What Glue Do You Use?
Curated by Yves Brochard

Dianne Bellino, Brian Belott, Erik Bluhm (artwork pictured above), Aline Bouvy/John Gillis, Sebastien Bruggeman, Richard Fauguet, Christian Holstad, Aleksandra Mir, Javier Piñon, Kirstine Roepstorff, Amy Sarkisian, Leonor Scherrer, Frieda Schumann, Josh Smith, Robert Suermondt, Marnie Weber.

January 11 – February 10, 2007

From the press release:

Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of work by Cameron (1922-1995), curated by Michael Duncan, George Herms, and Nicole Klagsbrun. The exhibition runs from January 12 until February 10, 2007. An opening reception will be held on Friday, January 12, from 6-8 pm.

This survey is the first solo gallery exhibition of artist, performer, poet, and occult practitioner, Cameron (Marjorie Cameron Parsons Kimmel). A maverick follower of the esoteric mysticism of Aleister Crowley and his philosophical group, the O.T.O. (Ordo Templi Orientis), Cameron was also an accomplished painter and draftsman and mentor to younger artists and poets such as Wallace Berman, George Herms and David Meltzer. While enlisted in the Navy, she was assigned the tasks of drawing maps and working in a photographic unit, which led to attendance at art classes after being discharged. In Los Angeles, she became the wife and spiritual avatar of scientist and mystical thinker Jack Parsons (1914-1952), one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and an influential leader of the OTO.

In the early 1950s, Cameron met the fellow LA artist and jazz enthusiast Wallace Berman who was fascinated by her artwork, poetry, and mystical aura. In 1955 Berman used his photograph of Cameron as the cover of his literary and artistic journal Semina 1 and included in the issue a drawing she had made the previous year. The drawing became renowned when the police cited it as “lewd” and shut down Berman’s 1957 exhibition at Ferus Gallery. After this experience, Cameron, like Berman, refused to show her art in commercial galleries. She remained, however, a crucial figure in the Berman circle. Cameron’s romantic aesthetic and commanding persona prompted filmmaker Curtis Harrington to commemorate her output as a visual artist in The Wormwood Star (1955), a lyrical short film recording the art and atmosphere of her candlelit studio. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger cast her in a leading role opposite Anais Nin in his film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (1956).

Despite the grim fatality of much of her writings, Cameron’s artworks portray a fanciful, even wistful lyricism. In the early 1960s she corresponded with Joseph Campbell, citing her interest in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, as well as in the fiction of Hermann Hesse and Isak Dinesin. Consumed by myth and the idea of protean growth, Cameron depicted the process of metamorphosis and transformation in hundreds of line drawings where ominous figures and landscapes emerge from uniformly striated, passionately articulated ink marks. Other gouache drawings and paintings depict mythic figures of her own creation engaged in ritualistic, symbolic acts.

Cameron’s sensitive drawings and paintings delineate a magical realm of metamorphosis and protean transformation. Featuring symbolic creatures in imaginary landscapes, her delicately articulated artworks rival those by fellow surrealists such as Leonora Carrington and Leonor Fini. They also seem fascinatingly prescient of fantastical works by contemporary artists such as Kiki Smith, Amy Cutler, Karen Kilimnick, and Hernan Bas.

In 1989 Cameron co-edited with O.T.O. leader Hymenaeus Beta an edition of the occult writings of Parsons. Also that year, Cameron’s artworks were surveyed in an exhibition, titled The Pearl of Reprisal, at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery curated by Edward Leffingwell. Cameron died of cancer in Pasadena in 1995. A selection of her work was included in the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition, Beat Culture and the New America 1950-1965 and in the 2005-2007 traveling exhibition Semina Culture: Wallace Berman and His Circle, organized by the Santa Monica Museum of Art.

–Michael Duncan

(Tip courtesy Kristine McKenna)

NOW ACCEPTING APPLICATIONS {We will be able to meet with prospective students in L.A. after February 1st, and prospective students in New York from January 11th – 27th.}

The topic/title for this second schoolhouse season is ‘Planet of the Humans’. What is our relationship to our environment? How can we as artists, designers, performers and writers respond to it more fully? How do we reconcile ever growing human need & consumption with ever more limited natural resources? Is there enough for everyone to thrive and not just survive? What do future generations of humans have in store? Are we afraid to ask those questions? Do we still dream about the future? Or have we collectively buried our heads in the sands of nostalgic reverie, craving the retro, historic, authentic, warm fuzzy security of a rosy optimistic past that never even existed? Why are even the best of us aiming for that which is sustaining? Why not remediating or ameliorating? Must even the most well intentioned contemporary human creation always have simultaneous degradation of everything around it as an unintended by-product? How will this story play itself out? Will we turn our behavior around in time to prevent our mass extinction? Will we remain but in a weakened position, a shadow of our former dominating species? What does a world with a submissive human look like? Or will we disappear entirely? What does a world after humans look like? Is that worth wondering? Do we truly understand our place on the planet only after we have imagined our absence? What should we do next? More questions coming…. All of the teachers for spring 2007 season in some way deal with these issues in their practice.

Spring 2007 Schoolhouse teachers:

{the list of teachers for the 2007 will be updated throughout the winter}

Amy Franceschini ~ Futurefarmers ~ Free Soil ~ {designer – artist}
Fritz Haeg ~ Gardenlab ~ Fritz Haeg Studio ~
Maria Lepowsky {anthropologist}
Yoshua Okon ~ La Panaderia ~ {artist – founder La Panederia – UCSD faculty}
Jenny Price {writer}
Heather Rogers {writer}
Ashwani Vasishth {ecological planner}
Claude Willey & Deena Capparelli ~ Moisture ~
Andrea Zittel ~ High Desert Test Sites ~ {artist}
dance, movement & yoga instructors:
Qusai Kathawala ~ {media designer / yogi}
Carol McDowell {movement artist}
Hana van der Kolk {choreographer/movement teacher}
Flora Wiegmann ~ Champion Fine Art ~ {dancer/choreographer/curator}

On John Coltrane and spirituality:

“Call it Universal Consciousness, Supreme Being, Nature, God. Call this force by any name you like, but it was there, and its presence was so powerfully felt by most people that it was almost palpable” – Alice Coltrane

Alice Coltrane, 69; performer, composer of jazz and New Age music; spiritual leader

By Jon Thurber, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
January 14, 2007

Alice Coltrane, the jazz performer and composer who was inextricably linked with the adventurous musical improvisations of her late husband, legendary saxophonist John Coltrane, has died. She was 69.

Coltrane died Friday at West Hills Hospital and Medical Center in West Hills, according to an announcement from the family’s publicist. She had been in frail health for some time and died of respiratory failure.

Though known to many for her contributions to jazz and early New Age music, Coltrane, a convert to Hinduism, was also a significant spiritual leader and founded the Vedantic Center, a spiritual commune now located in Agoura Hills. A guru of growing repute, she also served as the swami of the San Fernando Valley’s first Hindu temple, in Chatsworth.

For much of the last nearly 40 years, she was also the keeper of her husband’s musical legacy, managing his archive and estate. Her husband, one of the pivotal figures in the history of jazz, died of liver disease July 17, 1967, at the age of 40.

A pianist and organist, Alice Coltrane was noted for her astral compositions and for bringing the harp onto the jazz bandstand. Her last performances came in the fall, when she participated in an abbreviated tour that included stops in New York and San Francisco, playing with her saxophonist son, Ravi.

She was born Alice McLeod in Detroit on Aug. 27, 1937, into a family with deep musical roots. Anna, her mother, sang and played piano in the Baptist church choir. Alice’s half brother Ernie Farrow was a bassist who played professionally with groups led by saxophonist Yusef Lateef and vibes player Terry Gibbs.

Alice began her musical education at age 7, learning classical piano. Her early musical career included performances in church groups as well as in top-flight jazz ensembles led by Lateef, guitarist Kenny Burrell and saxophonist Lucky Thompson.

After studying jazz piano briefly in Paris, she moved to New York and joined Gibbs’ quartet.

“As fascinating — and influential — as her later music was, it tended to obscure the fact that she had started out as a solid, bebop-oriented pianist,” critic Don Heckman told The Times on Saturday. “I remember hearing, and jamming with, her in the early ’60s at photographer W. Eugene Smith’s loft in Manhattan. At that time she played with a brisk, rhythmic style immediately reminiscent of Bud Powell.

“Like a few other people who’d heard her either at the loft or during her early ’60s gigs with Terry Gibbs, I kept hoping she’d take at least one more foray into the bebop style she played so well,” he said.

She met her future husband in 1963 while playing an engagement with Gibbs’ group at Birdland in New York City.

“He saw something in her that was beautiful,” Gibbs, who has often taken credit for introducing the two, told The Times on Saturday. “They were both very shy in a way. It was beautiful to see them fall in love.”

Gibbs called her “the nicest person I ever worked with. She was a real lady.”

She left Gibbs’ band to marry Coltrane and began performing with his band in the mid-1960s, replacing pianist McCoy Tyner. She developed a style noted for its power and freedom and played tour dates with Coltrane’s group in San Francisco, New York and Tokyo.

She would say her husband’s musical impact was enormous.

“John showed me how to play fully,” she told interviewer Pauline Rivelli and Robert Levin in comments published in “The Black Giants.”

“In other words, he’d teach me not to stay in one spot and play in one chord pattern. ‘Branch out, open up … play your instrument entirely.’ … John not only taught me how to explore, but to play thoroughly and completely.”

After his death, she devoted herself to raising their children. Musically, she continued to play within his creative vision, surrounding herself with such like-minded performers as saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Joe Henderson.

Early albums under her name, including “A Monastic Trio,” and “Ptah the El Daoud,” were greeted with critical praise for her compositions and playing. “Ptah the El Daoud” featured her sweeping harp flourishes, a sound not commonly heard in jazz recordings. Her last recording, “Translinear Light,” came in 2004. It was her first jazz album in 26 years.

Through the 1970s, she continued to explore Eastern religions, traveling to India to study with Swami Satchidananda, the founder of the Integral Yoga Institute.

Upon her return she started a store-front ashram in San Francisco but soon moved it to Woodland Hills in 1975. Located in the Santa Monica Mountains since the early 1980s, the ashram is a 48-acre compound where devotees concentrate on prayer and meditation.

Known within her religious community by her Sanskrit name, Turiyasangitananda, Coltrane focused for much of the last 25 years on composing and recording devotional music such as Hindu chants, hymns and melodies for meditation. She also wrote books, including “Monumental Ethernal,” a kind of spiritual biography, and “Endless Wisdom,” which she once told a Times reporter contained hundreds of scriptures divinely revealed to her.

In 2001 she helped found the John Coltrane Foundation to encourage jazz performances and award scholarships to young musicians.

In addition to Ravi, she is survived by another son, Oren, who plays guitar and alto sax; a daughter, Michelle, who is a singer; and five grandchildren. Her son John Coltrane Jr. died in an automobile accident in 1982.

IN JANUARY 1899, A PACIFIST RELIGIOUS GROUP FLEEING PERSECUTION IN RUSSIA, EMIGRATED TO CANADA. ALMOST FORTEAN IN THEIR REJECTION OF ANY KIND OF AUTHORITY – THEY PROVED A THORN IN THE SIDE OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT. AUTHOR IAN MORFITT INVESTIGATES. (From Fortean Times 119)

[In January 1899], 8,000 Doukhobors from the port of Batum on the Black Sea settled in Canada in pursuit of a higher level of spiritual life. As they disembarked from the immigrant ship SS Lake Huron, each one hoped this was the Promised Land.

But the transition for this pre-industrial, rural, Russian Christian sect was not easy; their concepts of pacifism, animal rights and anti-materialism split the Doukhobor community into three factions. The most active of these was the ‘Sons of Freedom’, whose millennial zeal manifested itself in now-legendary nude marches and acts of violence that ran counter to their fundamental tenet of non-violence.

The need for strong spiritual leadership existed from the sect’s earliest days in Russia. Leaders who had visions or who received ‘visitations’ emerged according to a hereditary principal. The most influential of all was Peter Vasilievitch Verigin – known as Peter the Lordly – in the late nineteenth century.

Verigin’s influence held them together when, in an attempt to force to submit to Czarist state control, the Doukhobors were exiled to Siberia. It was under his direction that Doukhobors destroyed their arms in huge bonfires in a mass refusal to serve in the military in 1895.

Corresponding with Leo Tolstoy – whose admiration of Doukhobor ideals prompted him to become their greatest champion – Verigin saw the need to find a land where his people could live uncontaminated by a violent, selfish and materialistic society.

Verigin wrote that an earthly paradise was only possible by a return to “primitive conditions … and a spiritual stature lost by Adam and Eve.” Labour would be only in Christ’s service, currency returned to the Caesars that devised them, animals freed from enslavement. Metal objects were to be rejected because mining “tortured” people to obtain ore and food could be raised in abundance by solar heat. A new exodus was required to a land closer to the sun and closer to God.

Although some of Verigin’s phraseology sounds like half-baked religious philosophy, he was simply rejecting what he saw as the greedy exploitation of man and nature. He longed for a world without violence, where food was plentiful and neither man nor beast would suffer. “Plenty of corn exists, if only avarice were diminished,” he wrote. “The earth freed from the violence of human hands would abound with all that is ordained for it.”Ironically, a century on, this view is gaining more and more currency in western cultures.

A large segment – known as the ‘Independents’ – had already turned away from the communal Doukhobor lifestyle to run their farms on an individual basis. The first serious fracturing of the community was inspired, unwittingly, but the writings of Peter the Lordly himself, which were never intended to be read by his largely illiterate followers.

Embracing Verigin’s slogan “the sons of God shall never be the slaves of corruption”, a religious fervour took hold of another group. Releasing their livestock into the woods, the zealots hitched themselves to wagons when taking their produce to market. When hundreds marched barefoot and singing to preach to the unconverted, they burned leather and fur in ritual bonfires and discarded metal tools.

When Verigin arrived in Canada in 1903, the radicals were disappointed by his lack of commitment to their cause. In renewed zeal, they called themselves Svobodniki (Freedomites) or the ‘Sons of Freedom’ (SOF). Inspired by Verigin’s writings, they again took to the road to preach, only this time they marched in the nude, “in the manner of the first Adam and Eve”.

On their way to “destroy the throne of Satan”, the group chanced upon Verigin himself and forcibly freed the horse from his trap. But their march was intercepted by nearby villagers. Beaten and bleeding, they huddled together overnight exposed to the elements. Later, one recalled with amazement: “We remained naked and it was really wonderful to us that in such a wind we were not frozen. Those who stood guard over us publicly announced that the cold that came on was a very great cold, but not one of the naked was frozen.”

Marching on toward Yorkton, Saskatchewan, clothed but eating grass and leaves like their fellow animals, the SOF stripped before entering town. They were arrested and convicted of indecent exposure. Refusing to be bound over to keep the peace, they served jail terms before being returned to their home villages.

The peace was not to last long. Nakedness was a step closer to holiness, but there were other impediments to holy life, including technology. Zealots destroyed a wheat field with a roller, and the purifying powers of fire were applied to farm machinery.

The next march saw the SOF in long blue gowns and wide-brimmed straw hats chanting and denouncing the impure life and the moderate Peter the Lordly. They rented a house in Fort William for a New Year’s parade and marched naked through its snow-covered streets. Rounded up by police, they were taken back to the house where they sat naked on the floor around communal piles of fruit and nuts. A ceremonial burning of clothes in spring and more nude walkabouts resulted in further arrests and prison terms.

The communal Doukhobor life in Saskatchewan was brought to an end by the loss of the ‘Independents’ and government pressure to register their land. Having resolutely refused to acknowledge authority in any form since arriving in Canada – including sending their children to school and registering births, marriages and homestead property rights – the Doukhobors were officially dispossessed of their lands.

Peter the Lordly, lured by the promise of the lush fruit-growing valleys of British Columbia, used communal funds to purchase land where his people could relocate. The first prairie community, largely comprising Orthodox Doukhobors who still recognised the hereditary leadership of Verigin, were joined by the SOF.

Despite this new beginning, the SOF continued their nude marches – once acts of faith but increasingly becoming acts of protest. In 1922, under pressure from local to authorities to educate their children and adhere to laws, the SOF burned nine schools to the ground. In an attempt to liberate him from the contamination of material goods, Verigin’s own home was put to the torch as the SOF fuelled the fire with their own clothes.

Peter the Lordly’s regular denunciation of the SOF exacted the ultimate price when a train he was travelling in was dynamited in 1926. His death marked the first usage of this new form of protest. After much jockeying for position by heirs apparent, the mantle of leadership was assumed by his grandson Peter Petrovich Verigin. In aiming to unite Independent, Orthodox and SOF Doukhobors, his attempts to drive out the divisive forces earned him the title of Peter the Purger.

The Depression put paid to the promise of a better life for the Doukhobor community as repossession of property left them landless yet again. Frustration and increasing interference by authorities led once more to mass nude demonstrations.

Stripping and singing and torching of public and Doukhobor-owned buildings demonstrated their renunciation of the ways of the outside world. Pacifism gave way to other forms of protest called “black work”, lauded by many SOF. The greatest of Doukhobor taboos – violence – had become, paradoxically, a method to purge threatening influences.

Their belief that schools were a primary contaminating influence of schools led to an escalation of school burnings. “The cause of all this is the SCHOOL with its wrong orientation, thrusting sadism upon the youthful generation,” a SOF manifesto claimed. “Especially when a person partakes of higher education, or attends military academies, does he become a truly insane animal.”

Nude parents trying to physically remove their children from government schools were arrested and imprisoned. New schools, built to replace those destroyed, met the same fate within months of opening. Hundreds now joined the nude parades.

After the death of Peter the Purger and his unifying leadership, various leaders attempted to fill the vacuum. His son, John Verigin, was seen as too moderate for many SOF. Some turned to Louis Popoff – the self-styled ‘Tsar of Heaven’, known for his tendency to stride about in white robes and a crown of ripe oranges. John Lebedoff – respected in the hereditary tradition as a descendant of the first man to refuse military service in Russia in 1893 – also commanded a following. Michael Orekoff presented his credentials as a distant cousin of Peter the Lordly who had been visited by the Archangel Michael, and soon adopted the moniker of Michael the Archangel himself.

The government increased the indecent exposure penalty from six months to three years and conducted further mass trials but this served only to increase the frequency and numbers involved in nude protests. By May 1932 over 700 were incarcerated in a newly-built detention camp surrounded by 20 ft high barbed wire fences on a deserted island off the mainland coast of British Columbia.

The SOF were undeterred; in the following two years there were a further 153 acts of arson. As dynamitings and burnings of homes continued apace in the BC interior, government commission attempted to unravel the workings of destructive members of the community. Inevitably, a confession from one SOF member soon triggered a flurry of other confessions, accusations and counter-accusations that lasted into the Fifties.

Starved for strong leadership, much of the community turned to the exotic Stefan Sorokin who, like a latter-day Pied Piper, arrived in 1950 strumming his home-made harp and singing psalms he learned from Independent Doukhobors in Saskatchewan. A non-Doukhobor, he had escaped his native Russia and wandered for over twenty years, during which time he joined the Plymouth Brethren, Lutherans and Seventh Day Adventists.

During his short time in the community he toured settlements promoting an end to the “black work” and negotiated the release of 400 arsonists from prison. Stressing the need to find a new Promised Land, he took freely donated money for the search and settled on Uruguay.

Of the approximately 2,500 SOF Doukhobors, it was estimated that only 800 were involved in any real controversy and a mere 200 in the more violent practices. When the government, determined to find a lasting solution, made minor concessions to Doukhobor lifestyle, Sorokin encouraged his followers to drop their more controversial practices. While most of the SOF agreed, the most radical and fundamental believers waged the last and most violent campaign in 1962 involving 274 burnings and terrorist acts.

Train tracks and a massive electrical power pylon joined the list of targets of the SOF, who continued to torch their own and their neighbour’s homes. Despite the attacks over decades, death was never the intent and rarely occurred. The curious combination of nudity and burnings were always the preferred means of resisting outside influence.

In their study of the Doukhobors, George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic described the effect: “The exciting break of fire as a kerosene-soaked house burst into flame, [and] the deep thud of exploding dynamite, carried an irresistible excitement. Fire had become its own end, a passion that excited some of the arsonists to the point of orgasm.”

In all the manifestations of protest and religious mania, it is difficult to envisage one more bizarre than ranks of nude arsonists ejaculating into the night air as the flames leap higher and higher to the glory of God.

The community as a whole remained scarred for years after. Despite the fact that less than a tenth of the SOF were ever involved in the most extreme activities, the bulk of the SOF and the Orthodox and Independent Doukhobors were, and would continue to be, identified by outsiders as members of the same faction.

By 1962, the difficulties of assimilating into a foreign culture while steadfastly holding to fundamental beliefs had run their course. The ingrained distrust of authority, bred by a fear of persecution, was finally overcome by the necessity of having to confront the outside world. Ironically it was education that defeated the old ignorance that promoted a slavish adherence to pseudo-religious acts of faith.

Today the Doukhobors continue to espouse their philosophy of non-violence and now maintain links with similar groups throughout the world. On a web site home page, a single sentence refers to the extremism of a few members of past Doukhobors. It is no wonder they wish to forget their most troubled time.

Read more about the Doukhobors in Fortean Times 119.

Further reading: Aylmer Maude, A Peculiar People: The Doukhobors (1904). Harry B. Hawthorn, The Doukhobors of British Columbia (1955). George Woodcock and Ivan Avakumovic, The Doukhobors (1968).

From http://robertantonwilson.blogspot.com/index.html:

RAW Essence
Robert Anton Wilson Defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.
All Hail Eris!

On behalf of his children and those who cared for him, deepest love and gratitude for the tremendous support and lovingness bestowed upon us.

(that’s it from Bob’s bedside at his fnord by the sea)

RAW Memorial February 07
date to be announced