The birds like trying on hats.

Black Swan likes hats more than anybody.  Black Swan would like me to do a whole series of portraits entitled “CROWNING THE INEFFABLE:  Hats O EPHEMERAL GARNISHING Across the Centuries as CLASSICALLY DISPLAYED Upon the TIMELESS HEAD of the Rare BLACK SWAN.”

I refused and made him share a portrait with Hawk:

Hawk was deeply moved by the metaphysics of the plumed, dove-white hat, bound as it is by a ribbon of blue sky.  I don’t really understand Hawk’s line of thinking; it has something to do with avian creation myths.

Starlings swarm beneath a veil as if it were mist over the autumn brocade of the marsh grasses:

Crow-as-parrot with a parrot in a hat so naïve, I think it is surreal:

The phoenix thinks this hat is bad-ass, especially with a ruched tunic:

I put on a hat, too.  The birds suddenly silenced themselves; their heads cocked to eye my every move with beady-black intensity.

They thought I might be going outside:

WHERE ARE YOU GOING!! squawked Parrot-that-was-crow.

I could go outside.  If I knew where to go.

–The Odalisque

I like to be looked at so I decided that my first artistic project would be myself.

I have concluded, based on the information that Owl brings, that I must, therefore, be a PERFORMANCE ARTIST.    My performances are primarily observed by birds; you, fair readers, witness my documentation of the event, via my scrapbook.   The performance artist, Marina Abramovic, lived behind a glass wall for public viewing, and writes that the energy of the audience helped sustain her through the ascetic, ritualized ordeal.   I have to sustain myself through my life without an audience, drawing energy from other sources.

The record of my performance is, in the tradition of the odalisque (rather than the whore), not promoted.  It lies here, awaiting you, who might be interested in me.  Maybe I am a CONCEPTUAL performance artist since my scrapbook stimulates an idea of me, my life, in your mind.

The definition of  performance artist observes that we typically come from varied disciplinary backgrounds.  My background hasn’t varied much; it’s usually exotic and luxe, though I have been reduced to a line upon a flat field of color.  Usually, my background suggests an interior, like the obelisk.  Generally, the interior exists only to couch my nakedness, the hushed lustre of my body with its inviting apparency.

I might be a multi-disciplinary performance artist.  Like the movies I watch, my work exists in two dimensions + time.   My life doesn’t move as fast as movie film, but, then again, I have lasted for more than two hours.  I work with several types of imagery–visual and textual.   Plus, according to the birds, my dreams are all in sound.

The birds are not convinced by all this.  They feel they are important, independent aspects of my life, which means I might not be a performance artist, but a character in a play.

They are my existential dilemma.

They say there is no existential dilemma because this is not a play.  They are wildly interested in FOOD, FASHION and FUN.  They have asked me to post more on those topics, which were so popular last summer.  They want me to leave the obelisk and go hang out on the shore.    Ok, Ok, I say, but what does a work of art DO on the sea shore?  Every time I go out there, I’m assaulted by sirens and nereids, phantom ships shooting fireworks and giant seashells whose glossy interiors sigh sad circular themes, stuffing my heart full of feelings, padding the perfect punching bag.

Black Swan says, “Put on a bathing suit!”

Hawk says, “Take a sandwich!”

The starlings make a giant beach ball in the sky and spin like a celestial globe.

Phoenix found me on the shore (see my movie), and doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.  Obelisk, sea shore, o’er the hills, any place has fuel to burn.  Crow-as-Parrot still says nothing but “Where are you going?”  (shut up Crow!).

If I put on a bathing suit and packed a sandwich, if I hung out on the beach and caught some rays, would the sirens go away?  Would the seashells consent to being silent souvenirs?  Would the ship sail back to shore with treasure to share?  Would the nereids turn out to just be bait, the sirens the wiry hang-overs of a half-starved, worn-out crew?

When I ran from my former life as a decadent odalisque, I imagined being anything, anything native to the shore…not cheap toxic trash or the phantasmagoria of some sailor’s mind…I wanted to be real.

REGARD ME:

multi-disciplinary-conceptual-performance-artist Odalisque

]]> http://conversewithbirds.org/2013/05/07/performance-art/feed/ 0 conversewithbirds multi-media odalisque http://conversewithbirds.org/2013/04/24/why-does-the-phoenix-billet-3/ http://conversewithbirds.org/2013/04/24/why-does-the-phoenix-billet-3/#comments Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:03:28 +0000 Odalisque http://conversewithbirds.org/?p=2808 ]]> Why does the phoenix want to garb me in fire?  Another pile of ash on my pillow.  Phoenix fiery billet-doux.   “Things unintelligible, yet understood.”

(click to read the previous billet-doux)

do you know what but not how?
you will lose the path
in the fog of your emotions.
do not regret the past.
understand it.

you are the mud in which a stone is sunk.
clear your mind.
pick up the stone.
wetness skeins it like marble, smooth sculpted on
what shore?
where did you find this artifact?

what you call your life
is how you avoid living.
living–the outrageous adoration, absurd affirmation
of is’ness amidst all-vanish-es.

throw the stone of your heart
into the fire.
it might be an egg or a seed
that must be scorched
before it will hatch.

(Read her previous letter and my reply in bones, candy wrappers, a winnowing basket.)

Odalisque,

Henriette libre!  Chávez became a bird, and I emulated him, slipping through the bars of my cage.   For his corpse my guards were sent to herd the queues of mourners clogging the streets.   I got my coat and walked right out, stood beneath the red portico of my prison de bellas artes.   Nearby, a confused man (at the wrong museum).  I smothered him with my coat, and stole his clothing.  Left him naked, recumbent as an odalisque upon the threshold of the museum.

I wish I could have stayed to watch him come-to, humiliated and exposed.

Do you still measure time with grains of sand?  Caracas is no desert.  I will learn to blow rings from a pipe.  Ceci n’est pas une pipe.  It is my life, lovely halos of smoke, disintegrating.

You ask if I ever learned how to love?   I try to love myself.

Here’s a photo of my new self.  I mean, my disguise.

On the lam,

Henriette

Henriette was always the wilder of us two.  Some cruel justice in her…smothering a man with her coat!  But she escaped she escaped!

Henriette,

What kind of bird is Chávez?   Maybe we have mutual friends.   We could convince him to give you a visa and you could visit us here in the obelisk?   I’m not sure how you’d get up but maybe you can rig something with smoke rings and your coat?   I have bones here–I cooked a turkey for Thanksgiving, and kept the bones because I didn’t want to upset black swan by throwing them into the marsh.    They’re in my sugar bowl.  You can have them if you want.

I put your picture in my scrapbook with a collage that is not a pipe.

If you are seen, I hope you will be appreciated.

Your (treacherous-less) friend,

The Odalisque

Do I still measure time in grains of sand?

I woke up yesterday.  This is what I remember:

I can’t help but think that some of this was due to one of phoenix’ flaming billet doux.

But there was no ash on my pillow when I woke up?

COSMIC DREAM RADIO

Download: leave2candles021713.m4a

(if the embedded player doesn’t work in your browser, use the download link–it will open the file in another window and play it.)

Here I am in my traveling outfit with Crow (as parrot):

Oh the places we could go!

[click photos to enlarge]

Distinctive tower features Bluebeard’s Castle Hotel, setting for many legends.

Ah, the Virgin Isles.  But…the legends I’ve heard of Bluebeard’s Castle involve a slew of bloody no-longer-virgin wives strung up in a forbidden room.   Let’s try another page.

Lovers sit by the bridge.

I’ve always wanted to go to England.  I find the English language so romantic, mostly because I understand it.  Two lovers embrace beside an industrial thoroughfare and a recently fired cannon!   There, in the distance, another tower renowned for the murder of wives.

Let’s look up a place I’m familiar with.  Henriette and I spent our early years in Paris:

Café de Flore, on the Left Bank, has been favorite of Picasso and of Jean-Paul Sartre.
Place Pigalle is center for night life and cabarets of the more bohemian sort.

Surrealism began at Café de Flore as well.  It is  a movement I am particularly fond of as it liberated my head, allowing me to replace it with strange objects (when I want to blend in with the bohemian sort, I wear red harem pants as a head).   Ah Paris!  A place to see and be seen.  Henriette and I felt our souls excised by the cutlery at this gazing feast; if I went back I fear my scrapbook would regress to ghostly, bland snapshots, an empty odalisque’s un-experience of supposedly important non-events.

Students have beautiful scenes to paint.

This could be a very fine place to go as there do not appear to be so many people.  I like beautiful scenes and the company of artists, especially when they notice that I am also one.  Look at these beautiful scenes:

You may see bighorn sheep.

And yet, I don’t like the right-hand picture so much.  It resembles the first violent scene in my movie which initiated my triumphant retreat into the obelisk.

An odalisque is lucky to have an obelisk of her own.  If I left, could I find my way back?

Photographs from Around the World in 1,000 Pictures
Edited by A. Milton Runyon and Vilma F. Bergane,
(c) 1954, Doubleday & Company

Odalisque sits at her desk.  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING.”

Odalisque steeps her tea.  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING.  HELLO.”

Odalisque leaps to the window when Hawk or Black Swan or anybird, anybird at all, blessedly arrives in the window to save her from Crow.  “WHERE ARE YOU GOING,” says Crow.

“Hello,” says my bird guest friend.  “HELLO,”  squawks Crow.  Shut up Crow!  I don’t know where I’m going.  I’m in an obelisk for solstice’s sake, and it was a lot of work to get up here.   (as portrayed in my movie.)  Leave me alone!

Despite the fact that I did not choose Crow’s vocabulary, Owl, in an attempt to be helpful, brought me this:  Things to keep in mind when choosing your parrot’s vocabulary.

1. Avoid Profanity.

Profanity is the use of profane language, and profane language is that which is not concerned with religion, unholy because not consecrated, or that which debases what is holy.   I was once considered profane, especially as compared to, say, a Madonna.  So perhaps I should not try to teach Crow my name, The Odalisque.

2. Stay away from “catch phrases”

It’s always cute when talking birds chime in with something to say, but you want to make sure that what you teach them won’t get old or annoying after a while.

I take a book from my bed and flip the pages.  How about:

I would like to step out of my heart, and go
walking beneath an enormous sky.

or

From you to you I go commanded.  In between
the garland is hanging in chance; but if you
take it up and up and up look!  All becomes festival!

or

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we still are just able to endure.

or

If drinking is bitter, change yourself to wine.

or

Is love: a murderer without a knife?

or

She moves the way clocks move.

I can’t imagine even lovely, ravenous phrases  could preserve their dewy hunger if repeated as often as Crow says “Where are you going.”    If I teach poetry, will Crow use it sparingly, with the wisdom & ken to perfectly brim a fine distillation into each moment’s goblet?

3. Think long-term!

There are many things that will remain constant in your bird’s life, and these are often the best sources for inspiration when trying to decide on the types of words and phrases that you’d like to add to your bird’s vocabulary.  For example, your or your birds name…

CROW!  squawks my parrot.  ODALISQUE ODALISQUE ODALISQUE!  No Crow, you can’t say that it is profane.  OBELISK OBELISK OBELISK!  Nor do I want to encourage any creature in my care to believe that anything in its life is constant.  OCEAN OCEAN OCEAN.  UNIVERSE UNIVERSE UNIVERSE.  No Crow, all is in constant creative & destructive flux.  MATTER MATTER ENERGY!  MATTER MATTER ENERGY!  I do not know, crow.  I do not know.  It is best to assume all, all will pass but nothingness, from which materiality and warmth may inevitably emerge.

4. Choose songs/music wisely

It’s best to select songs that are “classics.” Popular choices for many bird owners are nursery rhymes like “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, and various oldies from the 50′s and 60′s.

This guidance is very intriguing.  It reminds me of Beckett who imagined mothers squatting to birth babies into their graves.  Nursery rhymes & oldies…everything in between is tedium.

Twinkle twinkle little star how I wonder what you are, up above the sky so high.  Like a diamond in the sky…

Crow before he was parrot would definitely have thought of the stars as diamonds, and coveted one for his stash.  But Owl would bring us a book on astronomy, show Crow that the stars are luminous bodies of charged particles held together by gravity and fueled by thermo-nuclear fusion, and that would have been that for everybody but Phoenix who would know, as if in ecstatic vision, the nature of heaven.

True singing is a different breath, about
nothing. A gust inside the god.  A wind.

5. Avoid alarming phrases.

Even if it seems like a humorous thing to do, there is a genuine risk that your bird could incite a fair level of panic given the right situation.

There are so many things that should incite a fair level of panic, but fail to.  Related to number 3 above, perhaps I should teach Crow to regularly incite panic with words that remind me of my impermanence.

WHERE ARE YOU GOING WHERE ARE YOU GOING.  HELLO.

Oh, hermetic Crow.  Even as parrot, you outpace me.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter that only by wintering through it will your heart survive…

…To all that is used-up, and to all the muffled and dumb creatures in the world’s full reserve, the unsayable sums, joyfully add yourself, and cancel the count.

–The Odalisque

(all bold text  from Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke)

(Why is crow a parrot?)

Where are you going?  Hello.

As far as I can tell I am not moving.  Well, I am, but only because I rest on this planet, which is repeating its one path around the sun.  Each night, when the sun vanishes, I feel sad.  It’s lonely in the obelisk without the sun’s co-habitation, once all you birds tuck your heads beneath your wings and roost, at least until I settle at my desk and set to work on my scrapbook.  Then I forget to be lonely or sad.   Day breaks the enclosing dome of night and I look up with a feeling of accomplishment.

Where are you going?  Hello.

I should get more sleep.   Maybe take a walk on the shore.  Pack up my scissors, throw some buns in my teapot, and head out for some free air.   I feel there is one right time for that walk and that it should lead me to one particular place.  It’s terrible, Crow, for that thought–of one time, one place–fills me with dread.  I do not know what time, what place, and I hovel up here bitter beneath this cosmic tyranny.   I want anytime, anyplace.  I would like the cosmos to operate with more ease, to unfold like the seed-head of a sea-thistle.  I resent being a wheel in this cosmic machine.

Are you?  Hello.

Odalisques are art.   I wanted to be real so I escaped the art in which I was trapped, but still I must make of my world art.  It gets very confusing.   There is a quote by a famous artist, “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”  I want to play with the world  like a child.

You?  Hello.

Yes.  My scrapbook  is an expedition.  A paper ship on the unconscious deep.

Going?  Hello.

Towards no horizon.  I progress through fathoms of depth and height.

Where?  Hello.

Crow, here is the page I made last night.  What do you think it means?  I show Crow my latest scrapbook page.  I cannot show it to you because it has not yet resolved itself into a single image.  It is holographic, changing with angles of light.  In a forest looking down or at a city looking up or upon a dune looking out?  A figure, his back is to me.  No…he looks right at me, I sit on the ground, no now, behold, his arm reaches out… Crow says: 

Hello.

my valentine has a hole in it

This valentine reminds me of an early conversation with the black swan:

…Is there a love otherwise made?  Of stone?
Its architecture, yes, toppled in weeds,
though an entablature on slipped columns
remains to frame the inorderable sky.

I could think:  Marking a grave.  Or
Its austere grace!  What time cracks falls away
to reveal a more essential beauty.

The ruins memorialize themselves.
Two might still walk among them hand in hand.

“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”   Let love, in its ruin, grace forgotten spaces, defy the spirit of our age which points, it would appear, only to annihilation.  Its shrill, destructive euphoria spares no room for soul-deepening ruins, lovely and bittersweet.

Happy Valentine’s Day!  May your love exemplify grace.

–The Odalisque