I don’t know why. I’ll try to find out. If for some reason you’re reading this (which despite evidence to the contrary I always doubt actually occurs), my apologies.
PS I figured it out, but it will take some tweaking of each picture’s code to fix. I’m slowly working my way back through the posts…
Franklin Jones (b. 1939), alias Bubba Free John, alias Da Free John, alias Dau Loloma, Da Love-Ananda, Da Avadhoota, Da Kalki, Da Avabhasa, and for the last couple years Adi Da Samraj (but with numbers of special secondary appellations), says he’s the Ruchira Avatar, the “God Man” for whom the world has waited with baited breath for, well, ever; the most enlightened creature ever incarnate. Greater than Buddha, greater than Jesus. He says he’s operating at level 7 in the cosmic video game of enlightenment, where the latter only made it to 5 or 6. Wra wra wra wra wraaaah – Game Over.
You can win an all-expense paid trip to nirvana however, if you simply recognize him as the World Avatar, put up some pictures of His Pudginess, meditate upon his lordly raised-eyebrowed visage, and get his groove on. Maybe you can even move to the island paradise he rules in Fiji (which he purchased from actor Raymond Burr, aka Perry Mason.) Former Playmates and general hotties, please move to the front of the line…
He’s been holed up down there for the last 25 years, waiting for the world to recognize him, and elevate him to the status of Global Grand Poobah, which he says will happen before he “leaves his body” (it was supposed to happen in 2000 – whoops.) He has the outfits ready. Standard gear includes purple John Lennon glasses, flower garlands, tiger-striped loin cloths (if he bothers, which he often doesn’t), orange togas draped over his enormous belly, and lovely tresses draping his shoulders – but as if metaphorically, only the fringe, hair having long ago departed the top of his head. I’m sure all the deep vibrations merely burned it off.
If this guy is God, I’ll declare myself an atheist on purely stylistic grounds. My god would never be so tacky, or self-seriously cornball.
Speaking of which, he fancies himself an artist now – last refuge of psychopaths and egomaniacs, and a interesting way to attempt global conquest. The website devoted to his art is called Da Plastique. Ooh la la (in pictures there, he sports a black turtleneck: Da meets Dieter.) He has a show at a somewhat crap gallery on the hot La Cienega strip next month, who nevertheless also have a show scheduled of John Baldessari later (I imagine of prints or something.) Adi Da showed some things at the same time as the Biennale in Venice, thereby tagging the show (and a website) with Venice Biennale all over the place. In the typical shuck-and-jive, it had no official connection, short of being organized by Achille Oliva, a former Biennale curator.
For some inexplicable reason, Donald Kuspit (yeah, that Donald Kuspit) was convinced of the necessity to heap praise upon the Venice show, and at some point earlier, Da’s photographs, many of which are of naked women – of course (he has lots of wives, and accusations of cultic sexual abuse abound among former longtime devotees.) What possibly got into Kuspit’s head? In his desolation about the “End of Art”, did he drink the Kool Aid? Did he just not do any homework? I mean, you can’t just ignore that the guy has spent 30 years declaring he’s THE MESSIAH! It begs at least a small mention in a critical appraisal of his art, don’t you think?
(the horse is the Da religion’s symbol. They’d eat this up in Santa Fe)
Over the years, I’ve been up and down the aisles in the spiritual candy store. I’ve checked out the penny candy and the lollipops, the pop rocks and the pixie stix (mmm – pixie stix). As I’m sure for many of you, since I can remember there was a niggling sense of something beyond the veil, as it were. 20 years of meditation and encounters with all manner of monks and masters have provided not only plenty of evidence of the need for skepticism, but also powerful confirmation of the possibility, and necessity, of a richer psycho-cosmology than the scientific-materialist one that’s dominated the “West” the past few hundred years.
Historically, one of art’s prevalent functions has in fact been to counter an assumed scientific hegemony, and its de-sacralization of the world. As that supposed hard duality has all but dissolved in recent decades, many grope for new ways of understanding the forces that rule our world, our societies, and our psyches. The rise of various desperate fundamentalisms is clearly understood from this standpoint. And that of Oprah.
Religion of course was the third leg of the tripod, and we’re all aware of the seemingly chaotic search for a new paradigm. Art, religion, and science have held equal fascination for me, and I imagine for many of you. They seem at times to neatly dovetail – and then sometimes to diverge sharply. Each have their traps, as well as more nuanced, inclusive, and complete manifestations. The reasonable baby should never get chucked with the intuitive bath water. But that baby was indeed pretty filthy.
One guy who has been trying to map the whole territory, attempt a complete, “integral” model of consciousness, is “philosopher” Ken Wilber (I resist using the term without qualifying quotes). The guy fascinates me – so much of what he says is undeniably compelling, and yet factual and theoretical gaffs, relentless breezy hyperbole, and the grotesquely hyper-rationalist, egomaniacal flavor of his presentation all make me deeply uncomfortable. Another thing: his taste in art is horrible – Alex Grey is his Integral Picasso. Last and by no means least is an inexcusable, long-standing admiration for ye ol’ Adi Da.
(there are actually peace signs forming an eyeball, in 1980 OP t-shirt colors…I feel a new age dawning already)
Early in his career as budding intellectual guru to the New Age, Wilber wrote a glowing review of a Da book, saying “[this] is the most ecstatic, most profound, most complete, most radical, and most comprehensive single spiritual text ever [written.]” Whew. Take a breath there, Ken. Later, after years of scandal and lawsuits rocked Jones’ Fiji compound, not to mention the funny outfits, Wilber began to distance himself, criticizing the Master publicly. However, a secret letter written to placate the Da’s followers was leaked to the public in 2000. In it, Wilber says “I have not…in any way abandoned my love and devotion for [Da]. . .my own opinion is that Master Adi Da is the living Sat-Guru [ultimate being/teacher]. . . . Many people have made their way to Master Da because of my own writings. I am completely happy about that, and I hope I can continue that positive influence…I speak of Master Da as the Sat-Guru . . . I affirm my own love and devotion to the living Sat-Guru, and I hope my work will continue to bring students to [Him.]”
Yuuuuuck.
Don’t get me wrong. I think spiritual teachers can be helpful, at some points even crucial. They come in many forms – like maybe just the checker at the WalMart - with many levels of so-called attainment and ability. Folks drift by karma and inclination toward a style they need or want. But it’s good to keep your expectations, of yourself and others, modest; and to keep your wits close about you. If you’re in a human body, there are necessarily limitations to your perceptual/conceptual reality, and the most that any of us can hope for is to sympathetically attempt to transfer some sort of helpful vibration from one neural network to another, keep waking up to the grandness of this single moment we eternally occupy, and grow as best were able beyond our more distressing relative limitations. Rarely does any of it go as planned.
These people we deem “artists” are at their best just free-agents driven to grope toward some comprehension of their own patterning and perceptual systems, making them manifest and opening territories for further feedback loops and creative discourse; maybe, just maybe, even helping to pave the way for a saner society and world. Art in a way is really a sort of social evolutionary medicine. Call it “spiritual” or “scientific” or “artistic” – happily, those terms don’t really seem necessary with a lot of art now, or anything more than limiting categories to be transcended and blended.
(one of Adi Da’s photographs. Wow. Dial the Wayback Machine to Marin, 1973. Do you like pina coladas? getting caught in the rain?)
Adi Da, and therefore his artistic expression, must necessarily have an agenda, and even if the pieces have some merit, I don’t do art with closed, self-referencing agendas. It all points toward him, not you. Which, while passe, is not unusual. What is is that he believes himself to be the most enlightened being who’s ever lived; that everyone on earth should recognize this “fact”; and that enlightenment (ie the end of human suffering and confusion) comes through this, and only this, recognition (funny how they leave this out of the press materials for his exhibitions). Maybe it’s just my complete samsaric ignorance, but this seems like, um, uh … oh yeah, “complete and utter garbage” I think is the phrase I’m looking for.
Discussions of Jones/Da often hinge on seperating the message from the man, that his books are chock-full of the greatest insights into spiritual conciousness ever. I don’t find this argument convincing. I say look to the man for the message – as he himself does. Years ago I did attempt a couple of his 70 plus books, and found them all but unreadable; self-centered, dated, drippy, repetitive, and tedious, containing few insights not found in a thousand more grounded, reliable, or convincing sources – ground paved by centuries of psychonauts.
This guy, no matter his charisma, aura, or one-time attainment, has clearly long been unhinged, deranged; some of his chakras have flown off the tracks, and one would have to be simply confused to be drawn into the ditch with him – either by too much thought and projected self-estimation (Wilber), or too little (the minions who act out the master/servant farce in Fiji). Either way, people get hooked by the “special” feeling of recognizing the God Man, and he’s ready made to feed on such adulation. Oh, you would be saints and sages, tread carefully.
(my word, he’s turning into Yoda…)
At best, he’s simply symptomatic of his age; archly symbolic, but of a much different sort than he assumes: an agonizingly inflated Boomer who found confirmation of his stratosphereric self-esteem as early golden boy of a first-wave Indian guru (in this case, siddha yogi Muktananda). Every single Eastern master who came over in the 60′s had one or two. They had no idea what the American ego was really capable of. Young sociopathic enthusiast shows promise, is quickly given permission to teach, and next thing you know, student knows better than guru, all ties are severed (to the teacher’s dismay,) and off they go to found a compound and “tradition” of their own, where clothes (of a particular gender) are suddenly discouraged and “true devotion” is shown by freely giving your body, and your cash, to the new master. Everybody is told to suck it up, and bury any questions – it’s “crazy wisdom”, baby! The list who followed this pattern is long…
Why is it that musicians, actors, and apparently Cosmic Avatars feel the need at a certain point to validate themselves by becoming “artists”? What is it about this absurd context that seems to promise some elusive confirmation? Adi Da’s pictures could be worse – at least he’s not painting, a la Dylan, Bowie, or Tony Bennett. But they aren’t all that great either. He supposedly studied the roots of Modernism in college back in the 60′s before realizing he was “the World Teacher.” You see him channeling early Bauhaus, surrealist and pop sources he would have been aware of, mixed in with some Indian yantric trickery and happy Hawaii tourist art cliches. Subtle they aren’t.
Da has been preaching for decades, and these pictures are as transparently didactic as Hallmark cards. You’re continually evaluating their desire to manipulate your attention in specific, not very interesting ways. Good art asks questions that it doesn’t already know the answers to. Cosmic omniscience would preclude that stance, I suppose.
Many of these works look like failed 3-D Magic Pictures or sci-fi book covers, and you’re mainly overwhelmed by the Presence of the All-Knowing Hand of the Ultimate, also known as Adobe software – the go-to media for urban shamans, yogic flyers, psychedelic channeling mediums, and aspiring New Age gurus everywhere.
(Perspective is relative, like Cubism – but the pure light of wisdom transcends duality. Get it?)
In the chaos of the present moment, when most so-called art professionals are occupied with just looking clever, and amateurs are simply buying into the game in droves, dabbling global gurus like Jones/Da can foist themselves right to the top, and apparently be taken seriously without any questions. Who cares that the pictures are just the overblown computer doodles of a megalomanical self-declared savior, production costs paid for by foolish former Hippie tithers? Who can even even be bothered to notice in the senseless crush of it all? “Geometric shapes in bright colors on aluminum panels (all real art is on aluminum panels now), statements about spirituality – hmm, must be related to Kandinsky…ok, works for me. How much?” This travesty raises interesting questions about the nature of art, and spirituality: where do they converge? Can they? Should they? Also, it directs our attention to numbers of ways the art system itself works, with all of its hidden mechanisms and rules – and the ways it’s simply busted to hell.
Culturally, socially, politically we are at an apocalyptic crossroads. We realize the desperate need for better models, that give our interiors and myriad selves full due, while better recognizing the limitations of material satisfaction and pleasure, for ourselves, and this stressed planet. Naturally, many now look to the East and its spiritual technologies. It has become clear how unprepared many in the first generation were to gracefully or wisely incorporate and integrate them, to discern and recognize their own mistakes, foibles, and confusion. Some still just carry on, further and further into madness and dismissability, fed by the adulation of cultic followers, and that uncanny glowing book-blurb industry. Waking up isn’t so hard. The trick of incorporating real insight into a socially relevant program and lifeway is at this stage much more so. The glorious disaster of one Franklin Jones is a spectacular demonstration.
While the finishing touches were still being applied, I took an early walk-through of Kara Walker’s retrospective “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love” at the FW Modern. I was needing to prepare for an upcoming class there for 5-8 year olds. Uh – I think we’ll steer clear with the kiddies.
But I think everyone else ought to line up to see it, this time-traveling phantasmagoria of visceral, unrelenting horror. Within a few seconds of immersion, I felt my solar plexus (and probably my anus and gonads) contract, and more than once I found myself wincing, involuntarily looking away from images and scenes.
I wish I was in town for the member preview (I was off on assignment). Holy cow. What did the wine-sippers have to say about it all? “My goodness, Melba, that little “pickaninny” being doubly penetrated sure is beautifully articulated!” “Yes; but tell me, is that fat(pregnant?) white man with a vagina being orally pleasured – or is he/she being tortured? Giving birth? I just can’t tell.” Tits, cocks, shit and more shit; births that look like shitting, sex that looks like birthing, atrocities that look like games, games that look like death, death that looks like birth. Black, white, male, female, sacred, profane, the ego and the id, all in one big roaring angry interpenetrating confused cluster fuck, as illustrated by Walt Disney studios.
It’s the latest in an unbroken stream of shows by African American artists at the Modern, and by a long shot the most provocative. I’d be curious to see how the white supremacists that were so outraged by Kehinde Wiley’s recent show react to this one. Which underscores why I think her work and this show are so absolutely necessary. Race is obviously still a (the?) pivotal issue in our national psyche, and the intractable wounds of slavery are even now too often blithely glossed over or ignored.
Show curator Phillipe Vergne marvels in his catalog essay how “nearly a century and half after the Emancipation Proclamation so little has changed.” What? Stereotypically over-reaching “liberal” blather like this is utterly infuriating, to me, and to some African American activists. By denying the momentous progress that has created this moment (when a black man is our likely next president,) and a society evolved to a point where Walker can even create this kind of discussion at the highest level of cultural discourse, Vergne actually confuses the importance of what she has accomplished, giving ammunition to those who would deny its necessity, and power.
We do need to be directly confronted with the looming, pervasive shadow material inherited from a history of injustice, those persisting incarnations that so often obscure the light of the progress that has indeed been made. Walker drags it all out, kicking and screaming; indeed, the very notions of light and dark are maybe her true medium, constituting the very metaphor running right through it.
While Walker is easily tied to an Expressionist lineage – one can’t help but see precedent for her endeavor in artists like Otto Dix and Max Beckman, and certainly in Goya – there is something much more calculated, knowing, and even nuanced that that. She owes as much or more to political conceptualists like Adrian Piper and Hans Haacke, or the calculated feminism of Judy Chicago. As clearly didactic as her work is, she folds in layers of researched historicity and formal/narrative ambiguity that avoid an effect of total bombast. Just partial.
This isn’t to say it’s purely bitter medicine. There is a pervasive, surprising lyricism and bawdy sense of humor that leavens even the heaviest scenes, actually acting to drive the knife even deeper. The show title sums up her cross-purposes — and those embedded in the American subconscious. Technical variety (including some of those now ubiquitous overhead projectors on the floor) keeps you visually intrigued, it’s all impeccably crafted and installed, and the whole thing isn’t an unlike a trip to a family theme park or history museum. Only just in hell.
A perfect outing for the Fourth of July weekend!
I watched one of those Art City videos this weekend, the one titled “Simplicity” (2002). There are great interviews with Richard Tuttle, John Baldessari, Robert Williams, and others. Dave Hickey, commenting on the broad historical parameters of the art world, is his usual hilarious, skewering, irreverent self. Amy Adler’s inclusion was a little inexplicable to me, but I liked watching her tear up her drawings after the pictures had been taken. Coagula founder Mat Gleason talks about getting beat up at openings, and he’s kind of such an obnoxious twerp (though entertaining, and I thought sorta lovable) you can pretty easily see why.
(Agnes Martin photographed by Chuck Close)
I was particulary riveted by shots with the late, great Agnes Martin. I’ve long been a devotee of her writings and work, but never seen such lengthy footage of her before. She’s interviewed partly at the famed Taos restaurant Doc Martin’s (which I have a special fondness for from having been many times since childhood,) and at her adobe studio. Between shots of her in Taos and Tuttle in his home in Abiquiu, with the light, the colors, the scenery, I was left reeling a bit with home-sickness. The hope is to head back there after Chicago. Maybe as some kind of visualization excercise, Raychael and I often eye up broke-down, Northern New Mexican adobes for sale on-line to fix up.
I transcribed some of Martin’s comments. She’s one of the rare beings one will ever encounter who lived wholely within a full-spectrum model of conciousness: inclusive, focused, embracing the earthly, while embedding it in a functioning awareness of what’s beyond it. There is a quality of mind, a state of being, that is free from the turmoil of incarnate existence. It can’t be depicted. But it can be experienced, and as Martin’s work demonstrates when seen properly, even transmitted.
“When I decided to paint, I knew I didn’t want to paint about this world, & nature. I wanted to paint abstract. The most obvious abstract emotion is happiness. So I paint a lot of paintings about happiness. I paint about happiness, innocence, & beauty: the feelings that we have that go beyond the world, that have no worldly cause.
“All my work is above the line. I don’t paint anything depressing (laughs.) To live above the line, you have to think ‘I want to be good. I want to be good every minute.’ And you only pay attention to things that you like, you know. When you go to the museum, you just look at the paintings you like. You don’t look at the ones you don’t like, stop & criticize, and all that.
“People think that they have to understand art, but that’s not right. Understanding is, you know, the bind. Contradiction & correction, that’s all…oh boy…”
“I think everybody is born to do a certain thing. And they ought to study themselves, find out what they like and what they don’t like and everything, and try to find out exactly what they’re supposed to do. Everybody’s rushing so much in this life they don’t take time to really look and find out what their response is, even to their own work.
“Well, sometimes I paint about tranquility. I have a lot of paintings about tranquility. It doesn’t matter where you are – if you bring your mind to a stop you’ll feel a light, delicate happiness. That’s tranquility. You’ve stopped.
“You don’t have to listen to anybody about anything. Whatever you want, you get.”
20 years ago, as a student, I used to type (on a typewriter!) notable quotes on 3” x 5” cards and tack them up around my studio. A few months ago I was digging through an old box and came across one that had survived. I thought it would be as good a reminder now as then what this whole art business is really about it, so I stuck it above my door, along with a picture of a certain dead guru-type dude for whom I hold a certain informal affection. I can’t think of any statement that better sums up my own aesthetic, and operational/aspirational life-art philosophy…
“Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one get’s one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.”
John Cage, 1961
