of coins, making it an impractically heavy garment. Hanging from a single sycamore branch, the jersey’s dimes recall a knight’s chain mail. The dimes face the same way, positioned so that the word “Liberty” is always visible to the viewer. Copper pennies form the number “78,” the seven made of pennies from 1977 and the eight made of pennies from 1978. This addresses the pertinent issue of race: the pennies Taye used to form the number "7" are all from 1977, the last year black males were not allowed to hold the priesthood in the Mormon Church, while the number "8" was created with pennies from 1978, the year the rule was overturned. The warm golden color of the pennies contrasts the shiny silver surfaces of the dimes, and one is perhaps tempted to forget that these metals – copper and cupronickel (the metal that replaced the more expensive silver-and-copper combination previously used to make dimes)—are charlatan materials of relatively small worth that convey value symbolically.

Conventionally, athletic shirts are designed to be light so that the wearer, here presumably a basketball player, can maximize his freedom of movement. As Taye has re-designed the jersey, it would literally weigh its wearer down, hindering and obstructing his movement. This can read allegorically: the mystical belief system literally weighing down its wearer. According to Taye, his interest in basketball is bound-up in his experience as a Mormon. He comments that it “was instilled [in me] that the second best thing to aspire to (if not lucky enough to be called a Prophet of God) was a career in the NBA.” He mentions that when pressed for space, a meeting would often take place on an empty basketball court, an obligatory part of every Mormon Church, and that the court would thus take on a mystical quality.

Taye culled two particular stories from passages in the Book of Mormon. The first story concerns Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, and his discovery of an ancient breastplate that is believed to have belonged to the prophet Mormon. Along with this breastplate, there were two golden plates with text in New Egyptian, as well as two mysterious and translucent rocks that Smith labeled “seer stones,” specifically called Urim and Thummin. When held in front of his eyes, he purported that the rocks enabled him to read the text and he thus was able to translate the words into English for all to read. As mentioned, the word “Liberty” is apparent on the face of the countless dimes, alluding to the second story. A soldier fighting for liberty, the General Moroni is a figure from the Book of Mormon often depicted in the form of a statue on the pinnacle of Mormon temples. Leading a battle, General Moroni rips his coat and writes the phrase “Liberty” on it as a symbol of his mission. This word is repeated on the face of each dime, though as Taye has arranged them, they hang upside down. The back of the jersey has a final element taken from Mormonism. Like the numbers created from pennies on the front side on the jersey, there is text on the verso, this one in the language Adamic, believed to be God’s original language. The coins spell “Pa Le Ale” which, according to Brigham Young, means, “Lord, Hear my voice.”

Taye’s choice of dimes (whose name etymologically derives from the French term for “tithe”) reflects the ten-percent tithe expected of church members, and the fact that a tithing member of the church would be protected. Therefore, Taye’s literal armor of dimes plays on this notion of the tithe as a protective gesture, placing Taye’s work in a lineage that goes back to medieval and Renaissance iconography of the Christian knight whose armor is meant to emblematize the defensive power of Christian faith, such as Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death and the Devil (1513), though of course Taye’s armor has a cynical subtext as it is constructed solely of money.

Eric Lunde and Julia Cross, a.k.a. Team Crunde, literally spotlight the mysticism attributed to rock stars in American culture of the last half century, a phenomenon that reached an apotheosis with figures like the one selected by Lunde and Cross: Ace Frehley, also known as Space Ace, an original member of the of the glam-meets-stadium rock band Kiss from the 1970s until the early 1980s (as well as the occasional reunion). Kiss is famous for their black-and-white makeup and costumes as well as their complicated, theatrical sets. Frehley’s nickname references the rumor that he may be from another planet, but whatever his origin, the oft-made-up and costumed rock star—the focus of the looping video Spaceman/lovegun/worshipme—is an apt emblem of the cultish popularity of rock musicians, one that overshadows the reverence of religious icons. (John Lennon’s infamous 1966 remark that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus” comes to mind.)

The NView video device used by Lunde and Cross to display the music video clip is dark without the illumination by a nearby tree of bright reading lamps which reflect off the wall’s surface and back through the translucent screen. Thus, without the additional lights, the image would become dark and obscure, suggesting that the light—here, understood as spectacle and artifice—not only illuminates, but also is the core of the Kiss’s obsessive appeal. One of the more humorous of the works in the exhibit, its appeal also lies in its homemade, DIY construction.

ENVISIONING THE MYSTICAL

Just as surrealist artists and writers of the early-to-mid twentieth century sought to express their unconscious in order to access primordial and universal symbols, certain visual forms and juxtapositions used in contemporary art seem to connote the otherworldly. Imbued with rich references to the history of art and old master techniques, Dennis Harper’s egg-tempera paintings construct a subtle sense of mysticism in two ways: first, by deploying jarring juxtapositions of typically disparate phenomenon (for example, binaries such as East and West, the living and the dead, or the old and new), and second, by rendering the imaginary, dreamlike images of a child’s imagination. While Harper’s paintings are clearly the product of extensive planning, under-painting and labor-intensive attention to detail, Jill Storthz’s drawings seem to be the product of spontaneous, compulsive action. Indeed, her drawings seem akin to the automatic scribbling of artists like French Surrealists André Masson or Jean Arp and often picture a variation of a simple mound-like structure. Though visually quite different, the two artists are invested in fabricating imaginary, miniature vistas quite personal in origin.

Interested in traditional painting techniques, Dennis Harper began both Terra ombra (2003) and Black and White (2003) with a monochromatic under-painting in casein and then added gradual layers of crosshatched egg tempera. The subtle gloss of the finished painting, the rich colors and composition made-up of a figure or group of figures in crisp architectural settings recalls the tradition of predella panels from Renaissance altar paintings. Yet, while predella painting featured narrative scenes based on Biblical passages, Harper’s paintings have the vague suggestion of an underlying story. Black and White is based on the co-existence of seemingly oppositional elements. Scattered throughout the brightly, modern interior space are spectral, almost hallucinatory images from the past and present, often lifted from other, older works of art mingled with figures and elements that have autobiographical significance for the artist. In the foreground are two twin sparing figures, their differences articulated by their costumes, since one is dressed in white and the other in black. Both are based on the same figure: Harper’s adolescent son. Harper notes that the overall garish palette and busy composition is meant to clash with the stark black-and-white karate costumes of the two boys, making them a focal point of the image. Their relationship underscores the play of oppositions evident throughout the image. In the background is another figure from the artist’s family— based on Harper’s late father—who appears to be recording events onto a piece of paper. Indeed, his presence is spectral and distant, with faded facial features, as if the product of memory rather than observation. Harper describes him as his possible doppelganger and mentions the red cross emblazoned on his shirt that makes reference to the emblem posthumously painted onto Velasquez’s self-portrait within Las Meninas (1656) that marked him as part of the Order of Santiago. Like Harper’s reference to Las Meninas, a specific scene from a Mughal miniature appears on the surface of a bright yellow wall. The circular movement of the composition is echoed by the painting’s overall layout. A scene of Christ’s empty tomb rendered dominantly in ghostly blue and gray, lifted from a painting by Renaissance artist Carpaccio, is visible through a pair of glass doors. Its otherworldly, alien quality plays off of the intense colors of the interior space and heightens the sense of disorientation ubiquitous throughout Black and White.

Though a far more quiet and personal scene Terra ombra features another figure based on one of Harper’s sons and is similarly filled with disconcerting elements and over-determined symbols. In this slightly older image, the figure is in only loosely based on his son, and incorporates the artist himself as well as, according to Harper, the all-American, iconic Opie Taylor of the television series “Andy Griffith.” Comfortable in his bed, the boy reaches out to a dark lamp that sits on top of a dresser along with a dark, useless light bulb, burned out matches and a dark flashlight. His arm partially extends over the sole source of light, which is a plastic nightlight in the form of the Virgin Mary. Her glowing light has a double role: her light not only illuminates the boy’s bedroom but also imbues it with shadows that transform into monstrous apparitions. Similarly, nightmarish, strange faces appear in the patterns of wood grain of the bunk beds and dresser, and seemingly innocuous elements such as the boy’s bed sheets—which are decorated with a skull-and-cross-bone pattern—indicate a darker subtext, in this case, the child’s mortality. The close juxtaposition of the boy and the skulls parallels the play of light against dark, and finally seems to comment on the ineffectualness of the boy’s simple gesture.

Seemingly driven by an obsessive need to repeat the same patterns and forms, Jill Storthz’s distilled drawings tend to feature a rich, off-center accumulation of line, pattern, and color that is offset by a large expanse of raw paper. A dominating motif that Storthz often—seemingly compulsively á la Close Encounters —depicts is a mound or pyramid-shaped structure that appears in Feather Dwelling, Stained Glass Shack and Glass Window (all from 2007). The simple forms seem open for interpretation. They look like abandoned, makeshift temples or elaborate bird’s nests from an eccentric fairytale. These mysterious structures appear to be made of a combination of organic and manmade materials such as straw, twigs, feathers, and shards of stained glass. Storthz’s reductive forms and bright colors recall graphic styles of the 1950s and 60s, but the drawings seem simultaneously archaic and contemporary: the images conjure prehistoric cave drawings and Native American mounds, but are created via scribbled masses of lines and a vivid palette. Hailing from San Francisco, Strothz’s drawings also possess a whimsical dose of psychedelia and the hallucinatory, bringing to mind the mystical wave that swept popular culture during the 1960’s Summer of Love.

Without a doubt, Butterflies is the most psychedelic of Storthz’s images included in the exhibition. A simple series of washes of watercolor create a soft rainbow that provides the background for an elaborate mass of pattern-articulated temporary-tattoo butterflies applied to the paper. These associations reference attempts to create alternate spiritual experiences through synthetic and organic drugs that can be traced to both religious practices and counter-culture movements.

IMMATERIAL/MATERIAL

Charles Winstead’s austere Tessaract (2005) is an octagonal, black-and-white painting that invites the viewer to become lost in its simple mandala-like star shape, in reference to the cosmos. Despite the inherent limitations of its two-dimensional format, the painting’s title makes evident that the artist has attempted to render a four-dimensional cube, or a tesseract, in two dimensions. On closer inspection, the painting breaks down into a series of interlocking cubes that shift before the viewer’s eye like an optical illusion, hinting at but never revealing the four-dimensional form. At the center of these lines is a black octagon that repeats the structure of the canvas’s eight-sided form, making it a shape-within-a-shape that reproduces the effect of two mirrors facing each other: the illusion of the ever-expanding infinite.

Winstead’s attempt can be seen as emblematic of mysticism in art generally. He depicts that which by its very nature cannot be depicted, rendering visible that which is inherently unseen. His effort simultaneously reveals the limitations of image making while also suggesting that images may function as a symbol, invoking the presence of that which is beyond the realm of representation. Winstead’s associations with high modernism—an era defined by artists such as Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock in which the simple, reduced painting reveled in its flatness—is of course appropriate, since it is at this mid-century moment that faith in the image as an object capable of inducing transcendence reached a peak.

Within the universe, the antithesis of a nebula or a star is a black hole—space and matter that has folded into itself at the moment of a star’s death. It remains the most enigmatic of cosmic phenomena: it draws matter to it with a force that is unparalleled in the universe, since nothing within its borders, marked by the event horizon, can escape its monumental gravitational force. Small—a mere 8 inches in diameter—Lindsay Satchell’s Vortex (2005) employs the language of the black hole, playing with its mystical tropes. Consisting of a black circle painted on the wall surrounded by a thin coil of wire, Satchell’s Vortex invites the viewer to contemplate the void of the dark shape, drawing one’s eye through the spiraling, almost hypnotic, line of wire that is seemingly pulled inward. Of course as a hue, black absorbs all of the light waves of the spectrum just as a black hole traps everything—even light—in its invisible realm of collapsed space. Indeed, a black hole notionally fulfills the human conception of the mystical: it cannot be seen, but it is a force that is real and overpowering. Nothing can escape its unseen borders, thus its territory is not unlike the surreal spaces of heaven and hell that exist theoretically outside the boundaries of knowable, rational space.

Stefani Byrd’s video Like it was Carved in Stone (Barbara’s Grave) (2007) shows a finger slowly tracing the outline of an eternity symbol carved into the surface of the pink granite of a tombstone. The finger belongs to the artist and the grave to her deceased grandmother, a psychic and numerologist. The format of video promises an even more permanent but finally intangible means of preserving this simple act. The artist’s attempt to access her grandmother by repeatedly touching the cold granite recalls the reaching but ineffectual gesture of the boy in Harper’s Terra ombra.

(OTHER)WORLDLY: ARENA & EXPERIENCE

Included in Adventures in Mysticism are several works dealing with the notion of site and spatiality. This is a crucial aspect of mystical experience since it is notionally dependent on a space beyond our own physical, earthly realm—a space increasingly difficult to imagine in an era in which little physical territory is left unexplored or unmapped.

Trevor Reese’s we will go together (peak of Mt. Rotui) (2008) is based on a legendary mountain in Tahiti, Mt. Rotui. According to myth, the odd, U-shaped peak of Mt. Rotui exists because its peak was stolen by thieves. The tip of the mountain was magically transferred to the interior of the mountain. The story describes the transference of the exterior of the mountain to its interior, a theme picked up upon and magnified in Reese’s multi-colored mountainous forms. Importantly, in the legend of Mt. Rotui, there is the notion of an unseeable part of the mountain existing illogically inside of the mountain, and it becomes the artist’s role to unveil the hidden form. Punctuating the façade of Reese’s hollow, constructed peaks are holes through which viewers can peer and view objects and images, including a living plant and an image of Mt. Rotui itself. Reese translates a monumental feature of the landscape into an interactive gallery encounter, playing the secret spaces of the mountain’s interior off of its carnivalesque façade.

Avantika Bawa and Scott Carter’s Untitled installation, draws on the tradition of minimalism and is accompanied by Bawa’s drawings Accents–a, b, c & d (both 2008). The installation draws attention to conventionally unused portions of the gallery: the ceiling, the corners, and the gallery’s porch. Created with glow-in-the-dark vinyl, the installation illuminates the dark spaces of the gallery as daylight fades from the gallery, transforming the space and altering the viewer’s perception of what parts of a gallery are important. The installation—which draws the eye toward the ceiling—also mimics the architectural effect of Gothic cathedrals, encouraging the viewer to look upward, not only toward the wooden beams of the ceiling, but towards the space conventionally associated with the heavens.

Beth Lilly’s Oracle @WiFi (2008) consists of a series of events requiring willing participants. Lilly makes her phone number public and requests that people call her on a predetermined day of the month. When she answers, Lilly will accept a question and an email address—but no additional information that might identify the caller such as his or her name—and will then take three pictures of what she sees around her with her cell phone at that moment. She will then email the images to the participant and display them on her website. In conjunction with this exhibition, Lilly will build a special site for ATHICA and a computer to access Lilly’s page will be available as part of the exhibition. Lilly’s project reflects the construction of cyberspace as heaven-like, a virtual realm that does not literally exist in tangible space, but is nevertheless discussed as a real place in which one may preserve his or her identity forever. (For a discussion of the idea of the internet as heavenly, see Martha Wertheim’s The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. New York: Norton, 1999).

Rachel Dove and Amanda Wile’s one-night performance, occurring on the opening night of this exhibit, uses large, super-bright construction lights designed to overwhelm the viewer. (See Checklist for image.) The lights are choreographed with a seemingly accidental pattern of flashes that may be seen from inside the gallery, as well as from outside. Pointed at other lights and toward the sky, the series of lights extends the space and limits of the gallery outward, and is meant to draw viewers toward them in order to most fully experience their pulsating patterns.

MORE THINGS IN HEAVEN & EARTH

Encounters with the natural world are often construed as a means to accessing the mystical and the transcendental, so it is not surprising that many of the works chosen for this exhibition feature light, the ocean, and outer space—natural phenomena that physically or conceptually dwarf humanity. They also encapsulate the unknown, particularly outer space, which is filled with mysterious dark matter and black holes, phenomena that correspond with many of our notions of the divine.

Darren Jones’ Nebula (2007) features a floating disco ball encircled by horseshoe crab shells. Through the title, Jones makes reference to the earliest phase in the life of star. A nebula is a near-formless cloud of cosmic dust, gas, and plasma that eventually will transform into a star and its surrounding planets, but in this nascent phase is a spectacular, multi-colored array of cosmic debris that sometimes forms from the advent of a supernova. Visually, the mirror-encrusted disco ball recalls the shimmering, ethereal cloud of the nebula, a colorful mass of diffused matter that will slowly take the form of a spherical star. The glittering exterior mosaic of mirror squares suggests the unseen nature and mystery at the core of the orb and the moment of creation itself.

Jones’ sculpture addresses the mysticism we attribute to the mysteries of our universe’s origins. With the disco ball suspended mid-air, the piece evokes an ephemeral drop of water creating a momentary splash, playing on notions of cosmic time and its perception from our vantage point on Earth. Jones’ Nebula also suggests the origins of life and procreation on a much smaller, infinitesimal scale. Like the creation of a star, which takes place on a scale beyond human comprehension, Jones’ sculpture alludes to the internal formation of human life that begins as a microscopic, unobservable process. It is not arbitrary that Jones chose the shells of sea creatures whose existence can be traced to some of the earliest fossil records. The smaller forms of the crab shells, initially countless and piled on top of each other as if in competition, are drawn to the larger, globular disco ball, recalling the moment when a mass of tiny sperm fertilize the larger, singular egg to begin the process that will lead to human life.

Wade Kramm’s Sundial (2004) is a series of vintage photographs, each featuring a single standing figure awkwardly positioned upright in front of the camera. The images seem culled from different decades of the twentieth century, probably ranging from the teens and twenties through the fifties, and the people portrayed are of various ages. No doubt each person meant to preserve his or her image for posterity, perhaps documenting a special moment or a stage of youth. What links the eleven photographs together is an unforeseeable and intangible detail: the momentary shadow captured by the camera’s omniscient lens (which in turn becomes an allegory for the photographic act). Kramm has arranged them sequentially to look like a sundial with its shifting shadows, imbuing the assemblage with a preternatural quality, as if a divine hand has linked this group of disparate, lost figures caught in the angles of the sun’s light. Kramm’s gesture fulfills their purpose, inserting them into a vision of a new generation, but their identities, like their shadows are fleeting and ultimately forgotten.

The first image of Jack Dingo Ryan’s Color Spectrum Diptych shows the basic light primaries (red, blue, and green, overlapping to create magenta, cyan, and yellow) projected onto the surface of the moon from three outdated light projectors. The second image is simply of a full moon’s face, a stellar body only evident to human sight because the sun’s rays (the full light spectrum reflected altogether to create white light) are reflected off of its surface. Yet Ryan’s first image suggests that human invention alone could reveal the shadowed lunar surface, or adversely, that the already outmoded technology seems absurd in comparison to the more timeless light of the sun and moon. Also included in the exhibition is Ryan’s Never Surrender (2007) (see stills on the conclusion page), a video that features a similar natural form, this one the dominant surface of the Earth: the constantly shifting surface of the ocean. One is tempted to become immersed in the ocean’s dangerously overwhelming and soothing rhythms, but Ryan tempers this impulse with the two titular words which slowly materialize in sequence, imploring the viewer to “Never Surrender,” a suggestion that seems futile and ridiculous. Again, Ryan pits humanity against monumental elements of nature.

BODY AS TRANSCENDENT SITE

Loosely based on Medieval and Renaissance Christian prayer manuals and recalling the early fifteenth-century Christian guidebook for dying, the Ars moriendi (which translates from Latin to the “art of dying”), Malena Bergmann’s kinetic and sound sculptures included deal with the notion of death, specifically her own experience observing her stepmother die. Through sounds, scents and visual elements, both of her exhibited sculptures appeal to the viewer’s various senses and are about magnification of a macabre and ignored theme.

The Ars moriendi and prayer books were created during the years of the Black Plague in Western Europe and provide instructions as to how to die properly, including comforting passages as well as practical prayers to utter on one’s deathbed. It was illustrated, and it was intended that the faithful memorized it in preparation for death. As morbid as it seems, it offered hope to the masses afflicted by the Black Plague.

Wanting to address the overlooked, unsettling topic of death, Bergmann created Vespers: About That (2007), which requires the viewer to kneel on a bright vermillion-orange pillow that the artist notes corresponds to the colors of the robes of Buddhist monks. The kneeling posture obviously invokes the tradition of prayer throughout the religions of the world, but for the artist it is particularly related to prayer and ritual in Christianity. Yet instead of praying, the viewer is instructed to press a red button that is wired to a heart-like form situated directly in front of the kneeling participant’s face. When the button is pressed, the pillow vibrates, shaking a series of acupuncture needles inserted into the surface of the fleshy form. It is adorned gruesomely with letters traced in iodine evocative of veins running through flesh. The image created by the vibrating needles creates an illusion: because the needle is moving too quickly for the human eye to focus on, one sees only a mirage-like blur. The image of the needle does not correspond to its position in space, but rather its imprecise perception, alluding to the fact that time itself is a human construct. The bloody letters spell out the words “About That,” as if to emphasize the fact that our attention is being diverted. Bergmann includes an object that is significant to the piece’s meaning, but is not readily noticeable among the many needles sticking out of the central form: located on the periphery of the piece and out of the range of the magnifying glass is a small gelatin capsule filled with the ashes of her dead stepmother. It viscerally shakes, rotating its contents as the tiny motor vibrates. While Bergmann calls the capsule the “heart” of the piece, she has placed it in a way that reflects the marginalization of death in contemporary culture.

Grassbasket: Lauds (2008) is intentionally contradictory: it is both living and dying, will become both dying and dead as the exhibition progresses and is both organic and synthetic. A basket made of sod that is filled with thousands of worms, it is an autonomous ecosystem; the grass is dying and will die by the end of the exhibition. Yet the worms will continue to thrive off of the decaying matter, and other life, such as insect and spiders, develop. It also includes an antique air raid siren that was once used to warn people of danger. Used here to magnify the recorded sounds of the unseen ecosystem, it serves as a “reminder” of human mortality and the underground lives that buried bodies feed as they decay. Like About That: Vespers, this piece also has an analogous moment in the Ars moriendi, which included an image of a rotting corpse being eaten by worms among its pages. It also recalls transi figures, depictions of partially decayed bodies—often depicting worms and insects living off of the departed’s remains—employed in Medieval and early modern tombs. No doubt the abject imagery was meant to startle the viewer and inspire religious devotion and faith as the only way to overcome the final plight of the body. Though Bergmann’s object fails to offer its viewer the specific consolation of religion, it makes reference to prayer through its title and through the repeated sounds of the invisible life thriving in the dying grass. “Lauds” refers to a prayer from the Christian prayer cycle, one intended for recitation every morning. As Bergmann describes her work, it is in a perpetual process of “becoming.”

Initially reminiscent of an innocuous, abstracted flower by American modernist painter Georgia O’Keefe, Jeremy Hughes’ Glorified or Marie Antoinette (2007) is a fleshy alternative to the austere and symbolic mysticism of Satchell’s Vortex or Winstead’s Tessaract. Both repulsive and compelling, Hughes’ painting resembles a human anus, yet with its hairless array of fleshy pinks it also has a florid, nearly pretty quality that vaguely disassociates it from that most taboo part of human anatomy. Nevertheless, it suggests excess and subversion, just as its title conjures the specter of the rococo queen, Marie Antoinette, a figure who has come to stand for immoderate pleasure and corrupt decadence. (As Sophia Coppola’s celebratory 2005 biopic Marie Antoinette suggests, we are compelled to regard her sympathetically at this moment.) Hughes’ choice to gender the painting with his choice of title must be taken seriously: in patriarchal Western culture, femininity is associated with the abject, the irrational and the dark. His painting is thus emblematic of the ruling principles of the mystical. Like femininity and all of its associations, the mystical is situated as opposite of the logical rational, which aligns with the masculine. Though light is an important trope of the mystical experience, it is also associated with the occult and the turn away from the rationalizing light of the sun.

Hughes’ painting represents an inversion of the abstract notion of the universe as macrocosm that runs throughout many of the works in this exhibition. Rather than representing the unknown of the cosmos, Glorified or Marie Antoinette pictures a visceral look inward to the unknown within our own human bodies. It is an image that conjures the notion of death in fragile human form, likewise bringing with it associations of sensuality and eroticism. Blown up to monumental scale, the image is both grotesque and seductive, recalling the opulently sensuous appeal of the Baroque. Indeed, as an image of a bodily orifice, Hughes’ Glorified also plays on the human desire for visceral proof of the divine—images that shock a viewer into (dis)belief. For example, Caravaggio’s Doubting Thomas (1602-03) shows an incredulous Thomas touching Christ’s open, orifice-like wound. It is a moment taking place at the threshold between interior and exterior, marrying the mystical to the corporeal by suggesting that transcendence is a physical experience one must have via the body. Like Caravaggio’s painting, Hughes’ naturalistic rendering utilizes the abject form of a dark, deathly orifice within our own bodies to solicit a viewer’s most involuntary, sensory reactions.

The body as the site of transcendence is the founding notion of Joe Meiser’s film, Transcendence Research (2006) that will be shown during the exhibition run. Participants were asked to enter a sensory deprivation tank for one or two hours in order to attempt to reach a state of transcendence. Meiser himself entered the tank for ten consecutive hours in order to experience mystical abandon. So as to maximize the effect (and avoid bodily danger), Meiser would exit the tank every couple of hours in order to eat and drink. Ultimately, he concluded that the senses are vital to human experience and that the long period in the tank left in him feeling “vulnerable and nameless.”

CONCLUSION

A found, uncarved rock is currently believed to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest, “work of art.” It was discovered near a group of bones far away from any other source of the same rock and is categorized as art simply because an early hominid identified in it the semblance of a human face and was believed to have carried it with him or her as a valued possession. With a similar sense of awe and prospective vision, the many spectators pictured in Larson’s How I Came to See the Virgin Mary series collectively look toward a relatively unremarkable image—a blot on a dirty cement wall—seeking in its hazy shape the outline of a divine but also finally human image. They wait in anticipation of a moment of revelation and transcendence. Yet, despite the appeal of pictures throughout history (as well as the occasional iconoclastic uprising against pictures), the image has an untenable relationship to the mystical. A passage from the Bible indicates the crux of this paradox: “While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal; but the things which are not seen are eternal (2 Corinthians 4:18).” The author of these words reveals an important distinction that simultaneously motivates and undermines the desire to represent the mystical in art. What is seen is knowable and ultimately can be understood and consumed. What is unseen belongs to another realm—but our only means of accessing this mystical realm is through our bodies. Here lies the challenge of representing that which is not of this world. We are bound to symbols and thus can only attempt to access that which lies outside of the signifying order through the very thing that is situated as its opposite, the material image.

Emblematic of much of the work in the exhibit is Winstead’s Tessaract, an iconic image revealing the artist’s explicit desire to imbue images with a direct, symbolic value. Yet the image may ultimately deconstruct itself (and all images). From different angles, the white lines seem to alternate from two-to three-dimensional forms, never quite achieving the four-dimensional form alluded to in the title. Rather the form seems always on the verge of appearing, and thus the moment of revelation is diverted. This inability to fully grasp the form reveals that the idea cannot be accessed through the symbolic image, finally conveying that neither the title nor the image can fully reference the idea of a tesseract. Its antithesis and doppelganger can be found in Hughes’ embodied, monumental Glorified or Marie Antoinette, an image that celebrates the opposite values: the bodily and abject, the personal and the perverse. It revels in the glorification of the irrational (opposing the conventionally privileged humanist notions of logic and reason), concepts that may be aligned with the mysticism of the arcane and occult. Finally, the painting seems to expose that the sensory and the metaphysical are inextricably linked.

It is the curators’ hope that the multi-faceted aspects of “mysticism” and the play between spirit and body, image and idea and the seen and the unseen will create open dialogue.

—Rebecca Ray Brantley, Curator
with editorial contributions
by Lizzie Zucker Saltz, Director