Sacred Clowns. McQueen’s Ariadne and Bacchus Armor

25Feb10

My father was my Heyoka. Amidst my chaotic teenage into adult years, if he knew I was sad, thinking too much or existing on an ego island of my own, he would stand at my doorway and just drop his trousers to his boxers and stand there with a dumb look on his face until I laughed. When people spoke to him from their misguided psyche or they prattled on about a subject he correctly deemed utter nonsense, he would stare straight at them and either blink his eyes repeatedly and hard and say nothing or just promptly fall asleep.  Heyoka is a Lakota Native American concept akin to the fool, a sacred clown whose purpose was to ride the horse backwards, wear the clothes inside out, play with gender roles and do anything to shift a person or a tribe’s momentary myth.

With Alexander McQueen’s death we lose a Heyoka and a Modern Mythmaker.  This one, for us, was unafraid to pierce reality and offer the Mirror and the Power to Play all Roles, both human and beyond. For himself, unfortunately, this gift ran out. No other fashion designer comes close to this blatant offering, except perhaps Martin Margiela, a nihlist to McQueen’s effusion. The guantlet has been laid down…McQueen is beyond The Masters, beyond Chanel, beyond YSL, beyond.

In the end humor is always the best armor and amour.

To explore the armour of our perceptions and psyche and give us new skin is the role of the Heyoka,the Fool. Rituals of art, architecture or design can be initiations to pierce, puncture, to move the constructs of skin and the labyrinth of the individual psyche into the collective.  For me, the heyokas of the heart are everywhere.  With my own father’s recent death and McQueen’s suicide, seemingly influenced in part due to the death of his mother, a dive into the roots of creativity, healing and humor revealed the magic of the Sacred Clown, the humor of the Universe and the cycles of Spring.  As we keep softening to the possibilities of our experience offering all kinds of Avatars of Amour in our midst, everything from spontaneous kindness, the painful suicide of a master or for me lately, even looking again and again at images of inspiring shifting forms such as the architecture of Herzog & de Meuron.  The trousers are dropped and life is staring at us waiting for us to Feel The Love.

Although these Heyoka Ariadnes are deft with aiding us conquering demons, like the Minotaur, by leading us out of puzzles with simple things like brilliant paradox, rare beauty, a new fierce pair of boots changing the way we walk and understand our place on the earth, joking or balls of red thread, there is no total immunity from the pains of life, as we are reminded by McQueen’s suicide and Ariadne’s story.

The mythical Ariadne is abandoned on an island by her lover after helping him out of the labyrinth…

Her name is traced to its Minoan roots is “All Holy One” from the Greek and the Cretan-Greek form for arihagne, “Utterly Pure” and the word “àgni”, in turn which goes back in time translated as  ”Holy Pure Fire” in Sanskrit.  Agni is one of the most important of the Vedic gods, as the god of fire and the acceptor of sacrifices. He is ever-young and immortal because his fire is re-lit every day.  Ariadne is already a Heyoka because she is based on the primal idea of a man’s energy even while being in the throes of playing the part of a very emotional woman who only wants to retreat to her cave due to being abandoned by her lover.

She is also the goddess of snakes and vegetation and lest her emotions drown her dreams as in this floating bed by artist Vincent Olinet, it takes a dream of Bacchus and a Spring-like re-awakening of pleasure and heat to remind her that her name is fire and that where there is loss, pleasure must arise again. This Heyoka’s fire could also be the serpent-like spiraling life and fire force of kundalini.

Bacchus, the God of Wine and Revelry, whose name means also means “To Shout”, appears to her in a dream and tells her to remain on the island because he was coming to marry her even as her lover Theseus, whose name means “To Set, to Order or to Dispose,” deserted her.

Ariadne auf Naxos, Richard Strauss’s opera within an opera, conveys the myth’s mirror image of pain and joy perfectly. The opera takes place in a rich man’s house where due to constraints of time, a drama must be performed at the same time as a comedy. The height of an aria which melts armoured skin is crowned by a rolling in of the comedy troupe…thus the tale of abandonment is always played along the receiving of the new.  The union of Ariadne and Bacchus is said to be the constellation Corona Borealis, a half-circle of stars, a celestial crown made by the supreme goldsmith, Hephaestus, at his abode underwater, suggesting the depth of this emotional rescue.

Just as the Opera’s many windowed stage set by Frank Gehry heightens the theme of humans ultimately playing all roles, the Prima Donna and the burlesque dancer, the Composer and the Patron, the Nymphs and the Clowns, the Opera has its own ways of playing with convention. The charactor of the Composer in Ariadne auf Naxos embodies the opera’s own Heyoka invention of the “trouser role”, a young man’s role played by a woman or a “skirt role,” where a man often plays an older woman. Traced to its beginnings, it was always a novelty first to spark ticket sales and a musical choice second.

“Principally, the Heyókȟa functions both as a mirror and a teacher, using extreme behaviors to mirror others, thereby forcing them to examine their own doubts, fears, hatreds, and weaknesses. Heyókȟas also have the power to heal emotional pain; such power comes from the experience of shame–they sing of shameful events in their lives, beg for food, and live as clowns. They provoke laughter in distressing situations of despair and provoke fear and chaos when people feel complacent and overly secure, to keep them from taking themselves too seriously or believing they are more powerful than they are.”—John Fire Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

A famous line at the end of Ariadne auf Naxos is meant to convey the whim of the heart of a woman, yet it can easily speak to our never ending desires and quest for sensation.  It is perhaps this relentless desire that is either our undoing or our salvation, depending upon your mood, religious proclivities or chemicals in your brain.

“With each new god, I surrendered without a word!”

1111 Lincoln Road by Paul Clemence

Alexander McQueen is quoted, ”From heaven to hell and back again, life is a funny thing. Beauty can come from the most strangest of places even the most disgusting places.”  It takes an open heart and brave eyes to consistently present ugliness to us and have it transform into beauty. What we loved about this man was his magic to do this with mere clothing and somehow in the process transform our vision of our souls as humans.

Buildings, like clothing, can be mythical in their playfulness of forms and perform their role as sacred clowns. Much like the stark white Gehry stage waiting to be animated by charactors or even Margiela’s all white store, few things are as soulless and hollow as a parking garage.  My new heroes, Herzog & de Meuron unviel 1111 Lincoln Road, a shopping and residential epiphany at the end of the famous shopping street, as a crowning touch of Heyoka structure and symbol of empty consumerism and auto culture, laid bare for pause amidst the 24 hour party that is Miami.

What once was a symbol of ghostliness is open and now inviting, guileless, without armor or protection, an exaltation of “non structure.” I imagine the new luxury and sensation, Post McQueen, will be more of this type of space.  Like a cave or a meditation, our experience in spaces like this are allowed to roam more and be a vital part of the invention and living charactor.

Where current fashion trends and logos are an armor that previously proclaimed a tribal identity, at this point in our expression, they are meaningless for protection or belonging to anything but a mindless buying club.  Artist, Tetsuya Noguchi and designer, Margiela capture this sacred clown taunt perfectly with Heyokas in the gallery and on the runway, encouraging new paths. Who will be crowned the New McQueen?

Hiroko Masuike for the New York Times

So we have lost a God with McQueen’s death.  With loss is a withdrawal and a re-orientation.  Where to place and express our desires post-recession, post-consumer culture myth and post McQueen to build a new Spring-like, Bacchus-rockin, Earth-lovin Heart amidst so much collective sleeping, despair and so much destruction of our biology and systems?  Transparency of our emotions and experience with each other is key. It is the Bacchus coming to rescue us. Herewith, a modern Bacchus and Ariadne offering, places playing with us and pushing us into reinvention and renewal.

A Drunken Bacchus Champagne Toast in a Glass Slipper To A Drunken Building With Much Sense.

One Jackson Square. New York City.

Like Margiela’s or Cinderella’s glass slipper, desire and danger, two primal experiences of emotional loss of control, are mixed for the sense overload that catapults us into “hyper-reality,” a term a friend used to accurately describe where we go in our psyche when someone close to us dies or we lose what we love most. Between the impact of the deaths of Isabella Blow and his mother, our idea of the public McQueen perhaps could not exist or create in that fragile bubble of pain, transparency, truth and endure the rigors of the identity shift space for himself, as much as he invited it for the rest of the world.

Where there is passionate emotion and life force in every fiber of McQueen, there is distance and transparency in Margiela, so I often thought of them as two sides of coin.  Margiela’s clothes are purposely zen and soul-less. I recently attended the launch of never-worn Margiela collected by private collector, Marcia Berger with a party put on by Michael Bruno’s 1stdibs.com, the elegantly lushest collection of objets online. (including astute couture curating and commentary by Clair Watson and Adriana Caras.) The party was held in three suites designed with 1stdibs goods at One Jackson Square, the new, very soulful and stunning green building of “ribbons of woven glass in the wind” topped by lush gardens and designed by William Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox. Cocoons of glass, uneven curvy spaces dis-orienting and yet so solid. Bascially as beautiful inside as out…transparent, enlightened. A Good Drunk.

A building of woven glass ribbons in the wind is as drunk sensibly as a pair of McQueen’s shoes. McQueen was an accomplished scuba enthusiast, and it influenced his 2000 Leagues Under The Sea collection, a passion shared by James Cameron who was influenced by undersea life for much of Avatar’s imagery. If water is pure emotion, it is a symbol that we are diving deep into the Earth’s emotion, beauty and the power it holds for us as popular culture to share this cathartic collective dream.

and now…A New Island Cave For Ariadne.

After my own father died in December, I spent many wintry hours in the 65 cafe of the new Alice Tully Hall, where the experience offered both sensation and space, like being in a cave that is completely transparent. Like the open mouth of a shark emerging from the depths, the shape is funny and jarring yet inside is all about safe and nestled with a view point not often experienced in the city. I also spent time at the ballet this winter and this piercing quality was echoed in the classic Sleeping Beauty story, another story of loss, love, a woman in retreat and despair but dreaming and hearing of Spring and New Love while she slept.  Ariadne would like this cave. I often think if we can just tap into the stage where we are moment to moment of the natural cycle from death and dust to seed to germination to sprout to shoot to plant to flower to death to dust… it is a savior from our linear despair. The best spaces operate as sacred clowns offering both angles and curves to jostle us with humor and grace.

How Ariadne and Bacchus Meet and Engender Stars.

How essential on an emotional level is this integration of biology in our psyche even in our cities. For me it is the arrival of Bacchus. I call it “wild-cycling” expressed in the other notable project by Alice Tully Hall’s designers, Diller, Scofidio + Renfro, The Highline. This green space moved abandonment into community and created a stage set for a tight-rope sacred space for balancing and also, like Alice Tully Hall, offering a mid level ribbon weaving through buildings, a brand new urban viewpoint. The soothing “non architecture” or the integration of the wild into urban through re-purposed railway tracks is like weaving and welcoming back a new lover, that of nature, a place to pause from concrete and breathe biology back into every fiber of our lives.  Our demand for this soft process from communal emotional support to pure foods to sacred secular experiences is absolutely the New Luxury.

My other favorite, Jardins du Ruisseau, a surprise on the way to the Marches aux Puces in Paris at Porte de Clignancort, is one of the best hidden gardens of Paris. A long stretch of a former rail line, it’s presence is even more compelling than the Highline for its random completeness, true spontaneous birth and cultivation by neighbors who live in along side cultivating their food, vineyards and flowers, instead of being a design of city planners and architects.

…and so this is the awakening of Ariadne, sleeping in the depths of the earth and woken by the arrival of Bacchus and new wines to be intoxicated by.  The natural counterpoint to one of McQueen’s last statements, his impossible, celestial, alien glittery, only-for-those-who-have-their-sea-legs shoe boots are Margiela’s classic statement, his grounded cloven Pan boots, a kind of earthen shoe good for another 1000 years of evolution. Come back to Earth fantasy.

“When a vision comes from the thunder beings of the West, it comes with terror like a thunder storm; but when the storm of vision has passed, the world is greener and happier; for wherever the truth of vision comes upon the world, it is like a rain. The world, you see, is happier after the terror of the storm… you have noticed that truth comes into this world with two faces. One is sad with suffering…”

…and the other laughs; but it is the same face, laughing or weeping… as lightning illuminates the dark, for it is the power of lightning that heyokas have.”  Black Elk, quoted in Neihardt (1959)

Yinka Shonibare Aliens

Wild-cycling as a new luxury can help insure we are not carrying earth just as a nostalgic memory through culturally patterned cloths to decorate our life-support armor as we are forced explore new worlds. Instead, as smartly armored Avatars, we can carry integral seeds of our emotional and sensory emphatic experience here on Earth, with each other and the living breathing fiber of organic earth. We stand the luxury of enjoying life through the precious gift of our own pure bodies and moment to moment Heyoka Guruship vs. manufactured Hallmark moments selling a Paradise that has been paved over into a parking lot.

After my father’s death, the reuccurring image for me was a roadside sight I saw years ago from inside our passing car, that of a dead tree struck by lightening alone in a field surrounded a lush green grove of trees.  When I was able to suddenly shift to seeing the tree from the perspective of the grove, I knew I was perched at the edge of the cave, after a long sleep, opening my eyes as the sun rose for a new morning.

Goodnight Sweet Prince.

Thank you for Your Dreams.

“We have trusted and we have been betrayed, and when the the protesting and the howling has ceased, we have followed that wound through the labyrinth, and it has taken us to the very bottom. And the bottom falls away, and the never-ending beginning lies in the palm of our hand.”  Rick Jarow

written by Jade Dressler

Filed under: ARCHITECTURE, ART, FASHION, FLOWERS, NEW GREEN, NEW YORK, TRENDS   |  5 Comments
Tags: 1st dibs, Alexander McQueen, Alice Tully Hall, ariadne and bacchus, ariadne and theseus, ariadne auf naxos, armor clothing, bacchus, buddhist, carravagio, chanel, Chanel logo, clothing as armor, coco chanel, Corona Borealis, death of a close one, diller scofidio+renfro, Frank Gehry stage set, glass slipper, God of Wine, Herzog de Meuron, herzong and de meuron, Heyoka, hidden gardens of paris, highline, Hiroko Masuike, jade dressler, jardins de ruisseau, JOhn Fire Lame Deer, Kohn Pederson Fox, kundalini, lightening, Marcia Berger, Margiela glass slipper, margiela tabi boots, martin margiela, McQueen quote, McQueens suicide, Michael Bruno, new luxury, new york city parks, nyc urban gardens, One Jackson square, pan, paris urban gardens, Paul Clemence, post McQueen, rails into gardens, rails to trails, Richard Strauss, Rick Jarow, sacred clown, Sleeping Beauty, Spring renewal, Spring wine, Tetsuya Noguchi, The Fool, the highline, the new luxury, trouser role, urban farming, urban gardens, urban railway lines, Vincent Olinet, why did mcqueen commit suicide, wild cycling, wild into urban, William Pedersson, Yinka Shonibare, YSL, zen