Rising from the Ashes

Rob, you’re quite right – if you make anything in a public (or even shared) place without consultation, you need to be expect it to be gone, or at least modified in an angry way, pretty quickly! Of course, this could be done on purpose, the resultant modifications/destructions documented and presented in a gallery.

In the case of the thing in the woods, I might have got away with the PW words – Persuasive Writing … we’ll see come the weekend!

I’ve just made my annual AXIS application. Although other bloggers have assured me that membership of AXIS is not something to get worked up about, I continue with my neurotic attachment to this doomed goal.

This is actually proving to be very productive, as having it at the back of my mind keeps me focussed on documentation … which is by far the biggest weakness of my practice. I’ve lost count of the things I’ve made or done of which there is no trace except a few memories of people long-since moved far away … so, referring back to Susan’s blog – did they happen, or were they made, at all?

Anyway, the point is, I have finally got round to posting the Aquaphonics video on the internet, two years late.

Collaboration between Jon Bowen and Helen JS Edwards, with considerable input from member of Oxford Improvisers, April 2010

I often ponder: “What is it about my practice that separates it from the conceptual mainstream?”. I keep coming back to this point: my work is not “about” ritual and the sacred. It is ritual and sacred. My work is not talking the talk. It is walking the walk.

It is not Damien Hirst putting a lamb in formaldehyde in a gallery to address the question of death. It is inviting an audience to participate in the killing of the lamb, documenting the event in my blog, making poetry from the participants’ speech, putting bloody hooks in a gallery, recording the sounds of the happening, and making an arty video out of the process.

Is this a retrograde step, a progressive step, a step sideways, no step at all, or missing the point altogether?

For me, it’s about drawing people in, enriching peoples’ lives, engaging people to explore things they wouldn’t otherwise explore, inspiring people to follow their own aspirations, encouraging people to reflect and question. Facilitating people to find their own voice in a world in which there’s always somebody telling you what to think and how to live, including – or especially – the art critics, academics, funders, sponsors and commentators.

For the art critics, academics, funders, sponsors and commentators it’s about some disjoint notion of quality. It’s about the quality of the concept, or the coverage and reproduction of the documentation, or the skill of the execution, etc.

It’s not about how well I draw people in, how much I enrich their lives, to what extent I engage people to explore things they wouldn’t otherwise explore, the degree to which I inspire people to follow their own aspirations, or the depth to which my audience reflect and question. They are especially not interested in facilitating people to find their own voice.

They are much more interested in using publicly funded galleries to “teach people to discern the difference between good art and bad art”. This is the phrase that appears in the founding document of every publicly funded gallery, which ensures the gallery attains charitable status as an educational body.

If the charity commission could grant charitable status to organisations which “empower individuals to assert their own voice against overbearing authority”, then perhaps publicly funded galleries and their associated retinues of critics, academics, funders, sponsors and commentators, could align themselves more clearly with the aims of artists, and less with the aims of government.

I often wonder whether the charity commission would grant charitable status to a body which “educates people to think for themselves, form their own criteria of what constitutes art, good or bad, facilitates people to question received wisdom, and empowers people to assert their own voice against overbearing authority”. I tried it with the Millennium art project I set up, but quickly realised the charity commission is a conservative place, and I was going to need to fund a very expensive barrister to have the vaguest hope of success. The kind of funds that grass-roots, artist-led organisations just don’t have access to.

Enough of this. I just had a great weekend. A whole day to mess about with a friend in the woods behind my home. Three trees came down in gales this year, scattering twigs and branches all around.

What to do? Something sacred? Something meaningful? Something to draw people in and engage people? Oh, to hell with it all, today I made something simply for the pleasure of making it, the joy of dragging stuff out of the undergrowth and putting it together and seeing what happens. A paradise of conceptual emptiness, a purity of experimentation and improvisation.

Then I think to myself: “It would look better painted white”. And then I think “Actually, I don’t want to paint all of it white, just selected bits”. And then I think “I want it not quite touching the dead oak tree, like Michelangelo’s Adam.” Then I think “I’ll bring the kids here and get them to add to it”. Then I think “I’ll get some friends up here too, and expand it further”. Then I think “At the end of the Summer I’ll paint it with flammable stuff and wrap fire rope round it, and make it a fire sculpture, video it and post the video on my blog”. And before I know it I’ve ruined a lovely afternoon of carefree construction, and turned it into Another Bloody Work of Art. Shame on me.

Satanism and satanic ritual abuse. Stemming from the 1991 Orkney satanic ritual abuse scandal, and further reinforced by the documentary “Accused” broadcast on BBC2 in 2006, the general view is that such things don’t happen, and never happened.

The Establishment (by that I mean the police, social workers, teaching profession, parliament and the Church of England) view is that Satanism and satanic ritual abuse are a myth. This view was, and still is, founded on the report “THE EXTENT AND NATURE OF ORGANISED AND RITUAL ABUSE (Prof. J LaFontaine) 1994”.

For practitioners of “alternative” rituals, such as myself, this is a good thing. Around the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, most self-styled pagans, new-age witches, druids, nature-worshippers, etc. were in a state of paranoia, as a holy alliance of evangelical Christian sects sought to discredit anti-establishment spiritual practices as cruel and abusive Satanism.

Now, most people smile benignly at a bunch of hippies round a bonfire, and only the few extreme evangelical sects get the jitters. Not that they’re overly concerned, as their primary focus now is to stem the tide of Islam, the latest “Devil’s work”.

Unfortunately, this is also good news for those who abuse children and vulnerable adults: surround the abuse with a few whacky rituals and nobody in authority will believe the victims or bother to investigate further.

Now, I’m not somebody who thinks that there’s a vast satanic conspiracy to hijack parliament, police, church and monarchy. However, it is undeniable that, every so often, individuals will turn up in mental institutions in a state of terror, complaining of being pursued by, or imprisoned by, or abused by, Satanists.

If I were a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, would I believe them? Of course not. These are classic signs of paranoid schizophrenia.

On the other hand, state-employed front-line mental health workers have a different experience. The following is a précis of several brief conversations with a psychotherapist with experience in the field:

“There is nothing a Satanist fears so much as their activities becoming known to the authorities. When one of their number arrives at mental health services, because their trauma has rendered them unable to function, it is a cause of great concern to them. One may at first dismiss the tales of occult ceremonies, rituals and related rapes and abuse, as fantasy, the sick products of a sick mind. The physical scars may be dismissed as inflicted by the patient themselves, to add credence to the patient’s own paranoid fantasy.

“However, when files start disappearing from locked filing cabinets … when one starts to receive death threats on one’s home phone … when one reports to the police that the individual may be at risk, but nothing happens … then one can only conclude that there is more truth to some of these stories than one may be comfortable with.

“Psychologists who deal with victims of satanic ritual abuse take it in turns. It is too traumatic, and plain dangerous, for one person to specialise in this area full time.”

Satanists are power-hungry. Not in the traditional, Faustian, sense of trading one’s soul for earthly power and riches. But in the individual sense, of enjoying having moment-by-moment power over individuals. The ability to inflict terrible cruelty on a person, repeatedly, with no fear of retribution.

It’s the kind of power that the worst slave-owners enjoyed, as immortalised in the 1970s book and TV series “Roots”. To rape, whip, beat, order about, transport, maim and even kill, with impunity. Where such behaviour is legal, there is no shortage of people prepared to exemplify it. Where such behaviour suddenly becomes illegal, it doesn’t simply stop.

So what is it with the ritual thing? Well, as Catherine Bell’s sociological/anthropological deconstruction of ritual demonstrates, it is an activity that is easily used to gain power over individuals. One only has to look at the power wielded by spiritual leaders such as the Pope, power which is largely maintained through ritual, to see how this can work.

If one enjoys such power, then ritual is an easy way to gain it. If one is conducting such rituals, then it helps to have something to worship. In a nominally Christian country where child sexual abuse is both outlawed and villified, the obvious candidate is the Devil. Hey presto! One has satanic ritual abuse.