Khazar Danm 203 Exercise III

Coded Situation

An anecdote from my experience or from things which have captured my attention

Decoding

What’s behind these anecdotes? What’s between the lines? What is symbolized in these stories/images/moments

Problem Statement

What questions/problems does the decoded coded situation/anecdote reveal? Does that revelation provide a problem to be solved, one which, if dealt with meaningfully will provide a measure for success in my practice?

After viewing my Cartonnage sculpture, I observed the viewers walking over to the text beneath my name on the wall behind.

What were they looking for? In walking up to the sign, I believe they were trying to get more information on the piece, of which there is a lot of information to be had. There’s a big backstory on the whole thing that is quite interesting, that really informs the piece. Delay in acquiring a sign and an ambivalence about labeling it in the first place led to its not being labeled. My actions forced viewers to bring their own meanings to the piece, even though they were seeking out some explanation from some authority in the form of a sign. Their examination of the piece had been deep and curious.

Is it for me to hand my viewers an explanation of the thinking or “backstory” behind my work? Does that place me in the role of Foucault’s annoying and dictatorial author who controls his viewers interpretations, or does that place me in the role of Benjamin’s author-producer, whose work should have captions?

After speaking with a reporter about my Lacuna sculpture, in which my MRI scan is stratified and suspended in a cube, the paper leads on article on the show it is in with “James Khazar has a hole in his brain”

A mixture of feelings hit me when I read the article. First, horror – that my very personal situation had been broadcast to an unknown audience. Then some pride in leading the article, and embarrassment at taking attention away from others. I have no problem in telling someone my personal story of a medical nightmare that I passed through, especially if I know them, or find them interesting or attractive, or want to impress them with my ability to be candid about myself. But such a revelatory disclosure to a mysterious audience is really disconcerting. How do I know whether the reader of the article can be trusted, or will think less of me, or will report me to my insurance company and I’ll never get coverage for any neurological condition for the rest of my life? It was a creepy feeling.

If my work is based in the deeply personal, what am I willing to disclose, and how am I willing to disclose it? Does my telling my own story in a way which can be directly interpreted, or providing a direct verbal or written interpretation diminish the value of a piece to a viewer, or enhance it. Should I care what other people think of me when they see  parts of me that are not superficial?

When I had lunch in the Castro at my favorite fish place with my newly found birth-mother, she told me the story of my coital beginnings. I was quietly angry that she couldn’t remember who my father was. We no longer communicate.

I went from stunned to disquieted to really pissed off over a period of several weeks. While Dolores, my birth mother, was visiting from Utah to meet me, we both really had no idea about how to relate to each other. Me to her nor her to I. The meeting was likely one of the largest events of my life. My father had just died, and in going through the safety deposit box he kept with my mother, I found my birth certificate. I had known my whole life of the fact of my adoption, but none of the circumstances. My mother was with me at the bank, and I asked her the question I’d been trying to ask her for several years: “Would you mind if I contacted my birth mother?” She didn’t, in fact she facilitated in my contacting her, which happened within 24 hours of my father’s death.
When I met Dolores at the Oakland airport I was gravely disappointed. That’s the only way I can put it. She was short, fat, had dark circles around her eyes. She was not the petite ballerina who had run away from home to go to New York and live in Greenwich Village with he beatnik poet boyfriend, where they had me but were forced to give me up because… well, I never worked that part of the fantasy out.  What was even more disappointing, and what led to the coded situation being the iconographic anecdote of the experience, was that it was the only time Dolores and I were alone together, and when she told me that she was so ignorant of sex that she got pregnant when a slutty girlfriend of hers was having sex in another room and left a 2nd guy in the room with her – who took advantage of her. It was three months later that her mother realized she was pregnant (she had no idea), and she couldn’t even remember the guys name. There go my fantasies. To this day I don’t know whether to believe her story or not.

How does genetic grounding play a part in my work? I have no gene pool that I can discover, that can relate me to a past, on one half of my “aura.” How do my personal mythologies differ from others as a result, and how do I express those differences?

In a dream, I saw angels, about a foot high, suspended in bubbles floating up from an overflowing dam. The changed from winged angels to winged cherubs to homunculi and floated above an audience at the bottom of the dam. All the while, cheesy canned music played from an orchestra below, like in a Disneyland ride.

Angels go back to pre-christian, pre-jewish mythology. They are the chosen being of god before humanity. When some fought god for equality they were cast down from heaven, doom not to flames but to an existence without the countenance of god. But pop culture humanity has turned them into “Disney-iffied” little putti, silly winged cupids. Or science has turned them into homunculi, symbolic miniature Gollems made from earth and mocking god’s sovereignty over creation, a creation that bubbled up from the primordial waters (behind the dam). I am an atheist, not by choice, but by the unyielding necessity of rational thought. I’d much rather believe in angels, but they are spoilt for me. Yet where do they come from? Chemical reactions in my brain when resting alone? Or is the constellation of complexities of sentience enough to let them exist with all their various forms.

Does god exist? Does it matter? Can I, should I, need I, express my ambivalence?

In 1945 an Arab peasant discovered the Nag Hamadi Codices. He brought it home not knowing quite what to do with it and set it by his mother’s stove. She burned a good part of it kindling her fires. The discoverer was involved in a blood feud to avenge his fathers death. He and his brothers found their father’s enemy and hacked of his limbs, ripped out his heart, and devoured it among them. Fearing a police investigation which would confiscate his discovery, he had a priest keep one for him. He showed it to a teach who sent it to a collector in Cairo where it began it journey into the world of biblical scholarship

What the fuck? The most important discovery in modern times concerning the (arguably) most influential religion on the planet is infused, tainted, layered with the undercurrent of a horrifying ritual murder. A ruthless and bloody effort to solidify a young christian movement by destroying unwanted stories and torturing to death those who read or keep them causes them to be hidden away for more than a thousand years where they are revealed in the midst of a blood feud of gory vengeance. An archetypal crone/mother treats the metaphorically blood soaked texts (a bloody fingerprint in a novel says more than the text) as kindling, like the witch in Hansel and Gretel, stoking the fires for who knows what kind of cannibalistic feast. Fear of discovery sends the texts out from this underworld of blood and death into another world of arcane and secretive scholarship. The Codicies remained lost even when found – they were secreted away by a collector in Germany and then captured by a power-mad biblical scholar who only allowed limited access to a few people a little at a time, likely because the Catholic Church feared what they contained.

How do I reveal the connections between good and evil that exist in this history that inculcates us all? Why should I? Whom does it serve to know these things? Is it enough that it is just fascinating?

There is a theory that the universe is self contained and not infinite. Imagine a room with two doors at opposite ends. When you exit the one door you immediately come in the other. There is no “outside” to the room, it is self contained. It is bounded by itself and finite yet a photon traveling through it would never stop. In this theory, in the universe, if you traveled long enough in any direction you would get back to where you started. However, the universe is so large that light has not had enough time to go all the way round and back to itself again.

Infinity appears to be unavailable while eternity is not. Is this an answer or a question to my wonderings/wanderings around agnosticism and atheism*? How could there be an infinite universe in any case? How could there be a timescale which has no beginning and no end? This theory may take care of the problem of infinity, although when using the room that leads into itself, it does beg the question of what is outside the room. It’s a brain teaser and a good one. Just like when I was a kid staring up at the stars trying to imagine where god was. If the stars were infinite where could “he” be? But if they’re finite and self contained then maybe there is an “outside the room.”

*Notice my choice is between agnosticism and atheism. I don’t include the possibility that god does exist, only that I might be able to move from belief in no-god to belief in maybe-god.

How do I represent this in a physical object?

I had a dream in which I found a tree in a forest I was walking in that had a large cleft in its side. When I reached into the cleft, I found and extracted a tall wooden stave or pole, with a disc at the top and a cross member just below it. I knew it was the most powerful object I had ever touched, but I didn’t know what the power was, only that it was potentially destructive

Tree-clefts have always struck me as representative of the vulva. As an over-stimulated hormonally drenched teenager (la tempesta de hormone in Italian) it was all I could see when I was in a forest (talk about not being able to see the forest for the trees…). Vulvas everywhere.  Yet from the obviously female symbol I extract an apparently phallic object. Could it be a kind of symbolic birth of myself or some part of myself? Seems likely. My dream, my unconscious, my forest after all.
The pole has a symbolic character similar to an Egyptian Ankh, which is sometimes interpreted as life, while in alchemy it is the symbol of Venus or copper, and in Hermeticism it is, due to it’s containing both a loop for the vulva and a rod for the phallus, it represents an hermaphroditic god. I favor the Hemetic version, but the extended shaft of the staff in the dream leads me to favor a balance with more on the male side, but a nonetheless significant female component.
It is a powerful object of some indeterminate kind. I can wield it thought, and I can sense its power. This internal knowledge I have has not revealed itself in the dream, only told me it was there and available when I needed it. An empowering feeling to have such a powerful object. It should be noted that it is not a weapon, despite it’s power. In the dream I’m sure it could be dangerous if used inappropriately, and I have no desire to do so.
Aside from its ankh-ness, its form is an ancient one. The staff can be seen as a symbol of power outside its hermaphroditic aspects.  In Tsimshian society it is seen as a representative of the sprit helper and a visualization of the axis that joined the upper world to the underworld. Frazer mentions staffs in the context of objects of power which can stop anyone from passing along a taboo’ed path. Jesus is often seen in Christian art with a shepherd’s staff.

Wood, then, can be seen as a primary and primal source of material. And it seems to be calling directly for some kind of expression in my practice. But what is that expression? Is it about power, or hermaphroditic essences? Or Both?

In Junior High school I was doing jumping jacks in a class for “ortho” kids. One boy, deathly skinny – you could see his ribs and he had a deep indentation at the base of this sternum – was being teased by the other members of the class. I enthusiastically joined in.

The victim victimizing another victim. I grew up fast in junior high school, resulting in my having long ungainly limbs over which I had little control. I also had a father who was absent from my intiation into manhood – he never played ball with me or participated in any physical activity that I might get involved with to help develop my sports abilities. These abilities were essential to passing from boyhood to manhood in 1960’s America, and as a result I was never invited to join the club by my male peers. In fact I was told very clearly to keep the fuck out. This left me sad and angry without really understanding why at the time.
The boy, the skinny boy, was in even worse shape than I was. He has some sort of debilitating condition which left him very week I suppose – it was never explicitly stated. We all thought whatever our shortcomings were that led us into this class for “ortho*” kids was our own fault.
I don’t remember the exact event, but I can clearly see him standing in front of me in the middle of the asphalt multi-purpose courtyard with the locker rooms right behind us. I can see the look of heartbreak on his face as I gave him a hard time long with the others. We had been friendly up until then, we had related to each other as mutual victims of the Physical Education nightmare we were being force through every single day. And I had to be like the others, and in order to be a part of them I had to Other this poor kid. The pleasure lasted about a heart beat and was killed by the look on his face.
The entire process of the inherent cruelty of the initiation process of boyhood to manhood is encapsulated in this moment.

*The word “ortho” was short for “orthopedic,” but it had a strongly pejorative alternative meaning that kids can only define with other words, like “fag,” “dork,” “retard,” and others. It had the usefulness of both the encapsulation of a multitude of meanings, all variants on “one who doesn’t fit in” and a dynamic sonification. You could extend it’s vowels and modify its syllable emphasis to devastating effect. It helped too to include sonic distortions imposing the qualities of the epithet onto the object being ridiculed, often as having the quality of speech of Lon Cheney Jr.’s Lennie in the movie version of “Of Mice and Men” or Mortimer Snerd from The Edgar Bergen Show

My relationship to the world of men is a major issue with me. How can I express it in a meaningful way in my practice. Do I want to use that expression in a didactic way? “Be aware that you, observer, should change your evil ways when you become aware of the pain and injustice your system of oppression has caused.” Or do I want to use it in a poetic way, just put it out there as a personal expression? Or do I want to use it to fuel the anger in my pieces, but remain a hidden force? Or some amalgam of all three?

This is a symbol I first created for myself in high school. I’ve re-interpreted it from time to time throughout my life until it looks like this today. It is based, now, on the golden mean. All proportions in it are derived from the phi ratio in one way or another. But it is still based on its original form of two bars over a circle. It is very rigid in its form, pure rectangles  over a pure circle. All have ratios that are based on either phi or pi or both. Both ratios are irrational numbers, mystical numbers which have no end, can never be resolved. It can be seen to represent a tension between a formal rigidity and a mystical universality. It also has a rigid hierarchy, rectangles over a circle, masculine over feminine, Apollonian over Dionysian. This was originally created before I found the relationship of masculine and feminine within myself, but it effectively reveals that internal relationship to me now.