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Kevin Notes that this guy is still one of my favorite artist I got to hang out with him in Jamaica, I didn’t understand a thing he said (it took me a while to get the accent down), but it was the time of my life

Written by Randall Morris

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

My Summer Vacation part 2

We traveled up intricate and winding mountain roads through exquisite green vista after vista to see the yard show environment of Errol McKenzie. The last time Wayne had seen McKenzie alittle less than a year ago he had been upset by the fact that McKenzie had destroyed part of his environment; in fact destroyed one of the most sensitive and important aspects of the site; the belly of the Black Moon Goddess, her womb disbanded and consigned to dissolution, her bones and floor reduced to rubble.
It seemed like a funeral march when we got there, some kind of grandeur diminished with no wind and no air only a cruel metallic heat that bore down like an occupying army. McKenzie pointed across the way where he had been doing some terracing. I felt selfish, I wanted his graceful surreal palace back, I thought he was rationalizing some loss, that something cataclysmic and sad had happened in his life. There was no roof, there was no electricity connected to his refrigerator, he mumbled something about channels of energy connecting to his control room, which was his bedroom and did have a roof. We ducked down into the entrance and walked in.
The room still held some of its marvels. The iconography of the carved walls was still sharp and succinct. There were moon rocks molded in and wooden carvings sunk into the architecture, but this room used to open out into the other rooms that had been destroyed, now it was isolated unto itself. In the corner were stacked some of the wooden sculptures he had taken from the original womb room.
He explained then that he had needed the stones in order to build the belly of the White Moon Goddess and that she was more important to him right now because she was getting more feedback from white (nonblack) people then he was from black people and so it was important that he have the site ready for a white woman who shall go nameless for the time being who had come to see him and whom he had recognized as the Goddess, knowing of her arrival before she ever showed up.
So listen to what I am telling you here and try to see it from where we were experiencing it. All the way through the country's heart to see one of the most idiosyncratic and important of the younger generation of Intuitives and he had crashed and burned, destructed Black Moon Island using her bone/stones to create a terrace in honor of some woman whom he now felt was the Great White Goddess.
The whole way up the mountain we had been talking about the problematics of the Gee's Bend situation fully aware of how easily things can go wrong across class, across race and across culture. Politically correct is often morally ridiculous. The artist, the academic, the collector etc are basically walking across a perpetual minefield, usually with little or no cognizance of what other people might have done minutes, hours or days before you arrive on the scene, that will have lasting consequences on what you do or wish to do. The core of Gee's Bend is a simple yes or no, right or wrong with as much chance of being settled out of court through communication as in court.
That very morning I had read the chapter in Sacred and Profane about Gee's Bend and neither side can downplay the glory and the power of the idea that the word artist is such that anyone can wear it and has the right to wear it and be it and be great at it and not held back by the words: self-taught, folk, outsider, or craft. That is the bottomline of the Arnett's intentions and no matter what has happened they have made that necessity of artistic identity public where it wasn't very public before. The artists of Gee's Bend aren't going to let their artistic identities slip away from them so easily ever again. The rest of it seems to be saber-bashing between lawyers and that can be very ugly to behold.
So here we are in the heart-stopping heat with Errol Mckenzie standing there gesticulating and rapping a kilometer a second about numbers and demons and goddesses and it gets more and more obvious all the time that being a sufferer and having less in the world, against your will, never makes things less complicated. He pulled us up to the top terrace and there was a three dimensional mound in relief in concrete and he said that was the moon eye, the combination of the black and white Moon Mothers. He wasn't letting up on us, he was driven to make his old friend Wayne Cox see exactly what it was he is trying to do here. The eye then abstracted off bipedally into two lobes that were the White Moon Goddess's head on one side going down into her neck which was about ten feet long and then a wall that looked like an old burnt out revolutionary era wall maybe pu together with Inca know-how. We were still looking behind us at the skeleton of the old installation. This concrete and neck was not hitting us right. My short hair was hot, my neck throbbing. I kept checking for imaginary fever. I had forgotten my water bottle at the house so all I had was this wet washcloth in a plastic bag. I went down to the car discouraged and de-energized and put the delicious cloth on my face listening to the beautiful little kid in a bright green dress sitting on a bright blue porch of a one room house compulsively slapping her leg in rhythm and I realized that I had been hearing that same beat on her leg since we had arrived and I turned to look at her and just then she went into a sequence of Touretts' barking.
Mckenzie was right behind me. I was still feverishly roiling all this over in my head and actually coming to the right conclusion in thinking: Get off it man. This is his place. The story is whatever he does. Holding on to what it was is fine but environments are not static. They are always on the edge of some kind of movement. He is still Errol McKenzie and you have no right to judge a Vision. No right!
He asked us to walk up the hill across from the site so we could get a better view. I remembered my kid when she was six running up this very hill because she thought she saw a deer. It was a brown goat. We would understand better up the hill he felt. The obvious implication of course and he was right was that we weren't getting it yet. And he was so right because we were focusing on the implications of ruins and this white goddess interloper and exploitation and he of course was immersed in this enormous overview. He, even though he now wanted to give the land to this new Goddess, was in control. Control was key word. Everything as built to resolve in his control room.
I climbed the hill in front of him passing the blue house. Blue is the color of warding off evil, and the child in the green dress and the odd smell of sweet laundry detergent where the mother was washing clothes in a metal pail and McKenzie behind me saying Turn, turn around now and I did. And it all looked different!
“Is the white moon goddess you now see…..”
“The black wall is her belly?, I asked.
“Exactly” he said…”And that is…..”
“Oh man McKenzie I think I see her!”
The wall was her belly he said made from the stones that had been in the womb of the old structure. She was there. Instantly huge. Instantly immensely important. There was nothing else like this in Jamaica; there was nothing else like this in the United States and there were several sites remotely related in Europe but still not like this. Not with sacred seals buried under them in the earth, not born from the womb of an older Goddess. The entire dynamic of the site had changed. For over twenty years Black Moon Island had slowly labored along changing incrementally but fundamentally dedicated to the uplifting of the Black Mother, the black moon female presence against the sun, against the patriarchal dyad of Father and Son. A site he wanted to be a didactic demonstration of cosmic balance.
But it had become consumed by devils. Eaten by evil. Evil was throwing his sculptures out into the yard at night and tormenting his head. His wife had finally left after years of a struggle to keep it together. His neighbors were not fond of him. “I saw her before she came, “ he said.
She is there on the hillside in blazing sun yet filled with Mystery and mysteries. His whole effort is a constant stream of attempting to balance a morally neutral universe that cannot be balanced by any institutions that have come before. Her head is divided into two lobes and unified by a single eye. Beneath the earth are buried numerous seals, moon stones and secret things that drive the forces of connection. Her neck is about ten feet long and flows into a graceful torso that culminates in the eight foot high black wall of womb stones. The rest of her body is white so her belly and womb have been carefully created from the black stones that made up the now dismantled womb of the Black Earth Mother.
Below the belly terrace are her two legs which are in motion and activated. Each is at least twenty to twenty five feet long. It must be remembered that these limbs and outlines, with the exception of the head units are not a single layer of outline stones but actual terraces. Earth was moved in large quantities and hundreds if not thousands of stones were lifted and fitted because he didn have money for cement to hold it together so each stone was handfitted and solid into terraces and walls between three and four feet high.
One leg ran toward the the lower south west of the torso in running configuration. Running or dancing. Most likely dancing because the other leg, a much longer one was bent at the knee where (o most amazing concept!) it touched part of the remaining wall of the old Black Moon Island. It then continued down almost doubled under the thigh.
McKenzie was elated that we saw it. He pointed to the knee. “See where she touch? That is the heart.” I squinted. There was a large smooth concrete construction about three feet in diameter split down the middle attached to the wall righ ton the other side of the knee. “that is the heart of both the Black Moon Mother and the White Moon Mother. They have the same heart for Moon Balance.”
And then we could see that from the heart stone began to run the white-marled paths or channels of communication about three to four feet wide that led to his bedroom/control center. Suddenly I could see the entire site as this network of interconnected forms and shoots and it was all organic and connected below, on and above the earth with buried seals, stones, secrets, and wooden and concrete extrusions.
McKenzie has, in essence, managed to create a work that structurally combines sculptural language with the two dimensional schemata of his evil-eating paintings which are compendiums of his channels, seals, organs, wombs, and eggs. His sculptures and paintings can now be read in a similar way. His art work as a whole has achieved forma l theoretical balances, extending his urgencies meaningfully into other planes, pun intended.
As I stood on the hill trying to take in the unified totality of what before had seemed to me truncated and disconnected, sad and broken down I was renewed in my admiration for this man who, against seemingly insurmountable odds, mental and pysical, could create this monument of iconic belief, from earth, wood, stone and concrete.
I was an am still concerned about the white goddess in the flesh. I feel she adds to the thinness of the edge he lives on. I cannot imagine too many potentially happy scenarios to come out of this. At the same time she inspired some of this vision, even though unknowingly. (We now know who she is). McKenzie's life is too real and too abstracted for anyone to be able to warn him about the possible debacle to come when either she never shows up again or does not fulfill his sense and need for a culmination of immediate prophecy.
But McKenzie is an artist who is well acquainted with the use of art as a mode of active cognition. For him it is a vehicle of self-healing. What to unknowing eyes like ours seemed to be meaningless destruction was actually a massive act of creative regeneration and one can only hope and even pray a bit that in the future he will pick himself up yet again from the void and begin to fill it with his unique and important visionary works. I look forward to Wayne Cox's paper on him at the Kohler symposium at the end of September.
(to be continued)

 

Errol McKenzie

 

The Eye of Moon Balance

 

The Heart of the Black and White Moon Mothers

 

The White Moon Goddess

posted by Cavin-Morris Gallery at 10:02 AM 0 comments

More Control Room

posted by Cavin-Morris Gallery at 10:01 AM 0 comments

Inside the Control Room

posted by Cavin-Morris Gallery at 9:58 AM 0 comments

Entrance to the Control Room

 

Errol McKenzie: What seemed to be in ruins

Here are some of the photos when we first got there and before we had the epiphany on the hill. Fortunately the site was well documented by Wayne in its earlier form as well. Remember you are looking at a transitional phase.

 

Some Freestanding McKenzie works

These are just a tiny tiny sampling of Errol McKenzies paintings and freestanding sculptures. Please remember this is just a recording of this visit and not an attempt to be comprehensive about the art.

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