Fluxes (1968) by ARTHUR LIPSETT

Fluxes
Arthur Lipsett, Canada, 1968, 24 min

 

This experimental short conveys avant-garde filmmaker ARTHUR LIPSETT’s view of the human condition and the chaotic planet on which we live. As in his other films (Very Nice, Very Nice; 21-87), the flow of images in Fluxes seems somewhat disjointed and erratic – yet it all builds up to a devastating indictment of the modern world. The film’s only commentary consists of unrelated snatches of words and sounds.

 

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  • N-Zone (1970) by ARTHUR LIPSETT (May 11, 2016)
  • The Arthur Lipsett Project: A Dot on the Histomap (2007) by ERIC GAUCHER (March 15, 2012)
  • Images tirées du film N-Zone (1970) d’ARTHUR LIPSETT (July 9, 2011)
  • Remembering Arthur (2006) by MARTIN LAVUT (May 12, 2011)
  • A Trip Down Memory Lane (1965) & Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) by ARTHUR LIPSETT (May 12, 2011)
  • 21-87 (1964) by ARTHUR LIPSETT (January 31, 2011)
  • Free Fall (1964) d’ARTHUR LIPSETT (April 28, 2010)

An After School Satan Club could be coming to your kid’s elementary school

Doug Mesner, who goes by the professional name Lucien Greaves, is co-founder and spokesman for the Satanic Temple, a group of political activists who are seeking to establish After School Satan Clubs as a counterpart to fundamentalist Christian Good News Clubs, which they see as an attempt to infiltrate public education and erode the constitutional separation of church and state. (Josh Reynolds/For The Washington Post)

Doug Mesner, who goes by the professional name Lucien Greaves, is co-founder and spokesman for the Satanic Temple, a group of political activists who are seeking to establish After School Satan Clubs as a counterpart to fundamentalist Christian Good News Clubs, which they see as an attempt to infiltrate public education and erode the constitutional separation of church and state. (Josh Reynolds for The Washington Post)


SALEM, Mass. — It’s a hot summer night, and leaders of the Satanic Temple have gathered in the crimson-walled living room of a Victorian manse in this city renowned for its witch trials in the 17th century. They’re watching a sepiatoned video, in which children dance around a maypole, a spider crawls across a clown’s face and eerie, ambient chanting gives way to a backward, demonic voiceover. The group chuckles with approval.


They’re here plotting to bring their wisdom to the nation’s public elementary school children. They point out that Christian evangelical groups already have infiltrated the lives of America’s children through after-school religious programming in public schools, and they appear determined to give young students a choice: Jesus or Satan.


“It’s critical that children understand that there are multiple perspectives on all issues, and that they have a choice in how they think,” said Doug Mesner, the Satanic Temple’s co-founder.


On Monday, the group plans to introduce its After School Satan Club to public elementary schools, including one in Prince George’s County, petitioning school officials to allow them to open immediately as the academic year starts. Chapter heads from New York, Boston, Utah and Arizona were in Salem on July 10 talking strategy, with others from Minneapolis, Detroit, San Jose, New Orleans, Pittsburgh and Florida participating online. The promotional video, which feels like a mash-up of a horror movie trailer and a “Saturday Night Live” sketch, will serve to promote the new club along with its website — Afterschoolsatan.com.


The Satanic Temple — which has been offering tongue-in-cheek support for the fallen angel in public arenas that have embraced prayer and parochial ceremonies — is bringing its fight over constitutional separation of church and state to the nation’s schools.


But the group’s plan for public schoolchildren isn’t actually about promoting worship of the devil. The Satanic Temple doesn’t espouse a belief in the existence of a supernatural being that other religions identify solemnly as Satan, or Lucifer, or Beelzebub. The Temple rejects all forms of supernaturalism and is committed to the view that scientific rationality provides the best measure of reality.


According to Mesner, who goes by the professional name of Lucien Greaves, “Satan” is just a “metaphorical construct” intended to represent the rejection of all forms of tyranny over the human mind.


The curriculum for the proposed after-school clubs emphasizes the development of reasoning and social skills. The group says meetings will include a healthful snack, literature lesson, creative learning activities, a science lesson, puzzle solving and an art project. Every child will receive a membership card and must have a signed parental permission slip to attend.


“We think it’s important for kids to be able to see multiple points of view, to reason things through, to have empathy and feelings of benevolence for their fellow human beings,” said the Satanic Temple’s Utah chapter head, who goes by the name Chalice Blythe.


The emphasis on multiple perspectives is a hint pointing to the Temple’s true foe. The group at first intends to roll out the clubs in a limited number of schools in districts that also host an evangelical Christian after-school program known as the Good News Club.


Good News Clubs, which are sponsored by an organization founded in 1937 called the Child Evangelism Fellowship (CEF), aim to reach children as young as 5 with a fundamentalist form of evangelical Christianity. For most of their history, Good News Clubs were largely excluded from public schools out of concern that their presence would violate the Constitution.


In 2001, in a case that commanded the resources of powerful legal advocacy groups on the religious right, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and the Liberty Counsel, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that to exclude an after-school program on account of the religious views of its sponsors amounted to a violation of free-speech rights. The CEF then went on a tear, and by 2011, it reported 3,560 Good News Clubs, putting them in more than 5 percent of the nation’s public elementary schools.


The Satanic Temple makes no secret of its desire to use that same approach.


“We would like to thank the Liberty Counsel specifically for opening the doors to the After Satan Clubs through their dedication to religious liberty,” Greaves explained to the gathering of chapter heads in Salem. “So, ‘the Satanic Temple leverages religious freedom laws that put afterschool clubs in elementary schools nationwide.’ That’s going to be the message.”


The Liberty Counsel agrees that the Satanic Temple has a right to organize its clubs in public schools and takes the view that they can’t be banned so long as they’re not disruptive or engaging in rituals that put people at risk.


“I would definitely oppose after-school Satanic clubs, but they have a First Amendment right to meet,” said Mat Staver, Liberty Counsel’s founder and chairman. “I suspect, in this particular case, I can’t imagine there’s going to be a lot of students participating in this. It’s probably dust they’re kicking up and is likely to fade away in the near future for lack of interest.”


The Satanic Temple is eager to compete directly with the Good News Clubs and doesn’t hide its belief that its own after-school product is on the right side.


“While the Good News Clubs focus on indoctrination, instilling children with a fear of hell and God’s wrath, After School Satan Clubs will focus on free inquiry and rationalism,” Greaves said. “We prefer to give children an appreciation of the natural wonders surrounding them, not a fear of an everlasting other-worldly horror.”


Good News Club leaders have defended their organization’s presence in public schools. According to the Good News Club’s website, “each club includes a clear presentation of the Gospel and an opportunity for children to trust the Lord Jesus as Savior. Every club also includes strong discipleship training to build character and strengthen moral and spiritual growth.”


Amy Jensen, a professional educator in Tucson who has a master’s degree in curriculum, instruction and teaching from the University of Denver, says she has decided to lead an After School Satan Club after comparing its curriculum materials with those of the Good News Club. Jensen noted that the Satanic Temple’s materials say the group encourages benevolence and empathy among all people, and advocates practical common sense.


“As a teacher, if I were deciding whether to teach that or the fear and hatred of other people’s beliefs, which is what Good News Clubs teach, I would choose what the Satanic Temple has available,” she said.


Like all ASSC teachers, Jensen is a volunteer. To cover After School Satan Club costs, including facility use fees and curriculum materials, the Satanic Temple is launching a crowdfunding campaign — which is how it covers many of its initiatives.


The blend of political activism, religious critique and performance art that characterizes the After School Satan Club proposal is not a new approach for the Satanic Temple. It is just the most recent in a series of efforts that have made the Temple famous and notorious.


In 2014, after the Supreme Court ruled that the regular recitation of prayers before town meetings did not violate the First Amendment, provided that towns do not discriminate among religions, the Temple decided to test just how much religious liberty towns allowed. They volunteered to perform a Satanic benediction in an Arizona town where the board had regularly opened with a Christian prayer. In that case, the town preferred to abolish the practice of opening prayers.


David Suhor from the Satanic Temple delivered a unique invocation after several minutes of protester disruption at a Pensacola City Council meeting on July 14. (Gillian Brockell/The Washington Post)


In this and other instances — such as when the Satanic Temple proposed the installation of a statue of Baphomet in Oklahoma in response to a stone monument emblazoned with the Ten Commandments — the thrust of the Temple’s activism has been to prevent religious groups from claiming the mantle of implicit state endorsement.


The group’s activism has much in common with a movement started a decade ago, when Bobby Henderson of the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster penned an open letter to the Kansas School Board in 2005, citing fears that the introduction of teaching religious intelligent design alongside the theory of evolution would inculcate public school students with Christian thought. Henderson argued that believing that there is a benevolent deity made of spaghetti and meatballs is just as legitimate as believing in God. Believers in the Flying Spaghetti Monster took on the name “Pastafarians.”


Like the Satanic Temple, the Pastafarians insist that theirs is a genuine religion. According to Henderson, who published “The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster” in 2006, it’s inaccurate to say that his church is “purely a thought experiment or satire.”


“The Church of FSM is legit, and backed by hard science. Anything that comes across as humor or satire is purely coincidental,” Henderson says on his website. “Let me make this clear: we are not anti-religion, we are anti-crazy nonsense done in the name of religion. There is a difference.”


Greaves likewise insists that the Satanic Temple is much more than satire: “We’ve moved well beyond being a simple political ploy and into being a very sincere movement that seeks to separate religion from superstition,” he said.


The Satanic Temple expects to face opposition to its after-school proposal. When the group sought to erect the Baphomet monument, the Oklahoma governor’s office dismissed the proposal as “absurd,” and right-wing activists joined the attack.


Given the fight ahead and the long odds of pushing Christianity out of public schools, an important question about the After School Satan Clubs is: Does the Satanic Temple really want religion — even its own — in public schools?


Greaves is blunt: “We are only doing this because Good News Clubs have created a need for this. If Good News Clubs would operate in churches rather than public schools, that need would disappear. But our point is that if you let one religion into the public schools you have to let others, otherwise it’s an establishment of religion.”


In the 2001 Supreme Court ruling, Justice David Souter penned a scathing dissent. He suggested that the decision would bring about a world in which “any public school opened for civic meetings must be opened for use as a church, synagogue, or mosque.”


The Satanic Temple probably wasn’t front and center in his thinking. Yet it appears determined to prove him correct.



Katherine Stewart
The Washington Post

Geraldo Rivera’s “Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground” (1988)


Devil Worship: Exposing Satan’s Underground
The Geraldo Rivera Show, USA, Episode aired 22 October 1988, 90 min



Geraldo investigates allegations of a widespread Satanic underground in the United States. He talks to investigators and looks at occult crimes and ritual murders that have been committed in the United States. He also speaks to to self-identified Satanists who deny that Satanism is a dangerous religion.


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Is Satan Still a Big Deal in 2016? (June 27, 2016)
The Devil Worshippers (1985) presented by ABC (July 31, 2012)

Could it be magick? The occult returns to the art world

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: a pandrogenous devotee of sex magick. Photograph: Peter Dibdin/Publicity image

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: a pandrogenous devotee of sex magick. Photo Peter Dibdin/Publicity image



GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE and TONY OURSLER have spent many years exploring paranormal phenomena through their artworks. Now, both have major exhibitions in New York – and suddenly they’re not alone in their interests.

Drugs, blood, caskets, fish and hair all feature in the arsenal of supplies enlisted for art by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE. A few more, for variety’s sake: bones, a brass hand, dominatrix shoes and the discarded skin of a pet boa constrictor.


Best known as a musical dissident with the proto-industrial band Throbbing Gristle and later Psychic TV, BREYER P-ORRIDGE has made visual art for decades as part of a ritualistic practice in which boundaries tend to blur. The first transmissions of musical noise started in the 1970s, but art has been part of the project from several years before then to the present day. Work of the more recent vintage makes up the bulk of GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE: Try to Altar Everything, an exhibition on view at the Rubin Museum of Art in New York.


The Rubin show focuses on correspondences between global contemporaneity and historic cultures from areas around the Himalayas and India, and the show surveys, in an expansive fashion, BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s engagement with ideas from Hindu mythology and Nepal. Nepal is a favored haven away from the artist’s home in New York, but – as with most matters in BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s realm – worldly matters turn otherworldly fast.


Reliquary by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Photo Invisible Exports

‘Reliquary’ by GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Photo Invisible Exports



Visitors to the exhibition are greeted by two large illuminated portraits of nude bodies on the surface of caskets standing on end, one belonging to the artist and the other to h/er late partner and muse LADY JAYE BREYER P-ORRIDGE. The unorthodox pronoun “h/er” is not a mistake but the preferred way to address the genderless existence of the pandrogyne, a state of male-female fusion the two were seeking to achieve by way of surgical incursions and rituals to combine souls. The undertaking was chronicled intimately in the 2011 documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, released to wide acclaim four years after LADY JAYE fell prey to cancer and died (or “left her body,” as GENESIS tells it). Now, Try to Altar Everything brings some of the couple’s collaborative artwork into the light.


Blood Bunny, made over 10 years until its completion in 2007, is a sculpture under glass of a wooden rabbit covered in blood. Hanging from its head is a ponytail made from LADY JAYE’s hair, bright blond in contrast to the dark blood all but black in its desiccated state. The source of it was needle pricks from injections of the powerful drug ketamine, which the couple took – and BREYER P-ORRIDGE reveres still – for its fabled out-of-body experiences.


“It’s such a powerful material that we don’t waste it – we use it. We’ve got little vials of blood in our refrigerator at home,” BREYER P-ORRIDGE says while staring the bunny down at the museum on a recent sunny afternoon.


'Blood Bunny': includes blood infused with ketamine. Photo Invisible Exports

‘Blood Bunny’: includes blood infused with ketamine. Photo Invisible Exports



Nearby are a small sculptural shrine with dried fish slathered in sparkles over an abstract mandala design (Feeding the Fishes, 2010) and an odd clock remade with fossil teeth, feathers and bits of gold alluding to alchemical forces (It’s All a Matter of Time, 2016).


Works of the sort in the show serve as reliquaries or tools for use in rituals rooted in a mixture of familiar religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, voodoo) and inclinations toward the more arcane realms of black magic and the occult.


“We’ve investigated lots of avenues and that includes occulture of various types,” says BREYER P-ORRIDGE, who uses the word “we” exclusively in reference to a sort of individual and collective self. Early learning from occult figures like ALEISTER CROWLEY and mysterious magical sects like the Ordo Templi Orientis led to a lifelong devotion to ritualistic practice that has expanded and evolved.


S/he speaks highly still of “sex magic, where the orgasm is the moment when all forms of consciousness in your mind are joined, temporarily, and therefore you can pass a message through.” And other ceremonial endeavors involving age-old symbols and codes continue to be part of a method of art-making that is as much about the making as the end result.


GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE 'Feeding the Fishes': a small sculptural shrine. Photo Invisible Exports

GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE ‘Feeding the Fishes’: a small sculptural shrine. Photo Invisible Exports



An essay in the catalog for the Rubin show refers to BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s earliest work’s dedication to “the ‘discovery of intention’, meaning it created and unearthed its message and relevance through performance, not before,” while characterizing h/er ritual-abetted communion with LADY JAYE as a “living, experimental work of art in the process”.


The exhibition, which continues through 1 August, arrives in the midst of a certain vogue for art attuned to occult practices. Last fall, a survey of demonic and deranged paintings by MARJORIE CAMERON, an associate of notorious rocket-scientist/occultist JACK PARSONS and film-maker KENNETH ANGER, showed at the gallery of prominent New York art maven JEFFREY DEITCH. A group show titled Language of the Birds: Occult and Art gathered work by the likes of BRION GYSIN, JORDAN BELSON, ANOHNI, LIONEL ZIPRIN, CAROL BOVE and many more (including BREYER P-ORRIDGE) in the 80WSE Gallery at New York University. Uptown at the American Folk Art Museum, a show titled Mystery and Benevolence: Masonic and Odd Fellows Folk Art drew visitors before closing in May.


Enough interest has been fostered and fanned out to make one wonder about the source of it all. Is it a yearning for art made for purposes other than mere aesthetic enterprise? A desired deferral to forces other than those proffered by markets and asset-class finance deals? A curiosity about creations devised with a mind for matters at play outside internal dialogues within just the art world itself?


TONY OURSLER, who has a new exhibition with paranormal proclivities on view at the Museum of Modern Art, says he can see the appeal of looking beyond the artistic pursuit for other forms of reason and rationale.


“A lot of people are trying to move into more social practices to find some relevance. It’s probably refreshing for people to see a certain kind of agency that can be offered in other practices,” the artist says.


OURSLER’s show is more playful and inclined toward levity and debunking than BREYER P-ORRIDGE’s. It includes parts of an immense archival collection related to stage magic and historical matters such as spirit photography and telekinetic mediums popular in the early 20th century, when notions of ghosts and transmissions from other worlds were very much part of the cultural conversation. The archive and a fanciful feature-length film, Imponderable, chart a peculiar history involving OURSLER’s own grandfather CHARLES FULTON OURSLER and his real-life dealings with characters including SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE, HOUDINI and various spirit-world fixtures who turned out to be hucksters and frauds.


About the magnetism of such a subject, OURSLER speaks of an “unending interest in magical thinking and how it’s generated through media and various social means that led me back to these world views.”

He insists, too, that they are not as anachronistic as many might suspect. “Everyone walks around with a matrix of beliefs through which they view the world,” OURSLER says. “Statistically, if you look at America, it turns out roughly 60% of the population believes in ESP. One in three people do not believe in evolution. Forty percent of the public believes in UFOs. The rationalism we assume to be there might not, in fact, be there.”


BREYER P-ORRIDGE attributes rising interest in the occult to certain fleeting motivations. “Some of it is pure fashion, always,” s/he says. But the role of ritual and faith in its own ends can be a guide. After growing weary of the hierarchies and conscriptions of ceremonial magic as practiced early on (see: robes, chants, gestures with strict limitations and rules), “We thought: Do you need all the fancy theatrics or is there something at the core that makes things happen? Our experience tells us it’s just one or two things at the core. One of those is being able to reprogram one’s deep consciousness through repetition in ritual.”


When a working sense of ritual conjoins with the process of making art, the result might be differently invested. “When we walk around to galleries, we’re nearly always disappointed,” BREYER P-ORRIDGE says of art s/he sees around town. “Most of it is not about anything. It’s decorative at best and looks nice in penthouses. And now it’s gotten more corrupted because it’s like the stock market – people going around to advise people what to buy as an investment. You can’t trust the art world.”


To be trusted instead: “That strange reverberation that tells me what’s fascinating.”



Andy Battaglia
The Guardian


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First Transmission (1982) by PSYCHIC TV (January 7, 2015)
Bight of the Twin (2014) by HAZEL HILL McCARTHY III (July 1, 2014)
Les yeux de GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE présentés à La Centrale (October 1, 2012)
La bible psychique de GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE (December 7, 2010)
‘Thee Psychick Bible’ A New Testameant By GENESIS BREYER P-ORRIDGE (October 27, 2009)