Pandrogyne: at the Warhol Museum

Veena said to go to the Warhol Museum while in Pittsburgh, so that was the first thing on my agenda the minute I had some free time.

We had the whole of Friday and Saturday morning (sort of) off, so Friday I went off to the Warhol Museum, with my host's museum card. I began, as recommended, on the 7th floor after I was issued statutory warnings about the disturbing nature of the content.

I'd been told the previous evening about Breyer P-orridge and about this current exhibit on at the Museum. I didn't know what to think; I might have already had a slight feeling of scornful queasiness. Surgeries, voluntary or otherwise can still give me heebie-jeebies.

But I went anyway because I'm intrepid like that. The first thing you see as you turn in is a screen with a film running. I waited for the loop to begin again and while I did, I read the basic stuff about Breyer P-Orridge: who they were and what their art was about. When The Pandrogyny Manifesto began again (you can see it in two parts here and here ) I watched it through and felt both moved and very disturbed. To make your entire body - not just the skin or the surface of it - your canvas, to reshape it and be your own creator-in-collaboration seemed like such an extreme expression of both art and love, that I didn't think I could watch any more.

But I went in anyway, and watched the images, the bricolage and the installations. I continued to be disturbed but I also felt stimulated and engaged and in a state of - what shall I call it - receptivity. The collaborations with Warhol's polaroids; the earlier work of Genesis when s/he was in Britain, the sigil to Derek Jarman who'd asked for help on the last film he was making before he died; all these expanded the subject of their art and gave a context to the work of two people who attempted to not just become one person, but to have a third always beside them who was both the sum of their parts and at the same time a new being.

The gods themselves.

*

All the same, I felt very antsy after the left the 7th floor. I walked dutifully down each floor, caught brief moments with some iconic Warhol stuff. In a room full of his films, I stood in a spot from where I could simultaneously catch Screen Test, Kiss, Blow Job and a film in which a man beats up another one in a bar while people just watch impassively and then the man goes away and another one picks him up as if he was a rag doll and just jerks him around a bit while a girl watches and smiles from screen right.

*

I'd had enough. I was about to leave but I needed the loo so on one floor I walked towards where I knew the loo should be. But it was the wrong floor and instead of the signs I was looking for, I saw a silver thing peeping out of a room. An attendant desultorily kicked it back into the room. Curious, I went to have a look.

It was called Silver Clouds. I watched it for a moment and the attendant watched me. Finally she said, 'You can go in if you want.'

So I went in. Helium filled balloon drifted around me and I stood right in the centre of the room, as still as I could. Pillow clouds nudged me along, attacked me half-heartedly, rubbed against my ankles like cats wanting to be scratched. One pillow stayed stuck up near the ceiling and I waiting for it to be dislodged like I'd wait for a lava lamp to begin its proper convectional journey from down to up and back again.

I thought about anthropomorphising gas-filled objects. I thought about what kind of morphism P-Orridge had embarked on and what the continuation of the project in light of the death of one of the partners meant for self-hood and otherness.

But mostly, I felt calm. I wanted to feel calm and I wondered why my steady state wants to be undisturbed, especially when the act of disturbing produced so many reflections I didn't have the necessary speed with which to process them.

*

Finally I visited the museum store and then left for rehearsal*.

__

*About which more later.

In which Yoko Ono is silent with Manjula Padmanabhan

Given five minutes with Yoko Ono, Manjula Padmanabhan tries to think what she could possibly do with the time. 

"I’d have to try something unique, I thought. Something that would reflect the singularity of this diminutive Japanese woman, this maverick bohemienne with the chequered past who captured the heart of rock ’n’ roll’s god-king only to lose him to the toxicity of fame."

Manjula gets her question time. And a bonus. Lucky Manjula.

[via Nilanjana Roy]

The view from here

After the Bal-Dalrymple stand-off, with a brief digression via anonymous solutions to the problem of IWE, here's Mridula Koshy's essay from earlier this month:

Too many Indian writers are immured in the broad brushstroke approach to Indian-ness. A generation and more have expended energy on a sort of anthropological writing, handling as curiosities what would otherwise be mundane – bindis, bangles and arranged marriage. Deciding how much of an India unfamiliar to the west may enter a work if it is to find success abroad is a constantly negotiated question for the Indian writer in English. Like Hosseini, some of these writers are immigrants to the US, while others live for extended periods of time in the west. The migrant writer is in this case like other migrant workers, someone forced by the economics of a global marketplace to travel where the work is. But the writer is unlike any other worker in that his work is determined by its accountability to audience. If there is any substance to the notion of authenticity, it rests here in the question of accountability. Nadine Gordimer said of African writing, ‘One must look at the world from Africa, to be an African writer, not look upon Africa from the world.’ 

Read the whole thing. 

I always want to know how people define authentic and how they know it when they see it. Koshy's definition is certainly an interesting one; for another approach to the question of accountability see Rahul's post today on music, the arts, and funding. 

More on this as and when. 

guardian spirit of the waters

Odilon Redon, Guardian Spirit of the Waters, 1878. Art Institute of Chicago.

A friend on Facebook has this up as her profile picture and I just love it, nearly as much as the Serafini Pulcinella flying on the clothesline.

When things loom, is must be Redon.(One way or another, escape is indicated.)