Art as Soul-making

2010-8_14 Art as Soul-making
“Religion (for Confucius) was a matter of doing rather than thinking. The traditional ritual of China enabled an individual to burnish and refine his humanity so that he became a junzi, a ‘mature person.’ A junzi was not born but crafted; he had to work on himself as a sculptor a rough stone and made it a thing of beauty.”
Karen Armstrong in THE CASE FOR GOD

You remember me mentioning Wolfgang Stoerchle in an email a few days ago. The arc of his creativity is relevant to our question, what is art?
Wolf came to Canada from Germany and then went from Toronto to California where he enrolled at Cal-Santa Barbara. He got there by unusual means, at least for the 20th century: by horseback. He and his older brother Peter went the 4200 miles on horseback. He was 18 at the time. It was 1964. They got written up too, by LIFE magazine, his first nod of recognition for his exploits. He started out an easel painter at Santa Barbara, but by the time he was in graduate school he was into Conceptual Art. I have a trick photograph of him arm wrestling with Ronald Reagan, who is smiling broadly as Wolf grunts. I have a photograph of him leaping feet first through a dry wall mounted on a wooden frame; his feet sticking out the other side. From there he went to New York to find out if he had the right stuff to, as we used to say, make it. He became a performance artist and gained a patron, the Philosopher of Aesthetics and Perception, and fellow German, Rudolph Arnheim. He did all his performances in galleries in both New York and L.A. Many of them dealt with sexuality, and he had a penchant to take his clothes off, too. It was a way of dealing with his own psyche and demons therein. Why or how he got chosen to be in that Dance Workshop in June 1973 is unclear to me, but that is where he teamed up with Sue to make a video together. The video they did was in that Video round-up at the Getty Museum three years ago. It was really all about her and his perception of her as woman and lover. He pictured her and dressed her as a seductress, or as he put it, a “black mother succubus,” black because she was clad in sheer black negligee and he had her doing some sexual acrobatics. She writhed and moaned in sexual agitation, her facial beauty looking rather hard and severe, as she stood on a round pedestal that rotated, at first very slowly, but eventually rapidly, spinning and simulating coitus, ending in an orgasm. The first time I saw the video I thought, wow, he really nailed it. Her dark side was in full bloom. She looked the epitome of the predatory female. Actually all three of us learned a good deal about ourselves through Wolf’s psychological stripping of a lot of artificial covering that was only skin deep. (When Sue saw it again in the Getty Show, some thirty years later, it seemed more than a little odd, as she had long ago shed that dark persona. Now she was a mother with two grown daughters who had kids and our marriage was nearly of 45 years duration. That flirtatious “bad girl” was a thing of the deep past. She now was a crone and liked it.)

My favorite piece that Wolf did in New York was called “Breath.” But it was quite unlike Manzoni’s piece called “Breath,” the red balloon mounted on a piece of wood. Wolf’s was an exercise in deconstruction. You see him bent over a brick of dirt sitting on a table. It is packed hard into a firm block of earth. Then Wolf starts to blow on it, nice and easy at first, but gradually he picks up the tempo and the intensity of his blowing. Pretty soon there some crumbling on the edges, and then more and more of the brick begins to break up, until finally we see a pile of dirt flattened out on the table top. And there is Wolf, panting, trying to recover from his exertion.

But when he and I were close he was disenchanted with the whole New York scene. He had gone there to test his mettle, but he found out it was just another “small pond,” not all that it was cracked up to be. Here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote me.

“The western notion of the ‘Great Artist’ is linked to virtuoso performance, to EGO, GLORY, and GRATIFICATION, to social status, and, finally, to fame. Fame implies a desire to identify with the dominant social forces, the moneyed class, the people who are in charge and ruining the planet. Artists today are too secular, too eager to be part of the ruling elite, and, I know this is true because that was a space I was in when I left California for New York. It took me a couple of years to find out New York was just another pond, and not the place for me to pursue a spiritual goal. There is one big obstacle: EGOTISM. It is something we need to overcome before it overshadows us. The operative word is service, and that I must surrender to the will of God.”

I have a little trouble with that business about“surrender to the will of God. “I know what he is trying to say but I’d say it differently, using another kind of metaphor, like the Tao or “the force be with you.” But otherwise I am in complete agreement with what he said.

The next time I saw Wolf was in Feb. 1974, just prior to his big move south of the border. He had made up his mind to launch his spiritual quest. He had sold all his equipment to gather some cash and pared his duffle bag down to the bare essentials. I told him I wanted to drive him to the border and bid him vaya con dios. He had burned out all the mediums of expression he was interested in trying. It was time to put his feet down and see where they would take hm. He said he felt a little like Buddha, leaving his soft life behind. I thought of the relationship between Narziss and Goldmund in the novel of that name by Herman Hesse, with me being the stay-at-home contemplative monk, and Wolf being the romantic road warrior who followed his heart and senses, not his head. A spiritual journey often starts on the road, like the Tarot cards suggest. He became THE FOOL, who takes off flush with belief and hope. He had come full round, only now his medium of self-discovery was solely his imagination. And he hit the road with little money, few possessions, and an open heart. It was up to him now to bring all his fire and focus to work on himself as a sculptor would shape a rough stone into a thing of beauty.

On Feb. 12 Wolf handed me his “Hermit’s Rod,” a sturdy walking stick he had been using the past few months, and crossed into Mexico. I had given him a hug and told him “vaya con dios.” As for the gift of the walking stick I was happy to accept it, thinking of another Tarot card, in fact I was touched by the gesture, as I knew it was a gesture of love and fraternity and I took it in that spirit. I waved my final goodbye and turned to leave, thinking I miss him already, for I haven’t enjoyed such good conversation and rapport with another male in some time.

Ten months later he was back. He got as far as small town outside Mexico City when he developed a physical problem, an abscess in his rectum and he had to have an operation which drained him of most of his money, plus the doctor didn’t do a very good job and he needed more treatment when he got back to the states. It was an ignominious end to his spiritual intentions. He hung out with us for about a week and then headed to Santa Fe to see an old girl friend. To make a long and complicated story short, he married the old girl friend and endured a rocky road with her over several months. He had a tendency to want a male dominant relationship with women; he wanted to set the agenda and the female should trust him to do the right thing for both of them. Well, his wife didn’t buy that and they went back and forth for months, not able to resolve their differences. But he was working; he had found a job at a bronze foundry that produced cowboy sculpture for tourists and collectors of that sort of thing. Then, on a Saturday night in March 1976, he and his wife had gone out to eat and on the way home a drunken Mexican American broadsided Wolf’s car after running a red light, killing Wolf. Sue told me that when he got high he always worried about his heart; he experienced palpitations and that scared him. The impact smashed his ribs and a bone splinter went right through his heart, killing him instantly. His wife was badly bruised but did survive.

For weeks afterwards I kept having these visions of Wolf trying to communicate with me behind some thick frosted glass. I could see his face as a distorted blur but could not hear a voice. Eventually the visions stopped,