ALDO TAMBELLINI: BIRTH OF GENIUS
"Pregnant Woman" by Aldo Tambellini
This is the ravishing poem that Aldo Tambellini sent me on my way to Cambridge on February 22. It was written about Pregnant Woman (above) that will be in my upcoming exhibition at the Pierre Menard Gallery, Woman in the 21st Century: Margaret Fuller and the Sacred Marriage, taking place as part of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial.
Aldo Tambellini, text from the 1960s
I was headed to Cambridge for an event at the Harvard Film Archives, presented by its erudite director Haden Guest, whose razor sharp introduction cut to the heart of the matter: the timeless value of the artist’s groundbreaking work in experimental film in the 1960s.
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa/films/2010janmar/tambellini.html
“Why black? That is a big philosophical question,” Aldo said from the podium, adding. ”That is enough.”
Aldo Tambellini and Harvard Film Archives Director Haden Guest in an unintentionally black photo
The program was initiated with Black on Black, a short video released last year which sums up Tambellini’s boundary smashing vision combining his many disciplines to a virtual iconography of blackness. His poetry is sculpted on the screen and read by Neiel Israel and Askia Toure’ (below). Words form spirals and a sphere that enters the consciousness like an eternal chant “Creation and Destruction. Destruction and Creation.”
“I became conscious because of the racial, the cosmic, the visual aesthetic,” the artist said after the screening. ”The first cosmanuat who walked in space said it was black. I was really excited.”
Aldo and I had an instant connection at our impromptu meeting at Pierre Menard Gallery last summer. He was finishing up his meeting with gallery owner John Wronoski when I walked in and was immediately drawn to one of his black paintings (above) propped against the gallery wall. “WOW!” Pure Kundalini in its natural form of the spiral. I was enthralled. Was it the genius or his paintings?
Both! He was with his partner, Anna Salamone, who told me how the artist’s works were rediscovered after being thought lost for many years. My hands moved, completely on their own to channel the Kundalini energy into the aura of the artist that my connection with his art had ignited in my spine I never in my life had such an experience of a cycle being completed in a single moment of time! From the creator to the observer instantaneously transformed into participant generating energy received from the art into the creator.
The New Paradigm revealing itself!
Aldo still claims today, with some surprise, that I completely understood his art with that initial connection with his painting, Yet, there seem to be no limitations to his depth of understanding about the universe and the hidden truths surrounding the time and space connection I am constantly discovering new things about Aldo Tambellini and his crystalline vision of an interconnected universe. ”We earthlings are all one!” It isn’t just talk, but he lives it. Always remaining on the outside, but close enough to reveal his knowledge of the “The Screw” (actually a performance that went with the SCREW Paper published to encourage ” an anonymous generation to arise,” see description at http://aldotambellini.com/video.html) That is the Heisenberg Principle at work! With this understanding of his role as participant and observer in his own interactive artistic experiments, Aldo absorbed the Shadow, or Saturn.
Aldo Tambellini birth chart; April 29, 1930, 3:00 AM EDT Syracuse, New York
By understanding his role (eleventh house Saturn) as leader of a new (Mars in Aries) movement in the collective, he could turn his attention to the transpersonal energies represented by Uranus (television) and Neptune (film).
Working with the very material of these mediums, he transformed his art, and himself in the process, into a vessel of transpersonal energies. In astrological terms, he redefined art (the stelium in Taurus, the sign representing art, in the second house of values) as the capacity for human interconnection (the trine from the Taurus Sun and Moon to the Eleventh House Saturn).
The birth came through considerable opposition (Pluto opposing Saturn) and rebellious (Uranus) struggle (Aries) to claim the Self (First House) by acting, with his female partner, as midwife (Pluto in Cancer) to a Creative (Fifth House) movement (opposition to Saturn in its ruler of Capricorn strongly placed in the Eleventh House of the Collective)
have never been so deeply moved by any work of art as BLACK PLUS X Aldo’s short film about black kids at Coney Island; he reversed the negative so the kids were white and the water was black.
Anna quoted the Grove Press Catalogue which says the use of the negative was: ”The artist’s answer to the race problem.” And even though I am color blind in regards to race, it turned my perceptions up-side-down. Getting on the subway at Harvard Square an elegant black man told me how much he liked my outfit. We sat next to one another on the train and talked. He was from Africa and runs an interactive global development project. It seemed to me that his soul was as deep as his skin was black. So deep that it had no bottom. Why, I thought, do such depths bother white people, so bound by their limitations? Could our obsession with materialism be the “antidote” to our fear of such primal darkness? Wouldn’t that mean a fear of deep space? The Unknown? I surrendered to his blackness, the depth of his soul, and by the time I got to Brookline, I believed this was the most beautiful human being I had ever met.
I related to what Askia Toure’, a black poet said at Aldo’s film screening, “Aldo showed us that black is beautiful.” How like the Black Madonna to deliver black Americans into the heights of the academy through the black medium of film!
OK. So what is this message of birth coming from Anna and Aldo? When I told Anna how much I would love to have Aldo in my show, she immediately knew what piece I was after, even though I didn’t know myself Pregnant Woman. And then, Aldo sent me the poem, which provided the work with even deeper meaning than the secrecy of the Black Madonna that Margaret Fuller carried with her pregnancy of Angelito.
What I wrote in my Black Madonna essay was: the virgin just about to give birth below the altar at Chartes Cathedral. Aldo has brought that ancient legend of the Black Madonna into the form that I didn’t even expect to discover in Black Madonna. It is the form of the Black Madonna herself.
Pregnant Woman sums up Margaret Fuller on so many levels.
And I can see it all lined up in the heavens where Aldo’s art takes root. In May, when the show goes up, Uranus, the Awakener will be contacting his Mars and entering the evolutionary passage through his T-Square. I read this as the lift- off for completely comprehensive and interconnected ouevre. Each passage unified, the whole trajectory reflects a New Paradigm — the cycle of universal interconnection that is the cosmos.
The Movement I have been actively seeking and writing about with the emergence of the icon of the 21st century was lacking the genius whose unification of art, practice and connection to the Self serve as a beacon to others struggling in the chaos of the paradigm shift. Aldo was born under the cardinal T-square between the outer planets of Saturn, Pluto and Uranus that triggered the Great Depression. We are experiencing such a configuration this year as the world economic order breaks down.
The multidisciplinary art of Aldo Tambellini reveals the paradox of the creative genius: the deeper the plunge into the creative darkness, the bigger is the light. Knowing Aldo has revealed in high relief the difference between creative for the sake of being creative and creative as a bringer of light to humanity, the true Promethean spirit.
Let me look at this poem more closely:
Ok, well I read dark matter as the Kundalini. Our surrender to this power removes us from our human limitations and connects us to the immense sky of the Cosmos. The last two lines are like a Zen koan or riddle. How can we read the sky if we close our eyes? But there the connection between outer and inner is complete: As I quote Nassim Haramein: ‘When we go within, we encounter the universe.”
I always ask artists if what they do is conscious or not. They inevitably say it is conscious. Aldo has the best answer, which seems to be the only adequate answer: he is conscious, yet he is channeling an intelligence outside of himself. I dare to presume to label this as the intelligence of the cosmic order revealing itself through the paradigm shift embodied in Pregnant Woman.
“There is no revolution without a man and a woman at its source,” says Aldo. This is the reality that Margaret Fuller lived with her partner, Angelo Ofilli. Their son, Angelino, was the child of the Italian Republican Revolution, born out of the unified passion of his parents. In being forced to keep the child, and her marriage, a secret, Margaret Fuller became the Black Madonna. And considering that the Black Virgin was the icon of the Templars, who still today aim to overthrow the Vatican, the myth she embodied — partner in the overthrow of the Pope to restore the ancient icon of the “sacred marriage” to rulership — was all too apt.
In Tambellini’s Pregnant Woman, Margaret Fuller is re-visioned as birth mother via a transcendent work of art — both personal ( the creator giving birth to himself) and universal (the earth mother nurturing the delivery of a new archetype into the collective consciousness in unison with cosmic timing). The form at the foundation of this work is the Tambellini motif of the circle, the sphere. As woman gives birth to her true Self, she creates a new cosmos. That is what we will be celebrating on May 23, 2010 when Woman of the 21st Century opens across the street from Harvard University, where Margaret Fuller now has an exhibition space dedicated to her!
Can academics continue to ignore the female genius that gave birth to the American literary canon, now reborn as a 21st century icon?
BLOOMING: YULIYA LANINA’S “JOURNEY TO THE HIEROS GAMOS”
"Seven Steps" hung on the studio wall of artist Yuliya Lanina
Twin stars that mutual circle in the heaven
Two parts for spiritual concord given,
Twin Sabbaths that inlock the Sacred Seven
February 19. The three Paperwhite bulbs planted at the Winter Solstice have started blooming! I am experiencing absolute joy as I, under the Taurus Moon, sit down to analyze Yuliya Lanina’s seven new paintings through the lens of Margaret Fuller’s quest. Here we have a “woman of the nineteenth century” transforming the mythology which gave birth to the American canon, becoming a warrior/lover/mother and equal partner in a romantic quest to overthrow the imbalanced icon Catholic divinity – the pope — with the 21st century icon — the sacred marriage.
In fact, Lanina’s seven extraordinary images capture the life journey of Margaret Fuller concentrated in the sixth stanza (above) of her poem, ”The Sacred Marriage,” which closes her book, Woman of the Nineteenth Century.
Of course, Yuliya was not consciously aware of Fuller’s life when she created this work; she confessed to having a personal history imbedded in them. But this is the magic surrounding Fuller. Her nineteenth century genius permeates the air of our current Zeitgeist.
In the close of Women of the Nineteenth Century, Fuller offers the poem as a concentrated vision of the hieros gamos – a nineteenth century ideal whose manifestation in form would come at a steep price — her life. Below is Fuller’s entire The Sacred Marriage poem, rendered her in the ascending hues of the chakras:
And has another’s life as large a scope?
It may give due fulfillment to thy hope,
And every portal to the unknown may ope,
If, near this other life, thy inmost feeling
Trembles with fateful prescience of revealing
The future Deity, time still concealing.
If thou feel thy whole force drawn more and more
To launch that other bark on seas without a shore;
And no still secret must be kept in store;
If meannesses that dim each temporal deed,
The dull decay that mars the fleshly weed,
And flower of love that seems to fall and leave no seed –
Hide never the full presence from thy sight
Of mutual aims and tasks, ideals bright,
Which feed their roots to-day on all this seeming blight.
Twin stars that mutual circle in the heaven,
Two parts for spiritual concord given,
Twin Sabbaths that inlock the Sacred Seven;
Still looking to the centre for the cause,
Mutual light giving to draw out the powers,
And learning all the other groups by cognizance of one another’s laws:
The parent love the wedded love includes,
The one permits the two their mutual moods,
The two each other know mid myriad multitudes;
With child-like intellect, discerning love,
And mutual action energizing love,
In myriad forms affiliating love.
A world whose seasons bloom from pole to pole,
A force which knows both starting-point and goal,
A Home in Heaven, — the Union in the Soul,
As an independent woman intellectual and activist born at the initiation of a defining American century, Margaret Fuller had no role models to look up to. In her evolutionary struggle to forge a path into authentic womanhood, she was completely on her own, a lone pioneer of the American intellectual frontier who was attempting to reconcile the ancient thought structures with the mythology of the New World and its interconnection to nature. She was to absorbed into Emerson’s Transcendentalist movement but soon saw the limitations — in both Emerson’s character and his philosophy of self-reliance — that would fail to satisfy her romantic cravings.
While the western frontier was just being opened up, this prodigy’s coming of age bumped up against the prevailing notion of “perfect womanhood” which viewed women as pure and necessarily confined to the home. Yet, the rigorous intellectual training of her father instilled her with a hard core discipline which expanded her horizons from the learning of multiple languages — Latin and Greek, in addition to French, Italian and German — as well as astronomy! When she was a teenager, her father decided to leave Cambridge and try to farm in Groton where she was confined to domestic duties and the female role of teacher. Her solution to her physical confinement was to go inward and seek the inner balance of masculine and feminine — the gender opposites determined for her not by her culture but her reading and translation of German metaphysical writers like Goetre. Out of this inner quest for the “sacred marriage” she was to connect with the female archetypes that she would embody in what was to become a celebrated public life – Seeker, Friend, Muse, Dark Lady Writer, Lover, Mother and Guardian. Along the way, she became the Mother of the American canon.
Here we see Lanina’s powerful images as the stages of Margaret’s journal as an archetypal template for the blooming of female genius. Lanina reveals this genius as she visually unfolds Margaret Fuller’s alchemical language crystalized by “Twin Sabbaths that inlock the Sacred Seven.” I will proceed to interpret both words and image through the lens of the 21st century icon, the hieros gamos.
1. Birth (Quest)
And has another’s life as large a scope?
It may give due fulfillment to thy hope,
And every portal to the unknown may ope,
- I hate glare, thou knowest, and have hitherto successfully screened my virtues therefrom…So well have I palyed my part, that in the self-same night I was styled by two several persons’ a sprightly young lady’ and “a Syrnen!!” Oh rapturous sound! I have reached the goal of my ambition: Earth has nothing fairer or brighter to offer.”
- –Margaret Fuller
"Duality (Quest)" by Yuliya Lanina
The “portal to the unknown” is that of the mouth, Margaret’s gilded gift of gab. Margaret’s early writings reveal a life quest that involved using her gift for communication to straddle the border between public and private. She had virtually no role models for this. Her underground alchemical writings sought to reconcile the opposites which dominated her highly strung, spirited nature. The Gemini duality which made her such a gifted conversationalist is brilliantly captured by Lanina above. From an early age, she understood that reconciling these opposites meant smashing the containers confining women and men into rigid gender roles.
Lanina reveals the specter of the dark feminine, the Kundalini, behind the open mouth, representing both Fuller’s gift and her desire for life experience that meant battling the opposing forces of fate and free will. The two would merge when she focused the arsenal of her talents and her courage as reporter on the scene of the Italian Republican Revolution of 1848. Yet, this butterfly would only emerge after a long underground preparation period marked by a struggle to integrate inner and outer worlds. How was a nineteenth century woman to achieve this when they weren’t permitted an outer life beyond the conventions of teacher or mother?
2. Vision (Temptation)
If, near this other life, thy inmost feeling
Trembles with fateful prescience of revealing
The future Deity, time still concealing.
If thou feel thy whole force drawn more and more
To launch that other bark on seas without a shore;
And no still secret must be kept in store;
- “Vision (Temptation)” by Yuliya Lanina
I feel the power of industry growing every day, and besides, the all-powerful motive of ambition, and a new stimulus lately given through a friend. I have learned to believe that nothing, no! not perfection is unattainable. I am determined on distinction, which formerly I thought to win at an easy rate…
The only way Fuller could tackle this thorny paradox was directly. ”The future Deity, time still concealing” was both the struggle and the process named through her many forms of writing: the sacred marriage. Through her 20s, as Margaret struggled with her internal dualities.
The gender opposites envisioned by Lanina as dual aspirations (winged creatures), the royal (crown) quest for the inner coniunctio (visualized by the alchemists as the marriage of King and Queen) launched by desire (the apple). Far too complex of a being to seek a simple, conventional solution in marriage, Margaret focused her energies on learning an alchemical, archetypal language developed in her poetry.
3. Cultivation (Comrade)
If meannesses that dim each temporal deed,
The dull decay that mars the fleshly weed,
And flower of love that seems to fall and leave no seed –
-
"Cultivation (Comrade)" by Yuliya Lanina
…but now I see that long years of labor must be given to secure even the “suces de societe, — which, however, shall never content me…I know the obstacles in my way…Yet all such hindrances may be overcome by an ardent spirit. If I fail, my consolation shall be found in active employment.
‘If meannesses that dim each temporal deed.” Margaret is referring to Saturn, the planet of Karma which, in her youth, cast a shadow on her social relations (Saturn opposing her Sun, Mercury, Venus and Mars in Gemini). Through powerful inner resources and conscious insight into her obstacles, she sought to overcome her sensitivity regarding the effect of her strong personality and powerful spirit, as well as the disappointment of unfulfilled expectations (“the decay that mars the fleshly weed”) and unequal exchange (“flower of love that seems to fall and leave no seed”) that, like a garden unattended, could mar her personal evolution.
The message here, in the third stage, is the necessity of grounding and confronting the Shadow. Fuller had the gift of penetrating through the persona to uncover the archetypal Shadow so the authentic self could be revealed; that was her condition for manifesting her ideal spiritual friendship, known in later generations as “the Boston Marriage.” Holding the energy for the romantic aspirations of her tight circle of women friends, the daughters of the Boston elite, she paved the way for the external manifestation of the “sacred marriage” in prototypal marriages embracing the mythology surrounding the birth of the American canon, notably that of Sophia Peabody and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
4. Dark Lady (Muse)
Hide never the full presence from thy sight
Of mutual aims and tasks, ideals bright,
Which feed their roots to-day on all this seeming blight.
Twin stars that mutual circle in the heaven,
Two parts for spiritual concord given,
Twin Sabbaths that inlock the Sacred Seven;
- “Dark Lady (Muse)” by Yuliya Lanina
Circumstances have decided that I must not go to Europe, and shut upon me the door, as I think, forever, to the scenes I could have lvoed. Let me now try to forget myself, and act for others’ sakes. what I can do with my pen, know not. At present, I feel no confidence or hope. The expectations so many have been led to cherish by my conversational powers, I am disposed to deem ill-founded…I do not think I can produce a valuable work: I do not feel in my bosom that confidence necessary to sustain me in such undertakings, — the confidence of genius.
–Margaret Fuller on her 26th birthday, 23 May 1836
“Of mutual aims and tasks, ideals bright.” At this crucial turning point, the Saturn return at the age of 28-30, Margaret concocted an experiment for a a mutually beneficial exchange that would eradicate her feelings of being thwarted by her bodily fate — never being able to find mutual beneficially relationships that lived up to her ideals.
“Two parts for spiritual concord given.” From this struggle to reconcile her deep inner duality symbolized by her astrological sign of Gemini symbol of the twins, Margaret embodied a new identity — centerpiece of a series of “Conversations” in Boston that brought her a steady income and local renown. Here she put her surrender to the Muse into good practice, as we see in this March 22, 1841 account by Elizabeth Peabody: ”On Saturday morning, Mrs. L. E. and Mrs. E. H. were present, and begged Margaret to repeat the statement concerning life, which which she closed the last conversation. Margaret said she had forgotten every word she said. She must have been inspired by a good genius, to have so satisfied everybody, –but the good genius had left her. She would try, however, to say what she thought, and trusted it would resemble what she had said already. She then went into the matter, and, true enough, she did not use a single words she used before. (Memoirs, I., 345-47)
“Twin Sabbaths that inlock the Sacred Seven” refers to the Sun and Moon, whose rotations instill the marriage of day (conscious) and night (unconscious) to unlock the powers of the seven planets known at the time: Mercury, Earth, Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter and Saturn. The “confidence of genius” would enable her to trust in her alignment with this cosmic forces.
This experiment was a highly successful as an externalization of interior monologues Fuller had carried on through her unpublished writing. They kept her socially engaged, self-supporting and were an ideal vehicle for her knowledge of the archetypes, mythology and the ideals of the “sacred marriage” to be transmitted through her circle, thereby elevating her friendships via the injection of this spirit.
In this image, Lanina inverts the traditional roles of masculine and feminine in the persona of the Dark Lady (Muse). Here the feminine is spouting a holistic language through her mouth while the masculine/androgyne is whispering in her ear. We recognize this feminine archetype in the late 20th century as Susan Sontag — who integrated these two archetypes with her marriage of dark persona and highly structured form in her writing.
Margaret Fuller escaped the trap of being identified as the token Dark Lady Writer whose elevated position alienated her from the very ideals she held so dear — the sacred marriage.
5. Secret (Guardian)
Still looking to the centre for the cause,
Mutual light giving to draw out the powers,
And learning all the other groups by cognizance of one another’s laws:
- “Secret (Guardian)” by Yuliya Lanina
“Still looking to the centre for the cause.” The greatest irony of Margaret Fuller’s life is that by the choice she made to have an Italian lover, resulting in an out of wedlock pregnancy that she shielded, along with her subsequent marriage, from friends and family, she was actually place on the path of the quest: to manifest her ideal (the sacred marriage) in her daily life. This could only have transpired through the underground journey.
“Mutual light giving to draw out the powers.” She is referring here to universal law: the Sun as the “mutual light giving” to “draw out the powers” released by planetary rotation and the interaction of the heavenly bodies. ”And learning all the other groups by cognizance of one another’s laws” is how groups of bodies on earth and in space function through a deeply imbedded consciousness of these laws of motion – time and space unified through the circular motion of the solar system.
Lanina reveals the crucial importance of being able to keep a secret, to hold the energy of the new birth through the gestation period. The quest gives birth to spiritual children, whose wholeness relies on the measure of mascuiine balanced with the feminine in their art.
What artists are faced with today is this: what is the language for this art form? What is the form itself? What does a holistic work of art look like? One that is contained in the opposites of inner/outer, masculine/feminine, conscious/unconscious?
Paradoxically, Fuller seemed to satisfy the need to consciously go underground with her adventure of having to keep a pregnancy secret as a very public person.
6. Drowning (Acceptance)
Still looking to the centre for the cause,
Mutual light giving to draw out the powers,
And learning all the other groups by cognizance of one another’s laws:
The parent love the wedded love includes,
The one permits the two their mutual moods,
The two each other know mid myriad multitudes
- “Drowning (Acceptance)” by Yuliya Lanina
Fuller’s deep understanding of the dynamics of fate and freewill at work in her death are revealed in “cognizance of one another’s laws.” Her writings revealed she knew her Promethean quest would require bodily sacrifice, yet she bore her challenge to reconcile fate and free will with great courage.
She wrote: ”Fate is la lawand the man that discovereth the law that rules him and follows it shall be firm when other things shake. It si like the presiding star astrologers feigned. It shall lead you to dangers and through them. Believe the stars, the transpersonal and personal forces, foretold of fate.”
Fuller wrote of ominous signs before embarking on her ship, the Elizabeth, that would perish in a shipwreck on a sandbar off Fire Island. “It was an odd combination – I had inteded if I went by way of France to take the packet ship “Argo” from Havre; I had just written to Mrs. Story that I should not do so, and at the same time request ed her to find Miss Fitton, who had my muff, etc.: having closed the letter II took up Galignani’s Messenter and my eye feel on these words – Died 4th April at No. 10 Rue Ville l’everque MissFitton – turning the leaf I read of the wreck of the Argo returning from America to France! There were also notices of the wreck of the “Royal Adelaide,,” a fine English Steamer, and of the John Skiddy, one of the fine Ameircan packets.”
Margaret Fuller’s understanding of archetypal astrology placed her far ahead of her times; in fact, archetypal astrology is only now emerging as a 21st century discipline; seemed to view herself as a victim of fate contemporaries saw the end of her life as a tragedy, recent scholarship views her as an American reomantic who surrendered to her fate, as if knowing she would live on as a myth in the collective consciousness. Perhaps it was, in fact, this idea about her which actually KEPT her myth underground, until being revived by feminists in the 1970s.
Charles Capper’s monumental biography, Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic, recasts Fuller as an American Romantic holding the tension between the fatalism of her belief in universal law and providence of divine intervention. He writes of her as happily fatalistic (“Thus it seems safety is not to be found in the wisest calculation. I shall embark more composedly on my merchant ship.”) yet shunting aside Fate in favor of Providence, “Praying, indeed fervaently , that it may not be my lot to lose my baby at sea, either by unsolaced sickness, or amid the howling waves.” Capper winds up this tension with her anguished prophecy: “Torn between Providence and Fate, she blurted out again her tragic wish: ‘Oh, that if I should, it may be brief anguish, and Ossoli he and I go together.’”
He concludes in the book’s closing pages, “In short, hers was not an end of classical tragedy but ironic Romantic pathos: not a character flaw but the same self-generated revolutionary hope that fatefully cast her into turbulent waters, shunned by most of her contemporaries, governed the darkened fates and absurd accidents of her end. It was a consoling myth that Fuller, attuned to the fateful cast of her choice, would have recognized.” (p. 518)
7. Renewal (Hieros Gamos)
With child-like intellect, discerning love,
And mutual action energizing love,
In myriad forms affiliating love.
A world whose seasons bloom from pole to pole,
A force which knows both starting-point and goal,
A Home in Heaven, — the Union in the Soul.
- “Renewal (Hieros Gamos)” by Yuliya Lanina
Joy to those born on this day: In America is open to them the easy chance of a nobel, peaceful growth, in Europe of a combat grand in its motives, and in its extent beyond what the world ever before so much as dreamed. Joy to them; and joy to those their heralds, who, if their path was desert, their work unfinished, and their heads in the power of a prostituted civilization, to throw as toys at the feet of flushed, triumphant wickedness, yet holy-hearted in masking love, great and entire in their devotion, fall or fade, happy in the thought that these come after them grater than themselves, who may at last string the harp of the world to full concord, in glory to God in the highest, for peace and love from man to man become the bond of life.
Margaret Fuller’s final Tribune posting from Italy, 13 Feb, 1950
The new female archetype is born of this vision of mutual action and co-creation with the universe. The feminine no longer identified with the patriarchy as passive and submissive, but identified with a galactic law of cosmic cycles — “a world whose seasons bloom from pole to pole” — interactive, dynamic and revolving/evolving with nature.
Lanina envisions this holistic state as the erotically contained (the red purse) duality of the gendered twins now merged into an androgynous Aquarian youth guarded by “a force which knows both starting point and goal” — the spirit of the Kundalini, the dark feminine contained in a holistic sphere and controlled by the stewardship of the Self while protected by the Guardian (the Shadow made conscious represented here by the Shark).
At last, we have arrived at our destination, the embodiment of the New Paradigm incorporating “A Home in Heaven, the Union in the Soul.” The overriding expression of Lanina’s final composition is one that Margaret Fuller knew intimately – joy!
Why was Fuller repressed for so long? Clearly, she was born with the gift of liberation and universal love for her fellow earthlings; it would take another 200 years for individuals to learn that freedom comes with responsibility!
ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Yuliya Lanina is a Russian-born American artist based in New York City.
Lanina has exhibited extensively both nationally and internationally. Her work has been displayed at the SIGGRAPH Asia 2009, Beijing Biennial 2009, Yeosu/Seoul Biennial 2008, Seoul Art Museum, Russian Contemporary Art Museum, Ludwig Museum (Cologne), Trinity College Science Gallery (Dublin) and other venues.
Lanina has been a recipient of Full Hunter College Studio scholarship, SIGGRAPH Travel Grant, the Award of Excellence in the Manhattan Arts International Competition, Spencer Scholarship, WCC Scholarship for Outstanding Achievements in Academic Area, NESIYA Fellowship, HIAS Scholarship and others.
To see more of her works visit www.yuliyalanina.com
26th ANNUAL AICA AWARDS AND THE KUNDALINI SPIRAL
- Master of Ceremonies Klaus Beisenbach presenting himself with the First Place Award for Best Exhibition of Digital Media or Film for his curation of “Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)” at the Museum of Modern Art
THE 26th ANNUAL AICA AWARDS
The crucial fact about curation that the International Association of Art Critics-USA celebrates at these annual AICA Awards is this: art may last through the centuries , but art exhibitions generally are fleeting! Our organization stresses the importance of art-ti-fact, a record of a brief moment when the planets are aligned to reveal underlying patterns by way of a new door of perception afforded by the public presentation of art.
One of the great things about this event is seeing the projected images from shows (see below) you may have missed or want to see again. Not to mention getting a face attached to the years of hard labor it takes to mount a noteworthy exhibition!
“You like to take pictures,” Dr. Francine Miller said as she handed me her camera on the way to the stage where AICA co-President Phyllis Braf was introducing Master of Ceremonies Klaus Biensenbach, Curator at MOMA and PS 1.
Hard getting work as a critic these days, so I stay versatile…
The timing of these awards, in a snowstorm no less, was portentous. We were celebrating art institutions right in the midst of all the talk of yet another art publication (Art on Paper) folding, corporate domination of the American culture and Roberta Smith’s bull’s-eye “Post Minimal to the Max” in Sunday’s New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/arts/design/14curators.html?ref=arts
Edel Rodriguez’s witty post-minimal sheep, as in “people are sheep,” propelled the arrow right home to its target — the New York art institutions! I applauded Smith’s final flourish: ”Message to curators: Whatever you’re doing right now, do something else next.”
(An aside: At the preview of the Roni Horn show at the Whitney Museum, I walked into a gallery empty, but for a few post-minimalist tubes propped against the wall, which prompted only one thought: “They haven’t finished installing yet!” I was left feeling similarly empty at the Hirshhorn’s Anne Truitt showin Washington, D.C. I was wondering if Post-Minimalism was a way to be inclusive of female artists who aren’t really saying anything — except that it’s good to have longevity with a good dealer!)
PERHAPS ALL THIS POST-MINIMALISM IS A CLEANSING THE PALATE FOR SOMETHING EXCITING AND AUTHENTICALLY NEW?
I like to think so! In the midst of this paradigm shift, it was helpful to remember last night that the art of Picasso and Bacon was once considered truly shocking and completely unacceptable for public display!
John Richardson accepting his Best Show in a Commercial Gallery award for Pablo Picasso's "Mosqueteros" at Gagosian
Curator Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art accepting the Best Monographic Museum Show in New York City award for "Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective."
There were some unexpected delights as well!
Anna Swinbourne not forgetting to thank her husband during her Academy Award moment as she graciously accepted the First Place Historical Show award for "James Ensor" at the Museum of Modern Art
Stephen Tashjian (Tabboo) accepting Best Performance Second Place Award for "Tabboo: The Nightingale" at Participant, Inc. in New York City
Klaus Biesenbach giving his curator collaborator Susanne Pfeffer a hug after announcing they received the Second Place Award for Best Exhibition of Digital Media, Video or Film
I captured some great faces at the AICA Awards reception. Terence Koh got my award for best coat!
AICA Member Roselee Goldberg, Founder of Performa, with artist Terence Koh and Stephen Tashjian ("Tabboo! "the Nightingale")
April Hunt of PS 1, simply gorgeous!!
Second Place Winner of Best Digital Media, Video or FIlm, Susan Pfeffer (left), organizer with Klaus Biesenbach, of "Kenneth Anger" at PS 1 Contemporary Art Center
AICA Awards Producer Francine MIller with AICA Co-President Marek Bartelik and MOMA's Anna Swinbourne
AICA USA Co-President Marek Bartelik with Slag Gallery owner Irina Protopopescu
Phyllis Braff, AICA Co-Preside
Always with the erudite comment, my friend Ed Rubin summed upthe majority of the figures that did the heavy lifting forthis year’s shows:
A "model curator type" from the Guggenheim Museum accepting the First Place Award for the Best Architecture or Design Show
“Most of the women accepting awards were tall, thin, dressed in black model curator types, with foreign accents”
For the most outrageous individual style, we had to wait until the next stage — the reception.!
For example, this unidentified fellow (below) came equipped with his own chest of medals!
But the biggest surprise of the evening was how much I loved the highly erotic performance in the Rotunda! Talk about “Contemplating the Void“!
Never before was the building, with its spiraling walls so pristine white, experienced for the splendor of its primitive design –THE KUNDALINI SPIRAL of the ancient Sumerian Ziggurat!
How did I know of this connection? Because of the museum’s fabulous “Frank Lloyd Writght: From Within Outward,” which won First Place for Best Architecture or Design Show.
A MUCH NEEDED INJECTION OF PURE EROTICISM INTO THE CONTEMPORARY ART SPACE!
As Wright undoubtedly intended, his design can be best appreciated in its stark nakedness!
NEW MOON AQUARIUS
New Moon in Aquarius, 9:51 PM February 13, 2010, Stamford, CT
What an wave of energy! The Aquarian New Moon conjunct Jupiter and Chiron. Mystic Crystal Revelations. Electrical Shock Waves.
Alexander McQueen Giving Form to the Dark Feminine
Shock indeed at the news of Alexander McQueen’s death. An obvious case of Kundalini burnout. Too much, too soon, too fast. As soon as I saw the news with a picture of him on the cover of the New York Post with his pants down, I instantly knew he had a Pisces Moon, but I didn’t figure the conjunction with the Sun and Mercury, along with a Pluto opposition. He plumbed the depths to bring up the face of the Dark Feminine. Indeed, many of his models wore make -up which was like hideous masks. But he found the beauty in the ugly and this served a higher purpose.
See all those purple lines going across the chart? McQueen’s Moon opposition Uranus had plenty of support from his personal planets, like Jack Kerouac, who I wrote about in my last post. Indicating genius due to its placement, an uncanny instinct (Moon) and imagination (Pisces) of self-expression (Fifth House) reflecting currents of the zeitgeist (Eleventh House). Both these men had humble roots and traveled great emotional distances (Moon square Mars in Sagittarius) to connect with spiritual traditions (Kerouac was Breton and McQueen was Scot), yet unable to cut the umbilical chord to their mothers, a condition only heightened by the isolation of fame. It is this feeling of isolation, along with Kundalini burnout, triggering their tragic end, when the constricting, depressive energy of Saturn opposes their Moon.
Kerouac, in fact, died in 1969 — the year that McQueen was born. What Kerouac was running away from in his literature, McQueen was bringing into fashion forty years later. Eerie.
DARK MOON: THE DARK LADY
February 10, 2010. Under the Full Moon, I visited the artist Dianne Bowen at her East Village studio. I was told I would know the building because it has a plaque at the door stating that Allen Ginsberg lived there. If there ever was a poem about the pent up Kundalini busting into the collective through the underground (Pluto square Saturn of 1955-56), it was Ginsberg’s Howl.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
Dianne Bowen's "Dragonfly"; archival pen, charcoal, oil on Chinese embroidered silk on canvas
Dianne sent me the above image after I told her about the Margaret Fuller exhibition I am putting together as part of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial. She used her camera to capture an underwater self-portrait and nearly drowned herself in the process. “They are directly related to the dark female fighting to get out and out from under man-made conceptions.” That sums up Margaret’s struggle to break free of her role as the Dark Lady of early American letters! Dark because Emerson didn’t pay her to edit his transcendental journal, The Dial — a job that nearly killed her!
Dianne Bowen's "Cherry Blossom"
These images embarked me on a post-Black Madonna narrative that I will be relating on this blog as part of the process of disseminating my own history with the Kundalini. My father dedicated his life to understanding this feminine power, first through Reichian therapy, and then through Eastern mysticism.
Last Sunday, at the Unitarian Universalist Church which served as the birthing ground for my art theory, I spied a title in the used book sale: Joyce Johnson‘s Minor Characters, about her sexual awakening. This intriguing story reveals an uptown Manhattan adolescent’s search for the Real, downtown, culminated in her entry into the Beat circle, where she met and fell in love with Jack Kerouac just as his star was rising. He would become famous during the course of this relationship, from the Sept 5, 1957 publication of his book, On the Road. On page 76, she writes about her friend from Barnard, Elise Cowen, who fell in love with Allen Ginsberg:
He takes her home that first night to his apartment on East Seventh Street and they make love — an act his analyst would have approved of and hers might have viewed quite negatively. More wildness, more lack of self-respect and even of self-preservation — this too-quick nakedness, this giving yourself over to a stranger. She’d done this too many times before, finding not love but only confirmation of worthlessness. But this has a different meaning….She had read Go, of course. Maybe that idea of Allen started there, with Stofsky:
A vision! A vision! The words kept stinging into his consciousness
like quickening waves of fever. As he went on, almost running now,
he found himself haunted by the odd uprush of pity and rage
that had taken control of him during the moment in the bookstore.
It was love! he cried inside himself. A molecular ectoplasm hurtling
through everything like a wild, bright light! And they were afraid,
almost as if they all suspected.
He had seen it clearly in an instant of pure clarity:
the chemical warm love that swam thickly beneath their dread.
What a description of the Kundalini! The chemical warm love, elevated to the Third Eye as a moment of pure clarity! And clearly, while Jack sought a language for this spiritual quest through his practice of Buddhism, a uninitiated young woman would approach this as the “forbidden” treasure (Pluto in Leo) of sexual surrender (Saturn in Scorpio)! Dangerous because, as Elise discovered, the Kundalini energy is so incredibly addictive!
Elise Cowen introduced Joyce Johnson to Allen Ginsberg, who arranged a blind date between Joyce and Jack, whose immediate “sacred marriage” connection was profound, yet fleeting as Jack’s sexual liaisons were under constant assault by his incessant need to hit the road. Yet, in 1957 the couple was blessed with the transit of Jupiter in Libra (falling on Joyce’s Sun and Jack’s Saturn).
How was this “sacred marriage” spirit grounded? Joyce revived the writer from his feeling of defeat, not being able to publish his eleven manuscripts (she was working for his one time literary agent) while giving him a crucial perch in Manhattan. His previous lover, Helen Weaver, threw him out of her apartment.
After being in and out of mental institutions, no doubt to Kundalini outbreaks, Elise committed suicide by jumping out of her parent’s window under the line-up on her assaulted Aquarian Saturn in February 1962. This image of the “fallen woman” archetype familiar to my Black Madonna readers, ends the book, revealing the importance of grounding the Kundalini. Ironically, Allen Ginsberg saw to it that Elise’s hidden store of poetry was published after her death. It seems these Beat women had to hide their own creative product least it interfering with their caretaking of the men.
Currently, we are under another Pluto square Saturn, a component of a T-Square with Uranus all year. One thing I intend to do under this influence is reconfigure the history of the Beat movement in the context of the sacred marriage. I certainly have plenty of research to draw on: the biographies of the Beat women, the latest of which is “The Awakener: A Memoir of Kerouac and the Fifties, published last year by Helen Weaver, an astrologer with an analysis of Kerouac’s mutable cross across his natal chart, a ready image of the sacrificial Christ. The title of Weaver’s book refers to the planet Uranus, which was opposed Keroac’s rising Moon, revealing an uncanny instinct to reflect the collective mood. She writes: “I rejected him for the same reason America rejected him: he woke us up in the middle of the night in the long dream of the fifties. He interfered with our sleep.”
And don’t we need a new movement reflecting the collective urge to wake up from the long sleep of the corporate stranglehold on America?!
FULL MOON
What a spectacular Full Moon last weekend!
Looming so large as it rose on Friday night, you could see the red planet Mars right beside it!
I was in NYC with visits to the studios of Yuliya Lanina and Diane Bowen.
The illumination of the Full Moon brought a full cup to the chalice I held to Margaret Fuller in heaven. The reward for my efforts was a live narrative for the “Woman of the 21st Century: Margaret Fuller and the Sacred Marriage” exhibition I am curating at the Pierre Menard Gallery in Cambridge. It will open on Margaret Fuller’s birthday in May.
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about.me
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Critic for Huffington Post Arts
Lisa Paul Streitfeld is a Curator, Arts Critic,
New Media Artist and Philosopher.
Ouroboros
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