April 2006, Chicago
Carrying forward the Eternal Festival, presenting: L. Francis and the Fertile Grid
As L. Francis, artist Frank Haines acts as an unchartered initiator. His authority to perform rites is self-granted. Adopting the initiatory traditions of the occult and ancient mystery schools –where individuals are admitted through a series of stages or degrees –L. Francis offers visitors their first step in the process of purification. By engaging the individual through allegory and symbol rather than the presentation of a singular Truth, L. Francis allows initiates to discover personal and universal truths for themselves.
Rather than endurance-performance, Haines has designed an ephemeral event. Linda Montano engaged in work that was intended to alter her state of mind, work that would train her to avoid the distractions of the material culture through meditative attention and activity. For Haines, this is not a self-centered event. L. Francis does not simply challenge his own spiritual makeup; it engages the audience to challenge the establishment of art. Where Montano focused on Hindu theology and ritual, Haines borrows traditions that range from Vedic ceremony to Magick and the occult, embellishing the space with images of Vedic traditions in collusion with occult and underground or outsider notions of spirituality. Integrating various traditions to create his own personalized and private ceremonial tradition, his performance is at once a culmination of process and commencement tradition.
L. Francis does not completely dissolve the barrier between art and life or artistic ritual and religious ceremony. Instead, Haines offers visitors an initiation to a lifestyle that runs counter to current trends in the art world. Staged in front of a luscious turquoise grid, L. Francis invokes and re-affirms Krauss’s ‘autonomous and autotelic’1 space of art. Here, the anti-narrative, sovereign space is declared fertile ground, rescuing artistic practice from having its ends increasingly framed by the capitalist death-drive. In terms of religious ceremony, the L. Francis environment also runs counter to current trends in religious spectacle. Rather than a major convocation at the mega church, Haines has created a fledgling camp for the Gnostic mass outside of the establishment.
Ephemeral work and performance art has long sought to challenge the art-as-commodity establishment. Since the Cabaret Voltaire took to the stage with grotesque masks and poetic incantations, artists have continually reinvigorated the debate over commodity consumption and cultural poverty. "It is useless," said Situationist Raoul Vaneigem, "to expect even a caricature of creativity from a conveyor belt."2 But yet here we are, cranking out art-product for an art fair economy that has hijacked culture and dressed a shopping mall up as an art festival. Transactional relationships have consumed art; transactional relationships have consumed us.
L. Francis purposes liberation from the art-commodity, but not through a new manifesto, movement or L. Francis as, soon to be commodified, savior. Rather, Haines performs an initiation that celebrates collective experience. Where a commodity driven art market promotes individuality and novelty, the rituals of L. Francis are aimed at building community towards universal brotherhood. The Situationist’s had declared: “To hell with work, to hell with boredom! Create and construct an eternal festival!”3 L. Francis and the Fertile Grid reminds us of art’s great potential, reuniting a few believers for a kind of intervention. Timed to coincide with the Taurean window, a time to clean up and come clean, enter L. Francis, April 21st, 2006 at 22:46 pm.
Participate.
Jonathan Rhodes & Shannon Stratton
1. Krauss, Rosalind. “Grids.” The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1986.
2. Marshall, Peter. Demanding the Impossible, A History of Anarchism. London: Fontana Press, 1992. pg. 77-85
3. ibid.