A.) In all the rooms, clowns never forget their bags. Bags filled with folded cloth or skins of rabbits and other small creatures. Chia seeds and containers of water, shut tight, rolled in a skin or cloth, sometimes filthy, sometimes clean.

Takes the rabbit skin, lays it flat, then uses a blade to cut a spiral line from center to outside. Takes the skin and pulls out the spiral into a corkscrewing line, it alternates between fur and skin. Takes many of these corkscrews and weaves them together into a blanket or cape. Folded into the basket or bag, with water and food. Put the whole thing over one shoulder.

Some stretch the fresh skin over their own skin, and it slowly loses its hair and elasticity. The many pores in the skin open slowly as it stretches, eventually breaks and rots with many microbes transforming the fresh skin into many microbes and small gasses. The microbes won't ever confuse their living skin with the skin they wear, their energy of seeds and leafs and animals and water and light do something to the living eater that tells it not to eat the living skin.

Ultimately, the orange shirt, dyed with onion skins and anatto seeds, just hangs. The next thought just comes out of the silence of water and food. The back can be straight for the orange shirt to just hang because of the water and food. The straight nature of the back doesn't keep the face from breaking into a smile so boundless that a laugh is pushed from the middle out through the throat and the eyes feel round and moist. This is "composure".

Maybe there will be a wall or waterfall of sitters, and on their quiet hands, more waterfalls. Maybe the rainbows and gut ribbons will be circular and radiant as wiggling cascades of seated bodies and composed faces with round moist eyes and laughing.

Geometry using the compass and straightedge will be as important as the gut ribbons, falling hanging clothes, water jugs, face paint, jewelry, fringe, tassles, pox, dust and food.

The rim of the bowls should be wet and catching light from hidden sources. Or the bowl lip should be holding the tension of fatty menudo broth about to spill over its sides. In one room maybe the activity of the spilled broth will be scampering to avoid it or just being soaked by the hot fat and water, just to walk outside and it's los angeles-neighborhood and everything is fine.

The outdoor streets and colors are inside in cloth dyed with indigo, anatto, cochineal, also sunflower, coppers and zincs, also stained with fine red ochres or water-bearing yellow ochres mixed into a paste and scrubbed into the weave of the cloth. Also, white chalks mixed with water and smeared all over the face with open and quiet hands, palms against cheekbones and closed eyelids. The white against brown, creates optical blues more shivering than lapis.

The ceruleans and lavendars, electric greens and grays of winter-los angeles and on opposite wall, the ochres, straws, pale blues and blacks of summer-los angeles.

Sharply inhaled breath and long streams of breath passing so softly against the nostrils that they are barely felt or felt like a thin stream of water with such little turbulence that it looks like a glass rod more than water.

But also the spectral elements like scintillating stocoma and eye worms, ringing ears, itches of all types, layered on the solidity of existence in faceted overlayed brilliance like these phenomena are droplets of water on a windshield through which streetlights, sodium vapor orange lights, are seen rounding the tiny arc of each droplet, a clown not caring to hit the windhield wipers.

Not caring to hit the wipers, not caring to stop radiant light, overlays of transparent washes of rainbows or bone resonant pains of the body moving against stillness before stillness. The wiggles, painful lights, flat pressures, quiet patterns lurching forward enough to knock the body off its seat, flat on its face, or even of one droplet tracing down cheek, wrapping under down neck, tickling down chest, ribs, getting stuck in belly folds: never activating the wiper, just seeing the orange vapor lights travel their tiny arc a million times simultaneously through round moist eyes and laughing.

B.) Beyond the topics of violence and spread, there should be an offering of joy and beauty. Color will be a primary tool for presenting both beauty and joy. Joy is raw color and pattern, the stirrings of joy that come from seeing pattern and color arranged with human intellect. The color of our surroundings applied to surfaces with a brush--what miraculous work of beings! Complex process of integrating the brilliance of what our eye sees and taking that vibration to cover a flat surface with it and other subtle vibrations into patterns and arrangements, compositions which we call images. To take the brilliant outside world of cycles and weather patterns, seasons and vast processes inside into a room of flat walls and arrange those colors that are inside of us through our memory and experience over many generations onto the flat surface into specific shapes which convey meaning. To understand that shape and color are one in the same, what a joy! To see our inner world of truth outside of ourselves, to see the outer world of color inside, layed out in flat and bold color of every shape and size, a joy to see.

Also to see the beauty of serene faces, of eyes and eyelids calm and equanimous. Rustle of leaves in eyes, animated living process in eyes and hands. flush of blood in cheeks, traces of that which we recognize as living, flickers of recognition that animate small movements of cognizance inside of the viewer--this is beauty. Beauty is to recognize, to feel the stirring of recognition which is actually connection. That an image can be connected to, but also serve as a bridge to deeper recognition and remembrance, oh this is true beauty. Deep wells of water touched. Faces will crack into smiles or fall away altogether. If something far inside can be stirred, brushed, opened to, that is miraculous beauty. Beauty in seeing your own nose on the wall as you've always known it, but never recognized it. Bowl of round fruits. Knife cuts through breads or something. Cloths folding and laying smooth. Many things in swarms that can only really be seen as whole patterns or systems, can be taken in by the eyes and cause something to fall down and open up to small and stirring recognition... "In this abstraction, I know myself to be integrated into what this system represents." Through the use of the image, a singing absorbtion into the image as the viewer recognizes image but also that they are image as well, that they and their stirring (the object that stirs the inside) are the same as the image (or what the image projects). The concept or essence triggered to life by the image and the viewing of the image is a a shared essence--it also exists in the viewer's inner life. The beauty is that oneness of essence, animated by wonderful recognition triggered by eye meeting mind meeting careful image. That is how beauty is manifested on the abstract level, there is no imagery that is particularly necessary--the imagery or what is represented falls away at the time the viewer falls away, the connection made by the relating of viewer to image is all that is required to the experience of beauty.

C.) You step into and must look at this, it sits still and plainly looks at you look at it. Seeing most, the things that we most avoid that we are made to go through, the specific processes of life that our bodies are committed to. Among the happy faces gallery another gallery of sagging skin, corpses, decay and puterfaction and even the habit and direct action of violence that animates Western ideas of progress. So, the room presents the antithesis of Western culture in a plain acceptance of decay and disintegration of our bodies, the ending of our personal lives, and also presents one essence of Western culture, one of its central theses, that of progress through single minded expansion, where bodies of all types are gristed, scarred, battered and mined as fuel for the engine of progress--to fuel the engine of endless progress as a biological perpetual motion machine.

Two very different horrors in the room, the horror of physicality and decay of our bodies and the horror of violence that has been directed toward our bodies in the name of progress or gain. The two appear the same to the gross perceptions, they both appear to be violence directed to the bodies of these non-people that are also people--the filth saints, clowns, invisibles. But this “violence” is actually not homogeneous--and a viewer will be presented with the two destructions in a manner that differentiates one as violence and the other as natural process (grounded and dispersive processes).

Violence
Violence should be presented so that people stare into the eyes of the sufferers of violence as opposed to being entertained by the seduction of violence. The many contact points available between viewer and representation are the subject of the representation, not the violence itself. The fact that vio-lence has been enacted on precious things is the subject of the room. The filth saint is full of contact points, it has eyes, many eyes, skin, hands, mouths, surface, all those things that can interface and ask "you see me don't you? you bear witness to the full texture, quality and concentricity of my story, of my actuality and presence, don't you?"

Violence itself is not the subject--it shouldn't be that the representation of violent acts on the body obscure the eyes (major contact points) of the figure that connect it to the viewer. If violence becomes the subject, then the purpose of the image is to distract from the nature of violence--the portrayal of violence as a main subject serves to cloak and muffle the true nature of violence. Portrayal of violent acts or the result of violent acts to the exclusion of everything else fulfills the total destructive nature of violence, which is to destroy the connection between what we perceive as "us' and what we perceive as "not us". Violence succeeds in destroying or obscuring this connection and this destruction is both caused by violent acts and is an act of violence itself. So, no image should be about violence, it should be about showing beings that have experienced violence, it should be about showing conn-ection and cultivating a strong connection so that the viewer understands that violence only exists in regards to actual suffering of actual beings and that as a subject in and of itself by itself, it is an act of violence.

Disintegration and Integration
Not to be confused with violence, is natural processes of disintegration and integration. Rotting skin, putrefying parts of our bodies, bones, blues and grays, greenish tones, inert tiny hairs, closed lids, lumps, hardnesses, soft parts, inert and unspirited object in the shape of a body. These are the processes that appear to be similar to violence but are opposite. These processes don't sever ties between beings but build ties between beings. Whereas violence obscures connections between all involved in its implementation, these natural processes, death, sickness, old age, foster broad ranging connections between all living beings. The horror of our own bodies becoming old and sick co-exists with that fact that we get very large once we die. We feed into the world that we emerged from in this strange and amorphous time of temporary organization. The organization appears, then disappears and our organization is not gone, but instead spreads through the earth to become many things. The disintegration of our bodies is mirrored throughout our lives by the disintegration and spreading of our acts and deeds, those actions and ideas we share in connection with all of those beings around us. Like we spread our good will and bad will to all of those around us, our actions and deeds animated by our bodily and mental processes, so too our inert bodies spread all of their nutrients and riches to the world after we've died. Our lives are acts of spreading larger and larger, our actions and ideas spread and fall upon those around us, all the while our bodies are being used for this purpose of spread--when all used up for the purpose, our bodies too spread and give. This will be presented also, so that a viewer can stare at it plainly and fully, and have it stare back.  

D.) Happy Crowd of Faces and Bodies

Pink face coughs up turquoise clouds and dust balls

Cleaved face allows direct looking into both of their eyes

The cleaved nature of their face means that skins of animals like gray squirrel and raccoon are the lining of their wounds (the inside part of their face)

Orange face, what orange on their face! Such cheer and good natured friendliness, a glowing orb chest

Ropes that look like twisted green, brown, red and yellow cloth are like borders around images, or snakes moving around them, but also like veins or roads or sinew

Some of them have been torn apart, those retain some of their cheerfulness but alarm also shows on their faces

"Wow, I've been torn apart, my natural state is to be devoured. You all should know that we spend most of our existence in a state of spread rather than a state of unity. Unity is brief"

Some might have grease stains on their embroidered clothing, capes, sarapes, tunics and shirts. Some of the shirts will be full of animals flying in all directions like cave paintings.

Some of the faces' chests will be caves.

Some of them will appear to be wooden women and men; like their bodies are made of carved wood with multicolored sinew joints.

Some will have slippery and shiny skin, some will have skin that's opened and full of pustules--their eyes will be open for you to look at them, or their skin will be made of eyes that will look at you

Some will have saffron colored handkerchiefs in their hands that they will stretch between their fingers, and their fingers will be stained green from holding and stretching the handkerchiefs

Many will have shades of sage grays under their eyes, like effluvium of glared vision sprayed out of their eyes

Many will have stone animals that they wear around their necks, others will be the things that others wear around their necks

Some will have fat rings of paint circling around their collarbones to their shoulder blades

Some will be painted bright colors, some will have bright colored skin

Some will have bleeding gums from disease or lack of care. These flares of pink and red will communicate smells

Some will wear bundles of bones and ochres, others will paint themselves with bone black and red ochre

Saffron, teals, oranges, vermillion, turquoise, corals, pinks, ultramarine, blueish whites, blacks, lime greens, simple greens, cerulean blues

Many will be disintegrating and incomplete. They will not ever complete themselves or their own meaning

Hair will vary greatly, most hair will be black or gray and straight or wavy

Some hair will be covered in clay, white clay or red clay

Some hair will have stamped images made with white clay by painting a design on their palm, then pressing the wet design onto straight hair

Some will have great jewelry made of silver shapes, some will have hard and sharp adornments and have their hands full of objects

Many will force you to look into their eyes or face until your own face comes into question

Some will have bent bodies, some will have straight bodies, some bodies will be run through with braided cloth in many colors, some of the cloth might actually be intestines dyed with plant stuffs like indigo, onion skin and madder root

Some of them will inspire some amount of terror because they will be the living manifestations of bodies ruined by violent acts

Others will be terrifying because they will be the living manifestations of what will happen to all of our bodies

Some will be terrifying because of our irrational fear of unpredictable behaviors, or our fear of irrational and unpredictable behaviors

Some will be so generous of spirit that they will give you energy to roam the room

Some will obviously be the hills of Los Angeles

Some will belong to the history of California

Some will have backbones as long as the continents

Some will recline across vast patches and tufts of land

Some will have hearts that open into yours

Some will be eating hearts

Some will split open, some will split you open

They will not be of a personal nature, or an allegorical nature, instead they will be of a gateway nature, one that allows one to pass through

Their attitude will be that of allowance, of invitation to take a step into

Some will have candles or lightbulbs, some will hold and light other types of lights

Some will sit in small burrows located inside others' burrows

Some will have clothing that has folds where other clothing can be found

Most will be worlds unto themselves, hosts of all life

The room of their bodies and faces will be full of turbulence and stillness

No lyricism, no fanciness. Plain faced truth even if it doesn't appear to be plain on the gross level, the faces will be easeful and presently plain

Some will sit and some will stand, some will be contorted by all types of things, boxes, caves, old age, deformity. The truth of bodies will be there for us to see

Some of their bodies will appear mechanical or wooden, some will be puddles on the floor, soft jackets of skin

Some of their skin will be radiant, some will be smooth and beautiful, others will have beautiful skin of eruptions

Some will have fur on their skin and the faces of animals

Others will have masks of animal faces or twisted faces

Some will hold metal things, rusting in their hands

Stains will be everywhere in the happy crowd of all kinds of faces and bodies

The faces will be serene in the happy crowd

The happy crowd will have endless depth and scale

The flatness of the depiction will speak to the essential limited view of our own perceptions, painted food and painted hunger

It will also speak to the abundant spaciousness of our connection with painted images, that our perceptions are a flat gate to real dimensional realities

1.) YOUR FACE WILL BE LIKE:

Clowns or spirit types, portraits, in large hi res photo prints, buffered with drawings, maybe ceramic objects.

Large portraits evoking large ideas of emotional states, obliquely referring to outdated and old iconography of lost traditions and inaccessible feelings. Hidden feelings, hidden cultures, all layed out through a manifesto of portraiture.

Sacred plants, foolish or contorted poses, layered clothing that hides the body or exaggerates it. Dirty or messy organic backdrops, enigmatic or ecstatic pointings to.

2.) Like gray blue plants, crisp and ashy

Like self regulating storms, building and ebbing, waving like fingered oceans

3.) I (my shivvering plant self) came out of an offshoot of the root of my rhizome, which has often used personae to establish and unhide dimensions of the fringe, dark connections/metaphysical connections unique to Los Angeles.

These connections include honoring the natural fibers of los angeles and the original aesthetic of the basin as cultivated and invented by the tongva people, harmonic resonances established, invented and amplified by thousand year projects.

Mestizo overlaying projects also created their own harmonics

The project in this context is an act of reclamation of an aesthetic value system, not traditional but living.

It's also a clown project though. XXXXXXXX the past with its emphasis on cosmologies peopled with saints or supernatural presences, point to this new thing. It's these personae that anchor the place that's really the subject of the photo.

Sacred clowning, like sacred sainthood is an exalted place in human perception. Clowns occupy a frige space on the opposite side of the spectrum of saints. They're dirty saints, creative and fecund. Getting into things , messing shit up.

The interrelatedness of them all make them a society. The individual attributes of each, often contradictory make them deities. "You can alway tell a god by their hilaritas" they have multiple attributes but maintain both sides if the "hilar" derivation being both full of hilarity and being hilarious.

Sacred clowning is a Native American practice. One power is that they are irrespective and sometimes disrespectful though not ignorant of power structures. They disappear, they reaffirm "no-soul"

These clowns challenge power by pushing through older harmonics, older perennial patterns. The power structure that down trods these patterns of life is non-living--while the fringe society that acts and re-enacts these works is more powerful than power structures.

"Funny Soul makes this world."

4.) Risk of humiliation as clown is target of laughter. Clown cracks open people as zen master cuts off student's finger. "Now you understand"

5.) Archetypical and can be consulted as a living embodiment of ancient human harmonics. A refined body language that enacts the symbiosis between human and non human earth.

6.) Outside Society: The clown is a representation of the egoless non participating human spirit--that which is apart from social convention, whose personality is unformed and ego undefined by the desires and reflections and self judgements triggered by society. Clown reaffirms existence of turbulence.