Dry Thirst of Honor is one of the photos in a show that has surprised me with its staying power, some two weeks after I saw it. The work is by Chris Gentile. The show is at Gregory Lind Gallery, SF, and the title is Reincarnation Blues.
This is St John. I'm not sure if the image here conveys the photograph there, but that, curiously enough, is part of what the work is about.
Start at the beginning. These photos are of sculptural/installation works created in the studio/lab, but the photo is the finished presentation piece, it is the documentation from which you experience the work.
Thus the image here online is a picture of the work which is the photo, which itself is once-removed.
Hence the title—Reincarnation: re-invention, re-birth, return to life—a second life as a photograph.
Now about the work. The Work. It is an opus, for sure, and his studio an alchemical laboratory where pieces are worked up to create a semblance from which you, the viewer, might glimpse a greater truth—or feel the stirring of a feeling, or some such other movement of soul.
Saint John, I have to assume it is the head of John the Baptist for it looks like the shaggy severed head of the Forerunner. Or it could be John of the Cross, Saint of the Dark Night of the Soul, otherwise known as Despair & Depression. Or, it might be my projection upon the black mass, the massa confusa signifying the start of the Great Work of integrating the opposites represented by the alchemists as the white of spirit and the red of body.
Here in Saint John: Tide of Regret you see the black mass hung on the wall and then, by degrees, slide, fall, coagulate on the blood red floor.
Now we get to the other half of the title, Reincarnation Blues. The blues: in a black mood, down in the dumps, feeling low. Melancholy. After-the-party let-down, heavy and sad, blues.
Red, red, red river, bloody ocean of sorrowful memories/ Carry me to the deep blue sea, I hear you calling me.
Who will lift the fog of bitterness, pull aside the tide of regret?/ Who will avoid the undertow of sentimental drift?
Ocean Life by John Cale & Bob Neuwirth
This is Human Nature. It's my favorite. Gentile constructed a nearly nine foot tall conical white structure covered in hooks upon which he impaled, straight from the vat, Maraschino cherries, their syrup dripping to a pool on the floor. Photo one, the Red. Photo two, the White, skeletal, stripped bare of the fleshy sweet fruit.
Why is it my favorite? Besides for the wonderful allegorical display, this work shows precisely the magic power of image. The abstractness of the image as metaphorical concept unfolds intellectually. And, something else happens—imagination takes hold and the thing is experienced in the round, so to speak, in its wholeness. You imagine it in the room: nine feet of cherries, sticky, dripping, the smell of it. Such is the power of suggestion.
First Edition, 1964.
This reminds me of Yoko Ono's Instructional Pieces published in Grapefruit.
LIGHTING PIECE
Light a match and watch till it goes out.
y.o. 1955 autumn
PAINTING TO BE CONSTRUCTED IN YOUR HEAD
Go on transforming a square canvas
in your head until it becomes a circle.
Pick out any shape in the
process and pin up or place on the
canvas an object, a smell, a sound
or a colour that came to your mind
in association with the shape.
y.o. 1962 Spring
PAINTING TO SEE THE SKIES
Drill two holes into a canvas.
Hang it where you can see the sky.
(Change the place of hanging.
Try both the front and rear
windows, to see if the skies are
different.)
y.o. 1961 summer
The reader can make or not make the works.
Gentile makes the work, but you don't see it. You see the representation and re-imagine it.
Integrating and re-animating the image—that's the essential alchemical task and its accomplishment is powerful, transformative magic. The artist and viewer share the real and literal power to create. Great stuff. Great work.
Grapefruit image courtesy of Wikipedia and ©Yoko Ono
