Thursday, March 02, 2006

Awhile back I started to work on a series of sculptures (I seem to like to work in series) with the idea that I would examine the dominant deities which are lately thought of as male, and show them as female. It all came from a crucified figure I made with a female form and which I later recognized was the equivilant of the Catholic Crucifix. The basis of the veneration certain highly religious people feel toward images or even certain objects, is the closeness, I believe, to archetypal iomagery.

So, with a 'Jesus' image there I did a very nice Persephone and am still working on that now. Still got the face to do yet... sigh. Anyway, with all this stuff going on about the Muhammad cartoons, and which I am very ambiliant about, I got to worrying. Was this a good time to be going ahead with a theme of religious icons portrayed as female? And that got me started about a whole stream of images which could be gender-swapped, and what would that do to the images? I've started on an image of Kali and started an image of Krishna but I started thinking about the variations on the theme. And that's what slows you down. Getting all het up about some detail or another... better to let it drift off to the side while you create. So I decided that Krishna as a child was a good topic, with the additional neat thing that I could possibly work on a Mother and Child theme too. Gets complicated if you get too many cross-threads, but you get what I mean.

Well, I think the problem with having access to so much information is the processing time required to catalog it all. Nevertheless, you gotta wonder if they are chopping the hands off in various ways, should we stick out our neck? What if they miss and hit a vital organ? Yeah, that would be bad. But Here it starts to get interesting, because since I equate archetypes with gestalt on a grand scale... well, you just gotta know that if Krishna as Kali makes public policy now, things will get 'interesting' on the street.

But for those of us living on the rim of things, these can be full times. I just have to relax and let the breath out. Like being flushed down the toilet, you might not be full of shit, but you're going down anyway. I think in times like these I should just make the strongest pieces I can make and just not bandy them about. I say this because after I do Buddha and some of the Western deities as female I will sooner or later come to Islamic images and they are lately cutting off people's hands. Both our "Side" and "Thiers". I really think the guys on our side like to watch more than the guys on the other side. But you can be slippery and if I make the right images and do it well, when this whole things blows over at least there will be a record that thru it all some of us kept our sense of humor.

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