Only a Few Yards Away: A Virtual Exhibit of Photography, Paintings and Collage

Holaday Mason and Celeste Goyer, with wall texts by James Cushing. Hosted by Beyond Baroque Literary Arts Center and the Mike Kelley Gallery. The show is evergreen on the Beyond Baroque website!

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Three Questions for Three Poets/Artists

James Cushing, poet and visual artist

1. How would you describe the role of mystery in your work as an artist and poet?

JC: Delicately!

Despite advances in neurological research, genetics, AI, the philosophy of David Chalmers, and many other rationalist forays, I think human consciousness remains the last wilderness, a great and still-uncharted frontier, and that the role of the artist / poet / writer / composer / filmmaker / whatever is to continue probing into this mysterious area. In the moment of artistic creating, I feel, with Rimbaud, that I am present at the manifestation of my thought, aiding its translation from the ideal to the tangible. The “goal” of the probing activity is to retrieve a sensible (seeable, readable, pleasure-giving, life-affirming) impression from the mystery while leaving its mystery intact.

As a reader of poetry and a student of the visual arts (including film), I look for the same thing — a “text” with or without words that preserves a moment in which the mysterious, elusive essence of human life in time is represented clearly, with its mystery intact. William Blake, my guide in this as in so many things, once wrote, “The wisest of the ancients considered what is not too explicit as the fittest for instruction, because it rouses the faculties to act. I name Moses, Solomon, Esop, Homer, Plato.” I write and draw and read and study in order that human faculties, mine and other people’s, may be roused to act. I keep returning to works whose mystery I feel I will never crack: the poems of Keats, the novels of Beckett, Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” sonata, paintings of Leonora Carrington, the quartet music of Ornette Coleman, “Last Kind Word Blues” by Geeshie Wiley… A long, but not endless, list.

2. What is it about collaborating with other poets and artists that you find compelling?

JC: Double the mystery, double the probe into it! When two subjectivities, each as mysterious to itself as it as to the other, drop their defenses and open their imaginations in each other’s presence, something like a miracle can occur — not that it always will! But the poems I’ve written and drawings I’ve made with my beloved partner Celeste Goyer show me elements of the mind in action that I cannot see elsewhere, and when I model for my spirit-sister Holaday Mason, I feel that “another me,” one that I know but do not know, appears in the photographs, not the face I see in a mirror.

To see examples in poetry where the miracle occurs, I recommend Saints of Hysteria: A Half-Century of Collaborative American Poetry, ed. David Trinidad, Denise Duhamel, Maureen Seaton (Soft Skull Press, 2007).

3. Do you think it's possible to articulate fully what engages us in a work of art or literature?

JC: Of course not! (I hope.) And I see two main reasons.

The spiritual / religious roots of visual art and poetic narrative put those aspects of life which defy rational thought into the foreground of human experience. Dramatic tragedy, for example, originates in the ritual sacrifice of an animal who is an offering to a god (Dionysus) and at the same time a representation of him. How can a god sacrifice himself to himself? Thus the ancients made sense of the interweaving of life and death — they preserved the irrationality of its mystery with paradox. In other words, in any strong work of literature, I expect to find a paradoxical element, a mystery that keeps me coming back for multiple encounters.

The other reason is that a human being is a work-in-progress. I don’t read or listen or watch at age 67 the way I did at 27 or at 47, and this is to be expected. For example, Madame Bovary engaged me at 27 and engages me today, but at 27, I saw it primarily as a brilliant rhetorical performance by its hero-author. Today, I see it somewhat as that, but more as a psychological analysis of the toxic effects of media-dominated consumer society, avant la lettre — “media” are Paris fashion magazines and store catalogues, “consumerism” is L’Hereaux and his store, but the idea is already there. You might say what engages me most is the notion that other elements of it that I can’t see right now may come to engage me later. It makes me look forward to being 87.

Holaday Mason, poet, photographer and psychotherapist

1. Are the tableaus in your images planned out in advance?

HM: Well, hmmmm… like the writing of poems, I rarely have anything planned out in advance specifically. Rather, I wait listening (mainly at a bodily level ) for what begins to be generated in the field between myself & those who have so generously agreed to play. Often there are elements that have symbolic reverberations in the way of myth as it lives within humans. What I have found over time is that much like the making of a body of poems that coalesce into a book, I allow my atunement to guide me & this offers ME many surprises, the greatest of which is often what has been a pre-conscious concern I am not fully processing or aware of. The images then become a series or body of work much in the same way a collection of poems written over perhaps five or so years begins to articulate it’s OWN nature. At best, I get out of the way & try to carry or hold the, at times, immense energies that generate during a shoot or during the years when certain “ props” or imported elements still seems to have a voice. As a psychotherapist, this “allowing “ for something to be revealed in my client is the path of the most powerful development. So, I do not really “ plan” much out. Most of the time what I have in mind never happens! I have these simple “ props” often easy to carry & employ & then see what my models & the weather & the light & the soil & the space “ say” to me—to us. I am simply the messenger. In a way we all sort of disappear & as Cush mentioned in his statement--- mystery acts through us to hopefully rendering something of depth & beauty which for me is an altar I will always kneel before.

2. What overlap do you see in your work as a poet and a photographer?

HM: Both art forms are for me expressions of the unknown & can only be “heard” mainly through the instrument of the body & emotion, when I allow myself to shift from the quotidian to the realms of the unseen. Ironic I know. But it appears (ha!) that many of my images both as a poet & a photographer come from those meditative non-verbal spaces. Recently I have had some work come more from a conceit but regardless, those works are never formed in a left brain way a priori to the action of taking pen to paper (I still almost exclusively draft poems by hand) or I actually begin a shoot. And, as I said, the amassed product or material is always a surprise to me.

3. What can you say about the way your photographs interact with Celeste's paintings in this show?

HM: Celeste’s painting have a deep duende often addressing emotional elements that we frequently only allow for in less distilled ways or which are, in fact, inexpressible, unbearable even at a semi-conscious level, let alone in the verbal linear domain we all so often inhabit. I do think, at their best, my images too reach into & seize aspects of consciousness/ existence we don’t have mirrors for. To name a few-- the mensus, how gore can render beauty, the many domains between waking & sleeping, the layers of grief, issues of censorship, of respect for the strange, of certain unpopular emotions. Celeste’s work & mine both speak to elements we all may never be able to fully integrate. As with all collaborations that work well, there is a call & response, a harmonization, a dialogue between the images, the people that strengthens the whole. In this collection the two sort of build the best sort of home for one another in hue, line, movement, echoing into a much larger more dimensional emotional ephemerality. They kind of keep falling in love with one another in a smiling generosity, like a happy mini eco-system embracing something bigger. I have and continue to love working with both Celeste and Cushing—the whole so often becoming greater than the parts.

Celeste Goyer, poet, artist

1. Is there a thematic commonality to the works in this exhibit?

CG: While the works weren’t chosen thematically, Holaday and I seem to be generally working similar veins of ore using a similarly instinctive approach. Certainly we’re both attracted to strangeness, mystery, the power of the feminine—specifically the mythic power of the post-menopausal woman—the crone figure—as she stands in contrast to the abstract world built largely by men.

I’ve come to think of this power as allied with the figure the first people call Spider Grandmother. She’s transitioned from creator of life to protector of life—her webs reach everywhere—she’s super-sensitive, which perhaps accounts for why many older women of my acquaintance can no longer comfortably wear tight clothing or smoke pot…She’s now pregnant with many seeds—the pomegranate jewels—containing death and the blood knowledge. Her fearlessness is needed in every society. At one time I proposed creating a huge contingent of grandmothers who would be partnered with government officials, ready to call bullshit on anything that threatens the common good.

2. Could you talk about the title of the show?

CG: Only a few yards away, something catches your eye. It doesn’t quite make sense—the scale is off, the color too strong for that spot, certain natural laws seem to be straining to hold. Only a few yards away is a world where surrealism is the governing force and time never heard of any arrows but only rolls along crazily like a hoop. The other world I’m describing is, as the saying goes, inside this one.

When I was a child living in upstate New York, I spotted a surreal object from the backseat of the family car. We were headed to Howe Caverns to see the decorated caves. I have a dim memory of that, mostly the moment where they turn the lights out, so you can experience true absence of all light, but I remember much more vividly, and still can’t explain, the monumental black-and-white cow I saw standing motionless in an ordinary field bounded by trees. It must have been four stories tall.

3. What does the description 'ephemeral' mean in some of your artwork descriptions?

CG: Photographing paintings in progress is helpful in many ways, and an additional benefit is to preserve a work whose final stage either veered away into a completely different direction or was eroded through overwork. Particularly when I work on rice paper using watercolors, it can break down under my rather violent application methods. These ephemeral works can become original prints—I’ve had some printed large-format on cotton or silk and added more color with ink or oil pastel.

I’m often struggling to fit my artwork into standard categories. For instance, the image called ‘Man from Hiroshima Part #2’ is a photograph in the studio of two paintings on rice paper stacked together and held in front of a light. I’d been painting an eye in a face and didn’t realize I’d broken through the first layer and was actually working on the backing layer through a hole… then that eye looked interesting overlaid on a different face, etc. I’m forever messing with bits and scraps. Sometimes, if all else fails, they become hats.