There Is Another World, 2003, Oil on Linen, 14"w x 24"h
I was recently reading "Shamanism" by Mircea Eliade, a 1951 anthropological study of indigenous cultures of Asia and North America. Eliade never implies any disbelief of even the most fantastic claim. He describes a common belief across these cultures in an "otherworld" (which is not necessarily a heaven). For example
The people of North America [Innuit] conceive the otherworld as an inverted image of this world. Everything takes place as it does here, but in reverse. When it is day on earth, it is night in the beyond ... the summer of the living corresponds to the winter in the land of the dead; a scarcity of game or fish on earth means that is is plentiful in the other world; and so forth.
When reading about 16th- and 17th-century still life painting, I am attracted to their use of a symbolic meta-language using their subject (food, objects, etc.) to create sometimes elaborate metaphors for spiritual belief. It makes me think that then, like now, art is always about a hidden agenda, and we are left in the future with a mysterious artifact. It also points to the potential for a mystical resonance in the apparently insignificant, an incredibly compelling idea. The "otherworld" of the everyday.
I don't know if we live in a world anymore that believes in the existence of two parallel realities and always sees the ghost of one in the other. Certainly there is still the parallelism of text and subtext, and this piece is based on my interest in this idea, as well as how cultures are connected. I wanted to explicate it in a really specific way rather than engaging in the usual subtle manipulations. When I finished it this piece seemed absurdly obvious, but now I am getting to like it.
The title of this piece is taken from a beautiful song "Don't Forget" (Ungakhohlwa) by Ladysmith Black Mambazo, that says
When you enjoy here
Don't forget
There is another world
Where you can enjoy here forever
And finally I really like the late Johnny Cash's song "The Man Comes Around," which provides a dark description of the golden ladder that connects two worlds, as well as referring to the perennial association between food and drink and the otherworld:
There's a man going around taking names
And he decides who to free and who to blame
Everybody won't be treated all the same
There'll be a golden ladder reaching down
When the Man comes around
The hairs on your arm will stand up
At the terror in each sip and in each sup
Will you partake of that last offered cup?
Or disappear into the potter's ground
Lynn Talbot, 2003
