More on Landscaping Religion — In northern New Mexico there is a church, El Santuario de Chimayo, one of the most-visited holy sites in what we currently call the US. It enshrines a small, circular pit famous for its “miracle dirt.” Like many religious art installations, the temple was built around the sacred place, which…

More on Landscaping Religion — The interior landscape is influenced by the exterior. Caves, with their shadowy twilight zones, are a great place to start any mythic journey as they are womb-like and occupy a very special place in the religious imagination. Jesus, for example, was born in a cave and resurrected in one; Elijah…

Fra Angelico (1395–1455) was a Dominican monk-artist known for his visionary dreams and advanced understanding of mathematics. He is featured in The Geometry of Angels (1998), where mathematician Ralph Abraham teams up with William Irwin Thompson to analyze one of the friar’s visionary paintings from 1435. It’s the Annunciation. The…

Part 1: Wet Dreams — Wet. Some men have multiple wet dreams a week if they stop masturbating, but most of the cis guys I know never have wet dreams. They have erotic dreams, sure, but they don’t actually ejaculate because they masturbate and have plenty of sex in their waking lives. …

One way colonized people encode their own histories into the dominant culture’s symbols. —

Why the ‘real’ human condition isn’t merely human — If body is ‘spirit,’ then it’s outside the periphery of our merely human intelligence, but its also a spirit linked to nature, to rivers, mud, fish, birds, minerals, stars, fire, and so imagining these non-human or more-than-human beings with the body is a way of disclosing a spirit which is…

What’s behind the most disgusting art material? — Japanese myth-histories focus on puking gods (Shinto) and puking ghosts (Buddhism), and Takashi Murakami paints a bit of both here in his gigantic 2002 Tan Bo Puking — a.k.a. Gero Tan. We see the Japanese character known as Mr. DOB—Mickey Mouse’s “mutant cousin”—playing the monster Tan Tan Bo dying. 2002…

Our Bodies, Our Gods — Body fluids are confusing. Take saliva for example. In your mouth it’s great, helps you digest food, but as soon as it leaves the body it becomes offensive, even “dirty.” Ew! Like blood or snot, once it’s out of the body it’s “matter out of place.” Vomit and feces are…

Juanita’s Loom with Textile — Another great hybrid art object and “strange tool” is this tapestry created by Juanita (Navajo, 1845–1910), who brought it to Washington DC to commemorate the signing of the Bosque Redondo treaty in 1874. Textile scholar Kate Kent calls this weaving one of the first Navajo pictorials. Purposefully incomplete, we get…