May 7, 2014
I’ve been invited by the astonishing, alchemical, and brilliant Degenerate Art Ensemble to curate a fourteen-day series of online essays that I’m calling THE TALISMANIC TETRAKAIDECAHEDRON. Click here to check out the inaugural post!
A Tetrakaidecahedron is a structure with fourteen faces. In this fourteen part series, I’m considering the artist as a fourteen-faced vessel – a hydra of sorts, an assemblage of hellhound selves who enter and emerge from our collective (and individual) underworlds, bearing talismans, rites, rituals, good and bad luck charms. We call this art, or self-expression. But it’s a shaman’s task, this cycle of creation and destruction required to conjure a work into being.
Artists are mundane creatures: we scrub lavatories, we accrue fines and tickets, we get arthritis and watch terrible television and worry about earwig infestations. Yet alongside these mundane faces we have more hidden within our hair: we are guardians, emissaries, and ambassadors of various underworld/s, and have prominent roles throughout timespace as figures of myth and mystery. What qualities and strategies are required to navigate these timespaces?
I’ll be chatting with various intriguing hellhounds artists over the course of the two weeks. Stay tuned to meet some truly lovely hellhounds.