photo:MITCHELL PAYNE, 1971
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Monday, February 1, 2010
INTERVIEW BETWEEN LINDA MARY MONTANO AND NICOLAS DUMIT ESTEVEZ, JANUARY 2010
LINDA: NICOLAS, YOU ARE STANDING ON A VERY INTERESTING GROUND RIGHT NOW...THE GROUND OF ART AND THE GROUND OF LIFE BECAUSE YOU HAVE TIES TO WHAT IS PROBABLY THE LARGEST DISASTER EVER: THE EARTHQUAKE IN HAITI ...BECAUSE YOU ARE DOMINICAN, YOU ARE LIKE THE COUSIN WHO KNOWS MORE THAN EVERYONE ELSE ...YOU ARE FROM THAT ISLAND AND KNOW THE HISTORY, CULTURE AND STORIES. SO WE NEED YOUR INFORMATION AND INSIGHTS RIGHT NOW! PLEASE TEACH US.
Nicolas: Linda, I am still processing a disaster that made itself present to me in bits and pieces through the media, the telephone conversations that I have been having with my mother, Maragarita María, in the Dominican Republic, and e-mail exchanges with Haitian friends in the US and abroad. Unlike my stepfather in Santiago, who when the tremors hit, called his wife thinking that he was having a seizure, I have been shaken intermittently by the graphic images coming through computer and TV screens. I don’t have a BlackBerry.
Before I continue answering your question, I would like to mention that recently I had a long telephone conversation with Sandy Plácido, a young Dominican scholar from the Bronx. Haiti, of course, was at the very center of our dialogue. We asked each other whether this was the right moment to talk about it or to concentrate all our energies in helping this country. My replied to Sandy was “Why not do both things?” Why not use the momentum this nation is experiencing to ask questions we never dared to voice. Before hanging up, I brought up to her your idea to take on some of Haiti’s pain(s) through your DYSTONIA treatment. Can you expand on this? How does the transference of pain works for you and those on the other side? What are your thoughts behind this art-life action in the context of such a devastating catastrophe? Can I ask you one question I often get? WHY ARE YOU DOING THIS?
I am going to take up the cousin comment in your opening statement. Cousins are for me very close family members since for fifteen years I was an only child. Haiti was the cousin we never visited or the one whom, at any attempt to visit us, we would flee from. Nevertheless, this family member would stop by our places by way of defamatory stories circulating word of mouth in primary school about a black man from the other side of the island stealing Dominican children. Haiti was the boogie-man, el Cuco. Haiti was the cousin with whom I would have LOVED to played hide and seek in the dark Caribbean night. The cousin I was longing to meet. Haiti is the cousin that for two years has kept me an insomniac in the South Bronx. From 2008-2009 I received grants from Art Matters, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC) and Printed Matter to engage in Borderless, an art-life experience for which I have been traveling from my home in New York to Santiago de los Treinta Caballeros, my birthplace in the Dominican Republic, to trace any connection that my relatives and I might have with the neighboring Republic. Did I tell you that part of my mother’s side of the family came from Lebanon by ship? Some Lebanese families not related to us settled next door. Anyhow, I cannot yet discard the possibility of connecting with Haiti through a Middle Eastern relative.
To summarize what could turn into an extensive narration, in 2009, in the town of Guayubín, near the Haitian border, Uncle Julio gave me confirmation of the Haitian background of my great-grandmother Inocencia Ortíz Belliard (Belliard was her French last name). Triggered by this revelation, I asked Uncle Julio and my cousin Venecia to take me to the local cemetery to find her grave. “She was a black”, he said, un-self-consciously approaching the stereotypical topic of race and ethnicity dominating almost all conversations about the relationship between the two countries. The same dialogue unveiled a link with Venezuela on behalf of my father’s side of the family. But let’s go back to Haiti. Inocencia’s grave is unmarked, and is next to that of her husband Manuel Espejo (Papá Muele). His is also unmarked, so we do not know for sure which is Inocencia’s. The two of them are resting side by side on what felt to my feet like a big sandbox dotted with conch shells in various states of disintegration. Why has it taken me forty-two years plus what seems like an endless journey through the cosmos to get to this particular moment? I don’t know if my late father Nicolás would have approved of this. His resting place is not too far from the locus of action. Papi shares a wide, white washed grave with his twin brother Eufemio. They are a few feet from Inocencia and Papá Muele.
L: WHAT DOES IT SIGNIFY, BEING DOMINICAN?
Rather than putting words in someone else’s mouth I am going to leave this question open for people to answer. What does it mean for you, reader to be Dominican? Please send your responses to: indioclaro@hotmail.com _indio_oscuro@live.com or post them on this blog at the end of this Q&A.
Is it dancing merengue, clinging to the tricolor flag, or eating an elastic mangú (man-goo) boiled and mashed green plantains that makes one Dominican? Have you have this dish? I could make it for you or we can have it at a restaurant in Longwood. We should have gone over this question while enjoying mangú with sautéed onions on top, melted cheese, and a glass of morir soñando, die dreaming, (orange juice mixed with milk). We can call it art-life. Any ideas for this? By the way, I don’t know how to play baseball. Does that make me less Dominican? I found this interesting video on youtube posted by a what seems like a young Dominican man living in New York City. It is worthwhile watching: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uh6l666W_Sg
In my case, Dominicanidad has meant undertaking an on-going search of all of the elements that inform who I might be. I am Dominican because I am a: New Yorker, Bronxite, Lebanese-Dominican, Dominican-York, Lebanese, Catalan, Venezuelan, Haitian, African, New Berliner, Spaniard, and who knows what else. I came to the realization that I am engaged in an undertaking that can bring my identity to some kind of dissolution or collapse. This process I am pointing to has brought me at times to an uncertain territory. I am up for this. Better there that than spending life in a prefab Lalaland.
L: BRIEFLY, WHAT IS THE CULTURAL HISTORY, THE POLITICAL HISTORY AND SPIRITUAL HISTORY OF BOTH THE DR AND HAITI...HOW DO THEY COMPARE AND CONTRAST?
N: What we know today as Haiti and the Dominican Republic was colonized upon Columbus’ arrival in 1492. The whole island was named Hispaniola, becoming part of the geographic portfolio of the crown. In less than a century after the conquest its indigenous inhabitants were decimated and after years of colonial neglect, Buccaneers, a group of freebooters from different European places, settled on the island of Tortuga on the northwest coast. In 1667 France took possession of the west portion of Hispaniola. What follows is a long series of dispute between France and Spain for leadership over the colony and later on, Dominican and Haitian struggles to define the border demarcating both nations. The biggest national holiday in the Dominican Republic is the independence of the country not from Spain, but from Haiti in 1844. What is today the Dominican Republic was from 1822-44 Haitian territory.
It is worthwhile moving back in time. In the XVIII, as a result of dissimilar economies, African slaves and their descendants on each side of the island were engaged in a different kind relationship with their European masters. While French Saint Domingue’s expansion made Haiti the jewel of France in the Americas, the Spanish counterpart barely got by in an economy of subsistence. This resulted in a higher number of Africans arriving in Saint Domingue, and not only that, in a stricter demand for production. All of this will come to inform the overall identity of the Haitian and the Dominican Republics in regards to Africa and the colonizers. The stereotypical perception is of Haitians as poor and African and of Dominicans as lighter skinned Latin. The Spaniard Grandparent Syndrome (SGS), as I call it, is so prevalent in the Dominican Republic, where many claim to have a Spaniard ancestor. In any case, the first time I traveled to Spain I was taken aback by feeling at home. Was I not properly weaned from the motherland?
Have you watch Pat Roberson’s video on youtube? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QszyMLxrQvk
where he talks about the pact Haitians made with the devil in order to obtain their independence from France and to form the first black republic in the Americas? The tele evangelist is not as historically uninformed as he seems to be at first, but ingeniously deceiving in masking the why of the many misfortunes of Haiti. The major one is the heavy reparations that France imposed on the newly created country (the equivalent today of 21 billion dollars) to recognize their independence and the US later involvement in the country’s politics. What Pat is skillfully describing is the affront of a bunch of colored peoples to fight for their freedom. Historically, Pat is talking about the Bois Caïman ceremony on August 14th, 1791 were slaves gestated the revolution that would free them from the colonizer. The conflation of African beliefs was a unifying force in this event. Anyhow, Pat is not alone in his description of a nation who faithfully follows the wrong path, a crowd of glassy-eyed zombies walking after dark. The media has done a magnificent job painting Haiti as the poorest place in the whole hemisphere. Have we been told why? This link is to a video giving some answers to this question. It was sent to me by a Haitian colleague living in Berlin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVwqar4e4Ks
One recurrent comment that I have been hearing in the midst of the catastrophe is that implying that something good might come out of this: What does a 7.0 earthquake mean in a place that before the earthquake hit was already a disaster? Wasn’t Haiti in a state of emergency prior to that?
A day or two after the earthquake, a reporter on TV got confused and said Haw… (meaning Hawaii), while trying to refer to Haiti. He quickly realized his mistake. It seemed like he swapped the names of heaven and hell during mass.
Can we I leave the discussion on spirituality for later? I know that you are about to ask me about one particular aspect of it.
L: WE ARE ALL VERY INTERESTED IN THE CONCEPT OF VOODOO AND HOW DO YOU WANT TO TALK ABOUT VOODOO AND HOW IT IS PRACTICED IN BOTH THE DR AND HAITI?
N: Voodoo, Vodou, we call it Vudú in Spanish, has had a good share of treatments in the US, from Hollywood movies to anthropological literature. From The Serpent and the Rainbow to Tell my Horse. To give you an example, in the section on Haiti in I Tell my Horse, Hurston narrates how she came face to face with a living dead, a Zombie, and goes on to describe some of the bloody secret societies that flourished in Haiti at the time of her research in the late 30’s. In the Dominican oral history of zombification, people are taken from the East to the West side of the island to be turned into one of these creatures. There are those who affirm having seeing someone who disappeared in the Dominican Republic walk the streets of a Haitian town.
Growing up it was commonplace for many of my family members and neighbors in the Dominican Republic to practice ritualistic actions for the purpose of changing the course of an everyday situation: an upside down broom with several crystal of sea salt, propped on a corner helped an overwhelmed host get rid of an undesirable guest. I tried this on many occasions. Women stuffed in their shoes a piece of paper bearing the name of the man they wished to keep subjugated and under the soles of their feet. The names of undesirable people were frozen at the subzero temperatures of the electric refrigerator. To me this was a mild form of zombification. We used camphor to shoo away evil and were instructed to pick up suspicious packages with our left hand. I remember helping my grandmother tie Saint Peter’s testicles, symbolized by a stone, which we hung to stop a torrential rain. Chromolithographies of saints were put upside down until the saint fulfilled one’s request. Saint Anthony has spent a lifetime with his head on the Dominican soil. Wannabe brides do so to urge him to find them a suitable candidate for marriage. Some of the ritualistic actions that I described above could possibly trace their origins to our African heritage, others are the product of the religious syncretism that prevails in an area where Africans forcefully brought to the region worshiped some of their deities through the representation of Catholic imagery. For example, Changó, the god of thunder is represented by the image of St. Barbara and Belié Belcán’s Catholic equivalent is as Saint Michael Archangel.
L: WHAT DOES VOODOO MEAN TO YOU PERSONALLY NOW? BACK WHEN YOU LIVED THERE?
N: Linda, How does one deal with Catholic guilt? How does one reconcile with believes other than those instilled through centuries by the Church? Is it fair to answer a question with another question? Please give us a recipe for shedding off our Judeo-Christian guilt. We are the children of the children of the children of the children of the children of the children of the children who were brought here from Africa. We managed to hold onto a piece of the umbilical cord. Mine was sandwiched in a photo album. I was born with forceps, went to church every once in a while. The Catholicism we practiced at home was a lax one. I will try to keep our conversation on Vodou as simple as possible. We are treading into a complex territory. The reference to horses has to do with the fact that when the Vodou practitioner is possessed by one of the misterios or luas (spirits) he or she is said to be mounted by them. The lua or misterio rides the person hosting him/her. So much to tell. My mother would take me to the houses of people who had the most amazing altars. We would go there for consultation and to get help fixing certain aspects of our lives. There were those who would go to them to get trabajos, works for getting married or for enhancing their luck. Our visits were mostly for spiritual purposes. I was told over and over that I had a light and that I was eventually supposed to get baptized in order to serve the spirits. By the age of seven or so I had amassed a personal altar of a remarkable size. I would use all of the money that Lebanese relatives would give when I would go to visit them at their textile stores downtown to buy chromolithographies of Catholic Saints. The 4” x 6” were no more than a quarter. One of my favorite ones was St. Clare holding a monstrance in her hands. Clare, Clara (clear) in Spanish. Her role was to clear up our path from obstacles.
Now. I keep in touch with one Vodou practitioner. We became good friends when I was attending a master degree at Tyler School of Art. He helped me with my thesis on the aesthetics of the Dominican Vodou altar. This man and his friends taught me a great deal about sharing and caring for one another. Together we would travel to the most economically disadvantaged areas of Santiago and would be received by those who had so little with such amount of generosity. Now I do not practice Vodou but recognize that I have been deeply shaped by it. I often think of the light that I carry inside of me. I ponder about the implications of awakening it.
The Spanish speaking Caribbean had very strong relationship with the flesh, with the here and the now. I have call it a culture of the flesh. Vodou is a religion in which the deities can travel to our physical world and manifest themselves tangibly. For example, I was able to interact with El Barón del Cementerio, St. Elijah or the Lord of the Cemetery, during a celebration. The woman possessed by him wore a purple and black gown. She resembled a dead person. Here we are talking about gender bending. Linda, I warned you before of the complexity of the subject. I am just scratching the surface.
L: HOW DOES IT INTESECT YOUR ART/LIFE? ARE YOU COMFORTABLE WITH IT? IT IS MYSTERIOUS AND VERY COMPELLING TO OUTSIDERS AND SO WE ARE ALL CURIOUS. AND FRIGHTENED BECAUSE IT IS SEEN AS TABOO. THE TABOO MAKES US INTERESTED AND ALSO FRIGHTENS US...
Not too long ago I realized that almost everything I create references altar building in the Vodou tradition. When I moved to the South Bronx, five years ago, I vowed to myself to keep my office free of art, objects, or any kind of decoration. You should come and see the place: braids in glass jars, a calendar of the Sacred Heart of Mary and two of Fefita La Grande (a folk singer in the Dominican Republic who is in reality a performance artist who happens to play the accordion), a huge French Canadian print of a nurse tending to sick man, who is in reality Jesus, a holy Rosary in a plastic bag, a purse of yours that I got at one of your performances, soil from the Dominican Republic and Haiti side by side in jars, like the two portions of the island, like the graves of my father and his twin brother, like the unmarked tombs of my great grandparents near the border, like the Vodou Marasas: St. Cosme and St. Damian.
There is fear in what we don’t know? I fear to drive on an US highway. I fear the prospect of wearing a suit and tie and working on Wall Street. I used to fear leaving New York City for more than a day. There is fear in treading into the unfamiliar and getting swallowed by it. I used to fear becoming an American until I realized that I was one before I moved to the US from the Americas.
Why do you think that outsiders including yourself are scared by Vodou? Can you suggest a performance for dealing with fear?
L: HOW WILL THE EVENTS IN HAITI AFFECT YOUR ART AND LIFE? WILL IT CHANGE THEM FOREVER?
Any security we have put in place to make our lives safer can slip away in a matter of seconds. We should not wait for a tragedy to come in contact with those we care for. I open my eyes and everything is standing. I close my eyes. I open them again and I find myself in the midst of the rubble. Earthquakes are constantly trying to wake us up. Some of these tremors can only be experienced at an individual level, but nevertheless hit all of those around us. Paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, videos, installations, audio pieces, site-specific works, get lost during periods of wars, massacres, nuclear destruction, genocides, ethnic cleansing. Yet art remains forever as reminder of its power to pull us out of the muck. I mean art as: helping others in distress, transporting a sick person to an emergency room, emptying our pockets and sending money to those in need.
Days after the earthquake my cousin e-mailed me from Hong Kong to ask me how will this situation change Borderless. I think she really meant to ask me how is this going to affect my search. I am sure that many of our Haitian cousins lost their lives to the tragedy. I am sure that many more remain to be helped and rescued from the debris, and that many, many, more than those dead have survived and will be there for our first encounter.
On January 25th I received an e-mail from Notreda Belliard sent from the border town of Ounaminthe telling me in broken Spanish that she was OK:” Estoy contento de tomar tu noticia. Espero que todo va bien para tí. Para nosotros no hay nunguna persona que se muerte durante este terremodo. Y tú como estas?” I am happy to hear from you. I hope that all is well. There are no dead among us. And how are you? Notreda and I met during my visit to Haiti in 2009. She promised to introduce me in future visits to other members of the Belliard family.
Dear Reader I am looking to get in touch with the Belliard family in Haiti and the Dominican Republic. My e-mail addresses: indioclaro@hotmail.com and _indio_oscuro@live.com
L: ASK YOURSELF ANY QUESTIONS I MISSED.
N: Thank you, Linda.
What can we do to help Haiti’s current situation?
Donate Now. Please don’t wait.
Pray.
Get involved.
Adopt a Haitian orphan.
Research the history of the place.
Update our own image of this country.
Give a presentation on the colonization of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Question the leaders of the powerful nations and their involvement in other countries.
If living in the so-called First World: Avoid repeating historical mistakes.
If in the Dominican Republic or in Haiti: Strive to live in harmony.
Write about Haiti in your church, office, school or college newsletter.
Become a Haitian.
MONTANO'S COMMENTS: NICOLAS AFTER READING AND THINKING ABOUT WHAT YOU ARE THINKING ABOUT, I AM THINKING THESE CONSIDERATIONS:
1. DO YOU THINK THAT YOU HAVE A LIFE'S WORK/ART SORTING OUT YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHY.
2. DO YOU FEEL THAT YOUR LIFE AS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST CAN BE "USED" TO MAKE A NEW UNDERSTANDING, A NEW PEACE, A NEW OPENING OF TOLERANCE BETWEEN THE D.R. AND H.?
3. WE TALKED ABOUT THE PERFORMANCE OF MY BEING OTHERS (BOB DYLAN, MOTHER TERESA, PAUL MCMAHON AND FICTIONAL OTHERS INCLUDING THE ALCOHOLIC, FRENCH WOMAN, COUNTRY WESTERN SINGER). DO YOU FEEL THAT IN D.R. - H WITH THE PERFORMANCE PRACTICE THAT YOU ARE DOING IS TIME FOR YOU TO BE EVEN MORE PERFORMATIVELY "HAITIAN" THAN YOU ARE ...THAT IS THE BRAIDS ARE "HAITIAN" CORRECT? I AM NOT PROPOSING YOU DO "BLACK-FACE" BUT I WOULD DEFINITELY TALK TO ADRIAN PIPER NOW ABOUT YOUR CURRENT PRACTICE...
4.HOW DO YOU TEACH TOLERANCE AND RESPECT TO THE CHILDREN OF EACH CULTURE, D.R.-H.? CHILDRENS BOOKS? WORKSHOPS? LECTURES?
WHY? IF I WAS BROUGHT UP IN THE D.R. AND WAS FED THE THOUGHTS YOU WERE FED ABOUT H. , I WOULD THINK THAT IT IS TIME FOR A RE-THINKING OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE TWO CULTURES. AS A PERFORMANCE ARTIST AND A D.R , YOU ARE IN A VERY WONDERFULL POSITION OF BEING ABLE TO INTERVENE HERE, HELP TRANSFORM SOME OLD WOUNDS.
I SEND THESE AS COMMENTS , NOT AS QUESTIONS TO BE ANSWERED. AGAIN, N, THANKS FOR TEACHING ME AND GIVING ME HOPE THAT ART CAN MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE IN OUR OWN LIVES AND IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS. IN ART/LIFE/LAUGHTER, LINDA MARY MONTANO
Dear Linda:
I just saw your comments at the end of the interview. I kept looking for them within the main text. I would like to think about your words for several days, since there are very relevant to the path that I am seeking to take with art-life. I don't know if I mentioned to you that before I e-mailed you for the first time in 2006, from Saratoga Springs, I kept hearing a voice telling me: "get in touch with her, get in touch with her". I am glad that I did. God bless you.
I am including some images of my trip to the cemetery in the Dominican Republic Taken by Sol Aramendi. Unlike in the US, some of the cemeteries there are quite active with people bringing food to the Lord of the Cemetery, people performing Vodou, people praying, talking to the dead or enacting rituals. Most cemeteries are gated and close around 6pm.
Nicolas Dumit Estevez Raful Espejo Ortíz Morel Belliard
Photographs: Sol Aramendi
© 2009 Nicolas Dumit Estevez
Monday, January 4, 2010
Linda M. Montano - Video Works
Archive for Sale 1 avi
Archive for Sale 2 avi
Archive for Sale 3 avi
Archive for Sale 4 avi
El Chow De Faustina
Linda Mary Montano as Bob Dylan
Linda Mary Montano as Paul McMahon
Linda Mary Montano as Mother Teresa
Father Le Bar Linda Mary Montano
DYSTONIA Linda Mary Montano
Two Ayruvedic Doctors
Archive for Sale 2 avi
Archive for Sale 3 avi
Archive for Sale 4 avi
El Chow De Faustina
Linda Mary Montano as Bob Dylan
Linda Mary Montano as Paul McMahon
Linda Mary Montano as Mother Teresa
Father Le Bar Linda Mary Montano
DYSTONIA Linda Mary Montano
Two Ayruvedic Doctors
Thursday, December 31, 2009
DEGENERATION/REGENERATION: LINDA MONTANO SPEAKS WITH LINDA WEINTRAUB
AUGUST, 2004
Performance artist Linda Montano has not waited to die to be reborn. Her rejuvenation is inspired by her father’s illness. Montano is his primary caregiver, monitoring his physical and metaphysical condition as it evolves moment by moment. Her art is a record of his physical decline and their synchronous spiritual awakenings. He is her teacher, but this is an ecological lesson for us all to learn. Linda Montano’s father is 91 years old. He enjoys his meals and wheelchair trips to the village. Three years ago he began painting. Sometimes he creates works of stirring beauty. They are spare, Zen-like, mysterious. It is also true that Linda Montano’s father has lost the ability to speak, walk, feed himself, and dress himself. Seven years ago Montano says she heard voices beseeching her to return home to care for her aging father and prepare them both for the inevitability of death. Five years ago she declared this experience a work of art. I requested an interview with Linda Montano to gather information about this art piece to accompany the section of my book, Avant-Guardians: Ecology and Art at the Cultural Frontier, which deals with degeneration and death. Instead, she revealed a joyful (she used the term ‘ecstatic’) revitalization of her own life and career. She may be his caregiver, but her father has been her teacher. The new wellspring of creativity and soulfulness that he exhibits, Montano believes, stems from his life-long spiritual practice within the Catholic Church, but also from the loss of his discursive faculties. His spirit seems ultimately liberated. The only end-point she discussed during our interview was the ‘death’ of the pioneering role she once played in the art world as one of the originators of performance art in the 1960s. But her art is being revitalize by the teachings she is receiving from her father. Once, Montano says, she felt like art’s left-over, a waste product of a bygone era. Now she is being ‘recycled’. She is transformed. Her work seems, once again,timely, innovative, and compelling.
LINDA WEINTRAUB
LINDA MONTANO’S EDITED COMMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW
HOW I RECYCLE
Six years ago I began getting messages to return to the small village in New York where I grew up. I heard voices saying, “Go home and care for your dad.” I obeyed in increments. At first I helped dad with shopping and doctor visits and paying his bills. By the third year when Dad had a stroke, I became a total, full-time care giver. At the time, Dad was 89. It took me two more years to name this situation ‘art’. That is when I decided to save it and not delete it. I recycled it from the refuse bin of life where it had no value. Once I called it ‘art’, my dad and I started collaborating and being at home felt divinely designed. Before his stroke he allowed me to video tape his life. He instructed his friends and family about what they should do for the video. He would say, “You can smile, wave, sing, walk.” He enjoyed the camera. I reflected his brilliance and creativity. It brought us incredibly close. It recycled our friendship, a process I think of as art/life ecology.
HOW PERFORMANCE IS BEING RECYLCED AND HOW THE COMPUTER RECYCLES REALITY
Performance art has been imitated by very high energy young artists who understand that they need to challenge the tradition. They have knowingly and unknowingly imitated many of the themes, styles, rituals, and techniques of performance art from history, including futurism and even referring to its cave origins. In doing so, they have deleted the pure and sacred understanding of brain waves, energy, and initiation. They have substituted the gross elements of exclusion, greed, competition, and shallowness as seen in Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor, You’re Fired and other reality TV programs. All of these basic, non-compassionate virtues are present in unconscious motivations of early performance artists, but early performance artists ritualized hese motives or denied them. Remember, we were the good saints, poetic, spiritual beings. Now, the younger performance artists added the hidden motivations. They brought the darkness of the human condition to light. This is a good thing. The computer also makes us look at reality differently. It offers the possibility of taking off the blindfolds and seeing everything, everywhere.
HOW ARTISTS CAN SURVIVE BEING DISCARDED:
The artists who were active in the 60s, 70s, and 80s cannot mirror today’s Olympic-styled, risk-taking athletes and technological dare devils. We are no longer useful. We have been discarded. We are the cultural garbage of the art world. This, too, is good. It frees us of the need to stay within the old direction. As garbage, we can either seed a new flowering or we can bitterly pick at our archives and shop for our names on Google.
HOW MY FATHER HELPED ME RECYCLE MYSELF
The younger artists have created a brilliant diving board to the next wave. It’s an incredible personal challenge to artists to find a way to recycle themselves. I had no idea I would find myself in my father’s light. Since 1969 I have been attempting to process light as art, as performance, as sculpture, as installation. Now I feel that everything was a dress rehearsal for making ‘DAD ART'. The rug has been pulled out of my art making process because, for the first time, I am not in control. I am fascinated by having to learn a new role as I’ve had to recycle my art statement from one of controlling time to one of relinquishing time. I have no idea when this performance will change. Time is gone from my art statement. I’m at the mercy of space because I’m committed to make ‘DAD ART’ as long as I receive the message. I am here in obedience to the voices, to this teaching.
Retired artists pray for opportunities to be taught new concepts. That is our ecological gift. I am experiencing the ecstasy of finally marrying art and life.
HOW I MAKE DAD ART
I’m saving all of Dad’s charts about his diet, baths, sleeping patterns, the condition of his teeth, his bowels, his genitals. I add comments from the nurses and tips on transporting him. His miniscule actions are noted. We document the new ways that he is creative. He was never a painter before he had his stroke. Now we sit him at the table and give him a brush and he is happy. He creates Rothko-like paintings. He seems to be channeling. You can see his concentration. It sometimes takes him a half hour to make one beautiful line.
HOW I ONCE MADE CONCEPTUAL ART
Every artist has permission to create a definition of what is art. Some people say only my paintings, sculpture, poems are art. Early in my career, I needed to appropriate everything as art, and find creative ways of parenthesizing certain aspects of my life as art. I did this by saying, “I will wear red this year. I will be blindfolded for a week. I will expose my embarrassment for three hours. I will call my house art.” It is a mind frame. You have to admit your intention and choice to the air, to yourself, your friends, the art community, the world. This game has satisfied me and kept me busy since 1965.
HOW DEATH MAKES ARTISTS OF EVERYONE
Death, after birth, is the greatest mystery. I have no idea what’s going to happen when dad or I stop breathing, but I know I have to practice states of transformation while I’m still living. I use Catholicism to direct me. I know I have to feel and study the technology of the sacred (the title of a Jerome Rothenberg book)so that I become a good student. The reward of spending this much time with my Dad is that I’m having an opportunity to bask in his light which he emits because he has surrendered his discursive mind. My father is Italian and Catholic, yet strangely his quality is Zen-like. He is half way between life and death. The payoff for his surrender is pure beauty. Beauty is a vibrational frequency, a brain wave. It comes and goes. His meds are carefully selected and all lined-up to contribute to his peacefulness. There is no doubt that he is helped by chemistry, but his good character and endurance are also contributing to this end game. Thirty four years of studying with a Catholic spiritual leader taught him how to keep focused. Sunday afternoons he would sit in silence in the church and meditate. He knew where to get his spiritual food. Now he seems to be reaping the benefits of his practice. He has become a living ecstatic.” It’s like a little monastery here. That’s what my art was always supposed to be like. Thanks Dad for being my co-pioneer in developing a new art/life – death.
What will remain after he dies?
Invitations to revisit Beauty.
Gratitude at having this time with him.
SILENCE.
Performance artist Linda Montano has not waited to die to be reborn. Her rejuvenation is inspired by her father’s illness. Montano is his primary caregiver, monitoring his physical and metaphysical condition as it evolves moment by moment. Her art is a record of his physical decline and their synchronous spiritual awakenings. He is her teacher, but this is an ecological lesson for us all to learn. Linda Montano’s father is 91 years old. He enjoys his meals and wheelchair trips to the village. Three years ago he began painting. Sometimes he creates works of stirring beauty. They are spare, Zen-like, mysterious. It is also true that Linda Montano’s father has lost the ability to speak, walk, feed himself, and dress himself. Seven years ago Montano says she heard voices beseeching her to return home to care for her aging father and prepare them both for the inevitability of death. Five years ago she declared this experience a work of art. I requested an interview with Linda Montano to gather information about this art piece to accompany the section of my book, Avant-Guardians: Ecology and Art at the Cultural Frontier, which deals with degeneration and death. Instead, she revealed a joyful (she used the term ‘ecstatic’) revitalization of her own life and career. She may be his caregiver, but her father has been her teacher. The new wellspring of creativity and soulfulness that he exhibits, Montano believes, stems from his life-long spiritual practice within the Catholic Church, but also from the loss of his discursive faculties. His spirit seems ultimately liberated. The only end-point she discussed during our interview was the ‘death’ of the pioneering role she once played in the art world as one of the originators of performance art in the 1960s. But her art is being revitalize by the teachings she is receiving from her father. Once, Montano says, she felt like art’s left-over, a waste product of a bygone era. Now she is being ‘recycled’. She is transformed. Her work seems, once again,timely, innovative, and compelling.
LINDA WEINTRAUB
LINDA MONTANO’S EDITED COMMENTS FROM THE INTERVIEW
HOW I RECYCLE
Six years ago I began getting messages to return to the small village in New York where I grew up. I heard voices saying, “Go home and care for your dad.” I obeyed in increments. At first I helped dad with shopping and doctor visits and paying his bills. By the third year when Dad had a stroke, I became a total, full-time care giver. At the time, Dad was 89. It took me two more years to name this situation ‘art’. That is when I decided to save it and not delete it. I recycled it from the refuse bin of life where it had no value. Once I called it ‘art’, my dad and I started collaborating and being at home felt divinely designed. Before his stroke he allowed me to video tape his life. He instructed his friends and family about what they should do for the video. He would say, “You can smile, wave, sing, walk.” He enjoyed the camera. I reflected his brilliance and creativity. It brought us incredibly close. It recycled our friendship, a process I think of as art/life ecology.
HOW PERFORMANCE IS BEING RECYLCED AND HOW THE COMPUTER RECYCLES REALITY
Performance art has been imitated by very high energy young artists who understand that they need to challenge the tradition. They have knowingly and unknowingly imitated many of the themes, styles, rituals, and techniques of performance art from history, including futurism and even referring to its cave origins. In doing so, they have deleted the pure and sacred understanding of brain waves, energy, and initiation. They have substituted the gross elements of exclusion, greed, competition, and shallowness as seen in Survivor, Big Brother, Fear Factor, You’re Fired and other reality TV programs. All of these basic, non-compassionate virtues are present in unconscious motivations of early performance artists, but early performance artists ritualized hese motives or denied them. Remember, we were the good saints, poetic, spiritual beings. Now, the younger performance artists added the hidden motivations. They brought the darkness of the human condition to light. This is a good thing. The computer also makes us look at reality differently. It offers the possibility of taking off the blindfolds and seeing everything, everywhere.
HOW ARTISTS CAN SURVIVE BEING DISCARDED:
The artists who were active in the 60s, 70s, and 80s cannot mirror today’s Olympic-styled, risk-taking athletes and technological dare devils. We are no longer useful. We have been discarded. We are the cultural garbage of the art world. This, too, is good. It frees us of the need to stay within the old direction. As garbage, we can either seed a new flowering or we can bitterly pick at our archives and shop for our names on Google.
HOW MY FATHER HELPED ME RECYCLE MYSELF
The younger artists have created a brilliant diving board to the next wave. It’s an incredible personal challenge to artists to find a way to recycle themselves. I had no idea I would find myself in my father’s light. Since 1969 I have been attempting to process light as art, as performance, as sculpture, as installation. Now I feel that everything was a dress rehearsal for making ‘DAD ART'. The rug has been pulled out of my art making process because, for the first time, I am not in control. I am fascinated by having to learn a new role as I’ve had to recycle my art statement from one of controlling time to one of relinquishing time. I have no idea when this performance will change. Time is gone from my art statement. I’m at the mercy of space because I’m committed to make ‘DAD ART’ as long as I receive the message. I am here in obedience to the voices, to this teaching.
Retired artists pray for opportunities to be taught new concepts. That is our ecological gift. I am experiencing the ecstasy of finally marrying art and life.
HOW I MAKE DAD ART
I’m saving all of Dad’s charts about his diet, baths, sleeping patterns, the condition of his teeth, his bowels, his genitals. I add comments from the nurses and tips on transporting him. His miniscule actions are noted. We document the new ways that he is creative. He was never a painter before he had his stroke. Now we sit him at the table and give him a brush and he is happy. He creates Rothko-like paintings. He seems to be channeling. You can see his concentration. It sometimes takes him a half hour to make one beautiful line.
HOW I ONCE MADE CONCEPTUAL ART
Every artist has permission to create a definition of what is art. Some people say only my paintings, sculpture, poems are art. Early in my career, I needed to appropriate everything as art, and find creative ways of parenthesizing certain aspects of my life as art. I did this by saying, “I will wear red this year. I will be blindfolded for a week. I will expose my embarrassment for three hours. I will call my house art.” It is a mind frame. You have to admit your intention and choice to the air, to yourself, your friends, the art community, the world. This game has satisfied me and kept me busy since 1965.
HOW DEATH MAKES ARTISTS OF EVERYONE
Death, after birth, is the greatest mystery. I have no idea what’s going to happen when dad or I stop breathing, but I know I have to practice states of transformation while I’m still living. I use Catholicism to direct me. I know I have to feel and study the technology of the sacred (the title of a Jerome Rothenberg book)so that I become a good student. The reward of spending this much time with my Dad is that I’m having an opportunity to bask in his light which he emits because he has surrendered his discursive mind. My father is Italian and Catholic, yet strangely his quality is Zen-like. He is half way between life and death. The payoff for his surrender is pure beauty. Beauty is a vibrational frequency, a brain wave. It comes and goes. His meds are carefully selected and all lined-up to contribute to his peacefulness. There is no doubt that he is helped by chemistry, but his good character and endurance are also contributing to this end game. Thirty four years of studying with a Catholic spiritual leader taught him how to keep focused. Sunday afternoons he would sit in silence in the church and meditate. He knew where to get his spiritual food. Now he seems to be reaping the benefits of his practice. He has become a living ecstatic.” It’s like a little monastery here. That’s what my art was always supposed to be like. Thanks Dad for being my co-pioneer in developing a new art/life – death.
What will remain after he dies?
Invitations to revisit Beauty.
Gratitude at having this time with him.
SILENCE.
Linda Mary Montano Interview by Mary Lachman
Linda Montano’s work was introduced to me fairly recently, as I expanded my ideas about dance beyond traditional technique and into the realm of performance art. Performance art is simply a conglomeration of all live elements of art. It is the act of breaking down the walls between visual art, dance, theater, voice and sound. The body is the necessary element to the form, and so I immediately found an affinity to the ideas behind performance art.
After reading about Linda, I became more and more fascinated with how I could expand my choreographic eye into areas I had never thought of as dance. Due to Jennie Klein’s generous offer, I was able to attended the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow after interviewing Linda, and was blown away by the many different kinds of physical expression I witnessed. And all of it was coming from outside the “dance world.” Thus, I feel as if my acquaintance with Linda opened a new door into an expanded definition of performance.
Last December I met Linda in New York City on the second floor of a little diner on Time Square. Construction workers sat next to our table and the ceiling had a leak. We tuned that all out and just talked for an hour. The way Linda spoke of spirituality is entirely different from the rhetoric of Bebe Miller. Linda actively practices and identifies as a Roman Catholic artist. Her work is created with doctrine and specific religious topics in mind. She had come to the city to read a letter in front of St. Patrick’s. The letter addressed the issues of the Catholic Church, which found to be misunderstood in the Church. So, when we finished our conversation we proceeded to St. Patrick’s and prayed together in the chapel, kneeling before God.
Interview Transcribed
Linda: Do you mind? I close my eyes when I interview.
Mary: When did you first begin to think of your work being influenced by your spirituality?
Linda: I’d like to begin this with a prayer…Holy Spirit let us collaborate on finding information that will be useful for both of us, and may it support our visions and help not only us, but people who come in contact with this information.
I guess when I left the convent and I went back to college and there was a nun there who was teaching, a wonderful nun. Just free. Back then she was wearing full Habit, but she was teaching sculpture and her attitude was so free and so loving and so helpful and so humorous and she gave me a spiritual key. And the key was to unlock my door of freedom, of creativity. And that door was also related to the door of spirituality because I had placed art on such a high pedestal, of vocation, and attainment, and reverence. It had the same…I knew art could get me to that same level of transcendence that I was getting when I went to church. Because I had seen it happen. I had seen my dad listen to music and transcend, and I could see my mom paint, and my grandmother, who was like a performance artist. I had seen her make art and transcend daily life.
Mary: I agree with you. I see artists transcend daily life through their art, but do others, outside, share in that transcendence?
Linda: I think it is a neurological…In fact you should read Oliver Sack’s book on music. He talks about the brain being wired for not only different sensational responses to reality, but also spiritual response. I think it’s sometimes just habitual wiring patterning. We were not a verbal family. We didn’t talk. We didn’t discuss. We didn’t debate. We didn’t work things out verbally, so I was really moved to my head chakra so to speak. To the Penial and Pituitary, and from the neck down I was pretty disregarded or inert. So maybe what was concocting up there was allowing me to play in that head arena with more joy and with more imagination, creativity, and sensual fluency, because that was my language. So you really want to look at things in terms of neurology and brain, and heart also, but it’s really your upbringing, culture, atmosphere, home life, and things happening inside the home. I mean if you compare the home life in the 40s and 50s, I wonder if you have the same kind of patterning neurologically or chemically. You’re talking about chemistry. Somewhere I was reading, God is G spot. Maybe God is a place of the sacred, but what is “sacred?” What is “transcendence?” What is “transfiguration?” Or spiritual ecstasy or the unitive. What is the unitative way in terms of a spiritual practice? But I felt like I was not only addicted but I was kind of programmed to get to that path via my family upbringing and programming and having gone to church and having being programmed for ecstasy.
Mary: I know you were quite involved in the practice of Eastern religions, so how do you see them in relation to Catholicism? How do you feel they fit together?
Linda: Well, actually, I was teaching sculpture at a Catholic women’s college in Rochester, NY, and a yoga teacher, an old old woman, maybe in her 60’s or 70’s, came in and started Hatha yoga, and through her I met her teacher who became my guru so to speak. He was a wise, smart, compassionate being who had been a medical doctor, a neurosurgeon and a craniologist, who switched allegiance so to speak from the medical practice to yoga because he thought he could heal better if he were immersed in traditional yoga, but he wasn’t traditional at all. He was very charismatic and able to create this community of meditators and Sanskrit scholars and artists. He was absolutely well rounded in his ability to enter us through all the charkas, so to speak. When I met him he was very magnetic. I was magnetized to him. I was also newly married to my husband and I was just really magnetized to yoga and I think what it did for me was it got me past my head and back to the bottom of my body, which had been cut off. And yoga was the beginning of acknowledging that I had feelings, I had language, I had a body. And I actually began performing once I began practicing yoga. In public dancing, in public lying in meditation. So yoga and performance were natural allies. And I think what happened was that I really had a strong calling to be a catholic priest and because that wasn’t an option in Catholicism I was able to segue from the catholic priesthood for women to performance. And as a performance artist became a priest. Meaning, I could help not only my self but others climb to the sacred, or move to the sacred, or ascend to the sacred.
Mary: Like the performance becomes a kind of Mass?
Linda: Yeah, yeah, that’s heretical what were saying right now. But that’s okay, I just want that on record that this is heresy…but yes. I mean that’s pagan and heresy and not something a catholic would say, but yes it’s true.
Mary: Metaphorically.
Linda: Symbolically, metaphorically, oxymorannically, moronishly,
Mary: How did people react to the sacred in your work? When you were creating work around the post-modernist area, did people say “no” to religion, “no” to meaning…
Linda: Well is was in the 70’s and 80’s and late 60’s and it was more about “yes” to eastern religions and “yes” to feminism, and “yes” to drugs, “yes” to experimentation, “yes” to no authority and “yes” to the breaking down of all systems into peace, love, and community. And “yes” to feminism, so women embraced performance…but we all felt that we were creating a movement and not only mentoring the movement, but modeling what was happening politically and culturally and physiologically. I don’t think I answered the question…
Mary: Well, no. I guess I’m wondering how people reacted to your use of eastern religious concepts in your performance. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you had been vocal about your devotion to the Catholic church and organized religion at the time, other artists would not have been on the same page at all so to speak, but was it a different story when you associated your work with eastern religion?
Linda: I did something very disloyal. When I was getting my MA in Europe in Florence, Italy, I was still practicing, a fringe catholic. I was unhappy with Catholicism, but I was still internally and subconsciously aligning myself with the titles; sacred art and sacred artist. And then, I went to grad school in Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, and something clicked there, and it was: Linda, artists cannot be Catholic. And I divorced myself. I was not a strong practicing Catholic then, but I decided that I would be a flip-flop artist. I’m not going to be “religious”…I’m not going to be Catholic. Cause, you know, I was making crucifixes in Italy…
Mary: That is a strong current in the art world today as well, the idea that you can’t be religious.
Linda: It’s over now. It’s now, today, currently, very avant garde to be a Catholic artist. To be “practicing religious fundamentals” or whatever. But it is a beginning, it is a beginning trend. So I really felt bad about that. I felt like that was a pattern of disloyalty, that I have to watch that in my self and not do that. I have to really ask; what is right to believe? I have to ask; who am I being disloyal to? Is it myself? Or what crowed am I trying to follow? And you know, why am I doing what I’m doing? And who am I betraying in my choices? So I really betrayed my call to be a catholic artist when I went to graduate school. From then on I laughed at the Church, I laughed at nuns. I made art that was down right sacrilegious. Not a lot of it…you know I did pornography… I was in the healing mode of disregard. Let’s be cynical about it, laugh at it, poo-poo it so to speak. But I did honor the eastern way because it was exotic, it was different, it was not catholic, it didn’t have the sins that I had ascribed to my past religion, and so, I played with the sacred, but via eastern traditions. Then, as I aged a little more, discerning, and knocked around by life I realized, wow, I better start working hard, because I had dropped my youth and the values of my youth, and the security I had found in Catholicism, and especially when I taught full time and I had all these students who were being very wild and wonderful and permissive, but I hadn’t had physical children. I think when people have physical children they change and I hadn’t changed. I was still like “do what you I want! Lets have a bong!” And we were all having a ball, but I got in trouble. And they got in trouble, and then I got in trouble. And I though “gee, I’ve got to rearrange and become accountable in a new way.” And then I took care of my dad and in doing that I was going back in time to my early Catholicism. So now…
Mary: Caring for your father was kind of also a way of taking care of a child figure that you never had. Caring deeply for someone.
Linda: I think so, I think so. Because I was just taking care of “Artist Linda,” who could do whatever she wanted, whatever way she wanted. Anyway…
Mary: I wanted to know how creed and doctrine, and the restrictions that religion places on art effect you.
Linda: Restriction and art? Restriction is like labor pains and art… artist really thrive on pain and suffering and upset and chaos. That’s our food. And for me it has been extremely chaotic and extremely painful. And people are mad at me and angry. Where’s the old Linda?! You’re not supporting us anymore! I have been through great, great pain. It’s almost symbolic. I can’t believe we are talking about this today because today is my graduation. I see priests and confess, and I found a real smart one. They become directors and mentors and smart people who can help. And one said “Use it [Catholicism] for your art,” which I know and it is something that I teach, but today is a real breakthrough for me. I found the venue to take the pain and create with it. To make it my clay, my dance, my poetry, my sculpture, my living sculpture. So, I think the secret is to not get all discombobulated when the caldron of chaos is at boiling point and ready for what’s to be put in it. But it has been a tremendously painful process, and I’m at the point where I can’t go back and be the old me. I mean, I use old also as…there is something that happens with aging and art, and women and art, and aging in general and the spirituality of aging in general. I think what happens is that people get scared because death is looming closer and closer and my age group starts dying. I want to be an intelligent Catholic this time around. Before I was young, I was believing without intelligence. Now I want to be free, but I also want to be obedient and respectful, and I want to be for justice without displaced anger, which makes basically angry people do activism. So I don’t want to be that kind of gnashing, masturbation…[angry sound]…gay rights…[angry sound]…women priests, but I want those subjects in there in a different way. All those things need to be in there. So I feel it is really wonderful to have met you. You are a midwife to me…that is really nice.
Mary: I run into the attitude that you have to be in a tumultuous place in your life, having crazy or awful things happening in order to create your art. But if you create art from some place that’s stable in your life or a place of balance, which a spiritual practice such as yoga or meditation can sometimes offer, your art is somehow less meaningful.
Linda: I think I understand what your getting at, but I’m not going to answered it how you expressed it. How I hear what your saying is that previously there was a belief system built up around art and the artist as the wild, untamed, suffering, crazed, unstable, not calm, not peaceful, not loving individual who was going to drink, smoke, fuck, and not get paid. And that died, that concept died, but it died when artists started making lots of money. I think if you looked at the timeline it went from crazy to wealthy, and I think now the door is opening for the artist to go toward mystic or enlightened, or compassionate, or aware, maybe aware is a more general term for what we are talking about. But those are almost cultural/political positions that follow the concept of art. I think as art became more, the doors opened to what it is to be an artist. We’ve moved from the genius of Michael Angelo with his socks being adhered to his feet, to the art of individual interpretation. It’s really opened the doors. And for you it might be about the practice of balance and compassion. I’ve always been a ricochet kind of artist. The creativity ricochets off what is happening in my daily life, and this particular ricochet event is not always tragic and chaotic, but the cure this time has been rocky. The medicine, the chemotherapy of it has been a bit painful.
Mary: You said there is an event that your art ricochets off of, and so I’m wondering how your spiritual life fits into that?
Linda: Because I am a performance artist I have used my body. That is my medium. I made sculpture, but now this is what I call living sculpture, and my body is my clay, my paint. What I do now, I’m living in my dad’s house, but I make believe almost that in order to heal myself on a daily basis, to work with myself, to keep myself out of chaos and places I’d rather not be visiting, I perform in my house for me and for God. I perform for God until I feel…I use God in quotes. I perform for the Holy Spirit until I feel that the Holy Spirit has visited me. So, I no longer have to use you, or use the audience, or use others, or use the eyes of other, or the voyeur, or the look. I no longer have to use that in order for me to create a change in consciousness that is a higher consciousness. That I can then transmit back to them. You see, it was a game of them to me, me to them. So what I’m doing now is Holy Spirit to me, and me back to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit to me and then me to my environment. And I don’t wait till I have an audience to do that and I don’t wait for a gig to do that, cause I don’t have many gigs these days. I think this speaks to what you were talking about with yoga and the spiritual practice. The practice now becomes when I go to church in the morning I’m doing it, when I’m at church, and when I come home and I turn on the radio and I try to incorporate a kind of …actually I have neurological disease called Dystonia, so I have to perform with my body in mind, not and mind, because of my body discomfort. But now performance is truly daily life.
Mary: what is that?
Linda: Medically I had a stroke in 91, and some people get this misfiring into the dopamine, where the nerve is telling my head to turn to the left. So if I didn’t have this scarf on I’d be looking at the wall. It has different manifestations. I use it, I make art about it, I put it in one of my videos, actually, I’m going to do this comedy act about it. So, things are good, It’s okay to be in a particular kind of jail of prohibition now because I’m working with it. It’s making me do the research to become more intelligent in my external practice so that I can internalize it, and maybe find a way…there are things called mental option and conscious. There are very fundamentalist ways of to be a Catholic and then there are liberal ways of being a Catholic. I am now in the fear, fundamentalist, don’t do anything bad or you’ll go to hell school, but I’m having to train myself so that I can make intelligent decisions about my choices. And that is part of my art practice.
Mary: So there are fundamentalists and then liberals on totally opposite ends of the spectrum?
Linda: Well, there is a kind of radical liberal on the other side of the pendulum from fundamentalists, and then there is conservative in the middle. The fundamentalist say, you can’t do anything, and then with liberals there are women priests, but they get excommunicated from the church. Having come from an Eastern playground of permission, love, and joy and peace and then back into this punitive church is my work right now. And yet, you know it’s almost embarrassment because people say, “what the hell are you doing, you use to be so fun. Come play with me.”
Mary: but for some reason that doesn’t sound like it’s stifling you…
Linda: no, no. it’s just a different call. A different path. And I was getting in trouble being out here. I was having affairs, which was hurting me and them. I need “no, no, no, no.” I needed no, no, no. I needed focus because I wasn’t doing good.
Mary: Maybe fun for other people, but not you.
Linda: Yeah. I needed a change.
Mary: It’s tricky in the art world, there is a lot of “whatever goes” attitudes towards individual choice, behavior, and morality. Often those attitudes translate further into; the more wild or rebellious the artist is, the better the art produced.
Linda: Well that’s the training. You almost go to art school to get that. And I was training people like that, with that mantra.
Mary: It seems like people need to have their view of the world shaken a bit in order to make interesting work. If you never question, explore, experiment, the artist will find it hard to produce anything beyond the mundane. So, the “art school” training is not entirely unfounded. One needs to break out of the mold of conformity and similarity of culture, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one must go through rebellious debauchery.
Linda: Exactly. I think it really is, “whatever goes” in order to get to transcendence. And during the process, it’s like we broke that myth, we broke that stereotype of the need for money, security… greed, our upbringing, the fear of death. We got all that worked out, but some people just need to find that through doing things that are bombastically, chaotically, permissive…and that’s what I had to do. Would you say a prayer?
Mary: Yeah. God thank you for this time. This moment to share where we are both at in our artistic processes and our spiritual journeys. How those two things relate, and how that feeds us and lets us grow closer to you, God. Thanks you for this lovely cold day and our time together. Thank you Lord.
After reading about Linda, I became more and more fascinated with how I could expand my choreographic eye into areas I had never thought of as dance. Due to Jennie Klein’s generous offer, I was able to attended the National Review of Live Art in Glasgow after interviewing Linda, and was blown away by the many different kinds of physical expression I witnessed. And all of it was coming from outside the “dance world.” Thus, I feel as if my acquaintance with Linda opened a new door into an expanded definition of performance.
Last December I met Linda in New York City on the second floor of a little diner on Time Square. Construction workers sat next to our table and the ceiling had a leak. We tuned that all out and just talked for an hour. The way Linda spoke of spirituality is entirely different from the rhetoric of Bebe Miller. Linda actively practices and identifies as a Roman Catholic artist. Her work is created with doctrine and specific religious topics in mind. She had come to the city to read a letter in front of St. Patrick’s. The letter addressed the issues of the Catholic Church, which found to be misunderstood in the Church. So, when we finished our conversation we proceeded to St. Patrick’s and prayed together in the chapel, kneeling before God.
Interview Transcribed
Linda: Do you mind? I close my eyes when I interview.
Mary: When did you first begin to think of your work being influenced by your spirituality?
Linda: I’d like to begin this with a prayer…Holy Spirit let us collaborate on finding information that will be useful for both of us, and may it support our visions and help not only us, but people who come in contact with this information.
I guess when I left the convent and I went back to college and there was a nun there who was teaching, a wonderful nun. Just free. Back then she was wearing full Habit, but she was teaching sculpture and her attitude was so free and so loving and so helpful and so humorous and she gave me a spiritual key. And the key was to unlock my door of freedom, of creativity. And that door was also related to the door of spirituality because I had placed art on such a high pedestal, of vocation, and attainment, and reverence. It had the same…I knew art could get me to that same level of transcendence that I was getting when I went to church. Because I had seen it happen. I had seen my dad listen to music and transcend, and I could see my mom paint, and my grandmother, who was like a performance artist. I had seen her make art and transcend daily life.
Mary: I agree with you. I see artists transcend daily life through their art, but do others, outside, share in that transcendence?
Linda: I think it is a neurological…In fact you should read Oliver Sack’s book on music. He talks about the brain being wired for not only different sensational responses to reality, but also spiritual response. I think it’s sometimes just habitual wiring patterning. We were not a verbal family. We didn’t talk. We didn’t discuss. We didn’t debate. We didn’t work things out verbally, so I was really moved to my head chakra so to speak. To the Penial and Pituitary, and from the neck down I was pretty disregarded or inert. So maybe what was concocting up there was allowing me to play in that head arena with more joy and with more imagination, creativity, and sensual fluency, because that was my language. So you really want to look at things in terms of neurology and brain, and heart also, but it’s really your upbringing, culture, atmosphere, home life, and things happening inside the home. I mean if you compare the home life in the 40s and 50s, I wonder if you have the same kind of patterning neurologically or chemically. You’re talking about chemistry. Somewhere I was reading, God is G spot. Maybe God is a place of the sacred, but what is “sacred?” What is “transcendence?” What is “transfiguration?” Or spiritual ecstasy or the unitive. What is the unitative way in terms of a spiritual practice? But I felt like I was not only addicted but I was kind of programmed to get to that path via my family upbringing and programming and having gone to church and having being programmed for ecstasy.
Mary: I know you were quite involved in the practice of Eastern religions, so how do you see them in relation to Catholicism? How do you feel they fit together?
Linda: Well, actually, I was teaching sculpture at a Catholic women’s college in Rochester, NY, and a yoga teacher, an old old woman, maybe in her 60’s or 70’s, came in and started Hatha yoga, and through her I met her teacher who became my guru so to speak. He was a wise, smart, compassionate being who had been a medical doctor, a neurosurgeon and a craniologist, who switched allegiance so to speak from the medical practice to yoga because he thought he could heal better if he were immersed in traditional yoga, but he wasn’t traditional at all. He was very charismatic and able to create this community of meditators and Sanskrit scholars and artists. He was absolutely well rounded in his ability to enter us through all the charkas, so to speak. When I met him he was very magnetic. I was magnetized to him. I was also newly married to my husband and I was just really magnetized to yoga and I think what it did for me was it got me past my head and back to the bottom of my body, which had been cut off. And yoga was the beginning of acknowledging that I had feelings, I had language, I had a body. And I actually began performing once I began practicing yoga. In public dancing, in public lying in meditation. So yoga and performance were natural allies. And I think what happened was that I really had a strong calling to be a catholic priest and because that wasn’t an option in Catholicism I was able to segue from the catholic priesthood for women to performance. And as a performance artist became a priest. Meaning, I could help not only my self but others climb to the sacred, or move to the sacred, or ascend to the sacred.
Mary: Like the performance becomes a kind of Mass?
Linda: Yeah, yeah, that’s heretical what were saying right now. But that’s okay, I just want that on record that this is heresy…but yes. I mean that’s pagan and heresy and not something a catholic would say, but yes it’s true.
Mary: Metaphorically.
Linda: Symbolically, metaphorically, oxymorannically, moronishly,
Mary: How did people react to the sacred in your work? When you were creating work around the post-modernist area, did people say “no” to religion, “no” to meaning…
Linda: Well is was in the 70’s and 80’s and late 60’s and it was more about “yes” to eastern religions and “yes” to feminism, and “yes” to drugs, “yes” to experimentation, “yes” to no authority and “yes” to the breaking down of all systems into peace, love, and community. And “yes” to feminism, so women embraced performance…but we all felt that we were creating a movement and not only mentoring the movement, but modeling what was happening politically and culturally and physiologically. I don’t think I answered the question…
Mary: Well, no. I guess I’m wondering how people reacted to your use of eastern religious concepts in your performance. Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you had been vocal about your devotion to the Catholic church and organized religion at the time, other artists would not have been on the same page at all so to speak, but was it a different story when you associated your work with eastern religion?
Linda: I did something very disloyal. When I was getting my MA in Europe in Florence, Italy, I was still practicing, a fringe catholic. I was unhappy with Catholicism, but I was still internally and subconsciously aligning myself with the titles; sacred art and sacred artist. And then, I went to grad school in Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin, and something clicked there, and it was: Linda, artists cannot be Catholic. And I divorced myself. I was not a strong practicing Catholic then, but I decided that I would be a flip-flop artist. I’m not going to be “religious”…I’m not going to be Catholic. Cause, you know, I was making crucifixes in Italy…
Mary: That is a strong current in the art world today as well, the idea that you can’t be religious.
Linda: It’s over now. It’s now, today, currently, very avant garde to be a Catholic artist. To be “practicing religious fundamentals” or whatever. But it is a beginning, it is a beginning trend. So I really felt bad about that. I felt like that was a pattern of disloyalty, that I have to watch that in my self and not do that. I have to really ask; what is right to believe? I have to ask; who am I being disloyal to? Is it myself? Or what crowed am I trying to follow? And you know, why am I doing what I’m doing? And who am I betraying in my choices? So I really betrayed my call to be a catholic artist when I went to graduate school. From then on I laughed at the Church, I laughed at nuns. I made art that was down right sacrilegious. Not a lot of it…you know I did pornography… I was in the healing mode of disregard. Let’s be cynical about it, laugh at it, poo-poo it so to speak. But I did honor the eastern way because it was exotic, it was different, it was not catholic, it didn’t have the sins that I had ascribed to my past religion, and so, I played with the sacred, but via eastern traditions. Then, as I aged a little more, discerning, and knocked around by life I realized, wow, I better start working hard, because I had dropped my youth and the values of my youth, and the security I had found in Catholicism, and especially when I taught full time and I had all these students who were being very wild and wonderful and permissive, but I hadn’t had physical children. I think when people have physical children they change and I hadn’t changed. I was still like “do what you I want! Lets have a bong!” And we were all having a ball, but I got in trouble. And they got in trouble, and then I got in trouble. And I though “gee, I’ve got to rearrange and become accountable in a new way.” And then I took care of my dad and in doing that I was going back in time to my early Catholicism. So now…
Mary: Caring for your father was kind of also a way of taking care of a child figure that you never had. Caring deeply for someone.
Linda: I think so, I think so. Because I was just taking care of “Artist Linda,” who could do whatever she wanted, whatever way she wanted. Anyway…
Mary: I wanted to know how creed and doctrine, and the restrictions that religion places on art effect you.
Linda: Restriction and art? Restriction is like labor pains and art… artist really thrive on pain and suffering and upset and chaos. That’s our food. And for me it has been extremely chaotic and extremely painful. And people are mad at me and angry. Where’s the old Linda?! You’re not supporting us anymore! I have been through great, great pain. It’s almost symbolic. I can’t believe we are talking about this today because today is my graduation. I see priests and confess, and I found a real smart one. They become directors and mentors and smart people who can help. And one said “Use it [Catholicism] for your art,” which I know and it is something that I teach, but today is a real breakthrough for me. I found the venue to take the pain and create with it. To make it my clay, my dance, my poetry, my sculpture, my living sculpture. So, I think the secret is to not get all discombobulated when the caldron of chaos is at boiling point and ready for what’s to be put in it. But it has been a tremendously painful process, and I’m at the point where I can’t go back and be the old me. I mean, I use old also as…there is something that happens with aging and art, and women and art, and aging in general and the spirituality of aging in general. I think what happens is that people get scared because death is looming closer and closer and my age group starts dying. I want to be an intelligent Catholic this time around. Before I was young, I was believing without intelligence. Now I want to be free, but I also want to be obedient and respectful, and I want to be for justice without displaced anger, which makes basically angry people do activism. So I don’t want to be that kind of gnashing, masturbation…[angry sound]…gay rights…[angry sound]…women priests, but I want those subjects in there in a different way. All those things need to be in there. So I feel it is really wonderful to have met you. You are a midwife to me…that is really nice.
Mary: I run into the attitude that you have to be in a tumultuous place in your life, having crazy or awful things happening in order to create your art. But if you create art from some place that’s stable in your life or a place of balance, which a spiritual practice such as yoga or meditation can sometimes offer, your art is somehow less meaningful.
Linda: I think I understand what your getting at, but I’m not going to answered it how you expressed it. How I hear what your saying is that previously there was a belief system built up around art and the artist as the wild, untamed, suffering, crazed, unstable, not calm, not peaceful, not loving individual who was going to drink, smoke, fuck, and not get paid. And that died, that concept died, but it died when artists started making lots of money. I think if you looked at the timeline it went from crazy to wealthy, and I think now the door is opening for the artist to go toward mystic or enlightened, or compassionate, or aware, maybe aware is a more general term for what we are talking about. But those are almost cultural/political positions that follow the concept of art. I think as art became more, the doors opened to what it is to be an artist. We’ve moved from the genius of Michael Angelo with his socks being adhered to his feet, to the art of individual interpretation. It’s really opened the doors. And for you it might be about the practice of balance and compassion. I’ve always been a ricochet kind of artist. The creativity ricochets off what is happening in my daily life, and this particular ricochet event is not always tragic and chaotic, but the cure this time has been rocky. The medicine, the chemotherapy of it has been a bit painful.
Mary: You said there is an event that your art ricochets off of, and so I’m wondering how your spiritual life fits into that?
Linda: Because I am a performance artist I have used my body. That is my medium. I made sculpture, but now this is what I call living sculpture, and my body is my clay, my paint. What I do now, I’m living in my dad’s house, but I make believe almost that in order to heal myself on a daily basis, to work with myself, to keep myself out of chaos and places I’d rather not be visiting, I perform in my house for me and for God. I perform for God until I feel…I use God in quotes. I perform for the Holy Spirit until I feel that the Holy Spirit has visited me. So, I no longer have to use you, or use the audience, or use others, or use the eyes of other, or the voyeur, or the look. I no longer have to use that in order for me to create a change in consciousness that is a higher consciousness. That I can then transmit back to them. You see, it was a game of them to me, me to them. So what I’m doing now is Holy Spirit to me, and me back to the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit to me and then me to my environment. And I don’t wait till I have an audience to do that and I don’t wait for a gig to do that, cause I don’t have many gigs these days. I think this speaks to what you were talking about with yoga and the spiritual practice. The practice now becomes when I go to church in the morning I’m doing it, when I’m at church, and when I come home and I turn on the radio and I try to incorporate a kind of …actually I have neurological disease called Dystonia, so I have to perform with my body in mind, not and mind, because of my body discomfort. But now performance is truly daily life.
Mary: what is that?
Linda: Medically I had a stroke in 91, and some people get this misfiring into the dopamine, where the nerve is telling my head to turn to the left. So if I didn’t have this scarf on I’d be looking at the wall. It has different manifestations. I use it, I make art about it, I put it in one of my videos, actually, I’m going to do this comedy act about it. So, things are good, It’s okay to be in a particular kind of jail of prohibition now because I’m working with it. It’s making me do the research to become more intelligent in my external practice so that I can internalize it, and maybe find a way…there are things called mental option and conscious. There are very fundamentalist ways of to be a Catholic and then there are liberal ways of being a Catholic. I am now in the fear, fundamentalist, don’t do anything bad or you’ll go to hell school, but I’m having to train myself so that I can make intelligent decisions about my choices. And that is part of my art practice.
Mary: So there are fundamentalists and then liberals on totally opposite ends of the spectrum?
Linda: Well, there is a kind of radical liberal on the other side of the pendulum from fundamentalists, and then there is conservative in the middle. The fundamentalist say, you can’t do anything, and then with liberals there are women priests, but they get excommunicated from the church. Having come from an Eastern playground of permission, love, and joy and peace and then back into this punitive church is my work right now. And yet, you know it’s almost embarrassment because people say, “what the hell are you doing, you use to be so fun. Come play with me.”
Mary: but for some reason that doesn’t sound like it’s stifling you…
Linda: no, no. it’s just a different call. A different path. And I was getting in trouble being out here. I was having affairs, which was hurting me and them. I need “no, no, no, no.” I needed no, no, no. I needed focus because I wasn’t doing good.
Mary: Maybe fun for other people, but not you.
Linda: Yeah. I needed a change.
Mary: It’s tricky in the art world, there is a lot of “whatever goes” attitudes towards individual choice, behavior, and morality. Often those attitudes translate further into; the more wild or rebellious the artist is, the better the art produced.
Linda: Well that’s the training. You almost go to art school to get that. And I was training people like that, with that mantra.
Mary: It seems like people need to have their view of the world shaken a bit in order to make interesting work. If you never question, explore, experiment, the artist will find it hard to produce anything beyond the mundane. So, the “art school” training is not entirely unfounded. One needs to break out of the mold of conformity and similarity of culture, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that one must go through rebellious debauchery.
Linda: Exactly. I think it really is, “whatever goes” in order to get to transcendence. And during the process, it’s like we broke that myth, we broke that stereotype of the need for money, security… greed, our upbringing, the fear of death. We got all that worked out, but some people just need to find that through doing things that are bombastically, chaotically, permissive…and that’s what I had to do. Would you say a prayer?
Mary: Yeah. God thank you for this time. This moment to share where we are both at in our artistic processes and our spiritual journeys. How those two things relate, and how that feeds us and lets us grow closer to you, God. Thanks you for this lovely cold day and our time together. Thank you Lord.
I DREAMED I WAS MOTHER TERESA: by LINDA MARY MONTANO
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, there lived an old, old old and getting older girl-child who dreamed that she was Mother Teresa. On awakening she asked herself,"How could anybody have the nerve to dream that she is Mother Teresa?" Remember , this is a dream , and it happened because a cute, pink MY LITTLE PONY dream-horse spoke to the girl in her dream and said, "Old old older girl-child, on the third, sixth, ninth and twelth day of the seventh month, you can sit on my back and I will ride you to a special place where you can pretend to be Mother Teresa." The old girl always wanted to be Mother Teresa and said,"This is wonderfull but why me? I'm not nun material, because I like to fight against life." "How do you do fight, you are too old to fight?" said the pink pony.
The old , old one said, I dont fight with my fists anymore because I have no strength, I fight life because:
I worry about my 401K
I watch Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood,Kathe Lee and Hoda,CNN, Cash Cab,The View
I fight life because I eat tons of dairy products
BOO HOO, BOO HOO, BOO HOO: I dont want to fight but:
I keep fighting life because I drive a gas guzzler
I have taken abouut 399 face book quizzes
I cook along with Rachel Ray
I laugh uncontrollably at I LOve Lucy re-runs
I have only one tomatoe plant in my garden
OH BOOOO HOOO pink dream pony, the list goes on and on and on, Im so bad, bad bad.
The pink dream pony was aghast and concerned and said, "You are right old girl, you arent Mother Teresa material." And that made her cellulited legs shake and made her feel worse and she confesssed even more and said, "BoooHoo, Im a lost cause, a facebook junkie, a tv addict and carbon footprint disaster. Im an American-aholic. Help me Help me Help me pinkster! Im asking for help but how can you, a tiny MY LITTLE PONY with a pink tail help me?
(S.D.Change music here to the CD:PAVAROTTI NESSUM DORMA..Volume lowish while talking then really loud when the text finishes...make sure turn the cd off when the song is over..or down as i leave stage....)
The pink pony said,"Close your eyes, feel my every word and in this dream prayer of ST FRANCIS OF ASSISSI, you will change.
LORD MAKE ME AN INSTRUMENT OF YOUR PEACE
WHERE THERE IS HATRED LET ME SEW LOVE
WHERE THERE IS INJURY, PARDON
WHERE THERE IS DOUBT, FAITH
WHERE THERE IS DESPAIR ,HOPE
WHERE THERE IS DARKNESS , LIGHT
WHERE THERE IS SADNESS, JOY
OH DIVINE MASTER:GRANT THAT I MAY NOT SO MUCH SEEK TO BE CONSOLED AS TO CONSOLE
TO BE UNDERSTOOD AS TO UNDERSTAND
TO BE LOVED AS TO LOVE
FOR IT IS IN GIVING THAT WE RECEIVE,
IT IS IN PARDONING THAT WE ARE PARDONED
IT IS IN DYING THAT WE ARE BORN TO ETERNAL LIFE, AMEN
The old old one said,"Oh wow, I have put down my boxing gloves and now I WAKE UP!
I have forgotten about WENDY WILLIAMS , KATIE KOURIC, DAN RATHER, TRAVIS SMILEY AND my retirement fund!
I can NOW feel like MOTHER TERESA! Smile like her!Laugh like her!Cry like her! Help like her!Act like her! And bless like her!
( S.D. CD SOUND UP A LITTLE LOUDER)
And that is the end of the story and beginning of an ecstatic dream about how an old, old older girl child learned how to celebrate life ,celebrate the air and moon and herself and celebrate everyone and still live in this old older olderst dream world of beginning to end.
( S.D.TURN CD REALLY REALLY REALLY LOUD AS I LEAVE OR MAYBE I HAVE LEFT ALREADY, WHO KNOWS)
The old , old one said, I dont fight with my fists anymore because I have no strength, I fight life because:
I worry about my 401K
I watch Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood,Kathe Lee and Hoda,CNN, Cash Cab,The View
I fight life because I eat tons of dairy products
BOO HOO, BOO HOO, BOO HOO: I dont want to fight but:
I keep fighting life because I drive a gas guzzler
I have taken abouut 399 face book quizzes
I cook along with Rachel Ray
I laugh uncontrollably at I LOve Lucy re-runs
I have only one tomatoe plant in my garden
OH BOOOO HOOO pink dream pony, the list goes on and on and on, Im so bad, bad bad.
The pink dream pony was aghast and concerned and said, "You are right old girl, you arent Mother Teresa material." And that made her cellulited legs shake and made her feel worse and she confesssed even more and said, "BoooHoo, Im a lost cause, a facebook junkie, a tv addict and carbon footprint disaster. Im an American-aholic. Help me Help me Help me pinkster! Im asking for help but how can you, a tiny MY LITTLE PONY with a pink tail help me?
(S.D.Change music here to the CD:PAVAROTTI NESSUM DORMA..Volume lowish while talking then really loud when the text finishes...make sure turn the cd off when the song is over..or down as i leave stage....)
The pink pony said,"Close your eyes, feel my every word and in this dream prayer of ST FRANCIS OF ASSISSI, you will change.
LORD MAKE ME AN INSTRUMENT OF YOUR PEACE
WHERE THERE IS HATRED LET ME SEW LOVE
WHERE THERE IS INJURY, PARDON
WHERE THERE IS DOUBT, FAITH
WHERE THERE IS DESPAIR ,HOPE
WHERE THERE IS DARKNESS , LIGHT
WHERE THERE IS SADNESS, JOY
OH DIVINE MASTER:GRANT THAT I MAY NOT SO MUCH SEEK TO BE CONSOLED AS TO CONSOLE
TO BE UNDERSTOOD AS TO UNDERSTAND
TO BE LOVED AS TO LOVE
FOR IT IS IN GIVING THAT WE RECEIVE,
IT IS IN PARDONING THAT WE ARE PARDONED
IT IS IN DYING THAT WE ARE BORN TO ETERNAL LIFE, AMEN
The old old one said,"Oh wow, I have put down my boxing gloves and now I WAKE UP!
I have forgotten about WENDY WILLIAMS , KATIE KOURIC, DAN RATHER, TRAVIS SMILEY AND my retirement fund!
I can NOW feel like MOTHER TERESA! Smile like her!Laugh like her!Cry like her! Help like her!Act like her! And bless like her!
( S.D. CD SOUND UP A LITTLE LOUDER)
And that is the end of the story and beginning of an ecstatic dream about how an old, old older girl child learned how to celebrate life ,celebrate the air and moon and herself and celebrate everyone and still live in this old older olderst dream world of beginning to end.
( S.D.TURN CD REALLY REALLY REALLY LOUD AS I LEAVE OR MAYBE I HAVE LEFT ALREADY, WHO KNOWS)
PERFORMANCE OF EVERYDAY LIFE
With respect for my living art lineage and those who inspired me, I refrain from mentioning the 3878947982 artists' names because this always indicates exclusion and bad feelings. But please know that I participate, as a practicing performance artist, in a still lively and co-collaborated trend, journey, history and google-able phenomena which allows us to offer our personal lives as material/memoir for our art.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 1: MONEY
Live artists often don't have to buy art materials because their post traumatic stresses, unrequited loves, daughters' first birthday parties, eating disorders, tango dancing and chronic illnesses are already there waiting, FREE; waiting for low budget transformation and voice.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 2: TIME
Life/art artists love to mold time, endure in time, play with time, structure time, repeat time, eliminate time, silence time treating it as if it were steel, paint, wood, stone.....
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 3: PERMISSION
Living art gives permission for anything , everyone, everything and everybody to be used as art. This permission of inclusion, headily practiced without boundaries or ethical concerns until the 90's,allowed for a 30-year play land of intelligent limitlessness and ecstatic trance.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 4:PARTICIPATION
We, life/artists, antennenned ourselves and through atmospheric, vibrational frequencies, picked up ideas (1950-1990) already conversantly fertile. Ideas from India, Japan, Asia, from feminism, from the civil rights movement, from the drug culture, from musicians and we rocked our way into a brave new world, alongside these co-rocking practitioners.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 5: MYSTICISM
We, living artists, really believed that we were altering our consciousness by altering our bodies, our faces, our identities, our names, our personas, our genders, our beliefs and our everyday lives. And this felt sacred, non-commodifi-able, and verging on the mystical. Like early believers, freely we shared photo images, ideas, food, gig information, studios, money, and kudos...without thought of litigiousness, verification of copyright, plagiarism issues or bitter intellectual property battling. Our grandfathers walked to school 14 miles shoeless in the snow, as the story goes. We wax poetic as well about our holy and happy early living art years.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 6:TEACHING
Many of us became so conversant with the genre, with the history, with the technology of dissemination (documentation via video , audio), that we accepted the charter and invitation to teach by example, by writing but also in academia where we learned how to muzzle our instincts for wildness so we could ethically direct other artists in progress(students).Guided by experience and tenure denials, some of us were able to carefully monitor our artist friends' enthusiasms and we directed them toward a more guarded/boundaried living art expression.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 7:DEATH
Now, trained to be artists of all of life, some of us segue trembling toward our most dramatic performance, our death. Now, accustomed to recycling our every insult, every illness, every disappointment, every marriage, every divorce, every death of parents, every hot flash, every betrayal, every beauty, every truth. We have every credential needed to make artfully sacred our last, documented, youtubed eternal and soft final breath.
LINDA MARY MONTANO
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 1: MONEY
Live artists often don't have to buy art materials because their post traumatic stresses, unrequited loves, daughters' first birthday parties, eating disorders, tango dancing and chronic illnesses are already there waiting, FREE; waiting for low budget transformation and voice.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 2: TIME
Life/art artists love to mold time, endure in time, play with time, structure time, repeat time, eliminate time, silence time treating it as if it were steel, paint, wood, stone.....
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 3: PERMISSION
Living art gives permission for anything , everyone, everything and everybody to be used as art. This permission of inclusion, headily practiced without boundaries or ethical concerns until the 90's,allowed for a 30-year play land of intelligent limitlessness and ecstatic trance.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 4:PARTICIPATION
We, life/artists, antennenned ourselves and through atmospheric, vibrational frequencies, picked up ideas (1950-1990) already conversantly fertile. Ideas from India, Japan, Asia, from feminism, from the civil rights movement, from the drug culture, from musicians and we rocked our way into a brave new world, alongside these co-rocking practitioners.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 5: MYSTICISM
We, living artists, really believed that we were altering our consciousness by altering our bodies, our faces, our identities, our names, our personas, our genders, our beliefs and our everyday lives. And this felt sacred, non-commodifi-able, and verging on the mystical. Like early believers, freely we shared photo images, ideas, food, gig information, studios, money, and kudos...without thought of litigiousness, verification of copyright, plagiarism issues or bitter intellectual property battling. Our grandfathers walked to school 14 miles shoeless in the snow, as the story goes. We wax poetic as well about our holy and happy early living art years.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 6:TEACHING
Many of us became so conversant with the genre, with the history, with the technology of dissemination (documentation via video , audio), that we accepted the charter and invitation to teach by example, by writing but also in academia where we learned how to muzzle our instincts for wildness so we could ethically direct other artists in progress(students).Guided by experience and tenure denials, some of us were able to carefully monitor our artist friends' enthusiasms and we directed them toward a more guarded/boundaried living art expression.
Why we made/ make an art of everyday life:
NUMBER 7:DEATH
Now, trained to be artists of all of life, some of us segue trembling toward our most dramatic performance, our death. Now, accustomed to recycling our every insult, every illness, every disappointment, every marriage, every divorce, every death of parents, every hot flash, every betrayal, every beauty, every truth. We have every credential needed to make artfully sacred our last, documented, youtubed eternal and soft final breath.
LINDA MARY MONTANO
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