by Jerome du Bois
Make no mistake about the claim we stake about the digital photograph below: it's world-class art, with 21st-Century Soul.
It is world-class because it calls forth and supersedes many major tropes in the modern and postmodern canon, from the gothic to the uncanny everyday, but without all the clutter of the constructed, without the stink of the academic lamp, and, above all, without the irony. That's where 21st-Century Soul comes in.
What's that? Well, it's the ParkeHarrisons without the contraptions, Mike Kelley without the fake nostalgia, and Crewdson without the crude scenes, for starters. It's beyond all those tired definitions and categories. It's straightforward and comes right out of life. It's real.
Come Out Tonight is American Gothic. It is a palimpsest of mostly American traditions of calling out the spirits, though of course the practice traces back to Delphi and before, to the soma shamans. The piece is also about shouting at the darkness, which, in frontier times, would be part of facing the unknown future with what used to be called backbone; and it also recalls the uncanny camp meetings on the prairie at Cane Ridge, Kentucky, in 1801, when the Holy Spirit held twenty thousand people spellbound for over a week.
But there's much more. The megaphone is a well-known spiritualist instrument, of course, for channelling the voices of the dead and for showing off psychokinesis. Here warm firm hands attached to a living body anchored to the Earth hold up the megaphone so a live voice sounds out through it, calling the dead and the living to witness --what? an intersection of the quick and the quicker, an infrathin crossroads of dimensions.
Look where she stands. The winter grass is dead, but the green wall she faces is bristling with life, and mystery, and death. The green wall stands for the dark unknown American frontier our ancestors had to face night after night --our people, Catherine's and mine, Scots-Irish and French Huguenot Americans.
Have you ever spent a night in the woods, reader? with no lights but the stars, the moon, and whatever sulfur you could strike into brightness? Let me tell you, darkness is thick out there. It contains everything you could fear, and that is why you must stand and face it down. Imagine facing that darkness every night for years.
But there she is, the little woman standing in the big night and challenging all it holds.
Catherine King's ensemble evokes the frontier, Native American fancydance dress, Gypsy disc spangles, and, with the long black gloves, long black boots, and long silver-black scarf, metallic Medieval mail. Take a closer look.
Note that the symbol on the tunic is not a lion or a bear or an eagle. She doesn't need those, because she's both strong and wise. Instead, she wears the butterfly, universal symbol of both hope and immortality.
And what is she saying to the living and the dead?
Why, she's inviting them to the dance.
Posted by Jerome at February 21, 2006 07:25 AM | TrackBack