Author interview
Feature interview in the Philadelphia
Inquirer
by Art Carey
Where Art, Science and Religion Converge
“His synapses crackle, his mind is a
pinball of ideas. When he talks, he displays the deftness of
imagination: intelligence having
fun. Unlike many visual
artists, he can express himself with words. His voice is
resonant, soothing, his thoughts linear, his language eloquent.
He makes the task of trying to know the unknowable seem
feasible.”
Some day, after The End comes—after
the supertankers and SUV's have done their damage, after the
ozone layer vanishes, the Heartland withers to dust, the
melting poles flood the coasts—what will happen to
civilization as we know it?
In a funky cedar-shake farmhouse in the
Brandywine Valley of Chester County, a wishful answer is
offered by an array of puzzling artifacts—a ceremonial
drums, shamanic shields, ritual tools and totems, and huge
tusklike horns that resemble the didgeridoos played by
Australian aborigines to induce meditation.
Carefully carved and painted, the objects
look primitive and sacred. They have a magic quality, conveyed
in shapes and textures of timeless beauty. Unabashedly,
they do more than look pretty. They tell a story. They are
instruments of myth-making.
And yet, in that drum, isn't that an
automobile headlight? And the calligraphic scrawling on the
drumhead: Isn't that the mantra of the Atomic Age: E=mc 2? That
medicine shield? Could that be an Oldsmobile hubcap? And over
there in the rubble, that toadstool-like object covered with
moss: Isn't that shiny design the logic board from a computer?
Curiously, none of the items is signed.
But the anonymous artist has left clues. He must have lived in
modern times, for he has harvested the debris of 20th-century
technology. And yet his sensibilities are ancient, universal.
He has not so much created this art as discovered and
resurrected it. It is derivative and synthetic in the best
sense. Its roots stretch back to cave paintings, Stonehenge,
Egyptian hieroglyphs, Mayan reliefs, the tribal icons and
implements of Asia and Afraica, the Celts and the Sioux.
What was this guy thinking?
Michael Green will tell you. In fact, he
spells it all out in a note that accompanies his exhibit at the
Franklin Mint, "Arts of the Afterculture."
The other day, Green, 57, of East
Fallowfield, was at the museum preparing for his first big
show. Excited, distracted, he was wearing a baggy crewneck
sweater, buff corduroy pants, and tennis sneaks.
And aging alum of the Age of Aquarius (he
did the whole hippie trip: psychedelics, communes, liveing in a
teepee in Woodstock, running a macrobiotic restaurant), he came
to Philadelphia in 197 to follow a Sufi Sage and stuck around.
Today, his hair and beard are gray, and he
peers over metal-rim spectacles like an inquiring schoolmaster.
His synapses crackle, his mind is a pinball of ideas. When he
talks, he displays the deftness of imagination: intelligence
having fun. Unlike many visual artists, he can express himself
with words. His voice is resonant, soothing, his thoughts
linear, his language eloquent. He makes the task of trying to
know the unknowable seem feasible.
He hopes the exhibit will attract a crowd,
and not just the usual pierced hipsters in black turtlenecks
and the tour-bus matrons with blue hair. He'd be thrilled if it
drew skateboarders in droopy jeans, dot-com plutocrats and
Net-surfing digerati, as well as the guys in tractor caps and
Valvoline windbreakers who normally ogle the model Corvettes in
the adjacent gallery.
he wants people to see his art because it
says something. Green does not have a fine arts degree, and
he's dismayed by the modern art scene. (Small ideas blown up to
a huge scale," he says.) Above all, he wants people to
feel something—a primeval tingle, awe in the darkness.
His work is unsigned for good reason:
"The finger pointing at the moon is supposed to draw
attention to the moon," he says. It's the art that counts,
not the artist. Fame and fortune can be ruinous especially for
an artist.
He has produced several books, including The Illuminated Rumi, a gorgeous compilation of greatest hits by the
ever-popular 13th-century ecstatic poet. His images are
recognizable but also fanciful, as in a dream. He operates in
the tradition of Michelangelo and da Vinci, proud to
illustrate, to create didactic pictures that spin a year,
impart a lesson, inspire a fantasy.
"Art is not just about
self-expression," he says. It should have a
purpose—to awaken our souls and point us toward the Great
Mystery"—that ever-elusive "cloud of
unknowing" that defies understanding even as it tantalizes
with the promise of bliss.
Art is "the way of beauty"; it
is also a way of teaching. "We are at the climax of an
era," says Green. "We have taken the scientific,
rational culture to the max. The Tom Swift model of
technological progress is exhausted."
The art of the afterculture is
"sacred art for a profane world." Even we violate
Mother Earth, treating the planet as an insentient source
of raw material, we are experiencing a corrective spasm of
spirituality. Poet Gary Snyder calls it "the river of
sanity," a powerful "truth-current" that has
nourished mystics through the ages and is now bubbling up like
lava.
From Joseph Campbell to drumming circles,
from feng shui to chaos theory, evidence abounds of our
yearning for magic, ritual and mythic depth, our need to
reconnect with the wellsprings of human holiness, says Green.
Spiritually, we are a starving, dying race.
The "afterculture" is a
romantic, prelapsarian vision where the vectors of art, science
and religion meet. It seeks to restore harmony between man and
nature, to open a path from mundane desperation to the splendor
of the spirit. It's a reflection of the West African word
sankofa—"returning to the past in order to go
forward>'
"Can we skim the best that science
has given us and ramp down our destructive consumer culture?
Green asks hopefully, "Can we embrace a downsized future
of simple living and mythic thinking?"
He pauses, looks at me earnestly:
"Can we afford not to? Can we sustain the way we're living
now?"