Vajrayogini

As the Blood of God Bursts the Veins of Time

Vajrayogini 2022

12 x 4 x 12 in

PLA, mirror trays, acrylic square

This piece is something of an outlier in the exhibition in that it is devoted to Buddhism, specifically to Vajrayogini, the supreme (extremely fierce and sensual) goddess of Vajrayana (Tibetan) Buddhism. To make the piece, I downloaded a jpeg of the ‘vajrayogini mantra’, which is used in that tradition at an extremely high level of ascetic training, the kind of practice that in earlier eras was hidden from aspirants for years until they were ready, but which you can now easily learn online. The meditation basically involves invoking and then becoming vajrayogini, and its a sort of propadeutic for the next, highest practice, which is to gain control of the chakra system and gradually deactivate each layer of the material body so that for a period of time it dies, and you experience your true immortal nature, which awakens loving-kindness (bodhicitta) in this life, and doubles as practice for when the actual moment of death comes (to ensure an auspicious reincarnation).

Anyway as I’ve said, I downloaded a jpg of the mantra in sanskrit lettering. Then I extruded it in Blender to turn it into a 3D digital object, and then sent it to Cura to arrive at a 3D print, which I then arranged on an acrylic square I bought on Amazon. During the installation, Zoe suggested offhand that it be a floor piece rather than be installed on the wall, which made sense to me. Then I though to line the wall with mirror plates (In this picture, the mirror plates have the headboard pattern I use for the philosophical arenas, but I eventually swapped them around for ‘blank’ ones), and suddenly the piece’s true essence appeared, as though it had been waiting there to be activated all along (the piece is nothing without the mirrors).

I think some spiritual memoir writing is in order here. In short, this piece exists because I had a profound and ecstatic mystical experience during February and March of this year. I’ve had a devout prayer and meditation practice for at least a decade now; but it was only towards the end of last year that I began using my imagination in an active way during prayer, allowing images and scenes to appear and take a life of their own, usually dictating what was going on to a speech-to-text app. I was doing this almost daily for a time, when I began to see a glowing orb figure with many hands and arms, periodically. What I was seeing terrified me for a time until someone proposed that it was a manifestation of Avalokitesvara, the goddess of compassion in Indian Buddhism. This seemed to square with other visionary experiences I was having with the goddess Quan Yin, who is seen as the same deity for China. One thing led to another, and I began having literal experiences of eternity that really cannot be described in words (Bernini’s ecstasy of St. Theresa sculpture comes close, though).

The experience unlocked my love of David Lynch’s films in a new way, and I returned to them (post-Blue Velvet). In April, shortly before I left to perform at Roadburn in the Netherlands, I went to see the ‘restored’ Inland Empire with Hesse Deni, who then introduced me (randomly, with no pious intention) the lore around the Third Fatima Secret; I was amazed I didn’t already know about it, and it all culminated in another synchronistic experience involving The Lady of All Nations (A Marian apparition that was ongoing during World War II and until 1984 in the Netherlands), on Easter in her shrine in Amsterdam. I’ll explain Fatima and The Lady later on, for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, when I get to the pieces in the show devoted to them specifically. The experience culminated with Liturgy’s performance of Origin at Roadburn on the day the Orthodox church celebrates easter, which was also a pretty insane day astrologically….

This all felt connected to the development of my art practice. It had only been in December and January that my sculpture practice really took off to include 3D printing and freestanding works, which was in part motivated by an invitation from Gern to do a solo show based on the work I had in my studio at the end of last year. The summer before that I’d begun working with a laser engraver, and had had a (pretty ecstatic in its own right) fervent summer experience during which I created most of the wall works in this show. A few weeks into that epiphany I was randomly invited to contribute to a few group shows (no one knew what my work looked like), first a hybrid artist-outsider exhibition at Kerry Schuss and then the infamous Triest group show that for some reason Sean Tatol turned into the talk of the town for a few months with an initial vitriolic denunciation in his review and then again at the end of year singling it out as the worst show he’d seen (or rather, as so bad, that it didn’t even merit the honor of being worst, but did merit a lengthy explanation of why).

For years on and off before then I’d intermittently been making work in more or less the ‘style’ of the combines in this show, especially since 2014 or 2015 (if you’ve been following along, you know many of those earlier works were incorporated into the larger ones here), but I didn’t have the confidence to stick with it; partly because the overton window of the art world was so fiercely closed off to all things spiritual at the time (at least the corner of the art world I was connected to and cared about), partly because my anguished gender dysphoria was holding me back from visual self-expression (this was an enormous factor) and partly because my general mental health difficulties made it difficult for me to tolerate or even detect the exquisitely nuanced social codes that one needs fluency in to navigate it (and I also just wasn’t really willing to put in the amount of social labor that most people seem to feel they need to, something I’m still not willing to do). I’d really wanted to be a ‘real artist’ in my early twenties - to do a show just like this, rendering mt philosophical concepts in gorgeous Rauschenbergian-Baroque architecture. Long ago, when Liturgy was first active, the people around Reena Spaulings were very nice to me, especially because of my Transcendental Black Metal text and a particular looped cappella performance I did (similar to my performance at the Alyssa Davis gala this past May) but I was just too shy and mentally unwell at the time to relate enough like a normal adult to make anything happen.

I meant for this to be a spiritual memoir but it’s digressed into a creative one. Let me step back for a moment and return to religion. During my childhood and teenage years, Christianity was a major concern for me, and so were Marx, Nietzsche and the history of philosophy (the disjunction between these interests, their ‘incompossibility’, was exceedingly perplexing). I grew up mostly in and around New York City, so my social upbringing wasn’t Christian, but there was intermittent if contradictory and inconsistent Christian (Protestant) influence in my family; enough, anyway, that I was sent to a Christian summer camp in the South (Missouri) as a child, where a counselor led me to give my heart to Christ. During college I discovered yoga and meditation as well, which I took to passionately, and after a few years touring with Liturgy I also got sober, which really activated my spiritual life in a new way, especially when, years into my sobriety, I encountered someone in the program who had demonstrably attained a degree of spiritual realization I’ve only otherwise read about in books.

It was also in college that I was initiated into the art world, partly due to the sheer privilege of my education - I took an art history course with Rosalind Krauss, I lived down the block from Columbia’s art building, so even though I didn’t major in it I got so see many visiting artists speak, I made friends with a generation of Columbia MFAs who were particularly successful once they left, etc. Over time, another factor was the loose affiliation between the art world and the music scene in New York that have been in place since the minimalism/no wave era, but my initial introduction was much more through the intellectual side (John Miller, Blake Rayne, etc.). By this time my passion for philosophy had settled on the work of Deleuze, Lacan, Badiou and Zizek, though the program I was in at school was for Analytic philosophy, so I was also studying hard core topics that verged on mathematics like symbolic logic and probability theory (I’d been initiated into computer programming and computer science during high school through an incredibly gifted teacher who taught a two-year course on C++). The art world was really the imagined audience for Liturgy in the beginning, especially for my ‘manifesto’ (black metal was kind of trending at the time in that context, Bjarne Melgaard and others were making work relating to the form), and I saw it as a place where my various passions for music, philosophy and drama could all exist together.

To return to religion, my Christian faith was always (if intermittently) with me during these years; I felt close personal contact with Christ, I wondered about heaven and hell, and I suppose above all I wondered how to square it with the nihilism and dialectical materialism that meant so much to me on the artistic and political planes. I had C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton books with me on the early Liturgy tours, and the whole aesthetic and meaning of the band was drenched in Christian imagery, with an anarcho-communist transcendental empiricism twist, obviously. Needless to say, my concerns were entirely illegible to the underground music cultures I was connected to and later on to the music industry and its media infrastructure. As the band’s reach expanded, it did so with an extremely uncanny and unique ‘always-already-cancelled’ quality that lasted for years (until I eventually found more compatible cultures online starting in around 2017). At first there was an explosion of interest (even from like the New Yorker and the New York Times etc.), but then a backlash came, and the band had a half-marginalized existence for much of the second half of the 2010s.

Right after college, in part as a result of delivering my “Transcendental Black Metal” lecture, I made contact with the para-academic philosophy scene, first under the aegis of “speculative realism” and then Accelerationism, a term I resonated with due to its common heritage shared with my concept of ‘the burst beat’ (the accelerating blast beat) in Deleuzean materialist ethics. But philosophers were never totally sure what to make of me given that I traced my major lineage through American Transcendentalism (which I associate loosely with Emerson, Whitman, James, Copeland, Coltrane, West), and I refused to denigrate Goodness, Beauty and God. The theory overton window was no more open to me than the mass media or artworld ones. I guess I bring all of that up because in the past few years - against the back drop of completely bewildering world-historical developments - more space has opened for my world view to be appreciated or at least taken seriously, at first online, and now in New York IRL. Now I get to have a Christian art show in a context where the orientations of figures like Kippenberger and Michael Asher reign. People ask me all the time what I think about this, how I deal with having been an outsider Christian for so long, and then encountering a cultural shift whereby Christianity has essentially become fashionable, but not entirely for the reasons I connect to it. The answer is: this sculpture.

The didactic message corresponding to this sculpture is that God is actually real, the soul lives on after death, and Jesus’s radical love is more important than anything, including legacy social and gender hierarchies that are no longer needed (and, especially, more than hate). Vajrayogini is real too, so is Avalokitesvara, so is Mary. The realm of the divine is larger than Christianity, and the point of Christianity is not reactionary traditionalism (this also goes for Great Art. You should listen to Wagner, because it will train your soul to be wiser and more compassionate, not because you don’t believe in modernity). Buddhism and Christianity are not the same, but they’re not in conflict; they are Hegelian antinomies which will be synthesized within a new social horizon which will transcend secular humanism but preserve its Respect for the Individual. Christ is really the messiah and really was resurrected; meanwhile, the chakras are real, and tantra is the highest path to spiritual realization. Most people won’t have ears to hear what I’m saying here, because its too radical and too different from all of the various, mutually opposed bad-faith worldviews that collectively make up contemporary mind-control. We will never outgrow these traditions, because they’re not just ‘cultural traditions’, they are actual practical modes of access to the divine; they will outlive much of what we take for granted in society, because they open our limited, rapidly evolving society to eternity, which evolves too, but not geometrically.