What I've been working on:
A collaboration with Samuel Keogh, titled Before Commandments, for an exhibition at Shudder Gallery in April.
An article that will be published in Poetry is Dead
An article that will be published in Under/Current Magazine
A language/food fast in the style of early reformation mystics (more on this in a later post)
Preparing a piece for the Chisenhale Residency workshop that will happen on February 21st
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the one article has been giving me a particular amount of trouble, and in the end, with the indispensable help of Yannis (working with an editor is such a luxury), I finally decided to split the article into two separate things. The bit I won't be using, sadly, is on Transubstantiation, but I will develop this into something larger for another project. Since it is relevant to this blog, here you go: a be-laboured definition of what Transubstantiation is (in case you were wondering this whole time):
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After religion lost its authority on suffering and reason to science after the enlightenment, a main project of art in the 20th Century has been to take over the tradition of mystical exploration from the church, being driven by a “…quest for a consciousness purified of contaminated language”* . It was first Duchamp, and later Conceptual artists who first made art’s obsession with language explicit, tracking the dispersion of mundane objects into an art discourse*.With Duchamp’s Fountain, a toilet became a conduit for the highest level of cultural thought just as a cracker previously provided a way to inject divinity into the body of a believer via Transubstantiation.
Transubstantiation is a doctrine belonging to the Catholic church and becomes an excellent device with which to identify the residue of religious ideology in art, and to re-purpose embodied ritual for use in contemporary art practice. According to the doctrine a person who receives the Host is spiritually transformed into the food he has eaten.
Transubstantiation? (or: I never went to Sunday School)
Transubstantiation is a theological belief associated with the practice of observing the Eucharist, also known as the Holy Communion. The practice is common to Protestants and Catholics alike, and is described by the Apostle Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians (11:23--26) where he reminds the church of Jesus’ wish that they break bread and drink wine in remembrance of his sacrifice.
These instructions were first carried out by members of the early church in Rome
and continue to be enacted in the present day. What makes The Catholic approach unique is the ‘Host’, which represents the body of Christ and using the power of God’s presence, simultaneously is the body of Christ. The Host consists of bread (in today’s terms, wafers or soda crackers) and wine (or non-alcoholic grapejuice). Transubstantiation is an infinitely repeatable miracle where the act of consuming the Host deposits holy essence deep into the bowels of a believer. One doesn’t need to stretch the imagination very far to guess what obsessions this cannibalistic allegory generated with regards to saliva, oral hygiene, the state of the stomach and the quality of a believer’s digestion* .
The key component of Catholicism is observing these forms of ritual and bodily absorption to bring about salvation (blood, guts, glory), rather than in Protestantism where the body suddenly disappears in the 1600’s and salvation comes through personal choice, reason or hearing the ‘word’ (evangelism)*.
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*Susan Sontag - The Aesthetics of Silence Aspen Magazine, 1967
*Seth Price - Dispersion, 2002
*Camporesi - The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation & Salvation in Early Modern Europe
*CBC Ideas - The Early Modern Period
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