Tao Te Ching Chapter 67

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep.

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

It's easy in our complex and frustrating world to simply complain and reflect back all the ugliness and injustice we seem to be engulfed in.

It's the job of artists to empty themselves of their belief systems toward purification and clarity. If artists are to be

cultural initiators, we must be ethical and moral servant leaders as well. Disregarding our

responsibility to the world around us as our practice continues the same provincial

high art conversation as was prevalent fifty years ago fails to embrace

our shared crises. It is therefore indulgent and passe.

Art is now about cultural healing, even

if by some sort of circuitous

and ambiguous

path.

The future must enter you a long time before it happens.

Unknown

When the great Tao is forgotten,
goodness and piety appear.
When the body's intelligence declines,
cleverness and knowledge step forth.
When there is no peace in the family,
filial piety begins.
When the country falls into chaos,
patriotism is born.

Tao Te Ching 18

Artist Statement

September 2011

A picture presents itself as the Unmanageable, the Illogical, the Meaningless. It demonstrates the endless multiplicity of aspects; it takes away our certainty, because it deprives a thing of its meaning and its name. It shows us the thing in all the manifold significance and infinite variety that preclude the emergence of any single meaning and view.

Gerhard Richter Notes, 1964-65.

Regardless of the medium, I am largely concerned with the direct experience of Mystery and the Sublime. Joseph Campbell once said that if you find yourself in the presence of the Archetype most call "God", you will find yourself to be so utterly overwhelmed that you will not, in that moment know if you are in the presence of Good or Evil. To experience this is the most stark, electrifying and terrifying thing possible. It is also the most Beautiful for from this empty Center springs all Truth, Goodness and Beauty. Fireworks and phenomena aside, breakthrough moments have continually redefined the world around me. They have conflagrated belief systems and all claims to certainty. In a sense, my work is journalistic and religious. I seek to revisit this space with tools in hand, while emptying myself of literal interpretations, presumptions and attachments. To varying degrees of success, I work to be nimble and malleable...to be useable. The expansive and scary freedom* that at times occurs is similar to and resonant with the initial experience.

There's an important fulfillment that comes through making work and the many dialogs the work begins to construct with the world around it. Mysticism is not entertainment. To glimpse the numinal is to be forever changed. To work to share this miraculous space with others is the crux of art making. What others bring to the experience of work, where they place it physically, what other art works it lives in proximity to, all these and other elements come into play. I enjoy interactions with others that are spurred by art. After a performance I wrote and performed with Ryan Bonne and Joe Houston in San Antonio, Texas, a learned woman approached me and told me that she had recently seen the Tibetan Lamas perform and that she'd had a very similar experience during my piece.

Real work needs to proceed from such places beyond the self. Some would say that we all have two selves. The first, which might be signified with a small "s" self is the one we are most familiar with. In this self is contained our many experiences, impressions, assumptions and persuasions. Many seem to only know this self. For others, fortunate enough to have some sort of momentary breakthrough, there appears the other "Self". Each of these vantage points has its own perceptual world. Many of the problems in our physical world could be realigned if more were familiar with what Jung called the numinous.

This numinal world, as ambiguous as it might be, is the real world. My work is about this world.

*Richard Rohr, Everything Belongs

In our present situation, the effectiveness of art needs to be judged by how well it overturns the perception of the world that we have been taught which has set our whole society on a course of bioshperic destruction I believe that what we will see in the next few years is a new paradigm based on the notion of participation, in which art will begin to redefine itself in terms of social relatedness and ecological healing, so that artists will gravitate toward different activities, attitudes and roles than those that operated under the aesthetics of modernism.

Suzie Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art

A poet is somebody who feels, and who expresses his feelings through words. This may sound easy. It isn't. A lot of people think or believe or know they feel but that's thinking or believing or knowing; not feeling. And poetry is feeling not knowing or believing or thinking. Almost anybody can learn to think or believe or know, but not a single human being can be taught to feel. Why? Because whenever you think or you believe or you know, you're a lot of other people: but the moment you feel, you're nobody-but-yourself. To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. As for expressing nobody-but-yourself in words, that means working just a little harder than anybody who isn't a poet can possibly imagine. Why? Because nothing is quite as easy as using words like somebody else. We all of us do exactly this nearly all of the time and whenever we do it, we are not poets. If, at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed. And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

R. Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path

[Suzi] Gablik speaks of the previous paradigm of the Enlightenment period and what it has meant to artists: Individualism, freedom and self-expression are the great modernist buzz words. The notion that art could serve collective cultural needs rather than a personal quest for self-expression seems almost presumptuous in that worldview. Yet this assumption lies at the base of a paradigm shift in art, a shift from objects to relationships. Gablik challenges her coworkers not to settle for abstract theorizing in making this paradigm shift. She personalizes and therefore grounds the transformations that must be undergone when she insists that the way to prepare the ground for new paradigm shift is to make changes in ones own life. Spirituality is about praxis, she is saying, not just theory.

Matthew Fox, The Reinvention of Work

Unless there is a speedy and radical shift in human consciousness, to bring about a re-enchantment of the world and the return of the sacred to the center of our personal and collective life, the human enterprise on Planet Earth most probably will come to a catastrophic end. The paranormal events that we have been discussing may be wake-up calls coming from the regions of the Holy Spirit, or what Kenneth Ring calls Mind at Large, to overcome our morbid entanglement with materialism in all its forms and manifestations and help us become aware of our Divine origins and our destiny as beings in the process of deification. Once that understanding, now buried down in the recesses of our individual and collective subconscious, comes to the surface, then we will feel, think, and behave in ways that will render us custodians of Creation and not its mindless destroyers.

Conventional scientists, sooner or later will have to recognize that what is happening today is not regression to prerational states of superstition but a quantum leap into super-rational states of awareness. It is not the reversal of the Enlightenment, as they are worried, but its fulfillment through the development of a new science that will incorporate the spiritual at the center of its preoccupation.

Kyriacos C. Markides PhD, Riding with the Lion

blueglassprojects, kansas city, mo, 2002-2003 both/and march 21, 2003 prospero's books, kansas city, mo.

Jennifer Coombes, Marc Saviano, Joel Kraft, J W Jeff Helkenberg, Monica Ross, Jason Beason, Alan Mitchell,

Coldy Brewer, Heather Brewer,Christie Bradley, Derek P. Moore, Mikal Shapiro, Adam Fox, Joel Kraft, Jeff Hogue

Community is the waythe means and the technologyto institute a planetary culture of civility.

M. Scott Peck, MD, A New World Waiting to be Born

photo: jennifer coombes

both/and blueglassprojects 2002-2003

march 21, 2003 prospero's books,

kansas city, mo.

"Numbering himself among the twice-born sick souls, James vividly detailed how these very different individuals are haunted by a deep sense of the risk, danger, and pervasive moral evil that runs through the world. Conscious of possessing a self that is somehow divided, these sick souls are examples par excellence of the constitutional disease James calls Zerrissnheit (torn-to-pieces-hood). From the perspective of the healthy-minded, these sick souls

seem to have no sense of unity or coherence to their lives. They appear riddled by inner instability, torn by tension and conflict between the various elements of their lives. The twice-born have known tragedy, failure and defeat, and they have named them such; but they also have a sense of the possibility of somehow rising above such experiences. A comic artist would nevertheless portray them anxiously insecure, identifying them with the label Argh! Sick souls also inhabit New Yorker cartoons, but they may be more familiar in the shape of Charles Schulzs Charlie Brown.

Does such openness to suffering, to the dark side of human be-ing signal some kind of denial or lack of spirituality? Are the recognition of darkness and the temptation to despair themselves failures? NO! The answer comes hurtling with all the force and wisdom of hundreds of voices echoing over thousands of years. These voices, the voices of the sages and saints, insist that it is the struggle itself that defines us.

Our many failures give meaning to our few successes, only when we peer into the abyss can we appreciate the magnificence of heights that are more than mere highs. For to be human is, after all, to be other than God. And so it is only in the embracing of our torn self, only in the acceptance that there is nothing wrong with feeling torn, that one can hope for whatever healing is available and can thus become as whole as possible. Only those who know darkness can truly appreciate light; only those who acknowledge darkness can even see the light. Our very brokenness allows us to become whole. no one is as whole as he who has a broken heart, said Rabbi Moshe Leib of Sasov. Wholeness, then, does not mean that the heart is not broken, that the pain does not sear. To experience sadness, despair, tears, and howls of pain demonstrates not some violation or deficit of spirituality but rather the ultimate spirituality of acceptance.

Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham,

The Spirituality of Imperfection

What seems to happen when we have spiritual experiences can only be known when that is tested. Otherwise we are likely to call ourselves a chef, open a fancy restaurant, and promptly poison the clientele.

A real teacher is continually diminished and a false teacher is continually exalted. Because if you're a real teacher, working with students, the impossibility of transformation must diminish you. When you understand what it means to be responsible for a teaching position, you cant be inflated. You see yourself in relationship to the immensity of the universe and the impossibility of what needs to be done, and you can only be diminished. It must humble you more and more and more. You could not be anything but humble if you were looking at what you are up against as a teacher, because what you're up against is impossible. Nobody, no matter how brilliant or skillful, can master the physics of reality. One can master the physics of form like Satya Sai Baba and Swami Premananda, who can materialize things. That can be mastered. But no teacher can master the physics of human nature.

Lee Lozowick from Mariana Caplans

Halfway up the Mountain

"In 1932, Jung wrote a fascinating essay on Picasso in which he connects the artist's blue paintings with the Tuat-blue of the Egyptian Underworld. He uses the word nekyia (underworld journey) for the artists' s interest in broken and fragmented images as well as his frequent portrayal of the Harlequin, which he says derives from an ancient earth deity.

The Egyptians believed in an underworld parallel to our upperworld where everyone and everything is upside down and the sky has a special underworld tint. This is a good image for where we go when our spiritual brilliance dims and we are faced with living our spirituality down within the thick textures of ordinary living. Not just an interior but a deeper world sets the stage for our spiritual progress and regress, a world that mirrors the ordinary one but is dimmer. It lies within the earth, within the earth crust in which our daily lives are lived out. On the surface it may not be visible, but to the person living in both dimensions it is seen, felt, and appreciated.

Commenting on this passage in Jung, James Hillman describes the anima or soul as a bridge between the known and the unknown. "The deeper we descend into her ontology," he writes approvingly, "the more opaque consciousness becomes." Opaque is the opposite, of course, of what most people want from their spirituality. They seek clarity and awareness. Spiritual people like crystals, not mud. But if we sought a life thick with vitality, we might not esteem clarity quite so much. We might realize that to live from fullness is to be down close to the earth where clarity is not an option, where the sky is blue but shaded. This is spirituality, too, a necessary complement to the brilliant and clarifying spirit we seek in the other direction.

The Egyptian underworld Jung mentions is a good image for deep spirituality. When the sun has set in the day world, it rises in the land of the dead, giving the underworld a blue sky and blue blush of reality. Whatever is happening in life, even in the spiritual life, has its underworld counterpart, and if we don't cultivate that bluer life, we have no way of knowing what we're doing in the light of the sun. The activities of a day may seem to be full of facts and external events, but from another point of view, one in tune with Tuat hues and tones, it may become clear that the facts and the events register as well in an underworld of meaning.

The tone of going down differs from the feeling of the ascent. As we move toward consciousness and enlightenment, we expect wholeness, integration, inspiration, and healing. Hillman uses very different words for the way of descent: dissolving, decomposing, detaching, and disintegrating. These words are not in the bright vocabulary of the new spirituality, or in much of modern psychology for that matter, and yet they offer a sometimes bitter path that completes the otherwise sentimental and partial view of the spiritual process."

Thomas Moore, The Soul's Religion

Artist Statement

Prairie Noir Series

Joseph Campbell defined the aesthetic as that which fosters reverence and the sublime as that which inspires awe. In direct personal experience there is a sort of darkness but this should not to be confused with malign or destructive forces. The universe is a vast and overwhelming place characterized by ambiguity, mystery and seeming contradiction. Its terrifying to have ones consciousness transformed. To have unitive experiences is to have awareness that compels one to create toward recreating such experiences.

My recognition of these states is partially why I am interested in the visual effects of pictorial layers. Veils show up over and over in my images. To see beyond the minds capacity to frame is to embrace a vast and disturbing mystery, even in the most mundane. Somehow representational images seem fuller to me when obscured by indecipherable elements floating over and around. The vague yet momentarily defined image seems more realistic and psychologically compelling than exacted physical representation. I am less interested in rendering the apparent than entering into felt complexities too numerous and nuanced to contain in simple terms.

In the Prairie Noir series I focused on familiar images of Oklahoma landscapes with efforts to enter into a a more personal relationship whereby I begin to see and feel new things. My hope is that I arrive at paintings that are at once honest to the physical environs and psychologically charged. I have struggled with a good deal of emotional baggage over my return to the place of my childhood. I've been influenced by many artists, but began focusing more on Joe Andoe's work the last few years because he's from Oklahoma and because he's been able to bring paradox to all too often banal rural Oklahoma image material familiar to us all. I've also been heavily influenced by Gerhard Richter, who, among other major contemporary German artists (like Keifer and Beuys) approaches imagery with deep social concerns grounded in a romantic regard for perennial mystical values.

When I am full of self, the world is small and dingy. When I am empty and open, it can be rife with scale and mystery. Archetypally charged works of art can only come from the latter place all the rest is artifice.

Beyond Good and Evil, Twilight and Night on the Prairie

Will Leathem

In Prairie Noir, Hogue continues his long-running inquisition of dissonance, interjecting texture and distortion between his subject and the viewer. For this series, Hogue steps away from his familiar palette to engage a new spectrum of tawny grass, earthen roads and vast reservoirs of aquamarine. This color shift establishes early on the underlying tension within the exhibit, and presages the key dichotomy of the collection...

article by Will Leathemat Art Tattler.com

npr (KWGS Tulsa) interview

I Wanna Be a Hero Sermons of a Post-Quantum, Neo -Charismatic Man in the Face of a New, Cable-vision- Free Epoch

Disillusioned with the safety and convenience of it all, he began to slip into the shadow of his gifts. Where he had once been the boy god in the lap of joy, he found himself spiraling down into the child tyrant's haunted kitchen. Often he railed against the imperfections stalking him. Sometimes in the dark damp night he would whine and cry for his sweet mother's soft pink hand's refuge from the cold red sky, but he'd push her away just as fast...eventually he could no longer linger, he left the world of televised worship and instant breakfasts as recommended by the Pastors, and moved into the adventure out beyond the voice-activated temple gates. The nights were long...

He laid in bed curled up in dark anguish, beyond the reprieve of the daylight. Terrors in the night were relieved by the splendor of the spring mornings. He'd lost interest in the things he'd once needed. He fell deep inside. He forgot...

Slipping into the afternoons of blissful absence of all that had seemed valuable, there was nothing beyond his dimply lit cottage nestled in the village beneath the Peak. Weeks had now passed since his move and often he awoke softly to the stillness and lightness of the mountain air. The golden warm sun nurtured his pale shoulders. The cold breeze tickled his flesh. He no longer hungered for pizza and could go for days with only a little bread and water. Prayers were drifting into conversations, and poetry flowed from the endless well in his heart. He wanted for nothing.

On the verge of dusk the mountain's peak shown a soft pink-violet. He'd broken his dependency upon cablevision. He could see with his heart for his media-mind had gone silent. There was a potted plant where his home entertainment console once sprawled. He was unafraid of the dark. His conscience was clean. He was beginning the glow. He could read between the lines...

Then it came. The Holy Spirit visited him that glorious summer afternoon and he fell into the Spirit World. His life passed before him and he was taken up into the heights. He looked down and saw his life pass before him. He realized the love that beholds all things great and small. He and the vision were One. He returned to the room sobbing with joy. He stood at once destroyed and elated for all he'd known now seemed gone. He had no body, yet his flesh was on fire. He saw everything as if for the first time. The blues above never seemed so blue. Like gorgeous luminous turquoise somehow lit from within. On the verge of terror he found himself on the open sea. He trembled in the face of such ecstasy. He couldn't believe his eyes and heart. He knew he'd been returned to the child. He'd forgotten how gorgeous it all is. Week passed. He was in heaven...

The strain of the lucidity was too much for him. He fell into the depths of loss and grief. What was once the endless perfumed summer afternoons slip off into the abyss like a fallen TV preacher into hateful and broken seclusion. He struggled against the helpers. They offered him all that they could--loving attention and regular phenothyazine. He found himself in the pit of despair. Nothing seemed worth living for, but he lacked the energy to escape. He endured the torture with sleep. He occasionally participated in small talk and spades. Time rolled slowly like a giant earth mover machine carving through the countryside forcing the earth to submit to its design. Soon the brown dirt was level and he stood looking forward and behind seeing a long endless line. He felt no hope, but he saw the horizon, and on it to the left he thought he could see his home. Gradually the days passed and he began to find his way through the structure of the compound. No longer showing signs of divine inclination the boy was released from the confines of major tranquilizers and ambled his way into volunteer work beyond the temple walls in the new world. Eventually he no longer needed the wise and gentle magician and moved on to life in the city. In time he all but forgot his odyssey. He living in two worlds, but no longer considered it. Sometimes he watched television, but he almost never went to church.

I Wanna Be a Hero, SAAI, San Antonio, Texas,1992

installation, music and text by Jeff Hogue

performed with Ryan Bonne and Joe Houston

edited by Joe Houston

I am advocating an alchemy of the spirit, an honest and imaginative refining of the emotions and life's complexities to the point of vision. The spirit is squeezed like wine from grapes out of the ugly habits that cause so much pain. By going down into the depths of the soul we find the raw material for a grounded spiritual life, and we discover a different quality of vision, deep forms of prayer and meditation, and a highly individual call to ethics, the spirit that vaporizes from the depths is in tune with the body and in league with desire.

Thomas Moore, The Souls Religion

I am not on the preferred patrons mailing list of any major NY galleries.
I am not important to anyone I know of inside the beltway in D.C.
I am not your sisters favorite secret lover.
I am not a thirty something millionaire defense contractor careening through jammed traffic in a red Italian sports car in Houston.
I am not a power Mensa video gamer in camouflaged shorts with expensive weed in my thigh pocket.
I am not one of Kalle Lassen's lunch buddies.
I am not readily confused with Asian Republican golf pros in crisp green Lacoste shirts.
I am not the owner of a Bombardier, Gulfstream or Hawker.
I am not an MIT custodian skulking around late night lab halls.
I am not omniscient or wildly intuitive on most Mondays or Fridays.
I am not Laurie Anderson's current boyfriend.
I am not a fan of most daytime TV game show contestants snack habits.
I am not a licensed massage therapist in fitted pastel spandex.
I am not a pet Red Tail hawk raging loose in a rich kids tree house.
I am not Dick Chaney's confessor (and God help the woman who is).
I am not (nor ever was) an extra for the making of any of the Planet of the Apes films.
I am not Peter Bogdonovich's primary psychoanalyst.
I am not Woody Allen's mothers scapegoat bridge partner.
I am not a first line victim of state sponsored European pharmaceutical industrial espionage.
I am not as bold as I was when I had longer and fuller and better hair.
I am not a talented speller like my father.
I am not a top notch political strategist/ painter/ art star living in the Hamptons with illegal house servants bringing me exotic breakfasts in bed.

endgame, 2008, pigmented archival print

If you ever have occasion to glimpse the Universe as It actually is, you won't have

many people to compare notes with. And if it's a joyous event, it won't be entirely.

notes from The Reluctant Dervish, 2011