Titus O.

I recently went to Texas to see and write about Lizzy Wetzel’s exhibition at WATW (see below.) She references the psychedelic realm and shamanism etc, which had me reflecting on my own experiences, and doing some reading online. I spent some time exploring an interesting website devoted to psychedelic/drug education, called Erowid.org. I’m glad that it exists, because information about these substances is crucial. I hope that young people use such sites to educate themselves before leaping in, getting some knowledge about what to anticipate. I find it a tragedy, however comprehensible, that virtually every single “hallucinogenic” substance has been made illegal. One of the biggest problems that creates is that that makes information about their use as illicit as the substances themselves, which just furthers more misuse and misunderstanding, and by extension more negative behavior, perpetuating the cycle by providing more horror stories that mask the genuine possibilities of healing psychoactive compounds. I believe implicitly in the potential use of entheogenic substances in the permanent cure of addiction and treatment of depression and serious mental illness (as demonstrated in numbers of studies),  not to mention their sacramental use to heal fundamental existential fears, crises, and in simple human evolution.

I don’t think its necessarily wholly bad that there was such a strong legislative response to psychedelics. I think that the knee-jerk “how dare THE MAN do this us!” rants of hippies and ravers is not very balanced. I think the wide, unregulated dissemination of LSD etc was maybe a needed social/evolutionary catalyst, well beyond the hands of human beings to fully understand; but I nevertheless find it tragic that these compounds were so egregiously abused and misused. They are extremely powerful, and they need contexts to contain and channel their healing potential, as all indigenous people who still use them understand and maintain in traditional forms. They are not party lubricants, though they can perhaps have more social functions and contexts. I’ve always preferred to take them privately, alone or with a partner.

I have not taken psychedelics in years, though I never say never again. Perhaps my biggest reservation in future use remains lack of adequate contexts that don’t carry with them the implicitly negative quality of being illegal. That is of course unfortunate baggage to carry in to a trip into the vast interiors of the psyche and unseen realms.

Ok, all this is a preamble to the account below I felt inspired to document after reading a few dozen stories of drug experiences on Erowid. Most of these leave me extremely dismayed, as most users seem to be 20 year old boys, I suppose attempting to self-initiate (another topic worth exploring) who spend a lot of time and energy to launch their difficult, illegal journeys, and then waste their time on them watching the Simpsons, staring at the filthy carpet in apartments shared by four other pot heads, and mixing various substances together with little sensitivity or clarity. I teach college students, and I have seen casualties. I recommend entheogens to NO ONE, though I see how many could be potentially be helped by them. There simply are not the guides, teachers, healers, and ritual contexts to insure safety. We don’t understand these things. Our culture hasn’t provided the tools. Though they aren’t wholly lost to us.

Anyway, an account:

My friend SB had acquired a somewhat astounding quantity of dried psilocybe cubensis, ie magic, mushrooms. He kept them in the freezer, nearly a quart bag full, anticipating an auspicious date to ingest them. At some point I was honored with an invitation to join him. It was a hot mid summer Saturday afternoon in a Midwestern city; it may have even been the Summer Solstice. I had recently finished graduate school at an Ivy League university. I had also lived in a Zen meditation center for those two years. I had been practicing meditation intensively, studying with authorized lay teachers and monks, and sitting/bowing/chanting hours daily and doing monthly retreats at that point for about 3 years. General interest in Buddhism and yoga went back a bit earlier than that. I was 24.

I would say that my general state of heart/mind was good, if maybe suffering from some low-level depression. Grad school had been very difficult, and utterly disillusioning. In the year previous I’d lost a number of friends and teachers to illness and accidents; I’d ended a 5+ year relationship with one woman under tragic circumstances, and was involved in another that was quite frustrating, for reasons quite beyond its long-distance. But I had good circle of friends, a job, and was physically quite healthy, practicing tai chi and meditating regularly.

I had first eaten mushrooms first some years earlier. It had been my first psychedelic experience of any kind, save marijuana, which I smoked at times but in relative moderation to many friends (I went to art school, if that gives indication.) I never was a regular daily smoker, and find that cannabis and I are not particularly suited for each other. I never had visual or auditory hallucinations, just heightened perception/thought/neurotic self-consciousness.

That first mushroom experience was extraordinary in that I was hiking in temperate rainforest in Australia with some friends, artists and musicians, who recognized the psilocybe mushrooms growing wild in a clearing. At the nearby seaside fishing cottage where we stayed, someone cooked them up for lunch. Lovely fresh mushrooms were transformed into a horrible goop we slopped on buttered toast. Absolutely revolting. It wasn’t my idea; I was doing a year abroad, and “______-on-toast” seemed to be the national food of Oz. Thankfully we didn’t also add Vegemite. Actually, we may have done. Nothing could have hurt.

The trip was blissful and painful in turns. I experienced greater highs and lows than I had ever known, including the classic “ego death,” with subsequent radiant resurrection. Plants spoke to me, reassuring me at various points. I spoke back to them. It all seemed very natural, and I felt I finally broke through to a real communion with the natural world that I had longed for. The trip lasted a long time – 12 hours or more. My experience seemed more intense than the others, but I chalked this up to my relative inexperience. Now, I’ve come to think that I have some synergy with, or am particularly susceptible to, the spirit or chemical substance of p. cubensis.

Since that initial psilocybin experience in Australia I had taken LSD 2 or 3 times and mushrooms just once more. Mushrooms even in moderate doses continued to provide distinctly more intense experiences than anything else yet encountered. LSD, for instance, always struck me as very kind, helpful, and forgiving. I never experienced the kind of whopping, kick-in-the-ass sorts of insights that I expected it might unleash; more “You’re ok. You’re loved. Maybe just look at this. It’s all ok.” SB and I had both read Terrence McKenna, the pixie-like entheogenic Pied Piper of the “Archaic Revival.” With my meditation experience and feeling at something beyond the most basic level of psychedelic experience, SB and I planned a “heroic dose,” as McKenna puts it. I am unsure of weight, but I estimate I ate about 15 dried mushrooms, caps and stems. SB ate about the same.

Before ingesting, we ritually prepared the space, his extremely trip-friendly early 20th c., second floor apartment, covered with Persian carpets, pillows, and tapestries; a tasteful post-hippie-ish pad. Not my style, but I deemed it a nearly ideal set and setting. I did some Buddhist chanting, we stated intentions and prayers, and got to chewing. We washed them all down with herbal tea. It was late afternoon.

We settled in to wait. The onset began fairly quickly, perhaps 20 minutes later, with familiar tingling sensations and pixelating visuals. I tried to sit in a good lotus posture, but the mushrooms don’t ever seem to like this and knocked me right out of it. I alternated from lying down to sitting casually. At perhaps 40 minutes (early-ish) I was visited by some sort of not-quite-visual entities. They were distinct presences, distinctly “other,” and were like swirling rainbows of light, but not exactly “outside” of me. I had entered their world, their space, their dimension. They were like the Spirit of the Mushroom, or maybe more properly its messengers. They were lighthearted, elfin, almost alien. An intelligence of their own utterly unique kind. They asked me wordlessly what I wanted to know. I look back at this as perhaps a mistake, or missed opportunity. I thought for just a moment, already somewhat addled my the effects of the fungus, and fatefully said “I don’t know.” I remember them quite distinctly giggling, with a sort of “ok, you asked for it” tone, then disappearing in a swirl of rainbow lights.

And so it began.

First, SB and I watched language fall apart, as can be expected at even more moderate doses. Spoken words became a hilarious joke, inelegant animal grunting not worth bothering with. We communicated telepathically, and laughed at the hilarity of it all.

Then things started to get weird.

Everything started to melt. And I don’t mean visually. The apartment, and everything in it, started to literally dis-integrate. This included our bodies. It was not at all comfortable. SB seemed to be fighting it, screaming in pain. Our bodies were mashing together, bones flesh skin organs melting together with carpets pillows walls. I remember the feeling of my bones collapsing – but this wasn’t easy or flowing. It involved tortuous sensations of being twisted and crushed, as solids became liquid, and we melted into the floor, and the floor sunk into earth. Over the roar of the apocalypse, I kept yelling at SB to not fight it, go with it, don’t fight it, go with it. At some point everything simply became a grey cosmic soup.

It’s been 15 years, and in this trip I experienced eons of time, so an exact chronology after this point is impossible, and perhaps unnecessary. And yet much of it remains quite vividly in mind. I remembered thinking even during the trip that the Tibetans speak of the Bardo state between life and death being 7 times more vivid than normal waking states of consciousness, and this seemed to perfectly correspond with what I was experiencing. Anyone who’s done any sort of psychedelic knows the heightened sense perceptions. These “hallucinations” had that quality of hyper-reality, and could in no way be exited with a thought or intention. The only way through was out the other end.

SB has no recollection of the above, or anything else of a real psychedelic nature. He only remembers passing flat out, and coming to hours later to find me lost to the world. My experience became so intense and unhinged that he remembers only more or less coming to his senses to look after me. In the throws of my journey, however, I felt completely connected with the very mechanisms of the universe, and in no way in need of such puny mortal assistance…

“I” eventually began to emerge again out of the soup, evolved from it over eons, as single-cell, plant, reptile, mammal, human, god. I emphasize that this was not in fast forward. I experienced every slow evolutionary step. Finally, I became god-like, but still somewhat fearfully mortal. I was clearly back in the now re-evolved apartment, but only to find it now cosmic battleground. I sat yogically upright, still, expectant. Darkness was literally and figuratively setting in. I knew one thing very clearly. I had to fight, for my own survival and the very fate of the world. I didn’t want to. I felt quite lucidly aware that I was just me, I had eaten mushrooms, I was in SB’s apartment. And yet, it simply was not that world anymore. It was this new, more vivid world, with a completely different set of rules and circumstances; there was no possibility of being in any other, and this one was in danger. I have to stress that this world was intensely more real seeming than the world of normal waking consciousness, and nothing whatsoever like a dream. There was the clear sense of finally seeing reality for what it really was. And in this moment it was terrifying.

There loomed a nefarious foe: strange creatures that needed to be defeated in no uncertain terms, who might otherwise destroy me and all that was good true and beautiful in the human world. In appearance they were hairless, a sickening greyish pink, like new born rodents. Something like the Grey Aliens described in abduction accounts, but not so upright or spindly. Humanoid, they seemed to mostly crawl, slither even. They moved quickly, always barely out of sight, seen just in shadow or periphery. They didn’t seem intrinsically malicious or evil, but were nevertheless wholly, unreasonably dangerous.  They could not be bargained with. They seemed related to human beings, but like some sort of soulless aberration that sought to mindlessly negate and destroy the particulate, differentiated soul-full beauty of human life. While we had both emerged from the cosmic sludge, they seemed to come from an aberrant time-line, parallel universe, or extraterrestrial source. They were what humans once had been, or might horribly become; in any case, all that mattered was to defeat them.

I have never, ever, before or since experienced that kind of fear. But it emphatically wasn’t to be succumbed to. This was time for battle, plain and simple. No escape. I steeled myself, waiting for them to come, up the stairs, through the door, through the windows. The anticipation was terrifying. I couldn’t stand, even if I’d felt I needed to. Though my corporeal body was clearly on the line, this battle was spiritual, to be fought with spirit and mind. I began to chant endless lengthy Sanskrit mantras and furiously, assuredly execute definitive complex hand mudras. These flowed effortlessly, and each was full of specific power, combined with the ancient verbal formulas I didn’t know (or care) how I remembered. Of course I have no idea what any of them were now, but am quite sure that they would have passed muster of any Hindu scholar drifting by. The battle raged endlessly, for eons. I somehow kept the precious world safe.

I guess in “real life” I was making something of a racket. Some neighbors called the police. Oh yes, of course I was fully aware of this, even before it happened. I knew the cops were coming, but I knew they were part of the whole cosmic dra-medy. Here came the expected sirens. And in the door the cops stomped. SB later told me that he explained to them that I was on mushrooms, and they just asked him to keep me quiet and they wouldn’t take me in. First however, they knocked me around a bit, threw me on my stomach, cuffed me, and hoisted my hands painfully behind my back with a booted foot on my neck.

I didn’t mind one bit. In my parallel reality, it was perfectly clear they were cops, sure, but galactic stage cops, beings playing their roles in a grand theater, for a play that I had helped pen. Their arrival and abuse was an initiation, and confirmation of my success in my role as earth defender in the battle. It signaled the definitive end of the fight. I had called them myself, I loved them, it was hilarious and a huge relief. I laughed the whole time, utterly grateful and amused. I was connected to everything, participating in everything (I thought the next day that they were just an “imagined” part of the trip until I saw the big bruises on my wrists and neck, and SB confirmed the “real” story.)

After this, for me the story just continued. SB hours later eventually called an older, experienced friend who came and took over. In the meantime, I realized that SB and I were infinite beings of light, souls who had chosen to incarnate on a whim, like teenagers on a lark. I knew the universe to be populated by a huge hierarchy of enormous intelligences, some galactic in scale and ancient, vast beyond even my body-freed comprehension. I knew myself to be a very young soul, a mere kid, at a million years or two (what was time?) A wise-cracker punk slip of light.

Like kids, like baby galactic surfers, we had been joy-cruising through the universe and thought to each other, “hey, let’s check out Earth, dude, terrestrial life. That ought to be a trip,” a decision as deep as choosing to go to a particular club on a Tuesday night. To do so, one needed to don a “4th dimensional space/time suit,” ie a body. Let’s do it, just for kicks, we’d thought. I now realized clearly, however, that there was a big problem: a virus that had been introduced into the suit, perhaps even malevolently like some kind of Luciferian conspiracy, that caused one to forget one’s origins and true nature. One risked incarnating, and thereby getting stuck perpetually in endless cycles of birth and death. It seemed hilarious and somewhat annoying, like a great practical joke, and I was inexpresibly relieved to remember. I laughed and cried to know the truth of it. “Stupid time-space meat suits!” I exclaimed. This strikes me now as possibly the most useful, enduring, and truest realization of the entire escapade.

Later, having cracked the code of materialization, I just conjured my girlfriend J____ out of the carpet. She was 2000 miles away on the East Coast, but I rubbed the edge of a Persian carpet between my fingers, and I sang her into being, the rug becoming the hem of her red velvet dress (when I called her two days later, she had been wearing such a dress that night.) She was there, as hyper-real as my own god-like self, and I was absolutely madly in love with her. She was my universal consort; she was every woman that I had ever loved, would ever love, that anyone would ever love, and I was every man. And yet wonderfully just my own infinite yet individual manifested myself, and she hers.

It wasn’t totally grand; everything was somewhat humblingly absurd too. My heroic stature was colored by the ridiculous archetypes of my childhood. I was Krishna, but I was also William Shatner’s campy Captain Kirk. I was Shiva, but I was also the overdone theatrics of Bruce Lee. I was grand as Jesus, and as pretentiously foolish as a comic book hero. With conjured J____ it was beautiful, sexy, and loving, but skulls and darkness loomed in the corners. This episode was tinged with a Freudian light too, as my consort took on my mother’s name, and I also among every other male hero figure became my father (who’s real-life faltering uber-heroic persona was likewise skewered.)

Later (eons again seeming to pass) I truly did become Lord Krishna/Rama in his most cosmic aspect, the absurdity dropped away. My skin was bright blue. I knew manifest universes as my own body and thought forms. Language was the ultimate technology. Every word had power, and could create the thing said, or even thought. One of my most distinct memories is of delicately rubbing my fingers and thumb together, seeing and feeling every particle, glistening like rainbow pearls, down to atoms, and knowing that I could create anything. I was divine hard light.

I felt vast love for everything. Space was infinite. SB, who is somewhat handsomely simian in appearance anyway, was revealed in his true aspect: Hanuman, the monkey god, my dear and trusted friend. J_____ was my Radha/Sita, kept from me at a distance; I longed for her but knew her part of me in any case (I was not particularly familiar with Hinduism at this point, but I knew enough to recognize these forms that emerged, especially in hindsight.)

I spent ages communing with infinite beings and personages. The true sacred nature of everyone I’d ever known revealed itself, and I communicated with them across time and space.

Things moved on. I became less and less individuated. I experienced the birth and death of countless galaxies, and universes. It was endless.

Finally, I began to long for oblivion. I couldn’t take anymore. I had witnessed billions of years. I wanted it to stop; I was simply exhausted. Eventually, like a reverse big bang, everything seemed to be drawn into a black-hole like void. Light and being twisted one way, then the other, forming a giant yin-yang, swirling one way, then the other. It twisted from my hara or tan tien, my belly. My whole infinite universe body twisted with it (and in reality I did convulse enough to toss around some things in the living room I later came to in.) Finally, the void. Death. Blackness. No awareness. Nothing at all. Forever.

…   …   …   …   …

Then, a sound. A name. My name? I struggled to open my eyes. It was hard work. I was sure I was dead. “Ah, the Bardo. Am I in heaven? What is this place?” I got one eye open finally (the other was smushed closed against the floor), only to see a big green apple being held directly in front of it. “Titus? Titus?” a familiar voice repeated. Ah, it was the voice of my friend K., who in his late 30’s then acted something like an older brother for me. “Oh, yeah,” I thought. I had been surfing the galaxy with him a few eons ago too, I remember. I was so glad he was there to help me through the transition into the next world. The lights were so bright. He wants for me to take this apple, I guessed. Is it knowledge? Will it tell me where to go now? Where’s the light? I used all of my will to reach for the apple, and weakly managed to take it. There was K.’s ruefully smiling face staring back at me. “He’ll be ok,” he said, to someone out of view.

I was a shirtless, sweating rubbery pile of meat sprawled amidst a not insignificant pile of destruction on SB’s living room floor. I managed to crawl to a futon in the corner and went to sleep. The next day, K. took me for a hike, occasionally laughing at me while helping me to try to pull my shit together.

PS: The best thing I can say about this is that I never once was tempted to try to recreate this episode. It never struck me that this was either the truth, or some evil aberration that needed to be denied to blocked out. It was instead just a terrifying, profound, and scintillating shattering of ages of “reasonable” notions about what I was, or could potentially be. It was also deeply humbling. Never again would I think that I could buy special protection from the mischievous power of plant spirit entities with a few sincere prayers and some meditation experience.

I also don’t deny that things may have happened exactly as I experienced them, reducing it all to merely the intense ravings of my lunatic unconcious. Maybe it was just that. Or maybe, as it so vividly seemed at the time, the mushrooms/universe/God etc conspired to have me eat them a that moment because a battle really did need to be fought. I was a needed deific pawn. Perhaps I indeed did save the universe. But thank goodness I didn’t come “down” and think that I was special in any way. If I helped, I’m humbly happy to have done so. Please pick the next guy next time, thanks.

I don’t know what the actual effects of this were in my “real” life. Along with other adventures in non-ordinary reality, I assume them to be nothing less than revolutionary. How much more so could it have been with a good guide, an experienced leader to sing me deeper into the truth, and help integrate those insights into my normal life? The question remains…

To be published soon. Here’s a link to Women & their Work, the gallery. And to the show website.

———————

In the beginning, void. Total absence. Out of this nothing came One. No why or how. Bang. There it is. Logos. One thought. A word.

Out of One came Two. From Two came Three, and from the Three, Infinite Cosmos. More galaxies in our universe than stars in our galaxy, more universes beyond this one than galaxies in it.

What was the phrase that shaped itself from this nothing (no creator needed, separate from the creation)? The one Word that begat the symphonic infinite holographic encyclopedia of being, all of it reducible to that first utterance; which is still just now, and always?

Why, “Love,” of course.

Well, apologies to you hard-nosed art worlders, but we can’t talk about the artwork of Lizzy Wetzel and not confront the obvious. You can’t not use the word “psychedelic.” You can’t not get a little cosmic for minute. You have to use the “L-word.” After all, she does.

In the ritual that initiated her exhibition at WOTW, individuals were selected from the crowd by a male “gatekeeper” dressed in nothing more than a hawk-wing codpiece, ornately embellished plastic Halloween wolf mask, and white body paint. They were ushered by two more masked, dark-costumed functionaries into a black-light illumined bamboo dome. There Wetzel, in hooded white druid’s dress, her stated intention to “massage” each person with amplified drum beats and chanting, whispered a healing mantra: “I love you.” Each participant was given an initiatory mark as they exited, an orange stripe painted down their forehead and nose.

Love chants, glitter hot glue, fluorescent shiny puff paint, black lights, animal parts: this work is nothing less than a challenge to every last vestige of high-art respectability, and really, the new academy.

By the 1990’s, after the thorough decades-long “deconstruction” of any authoritative aesthetic or material criteria, art-world clout had finally come to more or less be measured by a perceived level of analytical critique; a predominance of a sort of masculine, reductivist, passive-aggressive, hyper-intellectual gameswo/manship and tactical maneuvering, symptomized by a lack of any sort of emotional/physical expansiveness, in favor of endless small tight turns in the brain. Feeling was allowed, as long as it was moderated by a wink/nudge irony, political agitation, or was observably negative (ennui, angst, self-loathing, disgust preferred, thank you.) Sincerity was really only to be believed if what was expressed was unpleasant.

The last few years have seen an overwhelming push-back against this sort of discrimination, toward glee, joy, casualness, collaboration, hilarity, friendship, care, entheogens, make-up, and generally having a good time in the art experience.

Wetzel is a member of a creative generation emerging naturally in this moment, reacting spontaneously with their cultural products and intrusions – I would argue she happens to do it better that most. The world clearly needs a new approach. Things are a mess. We are out of balance. We need some healing. A Medicine Show, even.

Art as medicine; of course. What else should it be?

What needs healing? God, what doesn’t?

At root, we greatly suffer the loss of functional myth and meaning structures. Disconnection from Earth (physical and metaphysical,) each other. War, within the self, and by extension, everything else.

We are sick, unto the possible death of our species. To the death of many others, that is already certain.

We don’t have the luxury to be purely negative anymore, to wallow in the impulse to critique and intellectually unravel the mechanisms of our immanent demise. We need healing. We need vision.

Art can act as medicine. Illness, of all sorts, is about separation; even just from the notion of health itself. We lose felt connection to the trunk of the sources of being, and find ourselves driven out into strangled branches and twigs. Lost in the weeds.

Indigenous people everywhere lived and developed slow, sustainable cultures over dozens of millennia, building myth-ritual-social structures in harmony with human and natural patterns, staying connected to the roots, not losing site of the obvious. They ate, grateful, sustained by the gifts of the flowering world, and in turn they were eaten, by the earth, by its gods.

Very few of us still live consciously connected in this way today, and we exist embedded in conditions that make it seemingly almost impossible to do, like soul-caught bugs in media amber.

Indigenous societies had certain technicians whose function it was to specialize in this sort of harmonizing: of the human with human, and of the human with the seen and unseen realms beyond the boundaries of flesh and conscious psyche. We now generally use the Turko-Mongolian term “shaman” to label these doctors of the sacred.

If religions, as most now generally understand them, arose with the development of settled agricultural civilizations 5000 years ago, these free-agent visionary technicians, men and women, have been acting in much the same manner for closer to perhaps 100,000 years. This is not a heritage that we simply shrug off, or technologically “evolve” beyond. We are actually much less “advanced” than we think, functioning with essentially the same physio/psychological equipment as our great-to-the-1000th grandmother.

Many “civilized” human societies are deeply alienated from their original holistic human cultural systems. The “why” of it is (perhaps) a long discussion. But clear is that in the development of what has come to be considered contemporary art praxis, numbers of its significant recent practitioners have embraced the shamanic function quite consciously, engaged in what some consider an archaic revival, a revolution on par with the European Renaissance. Joseph Beuys would of course be foremost among these artists.

He is one of Wetzel’s art lineage ancestors. But like a reactionary shamanic art granddaughter, she’s painted his tools fluorescent pink and covered them with glitter and butterfly wings. Instead of aesthetically reclaiming the dark rusted iron and fat/felt of a resurrected Luftwaffe martyr, she re-posits her summer day-camp kids’ Hobby Lobby materials, and her DJ friend’s post-rave-culture club gear.

Wetzel is from the Southwestern US. She feels it too. She likes the desert; cacti and bones. Her material language emerges out of the dusty red soil and Hill Country caliche, and while she’s temporarily taken her alchemical laboratory to NYC, she doesn’t leave the region for long at a time. Certainly never in spirit.

The curtained, black-lit, sacred shrouded dome zone in the exhibition is balanced by a desert evocation outside it, symbolized by bright lights and a triangular installation of San Pedro cacti. The San Pedro is a source of many traditional medicines used for thousands of years in Americas north and south, famously including psychoactive mescaline alkaloids. Shamans know that plants have communicating spirits, and power beyond their mere chemical components — no different than you or I. She’s adorned these cacti with gold glitter and artificial painted blooms, and planted in hand-built clay chalices.

Circles symbolically relate to water, and triangles to fire. Balancing oppositions, male and female. On the walls are enshrined the ritual masks and garb worn at the opening. I pointed out to the artist that she’d intuitively arranged them as cross-adorned (4) pentagrams (5) inside triangles of light (3). There is sacred geometry at work. Each whole number by nature has associated energies and archetypal references. I’ll leave interpretation at that. Find in them what you will. I hope viewers will be drawn to spend time with the installation, and feel their way toward the messages Wetzel embeds and embodies in it, having happily struggled to midwife it into the world, in laughter, in tears. It was hard work, physical and spiritual.

The final element is a trinity of horse-hides stretched on the walls, with mirrored rainbow star-bursts tied across their surfaces. As I spent time gazing at them they began to resemble gateways opening into deep space, like images shot from the Hubble space telescope of black holes and nebulae. I like that rather than try to pretend to depict something cosmic using high-tech or illusionary means, a horse hide, a few strands of plastic craft cord, some octagonal feng shui mirrors , some goopy paints, and the context do the trick, perhaps more evocatively.

The whole thing is actually surprisingly discreet. Too often lately this kind of approach can feel like a big adolescent neon dump pile; trying too hard with the more-is-more, lamely forcing the glam tacky anti-art factor. Wetzel takes some lessons from the desert, from the indigenous, and maybe Don Judd and Dan Flavin. There’s a surprising kind of sophistication, tastefulness believe it or not, that you can’t really pretend. I call it ‘visual intelligence.’

The important thing is to know that it’s possible to generate these kinds of crazy/sane visions, intrusions, happenings, detournement, these kind of ancient/futuristic lineages and communities today. Wetzel’s effort is a challenge to you to create a medicine show in your own world.

And by the way: she loves you.

June 10, 2009

Titus O’Brien is an artist and writer currently based in Chicago.

Expanding space, opening space, activating space; “painting” without paint, but melting plastic; intuiting the right-feeling gesture, arc, relationship, body scale; playing with gravity, tension, innate properties, etc…going against “taste” but grappling toward rightness, a certain Quality, perhaps…

During my few years stint in a Soto monastery in California a decade back, I stumbled across a book in the library there that came to influence me, and my practice, enormously. Called “Cultivating the Empty Field,” it is the most extensive translation of 12th c. Chinese Zen master Hongzhi’s teachings in English. I can’t overstate how much this book meant to me then. It seemed to clearly and directly explain my real inspiration to practice zen, and my experience sitting on the cushion. This was revelatory especially as I had been practicing for years earlier in a Korean tradtion that emphasized chanting, bowing, and kong-an (or koan) practice. The founder of the school, Seung Sahn, my first Zen teacher, often admitted that he wasn’t fond of sitting, and reached “enlightenment” while chanting.

I wanted to refine my sitting practice, explore and season it, and I was always getting called in to the teacher’s room to have to have these absurd theatrical encounters, giving what I felt were somewhat canned responses, unable to talk about the nuances of what was happening for me in the practice, in simple terms. I was totally passionate and commited, and I “passed” plenty of koans; I just assumed in time (when I got more enlightened?) the ’system’ would start to feel more natural, less stilted and “Korean.” It never really did; but then I encountered Dogen Zen.

I don’t want to get into the wonders of Dogen here, but one of his immediate predessors and influences was Hongzhi. Here’s a passage:

“Silently dwell in the self, in true suchness abandon conditioning. Open-minded and bright without defilement, simply penetrate and drop off everything. Today is not your first arrival here. Since the ancient home before the empty kalpa, clearly nothing has been obscured. Although you are inherently spirited and splendid, still you must go ahead and enact it. When doing so, immediately display every atom without hiding a speck of dirt. Dry and cool in deep repose, profoundly understand. If your rest is not satisfying and you yearn to go beyond birth and death, there can be no such place. Just burst through and you will discern without thought-dusts, pure without reasons for anxiety. Immediately you can sparkle and respond to the world. Merge together with all things. Everything is just right.”

I just find each line full of liberating insight, and bow a deep bow of gratitude in the direction of 12th c. China. You can have Heiddegger, or Wittgenstein, or Sartre, or the Post-Moderns, or even wacky ol’ Ken Wilber. Throw in Confucius, Rumi, St Francis, Martin Buber, Ramana Maharshi, or even the Dalai Lama. If I had to choose (which thankfully I don’t), I’d just take Hongzhi, and shikantaza (”just sitting”).

Last fall I was looking for a copy of CTEF, and happily discovered that the book’s translator, Taigen Leighton, had recently moved to Chicago. I had been off the Dharma trail for awhile, unable to find a teacher or sangha that felt particularly right for me; though granted I hadn’t been looking all that hard either. I’d kept sitting, but done more yoga and whatnot for a couple years (I needed a fresh take.) Taigen is a Dharma heir, or “Zen Master”, in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki, the legendary transmitter of Dogen Zen to the US. Taigen is also probably the foremost western-born Soto Zen practitioner-scholar in the country (with many renowned Asian born translators, and more traditional “scholars” also making great contributions.)

So I went to sit with Taigen and the group he was leading who met weekly at a Catholic retreat in the heart of Chicago. They soon signed a lease on a new space, and opened their own center early this year (I was happy to design the window signage, for an old store front in Irving Park.) I’m trying to make it up once or twice a week, and though it isn’t really that far, with Chicago traffic or having to take two trains, it still takes me close to an hour to get there. Anyway, what an enormous boon to be able to practice this way in the midst of 21st century American urban existence.

I’ve also started a Zen sitting group at the School of the Art Institute, where I’m teaching, and this is enormously satisfying. This reimmersion in the focused study and practice of Zen is having direct results in my life. I can see it (I want to talk about this more next post). Now, I just need to find some income through summer, until fall semester starts…

I saw Richard Tuttle talk the other night, along with his wife, poet Mei Mei Berssenbrugge. Wow.

He really has become one of a handful of constant touchstones in my thinking about art today, from a couple of shows I saw in NYC 15 years ago to his retrospective in Dallas in 2006. This night, he read a series of short poetic “essays” that he wrote for a series of catalogs on color. I didn’t get exactly what, where, or for whom these were done. There was an un-synchronized slide show going on behind him with work spanning 1970 to a current show of new work in New York.

He spoke about letting the colors themselves write the essays, and they ranged from the profound to the impenetrable to the humorous (as when he’s conversing with the blue who is writing the essay on blue, “in his head” as it were – a phrase I always find to make very little real sense.)

After, he was asked about beauty and morality, and I loved that he took the question so seriously that he spluttered for a few seconds before getting started. He then emphatically said that he felt that art was really about the opposite of beauty, in that it is a way to digest and become aware of the phenomenal world without being destroyed by beauty. “I mean,” he said, “if I could see the actual beauty of this podium right here I would be annihilated by it.”

Jeder Engel is Schrecklich, said Rilke. Indeed.

That one statement really deftly flipped an entire aesthetic convention on its head, and reminded me of similar verbal maneuvers by Dogen, or any other number of Zen-type folks.

I had to go up and shake his hand after, pay homage. I was happy to find his handshake strong, dry, and warm, and his demeanor so friendly, attentive and convivial. I so liked him, and Mei Mei, with whom I briefly discussed Leslie Silko (her friend, and a favorite writer of mine) and her home in Abiquiu, a mile or two from where we stayed over Christmas.

My friend, artist Peter Fagundo, and I walked to the train pleasantly high and seemingly extra attuned and sensitive to self and surroundings, making drunken thugs and winos on the train platform extra-disconcerting, but accepted as grist for our attention’s mill.

We then went over to my place for a studio visit. I’ve been making some really difficult sculptures the last year. It began with a 3-D Design class in Arlington last spring. I worked along side the students, as I very much like to do, and made something with wire and melted plastic that quite intrigued me. I wonder if I have spent the year since going down a blind alley, while polluting the atmosphere with the noxious gases given off by heat gunned shopping bags and painting tarps. I’ve made a body of what I’d consider some tough, freaky doo-dads that are the most fun I’ve ever had in production, but with results that perpetually leave me aching with intimations of a missing element, or perhaps a wholly misguided approach. I’m at one of those agonizing if perceptibly fruitful impasses.

The crux of my dilemma has been this re-emphasis for me on trying to make a functioning, cohesive aesthetic object, but using a completely unconventional approach and material. I began with wire armatures, but wanted to have less control over the forms. This led me to airplane cable, that I began to zip-tie into looping, Marden-esque aerial forms hanging in space. Some stayed just like this, while others accrued plastic skins, as pictured here. These are just a couple hanging around in the living room until I can get them documented, and then hopefully out of sight/out of mind for a bit.

I know quite clearly what I do not want to see: production or process as cheeky gimmick, cheesy crap re-contextualized as wink-nudge formal maneuver, hipster anything. I’ve really wanted to avoid directly referencing ANYTHING in the world, and am both intrigued and frustrated by the wealth of associations the biomorphic forms I’ve been using conjure, for me anyway.

I have wanted to be in discussion with certain things – moderns, mainly, like DeKooning, Pollock, Leger, Andre Masson, Picasso, analytical and synthetic cubism, etc. Also, there’s an obvious relationship to John Chamberlain, and I think often about Tomas Kiesewetter, the contemporary German sculptor who I think simply kicks total ass.

And cartoon explosions.

So, I’m a bit caught at the moment, wondering whether to proceed, or step away from this approach for awhile. Pete and I have this open-ended project starting in a house in Evanston. That’s soon to become a real platform for a wide-ranging inquiry into art practice, and I’m sure some solutions will present themselves,  in the midst of new dilemmas.