The Paradox

I am engrossed in a novel this summer.  I take it with me to the studio and when I am in a moment of pause on a painting commission, I read. The Goldfinch is Donna Tartt's very thick contemporary coming of age story (a 771 page turner) about a fictional character, Theo, growing painfully into manhood and a real life painting from the Frick Collection by Carel Fabritius, painted in 1654. I find the painting, an oil on panel, to be a strange, disturbing, yet masterful portrait of a bird.  To my mind, a heartbreaking image as the bird appears to be chained by one leg to a small box-like container mounted onto a plaster wall.  It has been suggested that the thin chain might not be attached to the bird but to a thimble for dipping water, but I don't view it that way.  Life giving or restricting, the question of the chain remains a mystery.  The red-faced goldfinch looks out at the viewer from just above our eye level so we can never be quite certain of the truth. The story of the painting becomes metaphorical in the novel: Theo, caught in a horrific scene during an explosion in a museum, takes the painting out with him.  Then throughout the unfolding chapters, he, much like the little goldfinch, is chained to it, to addiction, deceit, fantasy.  As Theo says of his looting, "Mine, mine.  Fear, idolatry, hoarding. The delight and terror of the fetishist."  

In the same year that The Goldfinch was painted- in Delft, mid -17th century- an explosion in an ammunitions factory next to the artist Fabritius's studio took his life and destroyed most of his work. Somehow, the Goldfinch painting survived, traveled from the Hague to New York where it was purchased by the Frick Museum in 1896. Donna Tartt was so inspired by the allegorical piece that she wrote her novel with the painting as the central object, a secondary protagonist, albeit always hidden from view. Just after the explosion, the painting in the novel much like it might have been after the explosion in Delft, is covered in dust. Later, Theo hides it under his bed, wrapped in layers of paper and packing tape, later still after moving it from New York to Las Vegas and back again in a backpack, he puts it into a storage locker, out of sight for years. Always concealed, it becomes a talisman of his journey through the loss of his parents, an unlucky charm that he can't bring himself to let go of in spite of the ever looming dire consequences of the theft.

In an essay on How the Novel Made the Modern World, William Deresiewicz wrote "[t]here is a reason that we call them novels."  From the Italian Novella meaning "new story", Deresiewicz writes that the novel has always had, more than any other artform, "more room" to be real. And so true to form, The Goldfinch, the painting and the story it inspired is based on fact and fiction, there is a sharp realism to both.  Each a masterpiece of trompe l'oeil illusion, each a precise mixture of deception and truth.   On the final pages, at the end of the story, Theo says," ...as much as I'd like to believe there's a truth beyond illusion, I've come to believe that there's no truth beyond illusion.  Because, between 'reality' on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there's a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic."

It's an interesting thought, I love the idea of the "rainbow edge", but I believe that truth is something else, not one individual's 'reality' or that of another's. Truth is relative. Truth is beyond the dancing molecules that make up our existences. Truth is beyond the mundane, though it is within that too. That's the paradox.  Just as some truth exists in a certain light within the painting by Carel Fabritius and the novel by Donna Tartt, whether we are chained to something or the illusion of it, I believe our short time here is just a part of all that is. To be real is to be grounded in the moment and not in the fantasy. And truthfully, when art comes through us, when beauty abides, it is beyond this human frailty to understand. 

Yoko Ono: ARISING

Yoko Ono invited women from countries around the world to write testaments of harm done to them for simply being a woman. The setting for these testaments are part of her installation Arising, shown in conjunction with the 55th Venice Biennale along Venice’s Grand Canal, just a few steps away from the Rialto Bridge. In an interior room of a Renaissance mansion of the Palazzo Bembo, one finds the source of Ono’s unmistakable voice on the soundtrack to a video playing on a continuous loop. Her haunting aria wails, sings, moans, screams: 

“Listen to your heart 

Respect your intuition... 

Have courage 

Have rage 

We’re all together... 

We’re rising.” 

Arising is a multi-media installation—a single piece comprised of video, sculpture, sound, photos of eyes, and the written testaments from hundreds of anonymous women. On a flat screen mounted between two windows a video plays of a dozen or more human shapes burning like a pyre of corpses in a funerary ceremony. In the center of the gallery space, in front of the video, a mound of life-size female figures—perhaps the remains from the pyre—are piled up on a parquet wood floor. Far more realistic than mannequins, these lifeless bodies are covered with an ashen dust and encrusted with scales of a coppery green patina in an open mass grave. Testaments line two long walls from floor to ceiling and a polite Queen Anne table and chair sit at one end—a place for women to add their own narratives, if they are so inclined. 

At eighty years old, Ono has been creating performance art and installations since the mid-1950s when she moved to Manhattan and married her first husband, pianist and composer Toshi Ichiyanagi. Ono was on the cusp of change happening in the art world at that time as Asian philosophy met American artists through the lectures of D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University. Ono met John Cage during this critical juncture at one of Suzuki’s lectures on Zen. They became friends and she later helped to bring Cage to Japan, performing with him in a collaborative piece called Music Walk.  

Ono was a founding member of the conceptual artist group Fluxus, in New York City, and created a body of work that is poetic, somewhat ephemeral, and often profound. By comparison to her recent installation in Venice, her 1966 piece Forget It—a steel sewing needle pointed upward and mounted on a Plexiglas pedestal engraved with the title and her initials—is minimal, a found object with Duchampian connections. One thinks about the proverbial needle in a haystack or joining up one thing with another. Ono’s art has consistently been idea oriented and at the same time elegant in material form. Another early conceptual piece, Glass Keys to Open the Skies—four clear glass skeleton keys hanging in a thin Plexiglas case, keys that are too fragile to be used—speaks of the desire to unlock that which is beyond our reach. Arising differs considerably from these pieces, independent of cerebral games. Arising is not about intellectual calculation, but rather an offering up of a collective emotional wound for healing. It is as though in this chapter of Ono’s creative output, she wants to score a piece that is without the sparcity of her previous work and leaves nothing to the imagination.  

The components that make up Arising are literal in subject and content, leaving no space to query what the point is. This is not a needle on a pedestal, or glass keys. Ono’s performance Cut Piece, first presented in Kyoto, in 1964, and later in London and New York City, at Carnegie Recital Hall, does resemble Arising in the expression of content. Ono invited the audience to snip away at her clothing until she was left seated onstage with little but shreds covering her body. In an essay for her 2001-2002 traveling retrospective, Alexandra Munroe wrote, “Cut Piece expresses an anguished interiority while offering a social commentary on the quiet violence that binds individuals and society, the self and gender.” Arising has a similar social commentary with the audible voices of more than two hundred fifty individual testaments. Some women wrote that they had never shared their story with anyone before out of fear or shame. Their words contain the pain of secrets long hidden:

“My silent mantra was, ‘stay small, 

stay quiet, become invisible.’ My name is ‘Anonymous,’ 

because that is how my father made me feel. He touched 

and held me as tight as he could, though not in 

the way a father should.”

These are stories of physical abuse, sexual transgressions, and rape. These are stories of destruction. These are the types of stories flattened by television police dramas. They are not spellchecked or edited for grammar, they are raw. Curator and museum director, Nanjo Fumio, wrote of Ono’s oeuvre, “Some of her messages call for love and peace; others encourage us to see our life from different perspectives. But always at the heart of her messages is a call to us all to be human; and all are informed by Eastern wisdom and poetics transcending national boundaries.” Ono’s installation Arising will continue to travel to various venues during 2014, and all women are invited to continue to add their testaments. Perhaps these stories are a part of that search and the truths of an arising global heart. 

—Deborah Gavel 

THE Magazine, May 2014

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Guy Cross, Editor

A Prayer for Juarez and West Mesa: An Offering Mandala 2014

Sunday, March 16, 2014

2 p.m

Plaza of the National Hispanic Cultural Center

Avenida Cesar Chavez and 4th Street

Albuquerque, NM 

Free and Open to the Public

Please join us to create a prayerful community offering in memory of the young women of Cuidad Juárez and West Mesa, Albuquerque whose lives have been lost to violence.  Wear black and bring a large bowl to pour water, one to another, as we create a mandala—a portal between the dark and the light. Please invite your friends—men, women and children.

Contact:  Deborah Gavel, djgavel@gmail.com 

This special event is part of Women & Creativity Month and is sponsored by Littleglobe.

To view a video from the event in March 2012:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=leo-mZfcuoY 

About Deborah Gavel: Deborah is an artist, educator and sacred art activist in Albuquerque.  She is interested in the intersection of healing and creativity. www.deborahgavel.com

Women and Creativity Month is an annual, month-long series of events that celebrates women’s creativity across the disciplines.  Coordinated by the National Hispanic Cultural Center (NHCC) and the Harwood Art Center. Women & Creativity is a collaboration between over thirty partners and organizations in Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Visit the website at www.womenandcreativity.org 

Littleglobe is a New Mexico based 501(c)3 organization of creative professionals dedicated to artistic innovation in the service of social change.  Littleglobe exists to create collaborative art, nurture community capacity, and foster life-affirming connections across the boundaries that divide us.   Learn more at www.littleglobe.org. Littleglobe has been a Women & Creativity partner for the last five years.

The Venice Biennale Part II

"I recognize that I must be alone with my soul.  I come with empty hands to you, my soul." C. G.  Jung

A dear friend, Jane, brought me a gift in a pink box about half the size of a shoebox.   I opened it and turned back some limegreen tissue paper to reveal to my astonishment, an owl, a perfect specimen of a Western Screech Owl.  But specimen is not the right word, no, it is not an example or a model or a specimen- that sounds too scientific or Darwinian and not godly enough for this exquisite creature of the night.   It seemed to be sleeping in peace covered in a cloak of feathers, unbearably inviting to touch.  It had no obvious wounds, no blood or anything, simply forever surrendered to sleep.

I kept it near me in it's little coffin for several days on the desk in my studio, (one friend said this was creepy) I confess to a twisted love of nature labs and biology departments with taxidermic animals for study.  I read that owl is feminine medicine, associated with clairvoyance, astral projection, death and magic. For the next few days, it called to me; I picked it up, touched it, held it in awe. I gently pulled out its wing span and examined its miraculous flight feathers. And on the fourth day during a rare snowfall, I bundled up, carried it to a spot in the bosque along the river and buried it face down.  Just after I covered it over with soil and wood chips, I had the thought that maybe it should be buried face- up instead.  I dug back down into the ground until I reached the place that I thought the owl would be, but to my surprise, not there. I dug a little further to one side, down a bit, not there.  Could it be further down in the earth? I suppose, but I choose to fill in the hole again believing that maybe the feathered one had preternaturally disappeared.  I like to fantasize that I am part bird sometimes, that I too can fly silently on velvety wings. Thinking about the owl now reminds me of Venice, my recent night flight there to visit an art exhibition, the Venice Biennale.

The Encyclopedic Palace, curated by the NY's New Museum curator, Massimiliano Gioni, was brilliantly conceived, installed and organized. If that sounds overly gushy, so be it. I could not have put together a list of any works of 20th -21st century art I would have preferred to see more than what he chose. As one enters the central pavilion at the far end of Venice in the place where the Giardini Pubblici (the public gardens) meet the Adriatic Sea, the first piece of art one sees, after moving through the entrance, is Carl Jung's Red Book. The Red Book or Liber Novus was displayed in the center of the room, in a thick round glass case echoing the mandalas that are contained within it.  Under the safety of no doubt, bullet- proof glass, this magnificent object rested upon an angled steel armature so that one could view both the tooled red leather cover from the back and two illustrated pages, opened in the front.  In a circle around the ensconced book, mounted on stands, forty images were reproduced from the book giving the viewer a glimpse of what lies inside the 205 parchment paged manuscript.  Jung's Liber Novus was created during the time just after he split with Freud, when he went deep into his own psyche after the 1916 publication of his paper "The structure of the unconscious." Herein lie the stories of anima and animus, it's chapters are filled with incantations; the openings of eggs; magicians; experiences in the desert. God scrutinies.  What a profound entryway into this exhibition where Gioni asks us to consider the realms of knowledge.

Since the Jung heirs decided to publish a facsimile of the book five years ago, many have been able to see reproductions of his dream paintings and read the descriptions of his dream experiences.  But to stand before the original which is usually locked away in a Swiss bank vault was extraordinary.  How the curator was able to convince the Jung heirs to show the book publicly is a wonder in an of itself.  I thought for a moment that perhaps I should turn and go at that point, my trip complete at the sight of the Red Book, but I went on to be transported further by thirty-six lecture drawings of Rudolf Steiner, four large paintings by the mystic painter, Hilma af Klint, many small anonymous Tantric paintings from India and more that I will share at another time.  Though there is still much to process, (the scale of the exhibit was monumental)  I continue to be in wonder at how it all came together in this dreamlike place that is Venice.   What the experience of the biennale is thus far for me, mirrors the mystery of my owl friend: magical.  To float down the Grand Canal to a place of mystical images and investigations of consciousness parallels the symbolism of "owl" and produced a sort of death for me, a death in Venice for the one I was before.  As it has been said of owl wisdom, the gatekeeper to otherworldly realms, I traveled into another domain, deep into the waters of art history and into the port of the soul. 

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ikebana: the art of flower

Ikebana: the art of flower

Ikebana: noun, Japanese meaning, the fine art of flower arranging.

Ikebana is a disciplined art form in which nature and humanity, in an elegant dance, are brought together through the art of flower arranging. We are thinking of Ikebana in metaphorical terms -- the hand of the artist in relationship to materials of graphite, paper, ink, clay, wood, and oils--and  how the hand of the artist arranges materials, be that clay, beads or paint.