ART/LIFE COUNSELING WITH LINDA MARY MONTANO BY MEL DAY

“Art / Life Counseling” with Linda Mary Montano

Blog Response by Mel Day

I had an extraordinary experience with Linda Mary Montano’s ”Art / Life Counseling,” a performance piece. (Yes, the same artist who tied herself to another artist for a year.)

Montano had broken her hand and so was unable to perform in person. In her stead was an installation that included a large mirror and a wooden dresser in front of it with a note on top inviting viewers to call for Art/Life Counseling. Since Montano is based in New York, she required her visitor / clients to call before 4pm.

We were all busy setting up and running around to panels and performances yet I somehow arrived at the gallery space earlier than I expected on Friday. I found myself alone with the Montano’s piece, staring into the mirror: without giving myself an opportunity to think it through, I took out my phone and dialed her number. Cold-call counseling—and potentially intense personal self-disclosure—seemed risky, to say the least, and yet the possibilities of such an encounter were too intriguing to pass up.

What happened next transpired over exactly 18 minutes. Montano picked up my call immediately. After an exchange of greetings, I expressed how sorry I was she had broken her hand. I asked if she had been inundated with calls and was surprised to hear that she hadn’t. (We determined the time difference played a role as the gallery space typically filled up in the evenings.) She then asked me the following four questions:

1.What are the 5 most important events in your life?

2.What is your “issue?” The “thing” that keeps coming up for you (or something along those lines!)

3.When did this start? What is your earliest memory of this “thing/issue?”

4.What was your response? How did you handle it?

Then she asked me to repeat after her, word for word, her response—our peaceful pact—to this thing / issue. (Perhaps I’ll reveal her response in a future blog post. For now, I’m keeping it to myself to protect its power.)

Then she sang me a song.

I sat there in the hall in Roble a combination of mesmerized, fascinated, slightly embarrassed and uncomfortable—partly because I had my phone on speaker as I had forgotten my earphones—and utterly enchanted.

I said thank you. We said goodbye.

After we’d hung up, I wandered around Roble for awhile, startled and disoriented, as if finding my sea legs. I’d felt something shift during our call. Does this sound trite? Yet I would even go so far as to call the encounter transformative. An unexpected, clarifying, restorative soundness settled over me.

I seek out this transformative and heightened human exchange with others in my own art / life, but it often seems beyond my grasp (a little too much to ask?), and is all too rare, in my own and others’ work / lives. Human communication, let alone restorative transformation, is fraught with hurdles and gets so very, very messy.

I was astonished at how seemingly simple and powerful it was just then, with Linda.

I wanted to send her a thank you note. Here it is.

—

You can also read the published piece online:

INTIMACY AT ROSEKILL

INTIMACY AT  JILL McDERMID'S  ROSEKILL


LINDA MARY MONTANO/ INTIMACYARAMA : MEMORIES OF UNDISSOCIATIVE ONENESS PERFORMANCEARAMA


1. SEND ME YOUR NAME, LINDAMONTANO@HOTMAIL.COM SAYING: I WANT TO BE INTIMATE FOR 3 HOURS WITH YOU AT ROSEKILL MEMORIAL DAY RESIDENCY


2. THREE TIMES DURING THE MEMORY-RESIDENCY  I WILL BE  TIED AT THE WRIST  WITH ONE ARTIST AT THE RESIDENCY.
 MAY 27, FRIDAY, 3-6PM;
 MAY 28 SATURDAY, 11AM-2PM
MAY 28, SATURDAY,  3PM-6PM


3. I WILL GATHER THE NAMES OF THOSE INTERESTED IN THIS EXPERIENCE OF UNDISSOCIATIVE ONENESS AND  USE CHANCE OPERATIONS  TO CHOOSE THE PEOPLE WISHING TO BE INTIMATIZED WITH ME.


4. I WILL LET YOU KNOW IF YOUR NAME IS CHOSEN


IN ART/LIFE/LAUGHTER


LINDA MARY MONTANO: THE SAUGERTIES ART/LIFE INSTITUTE, TRANSFIGURATION HOSPITAL

MEET ME AT THE MET

MEET ME AT  THE MET; MONTANO

MEET ME AT  THE MET – A not-Performance 

It's over. Seven months, seven visits to NYC to meet at the Met  non-performatively.

 

THE CONCEPT:

 The Met is filled with treasures and icons and found beauty and forced from other cultures treasures and the history of the known universes tools and masks and ritual richness. The concept is: Performance is over and porned out and finished and tired and irrelevant and un-necessary. There is no future in it and the only way to go is backwards. The Met is retro-ically relevant and fresh and new and brilliant and tremendous in its anonymous wonders.  That's the ticket, the Met is anonymous, and everyone who made anything that is now in the Met is dead (not really), and the artists from thousands of years ago who did make things that are in the Met didn't want to be extraordinary or famous but made healing objects and paintings and sculptures and doorposts and lintels and jewelry for the sake of beauty, for the sake of making, for the sake of transforming self and community.  The Met is about the other, about the tribe and about art for the people. I needed to go there and learn from the Met.

 

MEET ME AT THE MET:

became an opportunity, not a performance.  An opportunity to come together in secret, to hide in the overflow ordinariness of THE THRONGS OF PEOPLE, an opportunity to NOT PERFORM although it is akin to asking a General surgeon to meet in an emergency room on a busy Saturday night and tell the surgeon, "Don't lift a scalpel!" For when you gather creative artists and friends in the name of no-performance, although the glee of not having to do anything but exhibit co-facetime is freeing, we DID show our happy joy to each other. And I must admit that we PLAYED a bit, roamed around the room assigned for that day, found our FAVORITE thing there, gathered the group around us and as I stated earlier, we, in sotto voce, non-performatively/fictictionally, told why WE made or curated our favorite object, painting or sculpture and in talking in Haiku-fashion about that painting or sculpture or ritual cup, we brought not only each other alive with our fantasy stories but gave the art in the Met, a new context and new reason to be seen. It was innocent and fun. No money or ARTFORUM review necessary.

 

Seven times we did this, meeting in the red room for January, that is, the one that is colored red on the Met Map ( Asian Art); and we met in the orange room in February ( Egyptian Art) and so on. Friends and new friends came and we sometimes exchanged phone numbers of our doctors/ comforted the new widow/ prayed as a healing team for successful eye surgery for another. It was not performance but covert life, meeting underground and incognito. Without applause.

  

MISSING:

I wont miss that bus ride.

But I will miss the woman at Gate 34, the Island woman who works at POA, and is always there on Sundays, blessing all with her beauty/concern/availability.

I will miss walking the 40 blocks to 81 Street, through Central Park.

I will miss smelling horses.

I will miss face and fun time and no muss, non-durated for 2 hours time with friends.

I will miss the easy endurance of this not-performance.

 

There might be another 7 years of something.

I don't know until I know.

But I do know that the inner Met-show will go on.

 

Do you miss me?

 

LINDA MARY MONTANO, 

Artist Teacher, Saugerties NY, 2016

5 THINGS ABOUT CHICKENS A FOUND ESSAY

5  THINGS ABOUT CHICKENS: FOUND ARTICLE

The Inner Lives of Chickens: 5 Things You Never Knew About Your Beloved Birds       

By Brian Barth on March 14, 2016

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No livestock is reared in greater numbers than chickens, and none has been studied in greater detailed. In 2004, chickens became the first bird to have their full genome sequenced, uncorking a deluge of scientific inquiry into their physiology, as well as their social behaviors and even their psychological dimensions. Scientists have determined that they are smarter than toddlers and exhibit learning and communication behaviors on par with primates.

Needless to say, there is more going on in a coop than meets the eye—chickens aren’t just egg-laying robots with tender breast meat; they are sentient beings with lives of their own. So if you’ve never thought about what chickens might be thinking, here is some food for thought.

How Do They Communicate?

All that clucking is not random—chickens have a language of their own. Experts say that in addition to saying “cluck,” chickens “pok,” “brawk,” and “squawk.” And from these basic syllables, chickens are capable of at least 30 different calls, ranging from “hey, I found a bunch of grasshoppers” to “see you later, I’m going to lay an egg” to “come over here, you sexy rooster!” Other calls are a response to stress, which vary between those that warn of a raptor circling above and predators that attack from the ground, like foxes. Hens start talking to their chicks in soft tones while they are still in the egg—if you listen close you can hear them peeping back from inside the shell.

Do Chickens Have Feelings?

Yes, says British researcher Jo Edgar, who determined that hens, at least, experience empathy. He designed an experiment that simulated chick stress and found that the mother hens behaved as if they themselves were experiencing the pain—a classic sign of empathy. Chickens are also known to display mourning behavior when another chicken in the flock dies, and they will show signs of depression if they are removed from the flock and placed in solitary quarters.

What Do Chickens Dream About?

More About Chickens!

How to Build a Chicken Coop

Today We're Eating the Winners of the 1948 Chicken of Tomorrow Contest

Denver Broncos' Von Miller Dreams of Being a Chicken Farmer

We don’t know exactly, but we do know they dream. Along with humans and other mammals, chickens (all birds, really) have an REM phase of sleep, a period of “rapid eye movement” that signifies dreaming. We’d like to presume that most of their dreams are filled with imagery and emotions from their daily lives, just as ours are, perhaps punctuated by occasional dreams that stem from chick-hood trauma or aspirations of flying like an eagle (chickens can only fly for a few seconds at a time). Chickens have another phase of sleep that humans lack, however, called USWS (unihemispheric slow-wave sleep), in which one half of the brain is resting, while the other half is awake. This is why chickens can be seen sleeping with one eye open and one eye closed, an evolutionary adaptation that allows them to keep watch for predators while they doze.

What Makes a Rooster Sexy?

There are a few criteria, as it turns out. Size and strength are important, as the more powerful roosters have a higher rank in the pecking order, and are thus able to provide more food for their harem of hens. The size and color of a cock’s comb—the fleshy red appendage on a male chicken’s head—is also a factor, as are the wattles, the dangling red flesh beneath their chins. Bigger and redder is better in both instances. Food, wattles, and a cock’s comb all come into play during the mating dance, which is called “tidbitting,” where the rooster repeatedly picks up and drops morsels of food on the ground in a dramatic way, while bouncing those fleshy protuberances around as much as possible. Still, hens are notoriously promiscuous, typically mating with several roosters at a time. They have the unique ability to eject the sperm of inferior roosters after copulation, however, ensuring that their genes will be coupled only with the most studly cock around.

How Smart Are Chickens (and should we be afraid of them taking over the planet)?

A surprising number of people suffer from fear of chickens, a condition known as alektorophobia, which may not be as unreasonable as it sounds given what scientists have been discovering about them. Recent research has shown that chickens can distinguish between more than 100 faces of their own species and of humans, so they know who you are and will remember you if you treat them badly. They’ve demonstrated complex problem-solving skills and have super-sensory powers, such as telescopic eyesight (like birds of prey) and nearly 360-degree vision (like owls). Chickens are the closest living relatives of the Tyrannosaurus rex (researchers determined this in 2007 by testing proteins from a particularly well-preserved T-rex leg bone), and they outnumber human beings on the planet 3 to 1. There hasn’t yet been an Orwellian uprising of chickens revolting against farmers due to poor coop conditions, but to all those that use tiny “battery” cages, cut off beaks, and engage in other atrocities common to industrial chicken farming—watch out, your birds may be plotting against you.

COVER OF "YOU TOO ARE A PERFORMANCE ARTIST"

COVER OF  YOU TOO ARE A PERFORMANCE ARTIST

MY FATHER

                                             MY FATHER FOR DAD ART  MOM ART  SHOW

  A first generation Italian American, Henry Montano worked for many decades at the Montano’s Shoe Store in Saugerties, New York, but was more healer than salesman.  According to his daughter Linda, “people would come from far distances to be fitted and have their foot problems corrected and my dad would do this in a very caring and
compassionate way.  Living with dad was like living with a mystical Zen Master.”  After a  hemorrhagic stroke, Henry Montano started painting therapeutically under the mentorship of his daughter, a practice he continued for three years until his death. As a result he produced a colorful body of work that celebrates his creativity, search for peace, and reconnection with loved ones.  


           

FOR CHICKEN DANCEARAMA: 7 DANCES IN SAUGERTIES FOR RE-SEED, JENNIFER ZACKIN

CHICKEN DANCEARAMA

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You replied on 4/14/2016 9:22 AM.

CHICKEN DANCEARAMA: Maybe it was Thich Nhat Hanh who suggested we walk with "love" on the bottom of our feet so that we can practice inner peace? In the early 70's, most likely inspired by the American Indian Sacred Chicken Dances, I donned an improvisational Chicken Linda costume and "danced" Chicken Dances for years. Suddenly/recently the urge to re-Chicken Dance has emerged and I now want to faux Chicken Move with Love on the Bottom of my Feet and am excited to be invited by Jennifer Zackin to participate in the Re:Seed Saugerties community art & soil building project and move with awareness in this earth honoring experience. All ages are invited to join us at each "mini-endurance" and walk/dance/bawk/eat eggs/step with love feet and improvise safely and beautifully so we can mentor PEACEFUL-FLYING despite our vestigial wings. Remember, Chickens were originally dinosaurs. Come costumed as a wild fowl and be a miniature version of T-Rex or a new born chick. Linda Mary Montano

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