John Sturgeon

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Conjunction/Opposition II

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John Sturgeon ©1977

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video performance - L.A. Louver Gallery, Venice, CA​

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b&w live & pre-recorded video, with sculptural set,

performers: John Sturgeon & Aysha Quinn and text.

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    In John Sturgeon's Conjunction/Opposition II a number of binary

relationships are dramatically developed from various conditions of

antimony or incomplete order into harmony and balance. The primary

terms are sexual, and at the center of the work is the male

consciousness' attempt to accommodate the complementary but opposite

forms of the female. The sexual relationships invoked are however not

primarily social or personal (though they certainly incorporate these), but

rather the dominant metaphors by which essential structures of human

consciousness in general may be phrased. Appropriately then the basic

oppositions and conjunctions are projected in images recruited from

other symbolic languages which have historically been the means of deep

psychological investigation (such as alchemy, astrology and Egyptian

mythology) as well as from the more personal resource of Sturgeon's own

dreams. Using these languages, Sturgeon develops proliferating patterns

of antithesis (e.g. square/triangle; desert/water; personal/public;

temporal/timeless), rich in both the density of their internal cross-

reference and in the texture of their separate occurrence, which parallel

and amplify the basic sexual metaphors of the piece.

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    As a result, the piece presents several different kinds of problems to

its spectators. On the one hand, it is extremely literary in that within the

different vocabularies used - not only those of the magical traditions but

also those of drama, video, dance and sculpture - the iconographical and

symbolic references are both extremely precise and also largely

recondite. Which is to say that since aspects of the piece speak in

languages that are no more current in the art world than among the

population at large, a substantial element of it requires detailed

interpretation. On the other hand, Sturgeon's use of esoteric languages

is, for want of a better word, extremely sensual, and though a response

to the piece which is simply sensuous and intuitive cannot finally be

adequate, nevertheless such a response can be both satisfying and coherent.

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    Like the dream - a primary art form that is constantly invoked - the

piece draws the spectator imaginatively into its world and also presents

information that can be rationally considered. The recurrence of

elemental, archetypal motifs, the evocation of ritual in the choreographyand the unpredictability of the action generated both the emotionally

charged atmosphere and the intense perceptual presence of dream. But

the same elements which produce this overall enrapture themselves have

very specific meanings. At the beginning of the piece, for example,

Sturgeon enters the polyethylene tent, an energy center which is the

thematic and spatial focal point of the performance and the means

whereby transitions of all kinds are made. Passing through a triangular

slit in the tent he approaches a large, square black mat, one of the piece's

four major performance areas. With a piece of white chalk, he draws a

circle around a black cloth on the mat. Removing the cloth reveals a

woman (Aysha Quinn) who rises, and the two performers draw a series of

signs around the circumference of the circle. They knot together two

strings which run from a triangular glass beaker and a pitcher positioned

on opposite sides of the circle, pick up the two containers, walk around

the circle and then re-enter the tent.

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    Already, even an uninitiated spectator has many points of access

available. An immediate sense of conjunction is established by the male's

awakening of the female, and one's own recognition of this conjunction

may be extended to include a sense of the symbolic function of the

beaker and the pitcher, a sense of the implications of their being united

across the circle, and possibly a sense of some further significance of the

male and female dancing around the circle. At this point one is in a

position to begin to incorporate the sensuous, intuitive response into

some larger analytic pattern. But what the spectator cannot know is that

the marks made around the circle form a chart of the constellations of

the planets at the time of Sturgeon's birth and of their positions on the

day of the performance. What appeared as merely a ritual action,

satisfying by virtue of its design, is for Sturgeon a means of symbolically

placing himself in the present, of setting his own 'astrological clock.'

This opening section thus does more than establish a mood; it

establishes the terms in which the performance will operate and also

establishes Sturgeon's own position within them.

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    As such, this introduction supplies a lexicon of basic elements which

the piece as a whole analyzes in greater detail. Upon re-entering the

tent, the two figures remove their clothes and subsequently they explore

the issues and the materials which have been introduced. Quinn, for

example, takes the beaker and places it on a stove in the middle of a

circular bath of water activated by dry ice. During the performance, the

water in the beaker eventually comes to a steady boil, again one responds

sensuously, to the mingling of the 'essence' of the beaker's content with

the steam from the ice, or to the contrast between the firs and the water.

But one can also be aware that these elements maintain and continue in

both their form and their content, the dialectics introduced in the

opening scene.

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    Other parts of the piece are similarly specific in developing the motifs

introduced at the beginning. At one point, for example, Sturgeon draws

a series of smaller squares and triangles inside another of the square

mats. Watching him, we are aware of certain visual puns and also

perhaps of the contrast between the severely angular shapes of his

design and the more fluent, organic forms of the materials that Quinn is

simultaneously employing. But when we know that Sturgeon's diagram is

of an Egyptian locational devise which in the 16th century became a

standard matrix for astrological charts, then we are able to perceive his

act as one of more than graphic or choreographic significance. Later

when Quinn, standing inside a polyethylene obelisk, breaks a piece of

clay into four parts and hands the parts to Surgeon, we are aware of a

number of textural ands spatial interactions; her nude body is strangely

luminous inside the tent, and as she breaks the clay we may more of less

have some articulate sense of a primal earth goddess passing Adamic

clay to a male who puts it is order. But these intuitions are considerably

enriched when we know that the clay is more than a material; it is also a

writing tablet of a kind, for on it are inscribed certain important planetary

conjunctions which Sturgeon must position very specifically for his

statement to become coherent.

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    All parts of the piece have this in common, then: while their initial

appeal is to the intuitive, the pre-rational, they lead the spectator beyond

this level of apprehension to one of highly specific statement. The parts

are gradually articulated into the recurrent patterns which we recognize

as characteristic of language.​

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    By using his languages to signify in relation to a world apart from

themselves, Sturgeon's primary accomplishment in Conjunction/

Opposition II is to introduce the spectator to a reality which, while not

autonomous, is nevertheless more profoundly real than the experience of

either logic or materialism. By investigating the personal on the level it

does, his work becomes more than personal, for the areas he explores

and represents are those where the differences of our individual and

private histories are submerged in the universal human. At the end of

the piece, the male and the female figures meet and, facing each other,

place their hands successively on the other's forehead, heart, solar-

plexus and genitals. This dance for arms and bodies, symbolically

marking the resolution of those tensions which have organized and

shaped the piece, also marks the unification of all parts of the human

body and mind into one harmoniously interacting entity. As such, it

signals the completion of the piece and the completion of our entry into

the world in which the meeting takes place. By virtue of the insistence -

the coherence and the intensity - of its affirmation of this level of

existence where we all meet as equals, the piece as a whole transcends

self-reference and produces a context for itself that is, finally,

metaphysical.

 

    In this way Sturgeon's art may appear as radically un-Modern. For

while the formal characteristics of Modernism (multi-locational

perspectives, open form, non-linear construction, temporal displacement,

etc.) are used, the teleology of Modernism is subverted, its techniques

not used reflexively or as a means of exploring the nature of the piece's

materials, but rather as a means of ontological affirmation. While the

experience of Conjunction/ Opposition II is then initially one of radical

dis-place-ment, it can lead to a re-place-ment, a coming home to the

place from which all journey's begin and to which they inexorably return.