| Valery Oisteanu, the Romanian born critic, poet and collage artist, has delivered a new movement to the East Village which he calls PO-COLLAGE. The first in a series of exhibitions took place in a basement gallery at the Thompkins Square Branch Library over the summer. It began with a reading and ended with a party in which participants revived the Surrealist practice of the “exquisite corpse” for a new era. Oisteanu’s definition of PO-COLLAGE is the integration of consciousness and unconsciousness through words embedded in the spontaneous transformation of image. |  |
Engaging the Kundalini for a New Era – Lisa Paul Streitfeld
Valery Oisteanu, the Romanian born critic, poet and collage artist, has delivered a new movement to the East Village which he calls PO-COLLAGE. The first in a series of exhibitions took place in a basement gallery at the Thompkins Square Branch Library over the summer. It began with a reading and ended with a party in which participants revived the Surrealist practice of the “exquisite corpse” for a new era.
Oisteanu’s definition of PO-COLLAGE is the integration of consciousness and unconsciousness through words embedded in the spontaneous transformation of image. His exhibit utilized works of friends, students and mentors around a personal journey reflecting a universal narrative of our time—the liberation of the eternal feminine through the kundalini penetration into body awareness. This, of course in preparation for the emerging 21st century archetype of the hieros gamos or sacred marriage of opposites, was so succinctly expressed by pioneer Charles Henri Ford, the American Surrealist who practiced collage as a visual form of alchemy.
The exhibition itself revealed the magical workings of the unconscious in its layout. It began with Ronnie Burk’s The Making of an Atomic Bomb, blending images of the bomb with Shakti, and revealing the connection between nuclear power and the long repressed kundalini energy. It continues with Oisteanu’s homage to Marilyn, the effervescent American sex goddess who marketed this power as unconscious sexual appeal that was followed by Andy Warhol’s marketing of the iconic image as art in including his own idea of it, by way of Campbell’s Soup. This is followed by Esther Mizrahhil’s story of the eternal feminine emerging through eroticism in fashion.
Lisa Moira incorporates PO-COLLAGE as an advertisement for herself; in a telling move, only her name was collaged into a collaboration with Richard West that ostensibly explores the archetypal feminine through illustrating a poem about a mermaid. On the other side of the room, Steve Dalachinsky and Yuko Otomo’s Life: Who Will the Champions Be? establishes a narrative of the media’s instruction on patriarchal values through iconic images of the happy housewife from the 50s.
In between, the narrative gets political with graphic depictions of the struggle of the US government to maintain those artificial values in Allen Sheinman’s Lying Dead in Golan Heights and Tom Walker’s Guantamino Story depicting torture practices by a fundamentalist U.S. government intent on repressing the kundalini transformation throughout the world.
Charles Henry Ford is represented by a marvelous poster of mingling masculine and feminine forms. John Evan’s Amato Opera is a narrative of the essential nature of art as channeling these gendered forces; he juxtaposes images of the building with a bum lying unconscious on the street. A dialogue between the curator and his wife takes place between his Duchmap’s Box, celebrating the transgender identity of the dada artist, which is placed on the wall behind Ruth Oisteanu’s Postcards to my Mom, a charming postage stamped case archiving artifacts from travel as a personal journey.
At midpoint, Oisteanu’s Pharaoh Dada/Rosetta Stone presents a sort of road map integrating ancient access to the kundalini power with the modern condition (Made in the USA) through the erotic fusion symbolized by an Egyptian Pharaoh with fiery, painted lips. He closes the circle with a poignant dialogue between himself and his mentor Ray Johnson, whom he met at a Charles Henri Ford tea party.
Johnson’s brilliant foreshadowing of the corporate marketing of the kundalini-charged, human icon in his legendary work, James Dean/Lucky Strike, introduces Oisteanu’s Bored?, the title of which emits from a female mouth below yet another image of Marilyn’s head on top of a drawn female form, and all of which indicate being fed up with the American domination of the universal female image. This self-contained work—which sums up the narrative Oisteanu brilliantly wove together through the work of 17 known and lesser known artists in his movement—calls for a consciousness of the eternal feminine by way of the clinical image of Mouth as it is juxtaposed over an image of the resplendent Sophia Loren.
