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the paintings of Alex Grey
Sunday, May 30 1999
I would have been content to hang around the house all day, in this case to install Slackware Linux on my 486 color laptop (the one given to me by Greg in Minnesota). Thankfully, Kim insisted that we get out of the house to go see an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in La Jolla.
The exhibit we were going to see was a collection of works by the contemporary painter Alex Grey, a guy who does hyper-detailed mystically-based anatomical paintings, the sort that make good posters for the dorm rooms of college kids.
It seemed like the sort of exhibit demanding an altered state, so we fired up a couple expertly-rolled joints and passed them around. As we were parking, the windows were all rolled up and we had sort of a "fishbowl effect" going on. There was still a fragrant haze an hour or so later when we returned from the show.
What can I say, the exhibit was mind blowing. I realized right away that Alex Grey paints still frames from my hallucinations. Whenever I'm kind of fucked up, I close my eyes and what I see are Alex Greys paintings. But not the anatomy so much; what I see is more like the the complex textures that cover the surfaces of the objects he paints. Not surprisingly, Alex Grey has experimented extensively with mind-altering drugs. Whatever he had to do to paint these pictures, it was definitely worth it. After seeing his paintings, all others looked pathetic.
As they work, all artists are bound by several different overlapping sets of rules. There are the rules imposed by the medium itself: how fast the paint dries, how narrow a paint brush tip can get, and the fineness of the surface grain of the canvas. Then there are the rules of the social-historical period: what is a painting, what receives praise, what receives derision, what is pornography, what is obscenity. Finally there are the rules the artist himself uses to constrain himself: hard edges versus blends, landscapes versus portraits, abstraction versus reality, fast work versus slow meticulous drawing, etc. The wonderful thing about Grey's paintings are the personal rules he uses to define the limits of what he does. For example, unlike most people, he's concerned with the insides of people, both in a scientifically-verifiable anatomy sort of way and also in a metaphysical-spiritual sort of way. Not only does he seek to capture the disturbingly brutal truth of our animal insides; he also wants to show the energy that connects us to each other and our environment. Happily, the energy lines he sees have all the charm of the Escher's best doodles, but in stunning technicolor. Sometimes an energy line is just that, a line. Other times it looks like a hazy ray from a distance, only to, upon close inspection, resolve into an evolutionary progression from bacteria all the way up through fish and insectivores to humans.
Compositionally, Grey's paintings generally seem to be built upon various sets of textures. There's the overall theme of the painting as a whole, which doesn't repeat across the canvas. But then, on the surface of that theme, some complex texture will repeat itself, telling and retelling some related story. And upon that texture can be yet another telling a still different tale. These are all like channels that one can focus upon independently. It can take a long time to puzzle apart what's being said by an Alex Grey painting. As a result, the paintings all have a strongly hypnotic attraction. Kim said she'd never before seen so many people completely mesmerized at an art exhibit. Indeed, she even ran across several people from her somatics school kneeling in meditation before one of Grey's more intensely spiritual works.
While Grey's paintings have an unusual ability to induce trancelike mental states in viewers, even bringing to this jaded old atheist a tingling reverential feeling akin to religious ecstasy, I wouldn't say that Grey's paintings are based on the teachings of any one philosophy or religious movement. The religious and spiritual references in his paintings were an eclectic mix, including plenty of Hebrew mixed liberally with Sanskrit and graphic depictions of the various chakras. But in other paintings, Grey showed himself to be comically dark in a way that most religious people would probably find deeply disturbing. One of his paintings, for example, graphically showed a man in the early process of exploding into small pieces. The unfortunat subject's penis was sliced into little inch-long chunks while a final spurt of cum unified them. Meanwhile, the buttocks and asshole, suddenly detached from the pelvis, shot forth a final log of brown poop. It was exactly the sort of painting I would have done in 5th grade if I'd had the talent back then. (Instead, I used to draw pencil pictures of helpless condemned prisoners being gradually lowered onto spinning buzzsaws.)
The main attraction of this particular exhibit was Grey's "Chapel of Sacred Mirrors". The chapel itself doesn't exist, but the series of paintings prepared to be its main feature (animated at right) do. They're mostly paintings of a single life-sized person, each demonstrating various human anatomical and spiritual systems. We're expected to look into these mirrors and behold some aspect of ourselves. So, while on the one hand we're a vibrant, bristling collection of nerve fibres, we're also a pot pie of digestive organs. The first and last "mirror" of the series actually are mirrors, engraved with various designs, so we actually can see ourselves before and after the tour. The plans for the chapel call for a large circular room with each painting set in intricately sculptured frames (which already have been prepared by Grey's wife) set into walls decorated with half-opened all-seeing eyes. For now, though, we have to be content with pictures hanging in a white rectangular room.
Adding subtly but powerfully to the images was the music playing continuously in the background. It wasn't music so much as ambient sound, a kind of soft droning that changed pitch every so often, like a subtle auditory hallucination seeming to animate the small details of the paintings.
After the exhibit, we walked down to the cove, setting up our towels on a sandstone shelf and relaxing in the full glare of the Sun over the beach.
Some surfers were down on the shore, doing a sort surfing I'd never seen before. They had short little surf boards, which they'd slap down on the steep wet beach and ride into the oncoming wave, only going a few dozen feet from the shore at most. They'd treat the oncoming wave like a skateboarder treats the side of a half-pipe, riding up the side, doing a quick 180 and trying to come back. Each wave was good for only about 15 seconds worth of ride, and then it was again time to await the next wave. The beach here in La Jolla is especially good for this particular sort of surfing, since the beach is so steep and the waves are still rather strong even a few feet from the conclusion of their travels.
We stopped at a bar in Mission Beach called Guava Beach, where we drank some booze and beer and ate surprisingly good food. The place was just the right mix of funky and trendy for Kim to express the desire to return for some future happy hour.
EJ took us to a party amongst some of his skater friends in southern Ocean Beach. The beer, which had supposedly been expensive and dark, was already gone, so we had to con a chick out of her freshly-purchased Rolling Rocks. For some reason I just sort of out of place amongst so many young skater types. As I told Kim, I was feeling "like an old man with knobby knees." Part of my problem was my attire: I was wearing a Calvin Klein teeshirt (made of unusually fine fabric) and khaki frat boy shorts.
To see the sunset, Kim and I took a different approach from the other partiers. Instead of heading to Sunset Cliffs, we climbed nearly to the top of the ridge which runs down the length of Point Loma. When you're up that high, there's considerably more water for the Sun to set behind. Interestingly, no one else on the ridge seemed the least bit interested in the setting sun.
Coming down the ridge, we ran across my co-worker Al at his apartment complex. He was having a casual hang-out session with his porch-neighbors and was in his usual easy-going good mood.
EJ, Steph and Kim on the La Jolla beach.
Me on the La Jolla beach.
Steph and EJ's friend Erin (left) talking with Kim at the skater kids' party.
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