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Here is a posting to La Lanterne that is not exactly makeweight of the Left. It is commentary on one of the more curious offerings of Bo's host, Dr. Omed, on his Tent Show. Bo cannot but note however, that most art is subversive, and this art more so than most, and hence it is fit fodder for the actionaries of the Left, if they would but clutch it to their malleable bosoms. One might say, -- at the mind's meat goes this same crooked worm; forgive us our sins D.T.
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I have known the polymath and contrary noetic aesthete who blogs as Dr. Omed for twenty years, and even so, the point of view of one of his categories, Nun of the Week, sometimes escapes me. However for the sake of easing new viewers into an appreciation of that insidious subversion and ongoing rumination, here are a few guidepoints:
The Dr. is an artist in many media, including poetry, photography, pictorial construction, caricature, cartoons, and other draughtsmanship. In all forms of expression he operates as an Imagist. He chooses, he throws up, or he creates out of whole cloth a series of apparently isolated images, i.e. images in which the artist eschews the usual layers of the bassinet, those of explanatory rhetoric or spin, except for the choice of sequence/location and the image itself.
These unconventual images operate directly, with a minimum of spin from the artist, on the personal and collective unconscious of the viewer. The Dr. is more concerned with maximizing the individual's freedom from all forms of mental coercion than he is with insisting on clarity or auto-exegesis of message. [ He explicates elements of his frequent prose, and might be drawn into expanding his written viewpoint on brief samples of the art of others, but can seldom anymore be drawn into explaining or comparing his own work. ]
Hence, the viewer should accept the whole oeuvre of the NotW [ or NoW ] without overcommitting to extracting the molars of meaningfulness in any particular day's effort, as we often must do with, say, a four panel cartoon such as OPUS.
NotW is then a series of choices, and a successive meditation on a rather delimited complex which migrates as an autochthonous beast through the bestiary of complexes in the Dr.'s psyche. The antihegira carries forward without words, [ yes, i suggest you at first ignore the texts subimposed, going back much later to enjoy them also ] in a transcendental negation of the overweening intrusion of alphabetical consciousness, to an audience composed mostly of committed abecedarians. At times the quixotic complex finds its casus belli in the Dr.'s otherwise subservience to the determinism of The Word, while the Nuns perhaps serve variously as windmill, steed, lance, valet and transient imago of the Don.
The images in NotW are not posed images, but found images scavenged from many a googling trudge down that littoral of consciousness which is approximated, concretized or reproduced by the entirety of the searchable WWW. So the images of the nuns are first of all those that can be found, images then dragooned into expressing the quotidian limit of the Dr.'s anabasis inexplicans.
Well, if art is where you find it, Pilgrim, then the interloper, the witness catches the desperation of choice as the Dr. is forced to throw off the mantle of caution and procrastination and post the temporary object, not of his desires, but of his forced march. Once again the meddling viewer ought not obtrude his own lubricious projections.
These "nuns in wet vinyl, seldom stopping to feel" may be found down in the pornographic verge, but their usage by the Dr. is hardly for the purpose of arousal. If anything may be said of the essence of nun-ness or cloistered life in general, that thing is the persistance of denial. For instance, the costumes of orders are haute couture but gone centuries out of date, and hence formerly a fierce denial of the transience of style, an homage to character when found devoid of style. But today's world so accepts transience as a commercial fait accompli, a rationale unto itself, that the basic metaphysical message is lost. The caricatures chosen by the Dr. then function in part so as to re-attach the meaning of undatable clothing to the need for permanence of character. [[ One wants to ask if some of those Italian artists posing these models are not lampooning their own artistic culture's emphasis on the dernier cri. ]]
Huh? one might ask. Why then the nudity ? The obsessions ? The sadism and masochism? The pedophilia ? The echoes of Inquisition ? The objectification of body parts? The sacrilege? The unhallowed joy ??
That joy, yes. Hmmm. Yes. Preteen. Just. The age of the meander, of the Walkabout. Our Dr.'s complex of Aboriginal curiosity. Exercised in an adolescent figment of Decameron, its deserts crammed with incubi of eremites clustered en cartel; its swamps no simple bogs, no mere lagoons quartering but a solitary creature each , but pousse cafes of primeval decadence, the illiquid eristic ejections from which, the bestial segregations of which, are defended against by regimented ranks of creatures in black and white, armed with cruxes.
One doesn't want to spend too much energy trying to comprehend or corral such a state of mind in the artist. The perspective is fluid, chaotic, full of progress and dissolve, a psychoid state of the high junior codified, that most of us demonize and deify and package in hoops of imbricated iron stippled with rivets, but which the artist just accepts, if with terror. And in this case, a sense of humor.
There is then no one point of view in NotW. The naughty world, the knotty problem cannot be fletcherized, adjudicated, nested, partited, dismissed or resolved. At best one has symbols nun, and carries on in the habitual fashion.
One other thing about the Dr. He worships the Goddess, not least as Crone. Such a burden on the male psyche demands an outlet [ and i assure you, the Dr. is absurdly hetero, and overly male, and thus as Auden suggested, brutalized by kisses of the notional Goddess ] . So instead of the Crone "creeping like a nun", or Mother superior in awe, he substitutes the youthful demiurges, but ones not ready to jump the gun, just to tease.
4:39:33 PM 
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