Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Love is Revolutionary


In a world where we are handed toy guns and sent off to war to create "peace" we have forgotten one of the most revolutionary tools that exists, Love. Galleries have become overcrowded with artists who create art from a place of pain,agony,fear, or anger. So when I attended Annie Sprinkle's and Elizabeth Stephen's 4th wedding ceremony/performance art celebration this weekend it really hit me how transformative and radical their art really is. Annie and Beth have taken on a 7 year art piece - based on Linda Montano's living life as art. For seven years Annie and Beth have vowed to live life in art and love through a vehicle they have created called The Love Art Laboratory. Every year the two artists' love and art coincides with a different color and a different chakra. And every year to celebrate their coming into a new color and chakra they engage in a wedding in which they invite their friends,performers, artists, and activists to offer something to the performance, to open themselves up to love and art and share that with the couple and the rest of the world. This years green wedding found the two nestled in a glen of redwood trees at UC Santa Cruz where a couple hundred of their closest friends came to wittness their radical openess and dedication to their art, love, and enviroment. This year Annie and Beth not only made their vows to one another but to the earth who they are no longer taking on as a mother but as a lover. The ceremony was set in a beautiful plot of land surrounded by towering red wood trees. The ceremony and procession was full of beautiful green nymph like creatures. There were around 20 performances including that which I offered up to the couple and amazing performances from Linda Montano, Sadie Lune, which were mc'd by Veronica Heart. Sexual revolutionaries Carol Queen , Robert Lawrence, and Sharon Mitchell were all in attendance and wearing their finest green. Performances included an erotic striptease while an enchanting girl sang opera(quite beautifully I might add), an experimental painting performance, a comedy routine that left the woman covered in borsche, and I performed a piece entitled SOIL in which I stripped down and handed Annie and Beth two green bowls of soil in which to cover my body, my vessel. Open hearted they both gave of their erotic energy as I gave them of mine. Coating my flesh in wet earth,over my head, my face, my breasts, my thighs, my feet. And then I reached inside of my cunt and pulled out a scroll in which I'd written my blessings for Annie and Beth's wedding. I don't think I've ever come across two people who exude more love and sexual energy and openess than Annie and Beth and I believe that their presence and art work is creating change, that artists that feed positve energy into the world can leave an everlasting imprint in the Soil that they have touched.

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