The Feminine Magic

Some insight into my current thought process… It’s not clear, so I am trying to parse it out here, and will hopefully elicit some dialog.

I have been reading a lot of Joseph Campbell, and find myself softening ever so slightly on the total disdain I have for religion. To some degree I have always given a lot of people a pass. I understand that Ritual gives people a chance to participate. It also perpetuates a culture, which isn’t always a bad thing. The self-righteous Yoga-Vegans fill their own lives with rituals, which lose their meaning for those who inherit or assume these rituals, but didn’t create them. This is how “organized” religions are ultimately born. Take the laws of Halal or Kasher – they sanctify an action. They remind a person that they make a choice, and that raises them above animals. But it also separates them. At its highest form, that is no different than the smugness felt by the modern shopper leaving a Bio-Organic supermarket. But a choice has to be conscious; the minute you follow rules and rituals blindly they become meaningless, and only benefit the system, not the person.

Religion is filled with stories of heroes, prophets, apostles, and saints. In many ways, people need myths and heroes to describe the magic they invariably feel in their life. But more importantly, myths illustrate the moments of our lives that move us through our changes.

The saints, the apostles, the prophets, the kings… the stories should serve as metaphors. They aren’t literal, but they are true – True in the sense that they reflect back to us feelings that we might encounter as well.

Those feelings – the love, the fear, the anger, the lust – that is where the Divine lies, that is where we become Gods. It is as much in the virtues as in the sins. And the great stories tell those moments, and challenge us to see ourselves in those stories.

So how does that come up in my work?

I’ve photographed women and nudes for a long time. I have had a fascination with the Feminine for years. But I am not interested in just taking pictures of hot naked chicks. I find that absolutely mind-numbingly boring, and the pages of large Taschen books, not to mention the internet, are full of quasi-artistic images which purport to celebrate goddesses and muses. They don’t. They’re just erotica. If I create an image like that, there must be a reason, a place it comes from.

I have been reading the stories of St Agatha, or St Catherine, or St Barbara, or any of the other female saints who were martyred for not submitting to a man in the way he wanted. The story is always the same… A man wants something from the woman, but she refuses. In his anger, he decides to hurt and destroy her. This two thousand year old story is no different than the man spraying acid in the face of a girl in Afghanistan for not marrying him. In the beatific saint stories the woman was always saving herself for Christ, of course. But that is just religion repurposing human tragedy to suit its own narrative.

These stories were tools for establishing the patriarchy in the early monotheistic days. Humanity began losing its magic then, as a very male form of society began taking hold. A religious/societal rule-set created for governance, for expansion, for reinforcement and confinement. It sought to replace the irrational, the inexplicable, the magical, much of what was feminine in nature. We lost our Goddesses then… Astarte, Ishtar, and all the others… relegated to martyred or motherly roles, or entirely re-envisioned as the embodiment of evil and the arbiter of original sin. But magic persisted will into the Renaissance and beyond. Anna Göldin was decapitated for witchcraft near Zurich in 1782, an era when brighter minds were already deep into the Age of Reason. Enlightenment, with its rigor around debate, and study, and evidence, did not defeat religion. If anything, it is the second version of a patriarchal system. It remains a male way of looking at the world, and if anything, has taken us even further from the Feminine. I scoff at religion as mindless superstition, but it occurs to me now that Reason and Enlightenment – though less superstitious and more egalitarian – does nothing to return us there.

I’ll grant that every little bit helps. Maybe those pictures of wannabe soft-core porn and beautiful erotica help restore some femininity into a massively male world, however coincidentally and circumstantially. And maybe life freed from patriarchal religion allows us to sneak the Feminine back into our interactions, into our perceptions, into our lives.

All this makes me want to tell myths, not tear away at the stories of others. It makes me want to bring the Feminine further into my work. Yet my resentment for religion, my disdain for its current popular form remains. The Gods did not make us in their image… we made them in ours. And it is time to make Gods and Goddesses that fit our time. Heroes that illustrate our stories. Saints that give our sacrifices a contemporary context.

I can’t stop right now, and I feel a little out of control. I want to consume information at a pace that is unrealistic, like over-eating knowledge. I’m gorging on books and wikis and video lectures, and I can’t seem to find a way to stir all of it into my images. My “Sacred and Profane” project seems to be changing into something entirely more complex than I set out to accomplish initially, and I am quickly accepting that the overall series may show these thoughts, but I can’t expect every single image to cover every aspect.

…and I need to stop gorging. Because when I get this way, I don’t only over-consume knowledge, i over-eat, too. One part of me says “Fuck It, it doesn’t matter if you’re a little heavier, you’re a Man not a boy…” but then my internal photographer and aesthete walks past a mirror… and is mortified. So keep the Amazon boxes coming, but chill on the Turkish food deliveries. And keep an eye open for Saints and Goddesses.

One of my many attempts at Goddess… Here the Venus of Willendorf. For more information please visit my website and see the Forest Project.

Broken taboos

Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing. Taboos after all are only hangovers, the product of a diseased minds, you might say, of fearsome people who hadn’t the courage to live and who under the guise of morality and religion have imposed these things upon us.

Henry Miller

 

The Eagle and the Snake

I’ve been rereading a lot of the great mythical stories, and Joseph Campbell at the same time. He teaches us that the struggle between the two mythical beasts – the eagle and the snake – represent the conflict between the earth-bound realism, and the soaring imagination. The combination of the two is the winged dragon, a majestic creature that shows up in most mythologies (though not in the Native American).

Why then is Christianity so insistent on showing various saints slaying dragons? Saint Theodore in Venice, Saint Michael the archangel no less at the apocalypse, but especially Saint George coming back from beyond the Crusader’s east, Assyria and India beyond it. There seems to be an insistence on taking a symbol that comes from within us, that allows us to complete the struggle for ourselves, and move it into the fold of its religion. The snake had long been sentenced to a life of representative sin, and the eagle, beyond its appearance in the tetramorph in early Christian art, never achieved the power of the dove, the sheep, the bull… or so many of the other docile submissive animals.

My favorite animal has always been the winged dragon; now I see why. When we come to terms with the struggle of what we dream and what is real, we become invincible. It is only then that we grow strong, and begin to change our lives, rather than having our lives change us.

Art will remain

Archaeologists have not yet discovered any stage of human existence without art. Even in the half-light before the dawn of humanity we received this gift from Hands we did not manage to discern. Nor have we managed to ask: Why was this gift given to us and what are we to do with it? And all those prophets who are predicting that art is disintegrating, that it has used up all its forms, that it is dying, are mistaken. We are the ones who shall die. And art will remain. The question is whether before we perish we shall understand all its aspects and all its ends.

Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Beauty Will Save the World

Your song

I don’t know if this story that is all over the internet is true… but how marvelous would it be if it were.

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Supposedly there is a tribe in Africa amongst whom the birth date of children is not counted from when they were born, nor from when they are conceived but from the day that the child was a thought in its mother’s mind. When a woman decides that she will have a child, she goes off and sits under a tree, by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the child that wants to come. And after she’s heard the song of this child, she comes back to the man who will be the child’s father, and teaches it to him. And then, when they make love to physically conceive the child, some of that time they sing the song of the child, as a way to invite it.

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Once the mother is pregnant, she teaches that child’s song to the midwives and the old women of the village, so that when the child is born, the old women and the people around her sing the child’s song to welcome it. And then, as the child grows up, the other villagers are taught the child’s song. If the child falls, or hurts its knee, someone picks it up and sings its song to it. Or perhaps the child does something wonderful, or goes through the rites of puberty, then as a way of honoring this person, the people of the village sing his or her song.

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In the African tribe there is one other occasion upon which the villagers sing to the child. If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the village and the people in the community form a circle around them. Then they sing their song to them.The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that would hurt another.And it goes this way through their life. In marriage, the songs are sung, together. And finally, when this child is lying in bed, ready to die, all the villagers know his or her song, and they sing—for the last time—the song to that person.

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I like the idea that we have a song, and that there are people who will bother to learn it.

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… and I like that this story gives me the chance to post a Leni Riefenstahl photo.

Father of the Year

Social indoctrination. It’s what is expected of every father. I’m sure his friends and his wife complimented him on what an attentive and good father he is. And I’m sure they prayed together, too.

Think about how you raise your children. Feeding them into the machine is irresponsible. You think you’re making their life easier. You may be right. But it’s still wrong.

And these days, the prevailing view often dresses itself up as the underdog, the minority view.

It isn’t.

You cannot teach your children desire and ambition if the goals you set for them are standardized and without real meaning. Good grades for a good college for a good job is the path of the machine. It won’t grant you the tools to exceed there, that requires tools acquired along the way. But once those are in place, the basic box-think becomes irrelevant.

Tired of the Fear

I have been working on a new project for months now. I am only really getting started, because I want to take my time finding the right visual language, but also want to make sure the images I create provoke thought. I don’t want them to be provocative without reason, I am too old for that.

The new project deals with religious iconography, but uses the language of beauty and fashion. I don’t do that casually, I believe that models have become our modern-day angels in terms of the visual language. I do not men that as a compliment. They are unattainably perfect creatures that serve to remind us that we are not “good enough” in the eyes of ourselves. The use of fashion models, dancers, and character actors in my work serves another purpose: it questions the viewer, and demands attention. Yet no product or service is being sold, and so the plasticity of the image requires attention beyond the immediate medial digestion system.

I have created about fourteen images so far, and have many more planned. Not all will see the light of day, because as I refine the purpose of the project, and get more comfortable in this visual language, some of the images will simply seem out of place. There will be many images that are simply beautiful… I could never just make message-pictures, that’s not my style… but certainly the project will have some key pieces that set the mood for the series.

Here are two images that I am willing to show right now.

I presented the series for the first time today at a photographic art masterclass in Paris, at the École Nationale Supériore des Beaux-Arts no less, one of the most acclaimed art schools in our time. Although the work was well-received, I was shocked by the childlike expression of fear over possibly angering religious fundamentalists. I will admit that the bulk of the work is provocative, it was created with the purpose of questioning our respect for religious imagery while using the baroque language of art to echo back a contemporary theme. But I was shocked and dismayed to find such timidity amongst fellow artists. Especially the older, more successful ones that were leading the class were mostly worried about the response amongst the ultra-religious.

How much longer must we all live in fear? Why do we – as enlightened people – fear the thuggish religious so much that we are willing to forego our rights simply to appease them? How long are we willing to let mullahs, rabbis, and the Holy Sea dictate to us what is acceptable when they contribute nothing to the progress of society?

Leave me your thoughts, or better yet just write to me at info@roth-photo.com and I will discuss it, though I may not answer right away.