| Unsettling and beautiful, Diamanda Galás’ work takes an assassin’s aim at ignorance. In pieces such as Saint of the Pit, Plague Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Wild Women with Steak Knives, or Defixiones: Orders from the Dead and Litanies of Satan, her performances, like her life, are never the same. Born in San Diego, CA but now a long-time East Village resident, Galás was classically trained in music, was a fellow at Princeton, has collaborated with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and in a performance to represent the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church in its response to AIDS, she hung from a cross and used texts from the Bible to enact public awareness and disrupt public apathy. |
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Cecilia Muhlstein on Diamanda Galás
{mp3}2007/DiamandaGalas-Lonely_Woman{/mp3}
Unsettling and beautiful, Diamanda Galás’ work takes an assassin’s aim at ignorance. In pieces such as Saint of the Pit, Plague Mass at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, Wild Women with Steak Knives, or Defixiones: Orders from the Dead and Litanies of Satan, her performances, like her life, are never the same. Born in San Diego, CA but now a long-time East Village resident, Galás was classically trained in music, was a fellow at Princeton, has collaborated with Led Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones, and in a performance to represent the hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic Church in its response to AIDS, she hung from a cross and used texts from the Bible to enact public awareness and disrupt public apathy.
Her work, which has been called everything from “blasphemous” to “transforming,” is, besides the infamous multi-octave range and brilliant piano work, a weapon in response to a world increasingly more violent and tragic. If its subjects, which include references to HIV, Aileen Wuornos, Artaud, Baudelaire, Henri Michaux, genocides, racism, and hate crimes, are disturbing, then what better way to conjure justice then through the cathartic voices of the dead and marginalized—those whose very lives were sketched by human iniquity.
As Galás states, “Much of my work is a realization of the Greek word katharizo. The English translation of this word refers to the act of cleaning—more artistically, to the word catharsis—as in cleaning one’s house of evil spirits. Curiously enough, one way of doing this for me is to create a hex, or katapa.The hex is, in Michaux’s words, not just a lovely turn of phrase, but a violent attack. The Latin defixio refers to a ‘fixing’ of an insulting person by means of a written and/or spoken/sung incantation so that he freezes in time. He is alive, but he is dead.” This physicality surfaces in her version of Screaming Jay Hawkins’, I Put a Spell on You. Galás’ voice wavers between silence, whispers, and excruciating pain. Elongated notes become registers of obsessive love and madness in an Artaud-like “theater of cruelty.”
“It is perhaps the legacy from my mother’s side of the family,” Galás says. “They were the Maniates, who sang the moirolyia, which by definition is inseparably a catharsis and a curse. Notably the Greek words are close. Greek tragedy has inspired my work as well: it has always been at once political, psychological, and intravenal, was written by a people who had a need to write such extreme work. It was a culture that thrived in the middle of the world, in the middle of all seaports, in the center of East, West, South, and North. It was destined to be the greatest culture that ever existed and was destroyed for the same reason. When people talk about Greek culture as the cradle of Western civilization, I wonder what they are talking about. Greece is not in the West. The Greeks spread their influence East and South and assimilated in turn that which they liked of the cultures with whom they traded.”
This ignorance of history recalls C. Nadia Seremetakis’ “Intersection: Benjamin, Broch, Blaudel,” where she writes on the history of the senses and Greek culture that, “The split between public and private memory, the narrated and unnarrated, inadvertently reveals the extent to which everyday experience is organized around the reproduction of inattention, and therefore the extent to which a good deal of historical experience is relegated to forgetfulness.” Galás reclaims culture as a vindication of those whose voices have been silenced by reinventing them in the present memory as sentient beings.
This societal amnesia in the present, in Galás’ words, is rendered by “…necrophliacs—we are now all dead—who know nothing about our culture or thinking but wish to claim it as their own, whilst relegating us to dead houses of learning. Relegating us to the Society of Footnotes. Precisely: Dead Messengers. Therefore when I do the ‘amanethes’ I am doing them for the Greeks; in a sense to reclaim what we have lost, to call to our gods and say, ‘We are here: do you hear us? Our icons’ limbs have been bombed, but we still survive and wait to render your message.’ This is clearly the voice of George Seferis…. And when I speak of Greece I speak of Anatolia as well, of the rest of Yunanistan. Yunali is the Turkish/Arabic word for the Greeks. That is to say the land formally known as Turkey, by the Turks. This spirit, yes, is the essence, of Defixiones, of Plague Mass, of all my work. It is a cry from the inglorious, from those who were buried alive by the jealous and the covetous, not to mention the ignorant, who have historically been the best henchmen of all.”
Diamanda Galás’ forthcoming work, Guilty Guilty Guilty, scheduled to be released in early 2008 on Mute Records, offers another extensive range of work. Everything from Tracy Nelson’s beautiful Down So Low, to songs made famous by Edith Piaf and Frank Sinatra. The selection of songs reveals the multiple dimensions of this extraordinary artist whose fierce interpretations and compositions evoke sublime and mind-altering catharsis.
