Subversive Liturgy
https://www.cityartsmagazine.com/blog-2012-04-subversive-liturgy/
At the moment Vermillion is lacquered ceiling-to-floor in wheatpaste, streaked and stenciled text, and canvases densely shellacked with graphite and paint. Gigantic twenty-foot-tall figures modeled after Caravaggio’s Entombment of Christ loom overhead (the faces and identities of the models have been hidden behind black masks). Hundreds of wine bottles congregate on the floor. They’ve been dipped in a thick, sludgy mixture of graphite powder, ink and acrylic paint—all tools of the mark-maker’s trade. The exhibit is called MYTH&MURDER and is a collaborative installation from the self-described collective of degenerate artists, New Mystics.
Who are the New Mystics? The name is obviously a nod to the Northwest Mystics, artists like Morris Graves and Mark Tobey who had their heyday in the 1930s and 1940s. You may recognize some of the New Mystics: No Touching Ground, NKO, Dan Hawkins, DK Pan, Specs Wizard, Baso Fibonacci, Aubrey Birdwell, Anna Telcs and Kyle Johnson have all had visible art practices and collaborative relationships with groups like Free Sheep Foundation and Saint Genet over the years. Others (Hope, Suck, Smurf) are the pseudonyms of artists less familiar to many gallery visitors, but whose work is accessible in a different way, scattered all across town.
New Mystics grew up out of a collective of street artists. Though their membership has expanded to include artists whose practices extend beyond traditional street artwork, the group is motivated by a common interest in unsanctioned interventions in public environments. This kind of post-graffiti street art has, of course, achieved critical success in recent years and even enjoyed some of the perks of institutionalization. Some members of New Mystics have exhibited work in galleries or been funded to make projects; others have only worked anonymously.
“Collective” may not be the best word to use in their case. Membership in the group is closed. From the outside it does slightly resemble a secret society, complete with ritual trappings, initiations and rites.
Because of this, an installation for public consumption seems a bit counterintuitive, and there’s a chance the work will come across as affected or inaccessible—except for the fact that New Mystics are rooted in the tradition of street art and view the city, and by extension all shared space, as a playground for inspiring experience. Emphasis on shared transcendence is the thread running through MYTH&MURDER that connects the values of their esoteric body politic to the random public who enter the gallery. Transcendence can be quotidian. It can take place unexpectedly, around any given corner in broad daylight.
Reference to community—specifically to intoxicated communion—are woven throughout the installation by the oceanic presence of wine and liquor bottles ceremoniously piled up. (NKO claims to have imbibed from every last one of them.) Stacks of books (encyclopedias, dictionaries, how-to manuals, self-help guides) blackened and sealed shut with the same graphite-and-ink sludge are likewise piled against walls and pedestals. We can infer from this mise en scène that for the Mystics refusal of common knowledge (in favor of a more occulted knowledge) goes hand in hand with ecstatic inebriation. Baudelaire’s imperative to be continually drunk on wine, poetry, virtue or whatever has been given material, sculptural form. But let it be (they suggest) a communion of poetic drunkenness, a shared ritual, collective rebirth.
MYTH&MURDER runs April 12 to May 5.VERMILLION Gallery is located at 1508 11th Ave and is open Tuesday through Sunday from 4 p.m. to 2 a.m.