SCULPTURES INSPIRED BY TRAVEL
Through desire and fortune, I, alongside my wife, Angela, have traveled to numerous countries, in part with the intention of instilling inspiration. This exhibit summarizes (at least a part of) that vision. In fact it is its central theme. Stories emanate out of each of the sovereign places I’ve been to, sometimes in beauty, sometimes in violence; more, stories that can be ancient or modern, mythic or fraught with today’s realism. What matters is that these stories weave together a unifying vision – in short, multiple ways of being human. For my personal understanding as the artist, and for the viewers as well, this exhibit aspires to demonstrate our commonality. Nations as different as Vietnam, India, and Italy, Mexico, Israel, and Malta, Greece, Peru, and Jordan, Egypt, Honduras, and Cambodia, show different ways of celebrating, and revealing who we are. In the end, such celebrations, as well as the incumbent (and unavoidable) tragedies center around my own nation, America, attacked over twenty years ago for its endemic diversity: as is embodied in the thematic work, OUR SHATTERED WORLD MUST FLY ITS FLAG. Three figures, a turbaned man, a native-American, and Lady Liberty herself, hoist a world flag atop the debris of the World Trade Towers– emblematic for which our nation, in its faulty flight, stands. And for which this exhibit embraces.
A view of the Room, the Layout, and the Artist
The individual pieces are shown below in more detail.
OUR SHATTERED WORLD MUST FLY ITS FLAG :: In the debris of the World Trade Towers, a flag had been found. Three firefighters, in a famous photo, reenacted Iwo Jima, as if to say that ‘our flag’ would persist amid horror and hardship. Except that the World Trade Tower, and for the most part, New York City, has long symbolized the gateway to the American nation. The real assault of the 9/11 attacks (and I speak as a native New Yorker) was against the multifarious and variegated nation that the United States claims to be, with its inherited and inherent diversity. So in reverence, I restated the Iwo Jima/9-11 jest, but with a sculptural twist: a native or indigent American, alongside a Middle Eastern American, and Lady Liberty, presiding over the New York/New Jersey waters, all in grand unanimity, hoist up the ‘flag of the world,’ reenacting the resilience of New Yorkers, as the people of our world-based nation reclaim our contradictory destiny. OUR SHATTERED WORLD MUST FLY ITS FLAG, as, in this sculpture, we reassert, despite our fears, that the flag of our welcoming world- nation is ‘still there.’ (United States)
JERUSALEM MUSICIAN :: Ordinary times on Jaffa Street, in Jerusalem, the street lined with shops and restaurants, where music and other forms of street theater enhance the urban décor – such celebrated activities leading up to Jaffa Gate, and Sulieman’s Wall, the Wall that delineates the fabled City of Old Jerusalem. But it is before we reach those monumental acres that we stumble upon a man, in something of a religious décor, but emanating sounds familiar to my American-ears – namely, jazz. In fact it is his jazz I am ensnared by. The sweet rivulet of a clarinet. The dreamy, hypnotic movements of holy earth, and what else can I imagine but the sonorous stirrings of an angel, where the claims of modernity are brought to collide with something that is ancient and still. Still and in movement – that is the essence of the man’s muse and his magic, and that is what we celebrate in his chiseled glance. (Israel)
RABABA PLAYER :: In the valleys of Petra, the ancient capital city of the Nabateans, where Bedouin merchants, purveyors of frankincense and myrrh, financed their temple building through their organizing of trade routes straddling numerous territories of what we refer to today as the Middle East, we hear rebound off the walls the luxuriant sound of the stringed rababa. For it is the forerunner of all (western) stringed instruments, with its robust haunting screams and purring that we associate with everything from violins to guitars. But in this space, the Bedouin musician brings us back to the beginning; where we realize we are where we never left. Sound is eternal. The walled acoustics remind us that music, no matter how profane and gratuitous, is always sacred. And especially so when a practitioner shows us, as he did in the shadow of the Petra’s Treasury, how it is done. (Jordan)
18 RABBIT :: At the base, in the underworld, Xbalanque and Hunaphu, the adventurous boys from the Popul Vuh, play with the ball that encompasses the spherical fates of the world. They play alongside the underground creatures, bats and snakes, as above them, on the escaleraro or stairway, mankind is elevated, where the ballcourt unveils life’s revelation through the game of ball itself – this being the essence of Mayan metaphysics, as we understand. Each of the iconic birds straddling the sides of the ballcourt in the center, tabulating our fates. As above in the heavens are the spirit god on the right and the corn god on the left. Unifying this form, from the heavens to the underworld, is 18-Rabbit, the axis of man. He is the giant of Copan. He is Man in his exalted state. He is heaven, earth, and the underworld. When he dies, civilization (Copan) retreats into legend. (Honduras)
18 RABBIT :: In white, with luxuriant floral embroidery, a stern if loving look – this is the glance of a Mayan woman, as I witnessed throughout the Yucatan (traversing some two-hundred villages over several decades). She straddles many modern nations, reminding us that national boundaries are modern ambiguities, meaningless to women whose archaic grimace is in surrender to ambient timelessness. No matter the era, and the difficulty posed, these Mayan women are survivors, indominable in their pride and posture. Through them we remind ourselves that it is ‘we’ who are the American newcomers. We are here with their permission. It is a meaning of respect, and even when it is forgotten, the glare in the eye restores an endemic power. (Guatemala/Mexico)
LORD OF THE DANCE IN REDSTONE :: Lord Shiva was a fountain of life, in his gigantic statuesque dancing presence. In the Ellora rendition, his painted face was already faded, as it must have been stunning when the paint, a thousand years ago, was still fresh and vibrant. The Ellora caves, carved over centuries by artists of the Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain faiths, reverberate with the complexities, even of a rivalrous nature, of Indian metaphysics. Shiva is a compelling deity. He dances, he flies, he embodies creation in its celebratory energy, even as he embraces the powers of dissolution as well – “I come as a destroyer of worlds,” as is stated in the Bhagavad Gita. All that ‘is’ will pass, and again manifest under the guise of karma. This is life in its pure form. Slightly garish, the intricacies of his carved manifestations inspired contemporaries to honor his living presence with abandoned flowers at his feet. Acrobatic in reach, turbaned in regality such that his movement stretches, Shiva-like, towards incorporeality. Alongside, yet in subtle strumming, she, Saraswati, the divine goddess, lifts him into the heavens through the vibrato of her music. In the background the natural order – trees, a bird, a snake, the sun and the moon and butterflies – meanders through an aura of timelessness. All of which is incised, with its movement and its stillness, into the fractious, contentious august beauty of Redstone-slate. Shiva as we know him is Lord of the Dance. None of the monotheistic religions (excepting maybe Kazantzakis’ Jesus dancing at the feast of Cana in the Last Temptation of Christ) offers divinities who could dance. (India)
GANDHI :: In my reiteration of his classic pose, Gandhi, the Mahatma, scrawny from his fasts and ascetic way of living, and yet in his characteristic judicial spectacles, from his years of lawlerly literacy, had brought down an empire with nothing more than a walking stick. In this he had earned the enmity of imperialists and religious fanatics alike. His assassination transformed him from a facile politician into an icon. His samadhi or cremation site, in the vicinity of Delhi, where we ventured on a trip to India, is a shrine – a place for Indians of all stripes (and at Gandhi’s samadhi, we are all Indians) to honor the meaning of nationhood, its blessing and its burden. (India)
KHAJURAHO LOVERS :: Khajuraho, unique as a temple complex in that it demonstrated Hinduism in his hierarchical purity. All aspects of life – from pornography (leaving aside our ‘western’ pejoratives) to enlightenment, are enacted here. What makes Khajuraho unique is that it survived the Islamic incursions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, whereby a virulent puritanical form of Islam (not unlike Christian Calvinism) would, as a matter of course, have smashed such ‘idolatrous’ improprieties – except that, by miracle of miracle, Khajuraho was bypassed. Ignored. Undiscovered. In the artistry shown here, red stone, invoking modern lines and aesthetics, I attempt to restate, or at least be inspired by the master works carved by Hindu sculptors a thousand years ago; masterworks showing all aspects of the human condition, from atrocity to exaltation, from lust to yogic enlightenment. AND OF COURSE THERE IS LOVE. Here I honored, recapitulating the power of love – conjugal but wondrous. Joyous in its spiritual-carnal union. This was love and the power of the feminine in all her sexualized beauty; as for her partner, he ingratiates her in a gesture of serene surrender. (India)
SAN ROSALIA :: The patron saint of Palermo, Italy, as we understand it, a Sicilian aristocrat, during the eleventh century, she withdrew to a cave atop Mount Pellegrino, a mountain outside Palermo. In 2002 we journeyed to the mountain to reflect on her presence – and what it could mean. It was then that we came face to face with the auguries of her austere withdrawal. A dank mountain, yet in her stillness, she seems to cast a thousand-year shadow over the facetious worldliness of the frenetic city beneath her feet. This was borne out when, during the seventeenth century, a plague struck Palermo. The petrified city learned – as we must learn and relearn over and over, particularly during pandemics, what we should never have to learn and relearn: that living with death is part and parcel of living with life. Except that the frantic citizens of seventeenth century Palermo, with a tenth of its population already in the ground, ordered, or cajoled, or perhaps pleaded with the respected monks of the 1620’s, to strike back. They – the monks – exhumed the exalted one’s five-hundred-year-old holy bones from her mountain sanctuary, and returned to the city where the bones – so the legends say – quelled the plague. Quelled the anxiety of mass dying. It is a story as old as man, and we know, in our infant twenty-first century, that we must learn and relearn the lesson all over again. Embrace her bones, and perhaps the pain of our current pandemic might yet subside – or at least turn less virulent. And perhaps we too might turn less virulent. (Italy)
ODYSSEUS AND CALYPSO :: Calypso, ‘she who hides,’ indwelled in the ancient isle of Ogygia, also known as the Isle of Calypso, which is today known as Gozo, sister isle to Malta, south of Sicily, in the heart of the Mediterranean. Centuries past, in a mythic time, Odysseus, so recites Homer, washed up on these shores sans his ship and fellow sailors. A straggler he had been, but he was still a man, whose allure was transformed under Calypso’s alluring glance. A goddess of the sea, she turned him from a sickly sailor into a luscious lover, promising him sexual immortality in her island paradise; that is, until a council of the gods orders him released from her joyous clutches, so he could reunite with his loyal wife, Penelope, and fulfill his marital destiny. From their cavernous domicile, at a place called Ramla Bay, on the wondrous isle of Gozo, we relive, in stone sculptural form, his entry, but also Calypso’s scrutiny of her ‘guest.’ Followed is their lustful interlude, she and he, Calypso, ‘she who hides,’ and Odysseus, sailor extraordinaire. Seven years of sensual bliss they shared, as she, goddess of earthly delights, finally releases him – relegating his time spent on Ogygia-Gozo to the recitations of memory and dream. (Malta)
ORACLE AT ATHENS (GREEK MUSICIANS) :: In the foreground of the sculpture are two musicians, literal renditions as we saw them (more, sought them out) at a café in Athens. The music they played, with guitar and bouzouki, was known as ‘rebetika.’ It was an outgrowth of, and a response to the chaos that had subsumed the eastern Mediterranean at the end of the Great War or World War I – a phenomenon that brought together a Greek form of passion with a Middle Eastern musicianship. Rebetika musicians were famous for wild and hard forms of living – even to the point where bouzouki musicians (as shown here in the sculpture) would fixate cigarettes between their pinkies and ring fingers, as if to prove, at least to themselves, that they could play and smoke in the same seminal jests. Their music, which has influenced all modern forms of Greek music since, is often called Greece’s soul music. Hovering in the sculpture over the rebetika musicians, in honor of the longevity and mystery of Hellenic civilization, are renditions of singers found in museum paintings that yet stalk the ancient memories of Crete. These paintings or images are identified with a civilization thirty centuries ancient. (Greece)
LOVE IN A TIME OF COVID :: Based loosely on the imagery of the classic Pietá, it centers the grieving not only on a mother for her son, but on the futility and anguish of two lovers, the woman hoisting up the man, who appears to have succumbed during a pandemic. In the right-hand corner is a medieval inspired skeleton. The skeletal figure touches the arm of the woman, a gentle nudge that forces the inescapable union of living and dying. The essential meaning of the sculpture aligns to the inescapable difficulties we, as a world-wide species, have struggled with as covid ravishes the well-being of so many of our loved-ones. Fraught with failing health and death, we are again reminded of a woman’s grievous glance. No greater bond exists than between a mother and a son, even as the son is grown, and the mother shares the quintessential anguish, as is displayed here. It is a storyline none of us can escape. (Italy)
LOVE IN A TIME OF COVID :: Woman of divided powers, representative of the tradition of the midwife – she who practices in the arts of navigating the complex of the hyper-religious vortex of nature and death. The inspiration for this sculpture, and work came from a novel by a noted Mexican-American novelist, Luis Alberto Urias. The storyline derives from a woman cast as the ‘Saint of Cabora,’ whose birth-name was Teresita. She was, in the harsh environs of North Mexico, an abused child who, out of spirt and desperation, formed extraordinary healing powers, common among certain women throughout the ages. ‘Curandera,’ she straddled the worlds of the living and the not-living, also, in its macabre replication, known as the world of spirit. A woman shaman in her own rite, with shared gifts and talents that bond her to certain majestic women the world over; comparable, for instance, to the Italian women (in the family annals of stories familiar to this artist), known as ‘curdieros,’ whose powers ushered the newborns into this living world, and when the miracles of medicine failed, took over the reins of curing. (Mexico/Italy)
INKA :: The Inka was the first man, the source of all power. Envisioned as larger than life, he was believed to hold the very sun to its orbit – by latching a rope to a hitching post, and lassoing the sun, bringing it to heel. The hitching post, known as the Intihuatana, was a symbol of deepest reverence to native Quechua and Aymara peoples, the People of the Sun. To the Spanish its very appearance aroused their contempt. Spanish conquistadores, in their fanaticism, smashed Intihuatanas whenever they came upon the dreaded stone formations. One of the few Intihuatanas to survive was at the grand ruins of Macchu Piccu, discovered or rediscovered in 1911, and herein depicted, based on a sketch I drew while at the ruins site, in this sculpture. Alongside it is a temple housing what is imagined to have once been (and herein depicted) an eternal flame. The Inka, in his prowess, is conceived to be as large as the (Andean) mountains. (Peru)
DEFOLIATION :: During the war years in Vietnam, the American government fomented a policy of defoliating the jungle-based countryside, where much of the resistance lay. The theory was that to destroy the camouflage of trees, the ‘enemy’ (including ordinary peasants and farmers) would be rendered visible, and therefore, subject to surrender. By intent or inadvertence, the dioxin gel used to defoliate the ‘skin’ of the forest also penetrated, and burned away the epidermal layering of human tissue, for those whose misfortune had placed them in vicinity of these nefarious attacks. This sculpture attempts to show defoliation in its abjectness and torment – as if the misguided policy of the American war-makers had been to treat all elements of nature, from the trees, to the animals, to the citizens themselves, as ‘enemy.’ (Vietnam)
APSARAS :: In this sculpture two majestic dancers dance as if sisters, or comrades, in mirror image of each other. Apsaras, as dancers of the spirit, dancers who would have danced for royalty a thousand years ago. At a time when Cambodia was tenaciously Hindu, Cambodian aesthetics improvised on Hindu motifs, from the jewelry worn on the dancers’ ankles and wrists, to the stylized hand formations, known as mudras, which are indicative of yogic and healing properties. Carved into the temples that make up, among others, the great complexes of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, Apsara reliefs are always shown at the higher levels of the temples, as if their poses are emanations from heaven. In ritualized décor, ancient or classical dancers did their dances in metaphysical silence, augmenting the power of their postures. Their classical work has survived into Buddhist times; and more recently, particularly for those who survived the dictatorship, their legacy is now center stage for much of what is considered folk art. (Cambodia)
HATSHEPSUT :: Hatshepsut was the widow of a Pharaoh. She was also the mother or step-mother of a Pharaoh, who was but an infant child and heir. The year (using our calendar) was approximately 1500 B.C.. Reflective in this sculpture, she took it upon herself to don a fake beard and ‘disguise’ herself, becoming the first, and only female Pharaoh to hold sway over the minions of a mighty kingdom. For the twenty years of her rule, she reigned as a Living God, while the people ‘played along’ with her antic. Under her rule there was a beneficent peace. She is the only woman buried and commemorated with a temple in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor. Flanking a sculpture of her are two centurions, in sharp relief. But as it is, in Egypt we learn the fundamental principal that ‘nothing ever dies.’ Adjacent, by a handful of meters from the centurion columns, a modern- day Egyptian soldier, wary and armed in a soldier’s uniform and rifle, studies the attendees, tourists, residents, and scholars alike. Three years earlier (from the date of our presence) three members of Egyptian Jihad, a forerunner to Al-Qaeda, replete with a misogynist ideology, gunned down sixty tourists, all under the watchful wariness of man-woman Pharaoh Hatshepsut. All are honored, in their overlay of history, in this sculptural rendition. (Egypt)
MASTERFUL DEFACER :: In an unexpected mystery, at the Alexandrine temples of Edfu, Esna, and Philae, in the shadows of upper Egypt, Pharaonic gods and goddesses had been mercilessly scratched and defaced. It was as if they were deliberately mutilated – in the manner of a crime scene; yes, mutilated with caustic intent, yet in ways that were equally arbitrary – indicating that some form of mob had descended onto each of these sculptural platforms, where they carried out their reckless deeds. Who were the culprits, the defacers? – I wanted to know, canvasing the vagaries of the eternal Nile. The executioners of such malevolent deeds? Who were the mobs? And when did they do what they did? The answer, as answers often reveal themselves, showed up in an obscure paragraph in a book I found at an Alexandrian hotel: the book’s subject matter was Coptic Christianity. In n obscure, but revealing paragraph I uncovered, like an historian’s sleuth, the engineer of this sacrilege: Theophilus, Archbishop of Alexandria. He had been commissioned – nay, ordered – by Emperor Theodosius, to carry out the systematic desecrations. The year we speak of was (circa) 375 A.D.. Theodosius, last Emperor presiding over the full Empire, before it had severed into its separate and distinct Latin and Greek schisms, ruled as Emperor a half a century after Constantine had Christianized the Empire. Incensed that ordinary Egyptians still made offerings to the prevailing Pharaohs’ gods, despite Constantine’s order, he, Theodosius, turned the mobs, through the agency of Theophilus, against the gods at the Alexandrine temples. Hence the desecrations – carried out in the shadowy pretense of the One True God, as chaos and pandemonium were fomented in the name of the Prince of Peace. Archbishop Theophilus is depicted in this sculpture as the masterful defacer, executing his desecrations through his inverted cross. To destroy a People (the Pharaoh Egyptians), first you must destroy their religion. Through his dispatching of his mobs, the Archbishop had sworn to annihilate the residual majesty of Hathor, Thoth, and Horus (in the sculpture already desecrated), but especially Isis, his most malignant target. (Egypt)
EGYPTIAN DANCERS :: Painted on stone edifices in the mausoleums of the pharaohs, and preserved across thirty-five protracted centuries, are two dancers celebrating their exultations of life after this life of sorrow is over; recapitulated here, in stone structural form where, under the reign of the eternal pharaoh, they dance and drink and love, all in reward for those who have lived their lives honorably. (Egypt)
JUDGMENT OF MAN :: The Egyptian Book of the Dead is a compiling of texts from coffins and pyramids inscribed over centuries, which recapitulate the fundamental narrative of Pharaonic metaphysics. This sculpture weaves into stone imagery the fundamental or genesis story of the Pharaoh religion. The story begins with a conflict or brotherly rivalry between Seth, the hunter, himself holding a dagger, and Osiris, the farmer, having been slain by Seth. Motive for the slaying is said to be jealousy – Seth observing how much more beloved Osiris is than he. Seth cuts Osiris into fourteen pieces. The strewn fourteen pieces lay along the banks of the Nile. Isis, having retrieved thirteen of the fourteen pieces, reassembles Osiris, corpse-like, as is herein shown at the base of the sculpture. The fourteenth piece, the phallus, Seth has fed to a crocodile, as it slithers along in the Nile, also set at the base of the sculpture. Because of Osiris’ lack of a phallus, he, despite his divine origins, is henceforth severed from the land of the living. Concealing the shame of his lack of a phallus with her hair, Isis copulates with Osiris, conceiving a child. The child Isis ande Osiris conceive is the falcon-faced Horus, archetype to all subsequent Pharaohs, the son who hovers here in the background. Horus is blessed by the horizon or solar god, Sun Ra, shown at the top of the sculpture, as he, Horus, is set to avenge his father’s death – in a war staged against his uncle. Standing to Horus’ left, our right, is Hathor, blessed goddess of beauty, and a life force in her own right; standing to his right, our left, is Anubis the jackal, Lord of the Underworld. Anubis allies to Osiris, at the far right. In his posthumous state, Osiris is now the Judge of the Living and the Dead. In executing his judgment, a heart is balanced on a sacred scale, hoisted by Anubis and Osiris, and judged against the verities of a feather. If the heart is lighter than the feather, a life of eternal bliss is granted. If the heart sinks the scales, the horrific verities of darkness stalk the soul for eternity. (Egypt)