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Speculative Realist (Found) Object Intervention at MIT List Visual Arts Center courtesy of Paradigm Shifting Sultan Sharrief’s Quantum Leap

“Speculative Realist (Found) Object Intervention” at “Welcome to MIT Playtest” at MIT List Visual Arts Center on May 16 succeeded in bring a post-subjective dialectic simultaneously into the American art museum & the academy at the start of “MIT Media in Transition +10: Democracy in Digital Media” — where the Mother of all academic panels took place under Sultan Sharrief’s visionary art process.

The introduction to the conference in the rarified space of the MIT List Arts Center was an interactive/participatory Event delivering the new paradigm art that I have been exalting as a critic for two decades!

At the entrance was preconference organizer Sultan Sharrief’s invitation to participate in his VR multimedia project-in-process: “Ancestral Holograms.” Encountering his ancestor in VR had a haunting effect after I met his brother in the food line and experienced his mother’s powerful presence on the integrated panel offering valuable insights about authentic collaboration arising from the heart — with examples in the local community.

By way of this rooted authenticity, the ancestral tradition leaps from locality to the national stage of the art museum!

“Welcome to MIT Playtest” on May 16, 2019 was an invitation to conference participants bring projects for open discussion…

“Speculative Realist (Found) Objects & the Ontology of Desire: Montreal, Cyprus and Berlin” found there way into the art museum by way of “Welcome to MIT Playtest” on May 16, 2019.

img_6103-2 — Phenomenology of “Speculative Realist (Found) Object Intervention” was intended to accompany my May 17 delivery of my paper…

5085E161-D359-4517-9C37-9D68CE33D6EE — Phenomenology of “Speculative Realist (Found) Object Intervention” was intended to accompany my May 17 delivery of my paper…

Valerie Giovanini (EGS 2017) hands a participant a card about her “Handmaiden’s Tale” panel with a photo depicting the use of the speculative object of the Eros uniform in civil disobedience.

I discuss a new dialectic of Eros in the academy with Sasha, a theater student deconstructing the character of Blanche in “Streetcar named Desire” for the local Fringe Festival.

After my first participation in an authentic incorporation of VR as an interactive medium into a paradigm leap as the organizer’s prompt into “Welcome to MIT Playtest”…participants were led through a makeshift labyrinth in the basement of the building…

….where Sultan Sharrief arose above the seated crowd as the priest of a new order, bringing his ancestry from virtual reality into the heart of the live action — by way of introducing a panel projecting into the future with his mother Sabreen Sharrief and four other paradigm shifter’s leap into the future (L-R): Henry Jenkins, Cornel West, Charity Everett and Jongwoo Han.

3E85825D-2A24-4B14-ABEA-288A225255F1 — ….where Sultan Sharrief arose above the seated crowd as the priest of a new order, bringing his ancestry from virtual reality into the heart of the live action — by way of introducing a panel projecting into the future with his mother Sabreen Sharrief and four other paradigm shifter’s leap into the future (L-R): Henry Jenkins, Cornel West, Charity Everett and Jongwoo Han.

TIME’S UP JAMES FRANCO!

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Postmodernism is a movement that refused to die. The aged postmodern icons go on and on…and as prominent critic Eleanor Heartney declared way back in 2004: “There is nothing to replace (them).”

And then, along came James Franco…

By 2008. the movie star had become bored and frustrated with the limitations of his expression confined to acting and the time-consuming grind of the publicity machine…

James Franco extremely bored while appearing with Amanda Seyfried at the Lovelace press conference at Berlinale 2013. The film was about how the porn star Linda Lovelace was used and abused by the porn industry and was surely a Promethean advance warning to the exposure of abuse in the mainstream industry if Franco was open to the message…(Photo by LPS)

In 2009, James Franco shattered the boundaries of the insular enclosed art world system when he traveled to museums across the U.S.A. to present and discuss Erased James Franco with the multimedia artist, Carter.

The intersection of art & film: the Aquariann Carter directing the Leo shadow evoked in painting behind James Franco. Photo courtesy of Carter.

The short art film Erased James Franco was filmed inside Carter’s installation at Yvon Lambert Paris in the fall of 2008. The key signifier in the installation had its inspiration in the postmodernist artist Robert Gober, namely a casting of James Franco’s actual leg strategically placed against an open door.

Dr. Francostein & his Monster as the Leo/Aquarius doppelgänger: The multimedia artist Carter directing James Franco on the art installation/set for the filming of Erased James Franco at Yvon Lambert Paris. (Astro-Portrait of FRANCOSTEIN is the composite natal chart of Franco and Carter, rectified by LPS.)

The exhibition was aptly titled Leg Opens Door/1963, an ontological reference to the Aquarian wave breaking in the sixties cultural revolution. Carter’s direction for James Franco to perform his ouevre at 50 percent was a real time symbolization of the collective emptying of the Leo personal self to absorb the light of the quantum wave as the Aquarian impersonal Self.

LEGONTOLOGY signed into zeitgeist by Carter. Photo courtesy of Carter.

Carter told me that James Franco had AHA Moment while making the film Erased James Franco. I pursued the actor for over five years to uncover what prompted the quantum leap that made Dr Francostein’s Monster the ubiquitous after-postmodern icon that I personally summed up as: “shattering every possible boundary between creative disciplines”.

My “Missing James Franco” journey across three continents began in April 2013 with the Copenhagen Collapse…

Carter (right) at the 2013 Copenhagen Film Festival to present “Erased James Franco”. James Franco gamed his former director by appearing via SKYPE to introduce “My Own Private River”, a recut of Gus Van Sant’s “My Own Private Idaho”. (Photo by LPS.)

By 2010, James Franco was on the red carpet of the Met Gala as doppelgänger to Marina Abramović wearing an identical tuxedo. Other appearances with art stars which revealed an unleashed shadow of celebrity famewhore lurking in the art world into the tabloid media that doesn’t normally focus on art stars.

The signature of the FRANCOSTEIN expression following Carter’s 2008 Aquarian experiment is a dual methodology of intervention and allegiance to meta.

Meta (from the Greek preposition and prefix meta- (μετά-) meaning “after”, or “beyond”) is a prefix used in English to indicate a concept which is an abstraction behind another concept, used to complete or add to the latter.

James Franco mocking the Mother of Postmodernism in his interventionist James Franco’s Film Stills exhibited at PACE Gallery in Chelsea in April 2013. This astro-portrait of james reveals the asteroid Eris conjunct his Sun and its ruler, Mars, in his 2013 Solar Return. (Gallery photo by LPS.)

This sums up the after-postmodern which was a media game that to be played successfully determined that the would be media star had to hold the tension of opposites, with his mastery of Web 2.0 multitasking…

James Franco triple-tasking his way out of the I Am Michael press conference at the 2015 Berlinale: posing for a fan’s Selfie, chatting with Mahari and avoiding his critic who took this photo. (Photo by LPS)

James Franco, with years of thespian training, could do this better than any art star. Therefore, his intention to outdo the avant-garde with his Web 2.0 mastery of smashing boundaries between the disciplines had a purpose…

Gadget Love Gesturing the Opposites: Smart phone in hand, James Franco blocks his shadow, Tommy Wiseau from the microphone (Screenshot from YouTube).

…beyond raising his celebrity into a virtual epic of platform-hopping never experienced before in the pop culture.

Meta means about the thing itself. It’s seeing the thing from a higher perspective instead of from within the thing, like being self-aware.

Making a movie about the film industry isn’t meta. Making a movie about making movies is. —Urban Dictionary

The January 8 telecast of the 2018 Golden Globes presented James Franco with his ultimate meta moment — to appear on stage with his shadow, Tommy Wiseau, whose “worst movie ever”, The Room, was meta-made into The Disaster Artist to win critical praise.

This way James Franco, currently starring in The Deuce, becomes the meta-figure personifying the tension between the opposites — good art vs. bad art — for the critics!

But the meta moment hat followed this triumph, a full decade after that momentous AHA Moment was signified by the pin that he was wearing —

TIME’S UP

James Franco, the master of the Web 2.0 meta moment, got a new meaning for both signifiers, The Disaster Artist and Times Up, in the wake of Twitter accusations in “real-time” with his acceptance of the Best Actor in a Drama Award at the Golden Globes. The flood of accusations to follow were indeed about the FRANCOSTEIN breaking through boundaries, including removing the guards while simulating oral sex for a film scene. Whether the accusations are accurate or not, the symbolism is apt for Mr. Franco’s meta project:

This is not what I meant when I commended you for transgressing boundaries, Mr. Franco!

In bringing together his own quantum leap into a critically hailed American auteur by way of a postmodern “meta copy” of “the worst movie of all time,” James Franco was doing a real-time performance of the tension of the opposites in which he personally defined the after-postmodern.

But the fallout which has put him on the defensive during his victory run reveals what happens when the human ego believes it can make the myths…

The nine-year reign of James Franco, as the ubiquitous figure of the after-postmodern superseding all other creative expression in this epoch by his sheer omnipresence has come to an end. Astrology confirms this as Uranus leaves Franco’s sign of Aries to move into Taurus this spring.

A new modernist movement has arrived and James Franco’s unexpected meta Moment summed up by signage on Sunset Strip revealing “James Franco’s life and art are getting uncomfortably close” provides a lesson right out of a neo-modernist playbook:

“WE DON’T CONTROL THE STARS, THE STARS CONTROL US.”

James Franco would be wise to withdrawal from the limelight and go inward to gaze at his fated star configurations as a means of shedding skins in 2018 and entering the realm beyond the meta: the Möbius strip where outer and inner are wedded in the sacred marriage of opposites.

But then, the very speed of the FRANCOSTEIN monster meant stomping on his critics!

Dr. Lisa Streitfeld is a Kultureindustrie theorist utilizing astrology as hermeneutics in the interpretation of contemporary art and pop culture. She is currently placing two book length texts on the market, “Missing James Franco 3.0: Nine Days at the Berlinale” and “Art & the Stars”, disclosing the ontology of the Age of Aquarius.

You can find her Huffington Post archives at:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/lisa-paul-streitfeld

She can be reached at shivalisapaul@gmail.com

In Memoriam 2017: Dianne Bowen, Anne Dufourmantelle and Kate Millett

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Dianne Bowen’s poem “REVOLUTION” with her spiral painting in a transitory New York studio space. Photo by Dianne Bowen.

DIANNE BOWEN

Read Kofi Forson’s “Dianne Bowen: Remembering a New York Artist”

Dianne Bowen started a (R)evolution right in her tiny East Village apartment building, distinguished on Second Avenue with a plaque proclaiming a former poet resident: Alan Ginsburg.

The irrepressible spirit of Dianne Bowen was dedicated to the resurgence of the empowering feminine icon which she heralded in the creation of her spirals as a living art of embodiment of past/present/future in whatever venue was open to it…

Dianne drawing her signature spiral, symbol of the continuity of the cycle of life/death/rebirth. Photo by Nikki Johnson.

Dianne Bowen concluding “(R)EVOLTUION: EROSion Flow at the Gershwin Hotel” on February 2, 2011 with the tearing of the spirals she made at the entrance ritual. Photo by Nikki Johnson.

Dianne Bowen “annoiting” Lisa Paul Streitfeld in the hieros gamos (heaven & earth) by drawing her footprint at the opening to “(R)EVOLUTION: EROSion Flow at the Gershwin Hotel” on February 2, 2011. Photo by Nikki Johnson.

My dialogue with Dianne Bowen began the night we met at a Williamsburg performance party hosted by Heide Hatry and John Wronoski, who would introduce me to Kate Millett. Indeed, my conversation that began in Brooklyn with Dianne was about a new movement in feminism that I was to discover she was hard at work in the embodiment in her character, her art and her “sacred marriage” partner I captured in image.

Dianne Bowen and her Sacred Marriage partner/husband Rein beside her “Cherry Blossom” at the opening of “Woman in the 21st Century: Margaret Fuller & the Sacred Marriage” at HP Garcia Gallery in Manhattan, 2010. Photo by LPS.

KATE MILLETT

I was thrilled to discover Kate Millett’s erotic paintings and showed them in my “Woman of the 21st Century: Margaret Fuller and the Sacred Marriage”, developed at Wronoski’s Pierre Menard Gallery in connection with the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial in 20

Presenting Kate Millett at Pierre Menard Gallery for a gallery talk about her word/image capturing the ancient Sky Goddess, the underlying theme of “Woman in the 21st Century: Margaret Fuller and the Sacred Marriage”. Photo by LPS.

During our discussion, in which she aptly wore her “Flying” T-shirt, the title of her 1974 autobiography in which she attempted to throw off the projections resulting from her overnight fame, I asked her how she had conscious knowledge of Inanna, the Sky Goddess, which was barely known in the sixties, and a surprising discovery of an ancient bisexual icon for women today.

“We had libraries in Minnesota,” she replied her characteristic sardonic tone. And as I queried her about the influence of this archetype on “Flying” and in her life, she repeatedly said: “Read the texts.” So I did. I purchased every one of the texts she brought to sell in the gallery and read them in sequence. It was an astounding discovery: Kate Millett, in her early propulsion to global fame after being distinguished as the only woman to be awarded with a degree with first class honors at Oxford, was to live the descent by way of her commitment to putting out revolutionary images in her art that undermined her academic influence.

In all of her mediums of expression — writing, sculpture, painting — Kate Millett was committed to the life of the unconscious, and her devotion to the internal journey got her committed to a lunatic asylum in Ireland at one point and a descent during the academisation of feminism in the eighties.

Kate Millett with the artist Aldo Tambellini at the “Woman in the 21st Century: Margaret Fuller and the Sacred Marriage” celebrating the passage of their “underground” art into the mainstream with the Cambridge celebration of the Margaret Full Bicentennial art. Margaret Fuller, the mother of American literature is Millett’s authentic predecessor as an American female intellectual grounded in the ever-present icon. Photo by LPS.

My experience of spending a few intense days with Kate Millett stream of non sequitur from made sense as her manifestoMy , like a jigsaw puzzle for the simultaneity of the left/right brain marriage. I found her to be the living prototype of the artist as a Third space between opposites. Her resentment at being cast by the media as the lesbian feminist icon resulted in her refusal to sit for a portrait for the cover of TIME magazine, which resulted in an Alice Neel painted portrait instead. She was married to the Japanese sculptor Fumio Yoshimura at the time of the 1970 publication of Sexual Politics, that made her an icon in the Woman’s Movement.

ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE

In order to change, recognize your desire, and then something will happen. If you consent to where you are, then you begin to change.

— Anne Dufourmantelle, 2012 EGS Seminar lecture

Anne Dufourmantelle (left) with Avital Ronell and Kleist in a single utterance. Photo by LPS

A new breed of philosopher could only emerge in France, where even the male philosophers attuned to the feminine, even if they don’t consciously acknowledge the polarity in their theories except to denigrate the overflow as “excess” (Lacan) . Dr. Anne Dufourmantelle immediately struck me as a new reality — a French woman thinker not bound by “think feel” and therefore in complete command of both her mind and emotions.

This could only take place through the inner marriage, a (R)evolution that I was devoted to instigating in France through my work with a French shaman trained by the son of Black Elk in the “underground” conversion through the native American church, the inipi, or sweat lodge. Steeped in Latin American literature, Ann Dufourmantelle had her emotions, chiefly her compassion, right on the surface.

A practicing psychoanalyst, as well as professor, novelist and theorist, Professor Dufourmantelle conceived of the name of a new Saas Fee collaborative philosophy arising out of the Schirmacher media in philosophy laboratory: the Conversion. She placed this new philosophy within a new continental apparatus, the Mobius strip, by way of a historical analysis regarding the integration of the subjective experience into philosophy:

You have a position of subjectivity, beginning with Nietzsche; his Ecco Homo text goes directly back to the Augustine moment. So, this is what I want to point out: how come the thinkers on these subjects towards this debt are those who explore what it is to lose oneself ––what is it to lose the hospitality of experience that drives you to the edge of what is no longer related to the subject? Nietzsche’s Ecco Homo is sharp-edged and provocative in the way he returns the possibility of knowing himself and the delusions – to obtain a moment where the opening to the REAL is possible. (Dufourmantelle, classroom lecture, August 2014.)

The word/image connotation of “conversion” suits a new continental philosophy grounded in a transformation process. The word suggests the religious or the mystical, and yet is rooted in science, chemistry originating in the ancient art of alchemy. Conversion is the process by which the nigredo, or shadow, transforms through the four elemental stages, (Calcinatio, Solutio, Coagulatio and Sublimatio), into the quintessential, the hieros gamos. This final stage had many names, including: the holy wedding, infans solaris and the philosopher’s stone.

Dufourmantelle explained her choice of the word “conversion” was about sameness going into difference, an interpretation which echoed Deleuze’s interpretation of the “eternal return with difference” as a 21st century evolution from Nietzsche’s pre-psychological eternal return of the same. Haven’t we come far enough in self-knowledge techniques to be able to reverse our fate? Indeed, the psychoanalyst instructs us to look closely at the process, emphasising the paradox: it is from the place of sameness that conversion becomes a radical difference. This philosophical language for what physics is calling entanglement so intrigued me that I starting digging into lesser-known Greek myths for a story of conversion. There was indeed to be found a tension of sameness versus radical difference in the centaur Pholus;

Pholus was gifted in a way that made him, like the healer Chiron, stand out from the tribe of wildly unstable bodies fusing hunter with the beast hunted. One day he had a visitor, the son of Zeus. Heracles had just finished his fourth labor, the capture of the Erymanthian Boar, and entered the centaur’s cave with a wicked thirst. His host was keeper of a cask of wine given to him by Dionysius. This was, in fact, the holiday spirit passed down through three generations. The popping of the cork created chaos. The other centaurs became intoxicated by the smell and rushed up to the cave where Heracles shot them with poisoned arrows. Chiron got wounded in the foot. Pholus died in his attempt to save him. (Streitfeld, Hermeneutics of New Modernism, Atropos, 2014)

The asteroid Pholus was transiting the Galactic Center at 27 degrees Sagittarius, the sign of the philosopher, in a conjunction to Saturn at Anne Dufourmantelle’s tragic death by drowning; she was tragically swept into a current while trying to rescue two boys on July 27, 2017.

The Mayans viewed the Black Hole at the Galactic Center as the World Tree symbolizing Life/Death/Rebirth. These three women will live on, and on, through their feminine wisdom in a time of transition out of the patriarchy.

(R)EVOLUTION IN GREECE: Michael Mantas’ “Receta” for the Avant-Garde

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It is a cinematic breakthrough that perhaps could only come from the monk. Michael Manta’s Receta expands the vocabulary of film to fold the personal journey into the universal quest for transcendence.

Mike Mantas enacts his inner monk on a spiritual journey in his “Receta”.

While this is no small feat, the surprise is how it achieves this quantum leap into the timeless; in real time by way of interweaving the making of homemade cheese into political documentary about his ancestral Greece during the violent uprisings anticipating the Trump era of nationalist revolutions.

As writer, director and producer of his own mythology transforming his identity from queer monk to avant-garde Greek-Canadian filmmaker, Mike Mantas‘ layered interweaving of autobiographical…

…the mythical…

…documentary of the Greek uprising…

…and political narrative of ego repression…

…absorbing the the long-repressed Shadow…

…by means of a multicultural tapestry of Queer identity on a sea journey…

…to absorb the transgender Aquarian icon…

…is coded with the newly arising icon of the hieros gamos via the extraordinary face of Mina Orfanou as the Goddess Eurynome.

Evoking the hero’s journey of our time of dislocation, Mantas, a trained actor, self-performs the marriage of polarities (masculine and feminine)… ….by means of mastering a Greek recipe for cheese created in real time…

Diametrically in opposition to the externalization of the “male gaze” …

…coded through the killer stare of the nude female store mannequins…

…melds symbol and gesture to herald a 360 perspective symbolized by the trangender figure holding a utility geometry of holism: an umbrella.

The outward projection of the psyche’s inner struggle for union takes place through the eye of Mantas’ vintage camera in which the analog camera serves as recurring motif…

…for the physicality of filmmaking in which the gesture with the camera is an apparatus of personal excavation…

… a metaphor of Heideggerian Being in which interior is reflected in the exterior…

Such a richly multilayered narrative texture utilising the Shadow as container for the embrace of the iternal feminine is new to cinema.

“Receta” has a metal lock box as metahpor of the Philosopher’s Stone storing the coded psyche.

Upsetting the hierarchical linear time measured in quantity, Mantas infuses kairos — the unexpected moment of the quantum leap– into film as a measure of the qualitative…

Melding analog and digital by means of the symbolic and performative, Receta constructs the organic source of film, celluloid, into the Mobius strip as it overcomes the binary dualism of the subjective/objective…

Receta proclaims a bold new era of cinema marrying subjective/objective through the right and left hemispheres of the brain. By challenging the viewer as participant in the quest for unity, the real/surreal seamlessly blend personal and universal narrative..

The Third Eye is among the rich iconography in “Receta” for the paradigm leap into the Third.

Mantas’ Greek birthname is Chronopoulos. Not surprisingly, this enterprising filmmaker has made his destiny in digging so deep as to establish the visual language of a new art for(u)m at the intersection of Chronos and Kairos…

…by means of opening new Doors of Perception.

While making unconventional demands for a whole brain participation to absorb multidimensional narrative, the rewards of learning Mike Mantas’ Receta are well worth the effort.

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And then, along came James Franco…

TIME’S UP

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DIANNE BOWEN

KATE MILLETT

ANNE DUFOURMANTELLE

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