A conversation between Nicolás Dumit Estévez and Rev. Derrick W. McQueen
NICOLÁS DUMIT ESTÉVEZ: Derrick, it has been one week since we talked on Skype about engaging in this discussion, and I have been thinking about Spirit ever since. We share some commonalities: we attended Union Theological Seminary, a bastion for radical and intellectual activity in the U.S.; we are involved in the arts; and religion has had a constant presence in our lives. In my case, as a Caribeño, my African, Middle Eastern and European roots, together with the Taíno presence still alive in Dominican cultures, have informed how I interact with the world, spirituality speaking.
What would you say is the role of Spirit in the performative, as it relates to the arts? What comes to mind as I ask this question is the Day of Pentecost, as narrated in The Acts of the Apostles, when the Spirit in the shape of a gushing wind descended upon the apostles, filled them with Fire, and caused them to speak in different tongues (Acts 2:1-4 NRSV).
DERRICK W. MCQUEEN: The role of Spirit in the performative as it relates to the arts for me is foundational. Art comes from a place of inspiration, from inside not only the psyche but from a place of mystery. I think that Spirit is what brings art from within and into the body itself, the artist’s primary tool. Because the Spirit is the force that helps to enflesh the mystery that is creation, whether it is engaged by the artist with intention or by practice only, serves to connect the divine that is the artist’s being to the same said artist’s body. Like the Day of Pentecost text you mentioned, it is this Spirit that enables artist’s voice to be heard, understood, and experienced in the art purveyor’s own language with exponential meaning being layered onto artistic piece. Pentecost is important in this light because it is the Spirit descending on the people, encasing itself in body that enables those assembled that day to go forth and tell their own story touching other hearts and minds. The fire is a good image because it ignites new flames wherever it goes. I believe the artist and purveyor dance this dance with Spirit.
ESTÉVEZ: I am drawn to images of Fire in the Bible, as I see them as pointing to that which one reveres and respects, and therefore handles with care; but also as that by which one yearns to be consumed, taken over or possessed. As someone who understands art as part of a larger experience called life, I have been open to encountering the Flame in my work. Perhaps it has been this search for Fire that drew me to the arts and is now taking me full circle around the Blaze: spirituality-art-spirituality. What about you?
MCQUEEN: I am drawn to the image of fire as it is so prominently featured in the Hebrew Bible. There it is so symbolic in the process of sacrifice. But for me it goes much deeper than that. I love the idea you mention of yearning to be consumed, taken over or possessed. Along with those I would add that there is a less spoken of purging by fire. I remember when there was a fire along in the forest of New Jersey pines. Everyone bemoaned the losses in that forest fire. But to my amazement, the forest started coming back the very next year. The purging of the fire was needed to pop open the pods and the seeds of the new trees planted themselves for the forests regeneration. I am always drawn to this idea of fire, even in terms of sacrifice always purges and burns away the dross. Growing up Baptist we often spoke of being taken over by the Holy Ghost Fire. I remember those encounters in church being the same cathartic possession when a role in a play, myself and character (in that order) finally melded together. I felt all Ablaze with the result all boundaries being fused together in the artistic moment, spirituality-art-spirituality.
ESTÉVEZ: I keep pondering about the relationship between contemporary art and religion and/or spirituality at a time when it is still not in good taste to bring the two together, and the professional artist who dresses in black like the priest/ess or minister is, on the other hand, expected not to believe. What do you have to say to those searching for a way out of this closet?
MCQUEEN: Just as I urge preachers and religious folk to embrace the perfomative I want professional artists to embrace the mystery that is at the root of religion and/or spirituality. I was once asked by artist friends, “how can you go to seminary and study God? You seem too smart and talented for that!” Those same friends are the ones who watch as I integrate the contemporary art experience in to the ritual that is worship. Those wanting a way out of the closet can step out into this space with the spiritual and even religious. One key for me, even as an ordained minister, is to realize that what we do not want to believe in is the hegemonic religion experience that we automatically assume means church. This religion as church is populated by three different constituents that hold sway over much of this mode of thought. There is the confessed spiritual but not religious/will not believe. There is the person who is sitting in the pew whose only investment in this is for their own spiritual need and who embraces the pureness of spirituality they have found in the form of religion. And then there is the hierarchy within religion that is primarily concerned with the running of things and the survival of religion as a dominant force in the world. I say to the artist that wants a way out of this closet, sit with those who embrace their spirituality and have found ways to access Spirit. Artists are the priest/ess and ministers and as such can hopefully embrace their intersectional titles for the sake of divining Spirit.
ESTÉVEZ: Thank you for taking the time to go over some of the nuances differentiating religion, as in dogma and orthodoxy, from spirituality, as in Holy Ghost, Spirit, Fire, Breath and Gushing Wind. I realized that I have been using both terms interchangeably, and that is so because I believe that Spirit can reveal a minute ray of her awesomeness even in the most institutionalized spaces, including some confining churches and museums. Personally, while I consider myself spiritual, my upbringing prepared me to repurpose from “religion” that which I can creatively apply to the spiritual.
MCQUEEN: Nicolás, while you have had your mind on Spirit since we first spoke on Skype, I have been thinking about the different ways we both entered into the realm of Spirit. I grew up in a Black Church tradition that encouraged the encounter with Spirit almost as a means of survival. It was Spirit that brought me up out of the racial otherness that we encountered with racism and the like. Our individual encounters with her brought us into our human being-ness, sacredness and set us aside as unique partners with her. This seemed to be the legacy the ancestors kept in our DNA from the motherland. Since I was a child, the arts have been the lens through which I’ve caught Spirit. Strangely enough, I walked away from ordained ministry as a teenager to become an artist, separating the two. Now I find myself laughing at the sacred irony, understanding that the two were dancing together all along.
ESTÉVEZ: My search for Spirit was one that translated materially into sculpture and site-specific installation, as I spent time as a child building an elaborate altar in my bedroom, not to mention the one that I fashioned in my family’s linen closet. At the time, art and religion were so naturally embroidered into my life, or tattooed into my soul that, while I was working with the two, I did not have the language to speak about these subjects from an intellectual perspective. I am glad that I was learning, feeling and experiencing by doing, as opposed to taking about it. Interestingly, with the exception of Saint Martin of Porres, who I see as a precursor of non-human animal rights, all of the deities in my altar were as white as the bright side of the moon. Nevertheless, now that I think about it, many of their wants and needs did not conform to the norms of the European Catholic Church, since more than one of the saints and virgins with whom I interacted were in essence Black at heart. Unlike you, I can’t say that I had a church I belonged to. We were Catholics by default, or so I think. This gave me great freedom to experiment spiritually, yet at the same time I had to constantly navigate in and out of conflicting worlds. I was the colonized white-looking child of a white and Middle Eastern mother and a mixed Black father, who had a difficult time coming to terms with his dark skin. The liberating thing in this complicated theater of life is that I could perform the role of the high priest/ess of my homemade temple!
MCQUEEN: After speaking with you, I continually see Spirit as a force that penetrates and enters into art transforming our process of creation, our encounters with art. And how does her mode of entering into us reveal our being and living as an expression of our continual transformation. I am thinking specifically about the notion that Spirit or pneuma in the Greek, is a repurposing of the very breath of God that transforms a clay model of humanity, artistic prototype, into a being of flesh and blood.
ESTÉVEZ: Now that you mention clay I must tell you that, prior to attending Union Theological Seminary, I was pursuing an MFA in ceramics at Tyler School of Art. Part of my frustrations then consisted in coming up with strategies for infusing what I was making out of clay with life, Prana, Breath and Spirit. This and Coco Fusco are the story of how I came into performance, and how the clay pieces that I was producing evolved into the props that I used in my early actions. At present, my expanding understanding of performance = prayer, meditation, dance, possession, procession, pilgrimage, cleansing, trance, Therapeutic Touch, chant, and so on. Through the years, it is becoming clearer to me how art is the channel through which I have been waiting for the Pneuma to descend on me and to take over. And so, I ask myself, why did I have to go so far to start the journey again where I first took off? By the way, pneumatology, the Christian theology focused on the Holy Spirit, is one of those beautiful terms one learns in theology school, and which one hardly ever has the opportunity to use. Thank you for bringing it up. P is for performance and for Pneuma!
MCQUEEN: Where do you stand in your thought of art in this Post-Enlightenment era? What I mean is we are having trouble still believing that everything is understandable, knowable and explainable. The fourth century bishop, Ambrose of Milan in his own innocence, experienced a wonderment of the divine. He spent much of his ministry trying to revel in the awe of the mysteries of the faith. Is there room in your art for a return to mystery even as we perform our art to, in some part, come to know ourselves in the divine?
ESTÉVEZ: Your question drives a golden nail into my heart because it reminds me of the importance of making room in one’s life for that which cannot be easily grasped.
I have been recently immersed in reading the works of Madame H. P. Blavatsky, P.D. Ouspensky, and Gurdjieff, all of whom were giving shape to their writings on esotericism and occultism at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, a time when new scientific discoveries were shifting people’s relationship with the unknown. Your question also reminds me of how, several weeks ago, I was riding with an older man who picked me up at the train station in Wassaic, NY, to drive me to a Therapeutic Touch workshop, when he mentioned Dora Kunz’s discussion of the amazing angel of New York City. This rather large being is responsible for covering an immense territory where loving and hating, together with many of other emotions, are taking place on an ongoing basis. The New York City angel’s job is to redistribute things to ensure the prevalence of peace in a metropolis where so many faiths and beliefs converge.
As I age, I am opening up to a reality much larger and multilayered than the one that is visible or simply measureable. I am working to experience my middle-aged body as one comprising an etheric, emotional, mental and spiritual counterpart. The thing is that I can be a being full of contradictions. I enjoy reading Madame Blavatsky as much as I do Èmile Zola’s scrutiny of the Lourdes of nineteenth century France. With occultism in mind, I must confess my disappointment with contemporary Theosophy, despite its inclusive approach to world religions and cultures, is that it still portrays a negative image of some Black spiritualities.
MCQUEEN: You and I have taken great pains in our conversations and discussions over the years to listen, hear and translate one another with great intentionality. How might this focused intentionality help the purveyors of art to understand their own encounter with art as a journey into the sacred? How might we translate Spirit in art with intentionality when spirituality is often eschewed in favor of experience with art and not encounter with art?
ESTÉVEZ: Spirituality is making a comeback in the arts, but the reality is that artists from my generation, who have been overly-utterly-professionalized to the core of their beings, have been implicitly advised not to allow their religious selves to permeate their artwork. This struggle is more evident in the case of those of us who are daring to deal with the very problematic symbol of the cross-sword and with imagery that is highly controversial in terms of its unavoidable connections to coloniality, slavery, and globalization. Zen aesthetic, on the other hand, is celebrated in the arts. But yes, there is something about the bloody cross-sword and the messy crucifixion that makes art audiences uneasy. The cross-sword that I am talking about is the symbol that was forcefully imposed on many peoples by the European colonizer of the Americas five centuries ago, and with which you and I must wrestle with on a daily basis. You and I must make sense of this redemptive but also colonizing tool that has caused so much devastation and pain on our planet. Returning to the root of you question, my incursions in the arts have been triggered by a search for a transpersonal encounter, and I can’t do that by renouncing the religious images, symbols and rituals that have informed who I am. For this reason I am grateful for the work of my friend and mentor Linda Mary Montano, and for that of clairvoyants (in a metaphorical sense) such as AA Bronson, LuLu LoLo, Billy X. Curmano, Jennifer Zackin, Ernesto Pujol and You.
MCQUEEN: After thinking about Spirit, art, mystery and intentionality I wonder what purpose the intersectionality of these ideas may aid in the prescriptive practices of homeopathy. Specifically, I wonder how they might counter the penetrative quality of Hahnemann’s notion of the infectious quality of miasms.
ESTÉVEZ: Homeopathy is relatively new to me. I have been drawn to it for exactly what you describe as mystery, and the sophisticated nonsensical ways in which it proposes to help one, help oneself to heal one’s body and soul. The homeopath I am working with, and vice versa, has prescribed belladonna to ease my present health conditions. I am combining homeopathy with Dolores Krieger’s and Dora Kunz’s Therapeutic Touch. I find something compelling in how Krieger discusses healing versus curing. Curing entails being cared for, while healing focuses on caring about and in making whole that which is broken. Some much of the religion and the art that I have come in contact with have been about curing rather than healing. Take for example the word cura, which shares commonalities with the word curator. I am wondering how things would look if more curates and curators would be given full freedom to operate from a healing perspective instead of a “curatorial” one.
MCQUEEN: Nicolas, this has been a fascinating conversation for me. I’d like to put one more image into play if I might. In the Revelation to John, it reads, “These are the words of the son of God, who has eyes like a flame of fire . . .” (Rev. 2:18 NRSV). In this passage, John the Revelator speaks to the city of Thyatira praising them for their good works while pointing how they act as consort to Jezebel. Here Jezebel represents the trappings of the idolatry of wealth, other gods, etc. This one who, as translated from the Greek, “having the eyes of him like a flame of fire” seems to me a wonderful way to encourage the artist to see in the wholeness of their spirit. We’ve spoken of flame—respecting it, how it purges and makes ready for renewal, how it is by which one yearns to be consumed. In this image I see the artist as having the eyes of flame that actually is able to see past the consorting with the prescribed performative notions. Thinking about what it means to see through the lens of flame, I sense it as a dynamic spiritual act of creating with purging, consumption, regeneration, respect for art as always moving in directions that cannot be predicted. And yet even with all of this, like John the Revelator calling the church of Thyratira to witness to the truth of their own calling, the artist is witness to this same kind of devotion to calling. In this sense, I would hope that as artists we see “having the eyes like the flame of fire” and that our creating will be claimed as the divine act that it is-the curing the need to consort with the status quo who I see as my distractor from a passionate call to live discerning truth through witness.
ESTÉVEZ: Let the fire grow!
New York City, fall of 2015