Articles and Interviews
Essays and Articles
I Thought I Heard a Splash in the Water, She Can Cook a Potato in her Hand and Make it Taste Like Chocolate, Exhibition Essay, 2021
1) Was there ever a time that wasn’t like this, full of suffering and distress? When Marija Gimbutas began her journey as an archeologist I think she might have asked herself the same question. Born in 1921 Gimbutas survived both Soviet and German occupation, sheltered Jewish people fleeing the Nazi regime and witnessed indescribable violence. "Life just twisted me like a little plant, but my work was continuous in one direction," she once said about her life.
2) Because of this experience I suspect Gimbutas, perhaps unconsciously at first, set out to prove through an, at that time, daring combination of mythology, folklore, linguistics, and archaeology that the human world wasn’t always centered on aggression and creating the tools needed to enact it. (“the unnecessary killing of ongoingness”, as writer, biologist, and feminist theorist Donna Haraway puts it) Gimbutas grew up in Lithuania in a family with rich folk traditions, feeding milk to the protective snakes under the house for example, and singing songs specific to that locality: songs of veneration for the water, the earth and the animals. Her father and grandfather literally kissed the ground upon waking, and then again before going to sleep.
3) I’m not sure where or when Gimbutas unearthed the first sculpture or ceramic shard that would come to (re)define her life’s work. Seeing, for the very first time, the symbols, female figures and patterns that would continue to reveal themselves in archeological digs, not only in her ancestral Baltic lands but also throughout the entirety of Europe, from Ireland to Greece, Portugal to Iran, made a significant impact on Gimbutas. The exact same designs, sculpted animal-human and female figurines, and evidence of ritualistic usage were discovered in far-reaching societies that would, during the Neolithic era, have found it difficult if not impossible to engage in cultural exchange. And yet Gimbutas found proof that they shared a visual language, ideograms or “sonatas of becoming” as she called them. More than effigies, they were representations of a culture’s spiritual ideology and connection to ecology. “...the iconography of The Great Goddess arose in reflection and veneration of the laws of Nature.”
4) The hundreds of objects that Gimbutas and her teams unearthed were deities or depictions of deities. They revealed a matrilineal/matrifocal pantheon of female and female/animal hybrid goddesses, mirroring the social structure of the communities that made them. In the Neolithic era, God was a woman, or at least it seemed that way. That’s not to say there weren’t male god-figures. There were. In the form of deer, bison, bird-masked men and/or daimons. It’s just that the majority of the figures found in burial sites and temples, near hearths and in kitchens, were definitively female. Unfortunately, this does not entirely prove that Neolithic societies were non-violent.
5) Gimbutas says she found no evidence of warfare, no arrowheads or objects of deathly destruction. Which, to my mind, also fails to indicate an entirely peaceful society. More important to me and my pursuit however, is this era’s unique ideology, rituals, customs, and perspective towards ecology and spirituality, which Gimbutas was able to establish through what is now referred to as Goddess mythology and symbolism. I’m curious about the potential of The Goddess in our lives today.
6) In the 1950’s, Gimbutas published a series of papers on the Kurgan culture (now Russia/Ukraine), specifically the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) speakers and their homeland. She hypothesized that PIE Kurgan culture was patriarchal, warring, pastoral and horse breeding without a pantheon of deities. In contrast, Gimbutas found Old Europe as matriarchal, peaceful, agricultural, and in worship of a pantheon of (mostly) goddesses. Gimbutas believed the meeting of these two groups resulted in tragedy, transforming Old Europe and its Neolithic culture into a patriarchal society with an appetite for violence, not unlike the one we live in today. Her thesis was initially ignored, criticized and debased. Moving forward, her work was reevaluated and found credible. Most recently in 2018, David Anthony, an anthropologist at Hartwick College, said that linguistic and archaeological evidence such as weapons found in graves suggests that European [PIE] progenitors had a warrior culture. “Language shifts generally flow in the direction of groups that have higher economic status... and in the most brutal situations, it will flow in the direction of the people who survived.” Contemporary European languages come from PIE speakers.
7) To help me work through the gaps in my own thoughts, ideas and research, I sought out other artists, academics, philosophers and writers who might be interested in investigating the influence of goddess mythology on contemporary culture, in discovering the ways in which The Goddess manifests herself in everyday life, in experimenting with forms that might represent a contemporary goddess, should there be one.
8) Richard Rohr, American author, spiritual writer, and Franciscan friar asks, “What if changing our perception of God changes everything?”
9) Like the Venus of Willendorf discovered in 1908 in Austria, some of the Neolithic goddess figurines were what people in 2021 might call ‘full-figured’. But not all of them. Some were shown pregnant, but not all of them. Some of the statues were not human rather they depicted many different species of female animals, from frogs to pigs to birds to bison, which were rendered pregnant but, not always. Some were hybrid female-bird-snake goddesses, or human female-bear-mothers, or human female-deer, or... Through her intensive research, Gimbutas discovered The Goddess, and her many manifestations. The kind of “symbiont” earth-being Haraway knows well, “Chthonic ones are beings of the earth, both ancient and up to the minute... tentacles, feelers, digits, cords, whiptails, spider legs, unruly hair... they demonstrate a material meaningfulness... writhe and luxuriate in manifold forms and manifold names.”
10) Humans living in the Neolithic era used basic pastoral farming practices. As such, they were deeply connected to and reliant on the natural sources around them. Namely the earth, the sun and water. But also, animals and their ability to reproduce. And, not to mention, the importance of maintaining their own lineage. Most humans want more than existence, they want to flourish. This relationship was, and still is, based on natural cycles in which human beings participated in and benefited from a complex ecology. Goddess symbols and associated myths were a reminder to human beings of their place within a larger, cyclical framework, a reminder to care and respect the earth and her cycles, and to work with the cycles as any other tool.
11) Haraway says, “...it’s important to not only respect the, a, life but to acknowledge that all have a death...” In the cycle of life and death, something that we as contemporary humans disregard is that death is situated very near to birth, to life. The beginning and the end are right beside each other on the big wheel. Thus, The Goddess, more than Earth Mother or a seductive Venus (although she was this as well), was equal parts life-giving and death-wielding. She controlled the duration of existence for all living entities on Earth, making daily worship imperative to survival, or as Haraway says for “thriving”. The tomb is the womb.
documenta 15: Making Time for an Unpredictable Future, Op-Ed, 2022
lumbung
First, documenta 15 is not a fixed exhibition. So, as others have noted, I had a different experience of the event than those who attended during the preview, or the initial weeks/months. The art fair, if I can call it that, changes from day to day as the audience, if I can call them that, moves and interacts with each venue, collective, and installation. Documenta 15 was front loaded with workshops, conversations, communal cooking/eating, parties, and other social activities meant to expand and contextualize the objects and images in each venue. Since I did not attend the first two weeks of the fair and its events, at times, the individual artworks lacked a framework; important for African cultural objects, for example, and/or videos depicting the day-to-day work of Cambodian farmers.
The concept of Documenta 15 being a practice rather than a theme, as stated by its team of Artistic Directors — the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa and their fourteen core collaborators, who are also collectives — is based upon community engagement, its needs, and responses. This is par for the course as ruangrupa is over twenty years old. lumbung, ruangrupa’s working metaphor which they define as, “… a rice barn where a village community stores their harvests together, to be managed collectively, as a way to face an unpredictable future”, successfully situates Documenta 15 within alternative, shifting, creative-socio-political economies. Within this metaphoric sketch and stated clearly in many of the venues and texts, is another ruangrupa word: ekosistem. “Since 2013, we — ruangrupa — with other Jakarta-based collectives — have tried to build ekosistems based on an understanding that even a group of people, a collective, cannot stand alone, but must purposefully play a part in their larger context… to keep an ecosystem in balance.” Therefore, the first thing the audience must get clear, if we are to engage with lumbung, ruangrupa, and in general with this year’s Documenta is that lumbung is “cosmology, experimentation, playfulness”. And these forms and exercises are also the result of the process of lumbung. In short, the process is the outcome.
On the Many Roles of an Artist and Woman: “Love to Love You, Donna Summer”, Op-Ed, 2023
The world premiere of the Donna Summer documentary, “Love to Love You, Donna Summer” opened in Berlin, as part of the 73rd Berlinale, on February 22nd, 2023. Directed by Roger Ross Williams and Brooklyn Sudano — one of Donna Summer’s three daughters — the documentary was in some ways a standard documentary featuring archival footage from her childhood and early career. The directors chose to depict Summer as “complex”, as one family member described her, revealing Summer’s emotional challenges caused by childhood abuse and the inevitable toll of stardom. However normal as it was, to watch a documentary not focused on the unravelling of a celebrity due to drug addiction was a great relief.
Amongst the fabulous collection of outfits and songs currently on rotation in my mind, is something that Summer said towards the end of the film. I wish I’d written it down. She said music or songs hit people in the “groaning place”. In the opening sequence, Donna is wearing a white dress, (in my memory) sheer in certain areas, with a perfectly long slit up the left side. She holds a white handkerchief in one hand and a microphone in the other, its stand halfway between her legs. She’s singing, no, groaning the beginning of the song, “I Love to Love You, Baby” the start of which is nothing but sounds — guttural, pleasurable moans and breathing. It’s an incredibly seductive scene. To say that it was a turn-on to watch, would be a great injustice to the word “wet”. Summer’s erotic female power is clearly defined from the outset of the documentary and aligns with what, I assume, is the image of Summer in many of the audience’s minds.
Remedios Varo, “Celestial Pablum”, 1958