In the past, art’s marriage to religion was paradoxically logical, functioning as a tool of communication and even intimidation—bullying to incite belief. But where, in the last two hundred years, when art has transcended its relationship with the church, does art fit into this niche anymore? What is left to believe in?
The configuration of Michael Dudeck’s Parthenogenesis exhibition at the Pari Nadimi Gallery plays a supporting role in his performance within the gallery. Three mannequins are suspended from the ceiling to create a triangular formation, and each is embellished with a variation of gas masks, strips of leather, rope, or plastic bits to create hybrid, decidedly male creatures—half-human, half-renegade post-apocalyptic warriors. Pencil and mixed media drawings, sometimes embellished with text and sometimes maimed—ripped, burned, sewn, splattered and pasted over—hang on the walls, alongside a row of photographs depicting Dudeck, a self-proclaimed Witch Doctor, costumed and posed in various stages of his imagined becoming. At the rear of the space, an altar outlined by rolls of orange tape awaits use. Surrounded by tropes of ritual—bowls of sage and cedar, and bone-like tools and decorations—it is at this altar where Dudeck’s ritualistic performance takes place.
Atmospheric music1 drones out of invisible speakers as Dudeck enters the space. Naked except for a coat of white powder, a fur-covered loincloth, a headdress bearing dreadlock-like ropes draping past his waist, and false yellow eyelashes, Dudeck solemnly enters the gallery carrying an orange iteration of the suspended mannequins, hoisted above his head. Dudeck is a worshipper, a master of ceremonies, conducting the ritual and offering the mannequin to each of the suspended gods by kneeling before them. Carrying the orange figure and placing it within the lines of the altar created by the rolls of tape, the ritual begins.
Before tending to the still, orange being, Dudeck lights the bowls of sage and cedar and blesses each of his drawings in careful ceremony around the room. Returning to the mannequin, Dudeck’s heavy breathing punctuates the ongoing soundtrack, his intake and output eventually turning into gutteral chants; notes held for longer intervals than seem humanly possible, and finally becoming frighteningly aggressive as his attention to the orange figure intensifies. The chants crescendo synchronically with the prepared soundtrack, becoming more and more musical as Dudeck honours the mannequin by breathing over its stiff limbs as if he was sucking out an evil spirit. Eventually Dudeck destroys the figure, much in the same way he has destroyed his drawings; the tape is unraveled and torn from the orange body, its left arm ripped from its plastic socket and placed on its chest along with the bones and skulls. Finally, in a conclusive act of transference, Dudeck removes his headdress and places it on the mannequin, carefully splaying the ropes over its body and placing the rolls of tape on its remaining limbs.
For as long as art has found meaning and purpose outside of organized religion, ritual, spirituality and shamanism have remained themes in all manner of visual media. Joseph Beuys heralded the healing powers of art and declared himself a Shaman; Mark Rothko believed his paintings to have transcendental powers. In both cases, viewers were made to understand art in a new way. For Dudeck, however, a burning question bubbles in the remnants of his performance: What, exactly, am I being asked to believe in?
Dudeck uses ritualistic, apocalyptic and dystopic language to describe his work, his biography sounding less like a statement of intent and more like a linguistic art piece in its own rite. He uses words like “vocation,” “migratory,” “nomadic,” and “transformation,”2 implying divinity, ritual, passage and transcendence before the art even begins. His website is subtitled “Witch Doctor” and is divided into four sections: Sigils, Effigies, Rituals, and Scriptures. The website, as a documentation of Dudeck’s body of work, is the neo-Goth, neo-tribal, neo-colonial traipse of a pantheological observer who has plucked tropes of rituals and rites to exoticize a religion of his own, where he is at once God, Shaman, Witch Doctor, Priest, Apostle, Sensei, Rinpoche, Guru and Imam.
Who is the figure at the altar? Does Dudeck honour a mannequin, or is the mannequin representative of a once-living being? Does his use of a Bic lighter to ignite the sage indicate the effect of modernism on ritual, or is it a product of lazy artmaking? Ritual of the more legitimized variety—like church, for example—exists as it does after thousands of years of practice and millions of practitioners. Perhaps what Dudeck proves, then, is the arbitrariness of such ritual—the ease with which one can just make it up.
Parthenogenesis—a name science has given, by the way, to the miracle of Immaculate Conception—is an extension of Dudeck’s vast interest in ritualistic practice. It is completely appropriate, then, as a title for Dudeck’s performance—a ritual born without cause, substance or reason.
Notes:
1 “An ethereal soundscore by Robert Taite” (“Exhibitions: Michael Dudeck.” Pari Nadimi Gallery. 08 Feb. 2009 http://parinadimigallery.com/Site/index.php/exhibitions/show/michael_dudeck.)
2 “My vocation challenges the divide between human and animal, rational and emotional. It studies the intersections, where binaries bleed into one another. I work at a transdisciplinary level. I engage in migratory, nomadic procedures whereby I occupy ‘in-between’ spaces in pursuit of a turbulent vulnerability that offers the potential for transformation.” (Dudeck, Michael. MichaelDudeckWitchDoctor. 08 Feb. 2009 http://www.michaeldudeck.com/bio.html.)
