2:30 EST, January 23, 1997
Performance/Installation
January 23, 2008
Curator’s Statement
By
Lisa Paul Streitfeld
The father of modern physics, Wolfgang Pauli, believed the hexagram, known as the Seal of Solomon, to be the configuration for the icon of the 21st century arising from under the collapsed quantum wave.
On January 23, 1997 a six-pointed hexagram appeared in the sky under a rare Jupiter/Uranus/Neptune alignment in Aquarius. Astrologers and metaphysicians declared this configuration as the gateway to the Age of Aquarius (gaiamind.com). Predating the Jewish religion, the hexagram, known as the Seal of Solomon, symbolizes the alchemical conuinctio, or sacred marriage of opposites, the Hieros Gamos.
I recognized this configuration in my January 23, 1997 solar return. Three weeks later, I attended a historic San Francisco Cycles and Symbols conference that brought astrologers and scientists together for the first time and met the scholar Richard Tarnas, who declared the Hieros Gamos as the icon of the 21st century. On Valentine’s Day, I initiated my first public performance piece as an impromptu public confrontation with James Hillman, the father of archetypal psychology, to demand why he referred to Venus as the Greek goddess, Aphrodite. In doing so, I revived the archetype of the Sumerian goddess, Inanna, the self-declared Queen of Heaven and Earth and ancient icon of the Hieros Gamos.
After this breakthrough, I began an intense cross-disciplinary investigation into the Hieros Gamos which resulted in the writing of two books on the subject. As I became driven to investigate the new millennial forms of the Hieros Gamos, my career path transformed from journalist into professional art critic. This journey culminated in a new art theory.
On the January 23 anniversary of the Hieros Gamos I launched a series of exhibitions with “actions reciproques” to access the power of the emerging archetype.
HIEROS GAMOS RETURN 2005
January 23, 2005
THE TRAJECTORY OF THE SPOKEN WORD
I hosted a dinner at the Lab Gallery with a dinner/poetry performance of three outstanding New York poets: Valery Oisteanu, Max Blagg and Edwin Torres. Legendary avant-garde critic/artist Richard Kostelanetz was in attendance. Through spontaneous performance, the three poets narrated the trajectory of 20th century Spoken Word to create a new language for the Hieros Gamos presented to the public at a Roger Smith literary salon that I hosted on February 17.
January 23, 2006
ICONS OF THE 21ST CENTURY
On January 20, I premiered ICONS OF THE 21st CENTURY, an exhibition of 23 artists investigating the iconography of the Hieros Gamos. The show opened with the interactive window performance of Laurel Jay Carpenter’s RED WOMAN depicting Eros as fundamental to the emerging archetype.
On January 23, gallery director, Matt Selmer and I hosted a dinner for artists, curators, dealers and critics. As a performance piece, I wrote Pauli’s dream of January 23, 1938 in the window with his symbols: a rectangle and circle located above a double wave (the glyph of Aquarius). At the conclusion of my curator’s talk, I read the contents of the dream (from Atom & Archetype).
In the dream I drew an oscillation process beneath the window – actually two oscillations, one beneath the other. By turning to the right from the curves, I try to see the time on the clock. But the clock is too high, so that doesn’t work. Then the dream continues. The ‘dark unknown woman’ appears. She is crying because she wants to write a book but cannot find a publisher for it. In this book there is apparently a great deal of material on time symbolism – e.g., how a period of time is constituted when certain symbols appear in it. And at the end of one page of the book, there are the following words, read aloud by the ‘voice.’ ‘The definite hours have to be paid for with the definite life, the indefinite hours have to be paid for with the indefinite life.’”
January 23, 2007
THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: FIRE
My search for an innovative literary form enabling me to write and publish instantaneously comes to a conclusion. I launched the five-chapter reality blogel (blog-novel) installation/performance, THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE, with the first stage of a year-long alchemical transformation: FIRE.
The alchemical experiment was initiated with a ritual ceremony performed under the Moon/Venus conjunction in Aquarius at 12:18 PM, January 20. A priestess consecrated the gallery as a sacred space to give birth to the Aquarian Age icon.
January 23 was the second day of the installation/performance. As the starting point for the journey, my blogel entry FLAME: PAGE SIX presented the emerging icon of the Hieros Gamos in the context of the celebrity obsessed media dominated culture.
THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: FIRE is followed by: WATER (SOLUTIO), MAY 7 - 11; EARTH (COAGULATIO), JUNE 18 – 22; AIR (SUBLIMATIO), SEPT 24-28.
HIEROS GAMOS SOLAR RETURN 2008
January 23, 2008
THE ALCHEMY OF LOVE: HIEROS GAMOS
Action Reciproque
Video Mural: Tatyana Stepanova & Michael Manning
Action Painters: Lisa Paul Streitfeld & Tatyana Stepanova
Musician: Lutz Rath
Wearable Art: Selma Karaca
Eleven years after the initiation of the cosmology by the hexagram among planets in the sky, there is a full moon on the historic date. A performance timed for sunset is intended to honor the cosmology by making it visible and thereby propel the Hieros Gamos into the collective consciousness,
I collaborate with Tatyana Stepanova in an action painting integrating words and image into a symbolic language to violoncello music by Lutz Rath to celebrate the initiation of the Aquarian cycle of Eclipses.
The performance begins at sunset, 5:30 PM, EST when I paint the Mayan World Tree symbolizing the Gallactic Center (the Mayan symbol of ending/beginning of time) and the text of Pauli’s dream on the wall opposing the gallery entrance. Stepanova will bring in the Sun and Moon converging with the Earth into an eclipse and the luminaries will interact with the central sculpture, the mirrored Psyche, and the projections of interweaving Stepanova’s allegorical painting with that of Michael Manning.
January 24, 2008 1:30 PM
INFINITY
For my final performance of the year long series, I will evoke the Aquarian Age goddess by creating the s Hieros Gamos in time and space. Sitting in the window in a man's night shirt, she will concoct a magical potion mixing Gold (Sol), Silver (Luna) and Copper (Venus) in Jupiter Oil, adding Solomon's Seal and Pomegranite Seeds. I will enter the eclipse where she will anoint herself and the icon of the Goddess and her child. Then, I will evoke Mercurius as guide for the alchemical transformation before invoking the Hieros Gamos by creating a Seal of Solomon around the winged Psyche.
This multimedia installation/performance will be disseminated over the Internet through the blogel (www.thealchemyoflove.blogspot.com) and the curatorial website (www.alchemyalive.com) as well as rogersmithnews.com and a YOUTUBE video.
No comments:
Post a Comment