----------empyre- soft-skinned space---------------------- I very much appreciate these discussions of magic, waste, modernity, witchcraft, myth, the ruderal, and survival on empyre – they are timely, worldly, and generous. They make me feel anxiety about some of the practices I do not understand but wish to know more about, and excited about possibilities to contemplate and share with other thoughtful people here.
When I think of waste and the ruderal, my mind immediately turns to Myra Hird’s writings in my carrier bag. She has taught me much about how landfills are unpredictable places with nearly unique combinations of waste materials that are having all sorts of new impacts on microbes -- the beings she knows so well from her work with Margulis and otherwise. Myra warns of the unpredictable dangers that could emerge from these unstable mixtures, and I wonder if she would also embrace the ruderal in her cautionary framework. I think she probably would have much to say about it. Myra visited us a couple years ago and we spent significant time discussing how she will devote the rest of her career to researching waste. At that time, she was thinking intensely about the concept of waste as a colonial relationship, using case studies of indigenous people in the Arctic, where militaries frequently dump their garbage, where the permafrost is melting, and where breastmilk is considered to be a toxic substance....... When I think of the generative possibilities of the ruderal, I think of how I admire beings who can thrive in the most challenging of circumstances, as I also reject the white-supremacist origins and persistence of “survival of the fittest,” that moralistic colonialist-capitalist mantra which usurped Darwin’s theory of evolution many decades ago... When I think of waste, I also think of how Myra taught me that the oxygen in our atmosphere was created by microbes. Cyanobacteria have injected tremendous quantities of oxygen into the atmosphere, and at first, the gas would have been considered waste that produced violent conditions for other species to adapt to in order to survive. Each breath we take is therefore a symbiotic act. The blue skies we see are thanks to waste that we might understand to be beautiful, perhaps magical – after all, the oxygen of our atmosphere is arguably the most significant impact any life has had on the planet… I think of performance artist Coco Rico and her origin stories about emerging from the Waste Land, drawing from T.S. Eliot, when I ponder the ruderal. Her political interventions always include elements of SF, multispecies responsibility, and magical expressions that provoke intense interest in her actions. …sorting through more of my carrier bag…. The discussion of shamanism engaged by Fabi, Whitefeather, and others, resonates with research I’ve done on the life and art of Norval Morrisseau, an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) painter who developed a counter-primitivist aesthetic and spoke back to the "spell" of Modernist painters like Picasso who felt entitled in their "great" works to take symbols and other visual elements from non-Western cultures without citing individual makers or crediting their cultures in specific terms. Morrisseau was the first Native artist to have a solo exhibition in the National Gallery of Canada in 2005-6, and his life is so interesting. He was known to live in close relationship and proximity to garbage in what others called a shack. Morrisseau’s rejections of fancy grant awards became badges of honor for him, ongoing gestures of resistance to rampant commodification throughout his homeland. He spent a significant portion of his life homeless in Vancouver (after much success in the 60s-70s). White settlers were confounded by his talent and fame and how they saw those attributes as incompatible with his living conditions, even if those conditions simultaneously produced a sense of titillating authenticity for them. Morrisseau developed a contemporary Native style of painting that was rooted in traditional Anishinaabe scroll imagery and his own experiences as a shaman trained by family members and elders who gutted suburban-looking houses, and built inside them secret traditional ritual structures so that they could continue their outlawed Midewiwin rituals in subterfuge. The shamanistic rites of passage described in his biographical materials are fascinating and teach us a lot about Anishinaabe lifeways that most people living in Anishinaabe Akiing (the great lakes region) are completely oblivious to... In 1978 he performed as a shaman for important people in Canada’s art world, via an action he referred to as performance art. He clearly had a sense of self-conscious irony then (theorized by Coco Fusco as the critical understanding performance artists of color exhibit while playing up to an audience’s racial stereotypes and expectations). The dynamics of Morrisseau’s shaman performance and tea party in the forests of Ontario challenged colonial tropes and revealed to me how he was also very much aware of the potential for connections that performing shamanism to white people opened up -- while also recognizing that there are limits to what can be shared with individuals who are not familiar with or accountable to the traditions from which his shamanism emerged. Morrisseau’s paintings from the 90s are rendered in brilliant blues, purples, and other jeweled hues – a stark departure from the “recognizably-Indian” color palette of his earlier work. He was notoriously enthusiastic about the blossoming New Age culture of the 90s, its spiritual dimensions, and its potential to foster connections between people from very different backgrounds. He was critically dismissed for being open to the spiritual dimensions of New Age in ways that functioned to deauthenticate his Indigeneity as "impure" in some art circles. Throughout grad school, I was taught to be very skeptical of New Age because of how appropriative participants can be, commonly taking visual elements from other cultures without citation or credit, sometimes even sacred things that align New Age with the practice of stealing Native things to commodify or otherwise coopt them, i.e. expressing a non-accountable power relationship even when the act seems well-intended. New Age, Shelly Errington once wrote, is one of the final remaining spheres where “primitive” and related ideas still circulate with positive valuation and without problematization... On a panel chaired by Grace Dillon, who claims Morrisseau as a relative, I pondered over ways to rethink the New Age phase of Morrisseau’s art production and how one might adequately curate it (plus how his Agokwa/transgender expressions are suppressed in authoritative narratives about his life). I rejected dismissals of his New Age paintings on the basis that they were not about an “authentic” spirituality or world view, as I also reconsidered my own biases against New Age and appropriation. Ciclón and I discussed on the phone at that time how Morrisseau taught me that New Age could be approached creatively -- as a mode for bringing together people from very different heritages -- as a potential platform that does not just give away the sacred or the secret to anyone, but which can be critically and inclusively spiritual, critical, and transformative nonetheless. My openness in recent years to New Age does not abandon critiques of problematic appropriations which sometimes still go unchecked in its circles. Rather, I am motivated to think about appropriation in more nuanced ways, and to possibly try to write something serious about what an ethics of appropriation might look like in related contexts. I’ve been inspired to return to analyzing performance work I did many years ago with Anna Deavere Smith, whose trademark hyperreal style of performing real people was once described by Richard Schechner as shamanism. Smith taught me her method and insisted on the value of showing almost excessive accountability to the people we performed, always inviting their criticism and agency in the events we staged. Her lessons reached me in profound ways as I reenacted a personal experience from a friend, for example, who was harassed by police because of his race and political beliefs, in a scene directed entirely by him and in which he performed as one of the police officers. Without his direction and complete control over the narrative, and Smith's overall production of the piece, I can't imagine how an Irish person like myself might otherwise ethically perform as a black man... (of course, no makeup was involved) My thoughts are evolving, but right now it comes down to relationships of accountability for me... to who claims whom.... and on what situated grounds….. <3 _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
