Grifting: COSM
Alex Grey, who are you? You can predict the World Trade Centers' fall through your painting? Your painterly formal realism and trypp is framed through Yoga practices? You've never heard of the MJT? You are so sincere, but your Church is also located in Chelsea? Moreover, your iconography is so advanced. How did all of this happen?
Here we go: the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is a collection of rooms on the fourth floor of a just-pre-derelict building in North Chelsea.
I entered while a drum circle was practicing in the chapel's yoga studio. Adjacent to the yoga studio is a collection of rooms that house "The Sacred Mirrors" and other works by Grey. The Sacred Mirrors are human-sized paintings and two mirror etchings. Admission is five dollars.
He's not an outsider artist. My distaste for the glorification of said "genre" is aparent. Here, it's different. Grey is highly trained in the lexicon of painting while simultaneously being aware of the contemporary art community of New York City. Maybe there's an inferiority complex with that community, but my guess is that the proxy isn't haphazard. The trope of the work, although interestingly social, is spiritual at its core. I'd bet that his primary audience is not the outsider art enthusiast, but rather the practitioner of an "involved mind/body dialogue." His penchant for this type of meta-narrative painting is what -- as far as I can tell -- has lead to the all-encompassing installation church being created. Self-emphasizing the work through a commitment to its display is not necessarily a new trick. However, the work exists because of the space and this commitment. Therefore, without the yoga studio, this work does not exist. Without the yoga studio, the work might actually be more problematic, misunderstood (and most likely unseen). We'll never know. In this case, the Church is the spectacle. The Church is the medium.
I'm less interested in a medium being the message because it is only as interesting as it is hard to define.
This gentleman artist, Alex Grey, is in his mid-50s. He spent 5 years at Harvard Medical School. There, he and his wife experimented with enhancers like LSD. Check this out: "During this period he had a series of entheogenically induced mystical experiences that transformed his agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism." He's shown his work all over the world and at completely respectable venues. He's a visiting professor at many colleges and a spends a lot of his time in cahoots with healers.
Something about this connection between creativity through expression and the interest in the mind/body relationship caused him to begin painting in a manner that renders the figure glowing and translucent with magical oil connections being made within the canvases.
There's also something about the way that true believers work, however: it is almost as if they've never been critiqued, that their ideas are worthy of a masturbatory squeeze into the consciousness of others without second consideration. They bestow an unquestioned and beautiful gift to the naive world.
Criticism here, isn't important; there is nothing stopping him/them. It is an amazing, unaware response to nothing.
Is the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors simply a little-known shrine to enlightenment tucked away in a conceptual burrow? Or, is it an attempt to participate in the dialogue of contemporary art community? Is it an installation or a plump yoga studio? Or, is it simply a work's relationship to its presentation techniques? Does the form match the content?
Yes and no.
COSM in the city.