Mark Hosler @ Bob Rauschenberg

Mark Hosler, charcoal in sketchbook, 12 x 9 inches, 2019

Mark Hosler, signature on adjacent page, 2019

Mark Hosler of Negativland: Another great concert at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at FSW State College. Drawing live was difficult because I was in the dark. Of ten sketches I made this is the only one worth showing (here but also to Mr. Hostler, who then signed the drawing on the next page with another drawing.) I've been listening (and reading) Negativland for the last two days.

Les Dani de Nouvelle Guinée

Dani woman with children
14 x 11 inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2019

The Dani who live in the western (Indonesian) part of New Guinea are known for their appearances. Men wear penis sheaths that are quite long and pointy. The sheaths look vicious but I assume they function the opposite way as it keeps men from getting an erection and therefore discourages the idea of sexual intercourse. Women, when losing a dear one cut off a digit of one of their fingers, a painful way to mourn but it helps mourning I suppose. The oldest paintings known in the world are those of hand stencils found in Sulawesi, Indonesia and in Spain. Some fingers in these hand stencils have digits missing. Due to the same tradition of mourning? It is well established that many early hands were the hands of women. Were they the first artists? The French publisher NordSud compiled four discs with the music of the Dani. The most surprising tracks are a number of examples of throat singing, adding yet another geographic location this age old tradition is still being practiced.

Out Demons, Out

Barbara Kraus (as Aloise Schinkenmaier)
14 x 9 inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2019

Here's an odd one for you. The source image is a still taken from the video Out Demons Out, in which Austrian dancer and performance artist Barbara Kraus acts as the also Austrian medium Aloise Schinkenmaier. In one of the most ridiculous videos I've ever seen Kraus, as Schinkenmaier, meets her old friend Satan, a man in a bear costume played by Martin Leitner. It's not Kraus but Schinkenmaier who is featured in the top 100. I could not positively identify Schinkenmaier herself in any of the many photos associated with the German album Okkulte Stimmen – Mediale Musik: Recordings of Unseen Intelligences, 1907-2007. On the second of that 3CD-set Schinkenmaier is heard as a medium picking up an unknown language while being recorded in 1967. Later the language was identified as a dialect of a little known Polynesian language. Schinkenmaier herself could not possibly have been aware of that language let alone speak it as if it were native to her. The recording clocks a dramatic two minutes in which Schinkenmaier narrates an emotional scene in this Polynesian language. I became interested in this recording in the context of something about memory that travels on a plane usually hidden to us (call it the astral plane,) the key to my hypothesis on the origin of music. In the zine Ach Ja #10: The Origin of Music (2) I wrote a paragraph headed "Dreams." 

Dreams contain images, sounds, and words that must be contained inside one’s being. Curiously the material contained in dreams might consist of features that were never experienced in one's life; places never traveled, languages never learned, sounds never heard, times of yore or future.  Where does this material come from? Archetypes, shared memory, or can the unconscious travel beyond our bodies to different times and different places? It’s known that our DNA contains of up to 3% denisovan, 5% of neanderthal, and a whole lot of early homo sapiens.  Along with DNA there would also be a memory, a trace of consciousness from our early ancestors.  We normally can’t access this information as it is stored deep down in our subconsciousness.  There are however atavisms, and there are still pre-industrialized (illiterate) people whose memories exist on different planes then ours. Oral traditions, counter-intuitively perhaps, can subsist through hundreds, even thousands of years. 

While it's easy to dismiss certain unexplainable phenomena as fake or trickery, I am not convinced that things that aren't easily explained, or don't fit known workings of the physical world, are therefore non existing. 

The Andaman Islands

Andaman Islands, Port Blair
14 x 9 inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2019

In November 2018 John Allen Chau, an American missionary, set foot on the northernmost of the Sentinel Islands. His mission didn't last long as he was speared by the indigenous Sentinelese. The Sentinelese inhabit the least visited of the Andaman Islands that are located in the Bay of Bengal east of India. The latest Indian census counted only thirty-nine inhabitants. The Indian government used satellite imagery to count because visits are prohibited. Chau traveled illegally. Since 1700, as far back as recorded history goes on the Andaman Islands, the Sentinelese have only been in contact with the modern world a handful of times, usually very brief as they either flee into the bushes or kill the visitors. The Indian government has decided to leave them alone. The Onge, who inhabit the largest of the Andaman Islands, are related to the Sentinelese but only rarely are in contact with the Sentinelese. The inhabitants of the Andaman Islands are believed to be members of the first wave of migrants out of Africa of our species some 60,000 years ago. The Sentinelese, moreover, are believed to have been completely isolated from contact since 30,000 BCE when they inhabited the island they're still living at today. Not only visiting is prohibited but also photography is not allowed, even from a great distance. There are only a handful of images of the Sentinelese known, all taken from a distance. Their language is unintelligible. There are no sound recordings whatsoever. The related Onge share their territory with Indian settlements and are also left to their own. I was surprised to find a sound recording made by the Indian Institute of Anthropology in 1960. The recording may be the closest analogy to the music of prehistoric men that exists. The recording was made in Port Blair, the capital of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and features a chorus of boys and girls performing a turtle hunting song.

Pic-eine'rkin

Three women from the ensemble Kiighwyak 
introducing the song Ay-ay-amamay
14 x 9 inches, oil and acrylic on canvas, 2019

Ay-ay-amamay is a song posted by OPOS (Open Planet of Sound), a music program at the University of Basel, Switzerland. We see and hear seven singers who form the group Kiighwyak perform a pic-eine'rkin (a style of throat singing specific to the Siberian Chukchi). The song, as is shown in the video linked to above, comes with a set of hand gestures. The movements of the hands, with an occasional clap in there, belong to the song. Traditions have withstood the ages, even when musical traditions have been repressed by political events. The Chukchi women seen in the video wear ordinary modern clothing. That traditional music isn't just performed by those peoples who haven't been in contact with civilizations, and that ancient musical traditions are performed in buckskin, or reindeer pelts belong to the world of myth. The pic-eine'rkin songs however, are performed today by only a few Yupik and Chukchi women. The style is related to the Inuit katajjait and the Ainu rehkuhkara traditions.  Recorded between 1991 and 1993 in Siberia. 

The small painting took me almost a month to complete. The central figure featured in the painting from the beginning, unchanged. The other other singers depicted did change their positions and sizes a few times. The portrait of Lenin, in the background gold-on-gold, appeared, disappeared, and reappeared several times, as did it's position and size.