[-empyre-] Welcome to Week 3: MODERNITY'S SPELL

[lucian o'connor]

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