alicubi journal :: the table is rumbling

I'm sitting here feeling rather silly--in a velvet coat. I should introduce you to Mr. Stoneking. He is typing for me. He is a better typist than me.

I'm wondering what you're going to ask me.

Okay, tell me about growing up in New Zealand.

Oh my god. Now this is a very frightening question, as I always felt like a refugee. I spent most of my early childhood walking round and round an iron clothesline. The wind hurt my arms. I felt I didn't belong anywhere. I saw everything differently than other people. I didn't really know what they were talking about--not at school. New Zealand is a very young country. It has a young verdant body, like the beginning of the world, but it has a very undeveloped mental body. Where the body is young, the mental body is frequently undeveloped. I always wondered why I'd been born there. My childhood was particularly painful, because the man who was pinned on me for a father was not my father, and although I didn't consciously know this, and it was a terrible secret of my mother's, something terrible weighed on me. I feared his introversion. I got migraines. When I lay in bed with a migraine, I would see his eye burst through the keyhole and float disembodied around the room. I would scream for my mother to take him away. Much later, I realised he had much more sympathy for me than my mother--but this is a long story. When I was thirty-three I found out who my real father was, but I won't tell you about this unless you ask me. It is a huge question you ask, and really demands a huge answer.

Yes, I can see that.

I think [it would be] out of balance with the entire interview. I'm not sure how much you want to hear.

I would agree, but what you have said is very interesting, and will suffice for now. I would like to move on to some other things I was thinking of...

OK. (That was Stoneking saying "OK." I never say "OK.")

You say that New Zealand is mentally underdeveloped. I wonder, do New Zealanders fall for American (also a young country) popular culture? How do you see fellow artists there responding to American trends?

New Zealand is very influenced by America, as is the whole world, but when I say it is very undeveloped mentality...most people wouldn't say that. I have mental relationships with hidden bodies. A land, a country, is like a person--its mental body, its emotional body, its desire body. New Zealand doesn't have a very developed mental body, but one can draw from anywhere. If one is in a cupboard, a prison, one gangs up, or is drawn to invisible people. One can have invisible relationships. If one is starved on the outside, one has the choice to turn inward. I am not a conventional artist, or a conventional thinker, and this has often left me stranded. I didn't paint for the public. I painted because I had an abundance of terrible creative energy which I spent years focusing.

You've been billed as an "outsider" artist. Is that a term you embrace?

Well...you could say it is rather a hideous term, as no one likes being an outsider. It means that one is spurned, often, by hierarchies. It is quite a frightening term, but as I have always been an outsider...this is something that is pinned on you, by other people. I would never call myself this. Those who have a vision in common call those who don't share that vision "outsiders." Am I untrainable? YES! And it causes me suffering at times, but I cannot deny my difference from so many others who call themselves artists and poets. I don't really like labels--full stop.

Perhaps then, could the term outsider be considered artspeak, and chalked up to the academic art scene's postmodern sense of irony?

Let us just look. If we don't label, but just look and perceive, we will see, without the jargon, some bored academic created this idea. The less we think about labels the better. Sense of irony? The irony is that the academics have NOTHING to do with the artists or their lives. People used to laugh at my drawings when I was a child, so I hid. I hid for years, put my paintings in cupboards instead of food, because I was afraid people would laugh at me. I used my own sense of realism, which did not harmonise with other people's. I painted for years before I realised I never gave people any thumbs. Now I am so relaxed, I often don't give them legs or arms. I do entirely what is thrown up to me from my unconscious. I paint for my own invisible audience, but I am not finally influenced by them. I have called up the serpent, and must work or die. That is all.

Now, a lot of critics feel that gallery scouts who "discover" outsider artists are making fun of them, while making money off them. Have you yourself ever felt exploited in such a way?

Well, you could say I'm not the usual outsider artist, as I have developed my painting to a very powerful degree. My approach is not really childlike or naive. I am working with ideas. My paintings have a mental, physical and emotional body. They are about putting soul power onto a canvas, in whatever form I am compelled to shape. I work like a medium. In this way I am nothing like an outsider, and yet I am a true primitive, because I have my own way of doing everything. People are afraid of the eye of outsiders because often they see things as they really are--the astral picture, the idea behind the idea, the archetype. It is entirely differently shaped. The others, the establishment, are the undeveloped ones. They go by what they think is a universal rule, because so many have the same idea, but they are really hideously brainwashed. Early in my life, I loathed the mundane.

Instead of asking you what conventions you eschew, may I ask what conventions, stylistic and otherwise, you choose to follow? You are quite obviously aware of art history and theory.

I broke away from most rules. I don't follow anything. I work like a medium. I am sharp as a hunter, waiting to birth an idea, and yet I am slumbering, mediumistically. I cannot interfere. I start without rules or knowledge, set adrift in the most eccentric vehicle, on blood-red waters. I know nothing. I remember nothing. I must leave my will at the entrance to the tomb, for if I am to draw from this vast universal well, I cannot interfere. It is only after I have struggled to birth the idea, I can lay aside my blindness, clean away the dross, and see what I have birthed. This is how I have worked for years. This is how I write. All the time I am grappling for logic, true logic, the balance of heart of mind. I can accomplish a lot in that strange fumbling darkness, shot with light apocalyptic.

However, you do choose to paint in conventional materials (oils), on the conventional surface (a rectangular canvas); though, of course, you do go elsewhere--with your ceramics and performance work.

Well, my paintings are all acrylic and toilet paper now. They are sculptured with gel. I use what is at hand, in my own way. A lot of my paintings are not rectangular. They are not any shape at all. The medium is a vehicle for the creator to express through. So if it was a rolling pin or a sheet of canvas or whatever, it is the inspiration that is important. The inspiration must be let free, or neither rolling pin or paper or canvas will sing.

Regarding performance poetry, Marc Smith, the self-proclaimed "Grand Pooh Bah" of the Chicago performance "Poetry Slam," said that he wouldn't (a paraphrase) waste his breath on people who hadn't spent years "mastering" and studying the art of poetry. He also said that all he strives for as a poet is to "be sent around to universities to conduct workshops, and do lectures at a thousand dollars a crack." What would you say to Marc?

I might not even talk to him. I think poetry is a very natural thing that most people are endowed with, but then hierarchies and places of training come in to it, and people lose their talent. For poetry is a natural and beautiful thing. It is a way of living, part of a whole way of life and thought, and it's been with me all my life--and with others that I've known. I have always put my creative life above my material need, so there is very little I can say about this man who loves trotting round universities.

William Stoneking said that your poetry expresses something that "cannot be taught in Creative Writing 101..." How do you feel about the notion, which goes rather unchallenged, that the university creative writing workshop is the best means of fostering good writing?

I'm horrified by that, as I always feel that if a person wants to write or paint or draw, if they retreat to that wilderness of the unconscious, it's all there, a universal well anyone can dip into. But this is the exciting thing from my point of view--if one could be a type of teacher with young children, teaching in a different sort of way, which has nothing to do with posting information, or pinning the person down to a course.

Do you agree that it's the dominant paradigm nowadays--i.e., go to school, learn to write, become a Great Writer?

It's really about opening the lid of the unconscious and letting out what is already there. But a lot of people have become ill from it, and are able to do nothing. One cannot avoid the pain and anguish that is consequent upon an interior journey, but it is precisely that journey that must be made, if one is going to find one's own voice, and not the voice one has been educated to have.

Have you had a mentor? I think mentorship is the most important means of developing one's abilities.

You could say I had millions of mentors, invisible ones, when I was a child. Our house was full of poetry and amazing literature, and prints of all the modern painters.

My earliest memories, from [age] two or three, are turning the pages of art books, looking at Ben Shaun prints, Picasso, Kisling, Modigliani, the lot. I would pick up a book, and have a relationship with what was inside. People seeped out of books. The people who wrote them were my companions, and I read very early. My mother had a wine velour book of the writings of Oscar Wilde. I became obsessed with him. I loved him as a human being. I had a relationship with him. I read the most unsuitable books as a child. What I read and didn't understand stayed inside me. I didn't know what they were talking about, and I didn't want to know. I didn't know what they were talking about AT SCHOOL, I mean. I KNEW what the writers were talking about, and it had nothing to do with what the teachers were saying, because there was no inspiration, only secondhand brainwashing. I felt I needed to leave my mind empty, so that I could hoe my own wilderness as much as I could. All those years of fear...I used to think of myself as a leper...me hiding behind a curtain on cold dark days...it was worth it, because when I finally inherited my mind, I didn't have anything to get rid of--no stale ideas and training and information. I lived in a ruthless wilderness, interested in nothing, except perhaps seduction, which I was really good at.

William also says that anyone who finds your work humorous has himself "to blame." What is wrong, if anything, with someone finding humor in your poetry, or your paintings, for that matter?

But my work is terribly funny. I think what Stoneking means is that if they see that humour, it is because of what THEY bring to their perception. A lot of people see only fear and anguish and pain in my work, but that is because that is what THEY are bringing to it. My work often reflects the psyche of the one who is perceiving it, and the reflection can change as quickly as one's mood. This is poorly expressed, but do you see what I mean? The perceiver is part of the process of creation, and bears some responsibility for what they see and hear. People frequently don't participate in creation, largely because the egos and lack of talent of so many so-called artists, albeit well trained, allow them no room for participation. They can find no evidence of themselves in what they are looking at.

The titles of two of your paintings are intriguing, and I admit, quite funny--Conrad Crying Because She Can't Put Eisenstein's Head Back On, and I Always Sucked Your Nose. Tell me about these titles.

Re: Eisenstein. Stoneking wrote a play about Eisenstein, in Mexico, and I wanted to do a painting to go on the cover of the published text. I had very little money, and painting is an expensive thing. I have gone without everything to paint. Anyway, I couldn't afford the toilet paper, so I used newspaper. I made this huge lolling head, which excited me enormously, using gel and impasto. The weather was wet. For three weeks it rained. The head got heavier, and heavier each day. Stoneking would come to my studio and threaten me, saying, "you'll never keep this head on." Every time I fastened it to the canvas and thought it was secure, it would slide off, and fall to the floor with a terrible crash. I'd scoop it up like a lunatic, trying to keep it on with willpower. There was no other way it was going to stay on. Every day Stoneking would say the same thing. Every day I would glue this huge head back on. After three weeks, I was broken, in the most terrible despair. Stoneking gloated with a pink face. He was married. It was then that I made the final painting, totally defeated. It was a painting of me in an open coffin, crying because I couldn't keep Eisenstein's face on, and all around me were the faces of my personality, grinding their teeth.

Re: Sucked Your Nose. It's about Stoneking and his son, Christoph. When Christoph was a little boy, Stoneking always sucked his nose--it was so fat and comely, and Christoph was like this bewitched salamander. He was so small, and Stone so big. That is all.

I thought it had to do with the rustic custom of parents sucking mucus from a baby's nose when it is sick.

No, nothing so clinical--just an expression of affection.

You are described as a spiritual person. Tell me a little more about your spiritual beliefs, and what the word "spiritual" means to you.

Who said I was spiritual? I can answer, but I am wondering where you got this idea.

The word comes up a lot in reference to you.

Well, I have lived in a very strange way, washed up on strange shores, and I spent a lot of time alone. It is a very difficult thing to talk about, as I have led a very scandalous life, in the eyes of most people--scandalous and tragic. At the age of twenty six...it really started there...I had an apocalyptic happening. I didn't want to live anymore. I didn't see any reason for living, because when I looked, I didn't love anybody--not the man I lived with, not my child, Miro. I felt like a loathsome creature. When I put my head in a gas oven, and lay there amongst the crumbs, I had an apocalyptic vision. I realised that this physical part of me that I identified so strongly with was only one small part of me--that the soul was trapped in the body. It could fly in and out. That I was the sum total of many experiences and lives. The perfume, the stench, the horror, the joy...and that if I killed myself I'd still be left with all my problems, spinning round without a body, an eternal howl. I pulled myself out of the oven. I realised I had to go on living. My fear of exposure was so great that if I did die, they would pull me out of the oven and see me in all of my hideousness--a monster out of a fairy tale. I had fallen into a pit. I had to find a way of getting out. I asked myself if I loved anything, anyone. I loved no one. My reflection was my curse. I did love something. I loved hills, trees, rivers, sea, and I knew I could never appear in front of them again until I had changed. My sole aim was that I could change enough so I could lift my head and walk outside under the sky. That I could walk beside trees, appear beside these beautiful things without feeling like a monster. I shut myself in one room for nine months. I burned all my clothes. I was like a crouching beast. My closet lover was Torment, and his brother, Horror. It was Lucidity I longed for. It was the most extraordinary journey--at first, a terrible hopelessness. I used to look in the mirror, thinking, "if only I could look ordinary..." I looked only like a beast. Bit by bit, a hidden landscape appeared. The blood-red cord fell at my feet, writhing at my feet. I worked with it blindly, instinctively, still cloaked in fear, and after some months, I was dimly aware that I wasn't alone, that I was surrounded by invisible minds, that I was unable to touch or see. I had help, but it was very dim, and yet I knew it was there. I worked very hard, invisibly, for nine months, in one room, never coming out, and at the end of nine moths I was able to walk outside and lift my head, like an ancient leaf. A lot of bark had fallen, and this was the beginning of drama after drama after drama, and a journey into the parody of life. I was slowly eradicating fear. The task was simply to go into the world and deal with it. It was a weird thing, because I had resisted it for years. It was my great fear from childhood. I stared at Atlas on my mother's stove. It was linked to me going into the world. It was what I had to do, and every day as a child, Atlas would remind me of this.

Maybe spirituality to a degree is to know one's own wickedness--and one's wickedness is really everyone's wickedness, and we're all in the same plight. Anyway, from then, I looked more at my own personality, and my whole life became my creativity. I recovered my life through my paintings and poetry, and lost everything in the bargain--except my self. Husbands, children, houses, money, reputation--falling back into ego's plight. But all this is another long story...I am a rather horrendously dramatic person.