IRENE CAESAR: INTERVIEW WITH ALBERT WANG FOR THE ART ASSASSIN PART 2

[irenecaesar]

The Art Assassin 2

a nonfiction novel by Albert Wang, or a portrait of the artist as a young failure…
Written by Qi Peng on May 14, 2011

A Portrait of the Artist as Joan of Arc, or the Ideological Provocateur:
Irene Caesar, Artist Represented by Alexandre Gertsman Gallery

PART 2



Irene Caesar: Grady Turner Contributes to the Collective Subconscious (diptych)

qi peng: How would you describe the process of creating the portraits?

Irene Caesar: I wouldn’t call the participants of the project the sitters for they act rather than pose.  The participants - some well known NYC art critics, curators and artists - enact in their portraits not only a specific art concept, but also the philosophical, moral, socio-political and existential concerns of such artists as Kandinsky, Malevich, Warhol, and Hirst.  That is to say, each portrait attempts to re-create some very specific continuum of culture that inspired these artists to create this or that art concept.  The project is an exercise in very intense compassion.  The participants of the project re-live the lives of these artists in their own ways, and literally go through similar emotional and intellectual turbulence.  Every image in the project is a photographic recording of the most climactic moment in this emotional and intellectual turbulence.
The very set-up of the shoot provokes the participants to manifest this turbulence with no reserve - to outburst pain, sorrow, melancholy, inspiration, fury, irony, etc.  I function as a director, rather than simply as a photographer.  My function as a director consists not simply in creating the provocative set-up, but also in creating the overwhelming emotional atmosphere - the energy field - to help participants arrive at the climax in self-expression.  When I shoot I constantly speak in a suggestive or encouraging manner.  And I make my suggestions in a highly emotional way.  I myself go through the same emotional and intellectual transformations as my actor, through the same acceleration of emotion towards its climax.  When my actor cries, I cry too.  When he laughs, I laugh too.  When I laugh and cry, my camera shakes so much that I am grateful to use an automatic focus.  The verbal encouragements I give act like enchantments or hypnotic suggestions.  They put not only the participants into trance, but also myself.  I define my approach to shooting as interaction rather than as documentation or staging.  I believe that this interaction increases the force of individual expression manifold.
Let me explain more what I mean when I say I approach photography as a painter.  I have much more engagement with my medium than a photographer, or even than a staged photographer who choreographs his actors according to his vision.  The painter has an immediate connection with his medium - his mind gets extended with his arm, and his arm gets extended with his brush, and brush gets extended with paint smearing across the canvas.  The minutest movement in painter’s mind immediately influences the movement of his arm, the movement of his brush, and the movement of the paint across the canvas.  When I shoot, I have the same intimate and uninterrupted connection between my mind and the minds of my actors.  The minutest movement of my mind immediately produces the movement of my actor’s mind, and - the intensity and intention of his emotional outburst.  The work in the photographic studio is usually understood as the ability to control the amount of light bringing the image out of darkness.  My own work in the photographic studio consists more in controlling the amount of light produced by my mind and the minds of my actors than simply in controlling studio strobes.

qi peng: Could you give some specific examples of how this interaction between you and your actor happens?

Irene Caesar: For example, I asked Arthur Danto to enact the central idea of pop art - the transfiguration of the common place.  The image is called “Arthur Danto with Wise Puffy Cheese Doodles.”  It depicts Arthur Danto with horribly orange cheese puffs in a big silver baking pan right next to his mouth.  The image would have been extremely grotesque if not for the grimace of intense suffering on Arthur’s face.  Arthur is an old man and he is in constant pain.  The grotesque collides with sorrow.  This collision of two opposites increases their intensity many-fold.  This intensity validates pop art against the value of human suffering.  The portrait proves that the value of a man called Arthur Danto is immeasurably higher than the value of pop art.
My other portrait of Arthur is called “Arthur Danto helps Damien Hirst with his spot paintings,” and it depicts him when he throws the colorful plastic eggs up from the same baking pan, while the camera catches them in the mid air.  This image opposes the inhuman indefiniteness of meaning in the mechanically created abstract pattern to Danto’s famous ability for the intellectual focus, called lovingly by the art crowd as Danto’s gravitas.  This opposition creates an absurd effect, which reveals that a man is more interesting indeed than the indefinite play of the abstract pattern.  When I was shooting this portrait, I was shouting “Higher!  Higher!” - so that Arthur would throw plastic eggs high enough for my camera to catch them in mid air.  It was so loud and ecstatic that Arthur’s wife Barbara, resting sick in the other room, came out to inquire what it is all about “Higher! Higher!”  Revealingly, these words refer not only to the attempt to throw the plastic eggs higher in the air, but also to the aesthetic solution of the portrait, in which the most ridiculous, grotesque collides with the sublimity of human genius, and the latter dominates in the hierarchy of meaning.
My portrait of Vitaly Komar is done in co-authorship with Vitaly as his idea and performance directed and produced by me.  The portrait is called “Vitaly Komar contributes to Transhumanism.”  Transhumanism believes that humans will gradually progress to become post-humans, the waveforms of life with their bodies being purely prosthetic.  Accordingly, they believe that abstract art is the only art that corresponds to the post-human stage.  The portrait consists of five images, in which Vitaly is depicted with his head sticking out of the round hole in the middle of his abstract painting called “Mandala.”  Five images show different stages of how Vitaly rotates “Mandala” around his head while going through some very intense emotional transformations.  The composition of the portrait is built of one central piece with four stages surrounding the central piece in the configuration of a cross.  The objective of the image is to demonstrate that the value of unique experiences, and of a unique man who goes through them is incommensurably higher than the estranged impersonal value of the abstract universal mandala.
When I was shooting this portrait, and he was rotating mandala around his face, Vitaly recalled the most significant experiences of his life.  For example, in the central piece, he recalled being an infant at the moment of getting out of his mother’s womb with a horrible cry.  This piece depicts Vitaly yelling with his mouth totally round in the round hole of the mandala, with his round glasses increasing the roundness of his outcry.  Among other things, Vitaly recalled how his only child, his son died recently in his arms in Moscow.  He recalled the tenderness of his mother.  We spoke about my own most intimate experiences.  The shoot was very intense emotionally, on the edge of tears and laughter.  When we parted, Vitaly embraced me, and stroked my back as if I was his only child, with tender words of compassion.

qi peng: Quite a few portraits in the project “People of Art as Objects of Art” are done in the nude.  This is striking because these are quite well known people.  What is the role of nudity in this project?

Irene Caesar: I use nudity in this project and elsewhere as electrical shock therapy.  Nudity is usually associated with pornography or eroticism, explicit or implicit.  Nudity in my artworks is beyond eroticism.  Some of my nudes are explicitly non-erotic or even anti-erotic.  Often I depict bodies that cannot be sold as sex objects, or I depict nudes engaged in activities that are incompatible with erotica, or I depict emotional states that extinguish lust.  Nudity in my portraits emphasizes humanity - humanity on its own, stripped off any objects.  This kind of nudity is released both from shame and from sensual bodily pleasure.  This kind of nudity juxtaposes man as a live being to dead objects, and shows the ridiculousness of transforming man into an object of sale, sexual gratification or aesthetic appreciation.  This nudity bares soul, not only the body.  It calls for compassion, not consumption.  There is only one more artist in the history of art, whom I know to treat naked body like this - Lucian Freud.  But almost all of his nudes are too drowsy.  Because of the monotonous drowsiness of his portraits, Freud still does not overcome the depiction of man as an object on display.  He does not make a break-through towards the depiction of man as a subject, an agent with a free will.
One of the nude portraits in my project “People of Art as Objects of Art” is my portrait of David Gibson, called “David Gibson contributes to Abstract Expressionism.”  David is depicted naked when he is spitting breadcrumbs out of his mouth, and my camera catches them in the midair.  Drips of bread create an abstract composition, uncannily reminding of Pollock’s paintings.  The portrait is a parody on the uncritical idolatry of abstract expressionism.  It demonstrates that abstract pattern is indefinite in its meaning, and can be legitimately interpreted as the total grotesque of breadcrumbs, first chewed and then spitted out of the mouth.  The portrait laughs at the ridiculous pretences of abstract expressionism to value its indefiniteness of meaning more than the definiteness of human form with its clarity of suffering and compassion.  Nudity plays crucial role in delivering this message.  David’s nudity is not the nudity that is offered to a viewer as some forbidden spectacle.  David reminds of the ancient Bacchus in his ecstatic revelry.  Bacchus’ ecstasy is about being god-like (half-divine, half-human) - that is, being a creator.  Bacchus’ nudity is natural to his state of mind.  It is the manifestation of his almost divine freedom - the conviction that he, as a man is more valuable than any objects of culture, like clothes, or like drips of paint on canvas - he, as a creator, is more valuable than his creations.  And in this state of natural freedom, man rejects the dead artificiality of an artifact that has lost its connection with vital human needs.  He realizes that he is above any cultural code, like making nudity a shameful taboo.  He goes beyond culture.
My other artwork from the project “People of Art as Objects of Art” is even more exemplary in this sense - diptych “Grady Turner contributes to the collective sub-conscious.”  It depicts a heap of nude bodies, with all the limbs tightly intertwined.  Such heaps of nude bodies are associated with group sex scenes.  But, while sex is never disinterested and unconditional, the objective of this image is to express the disinterested and unconditional intertwining of minds within the collective subconscious.  Our minds are of the vibrational, wave-nature, and they are interconnected whether we realize this or not.  This merger of minds within the collective sub-conscious goes beyond eroticism.  The left part of the diptych depicts the positive state of the collective subconscious: I asked participants to touch each other not in the erotic manner but like a loving mother touches her child - with unconditional disinterested love.  The right part of the diptych depicts the negative state of the collective subconscious: I asked participants to break free from the knot of the collective subconscious.  Literally, it meant to break free from the entanglement of nude bodies.  The participants scratched and pushed one another, trying to pull their own bodies out of the heap of bodies.  As a result, this part of the diptych expresses the explosion of negativity - hatred, fear, despair, aggression, fury, etc.  It shows the inevitable price of the individual freedom.  Nudity in both parts of this image is simply necessary - it reveals the healing or killing openness of man’s mind to the minds of other people.  Our minds are more naked, more vulnerable, more defenseless in front of the negative or positive infringement of the collective sub-conscious, than a nude body inside the heap of nude bodies.  So I would call this kind of nudity “the nudity of mind.”
My portrait of John Haber, called “John Haber contributes to Minimalism” goes even further in its criticism of abstractionism than my portrait of David Gibson.  It depicts naked John cutting in cold fury the pages from glamour magazines with life-size faces of beautiful girls.  His scissors mutilate girls’ faces, slashing their lips and eyes and ripping their noses and ears apart.  What happens outstrips the cruelty of Jack the Ripper.  Strips of slashed faces create a minimalist composition in the air, and John rips girl’s faces apart in order to produce a piece of minimalist art.  The image states that the enjoyment of human deformation in abstractionism is identical with the enjoyment from mutilating in sadism.  But the cruelty of abstractionism outdoes the cruelty of a serial murderer, because it transforms the individual perversion of a serial killer into the respectable social institution of art, into cultural fashion, ideological creed, and a habitual way of thinking.  Abstractionism cultivates a taste for mutilation and total indifference to human suffering, which ensues from this mutilation.  It is the aesthetization of murder that Jack the Ripper simply did not have time for.  And even more: abstractionism lacks compassion not in the way as Jack the Ripper lacked compassion, but in the way as machine lacks compassion.  It is inhuman.  John’ nudity in this portrait is the powerful reminder that John Haber and Jack the Ripper are not machines, not objects - they are human, live, even touching in their humanity.  Thus, the portrait is ambivalent - it goes beyond satire.  It preserves compassion, and intensifies it by colliding a man and a machine.

qi peng: There are two portraits from the project “People of Art as Objects of Art” that are done in the nude and can be considered sacrilegious - the portrait of Larry Litt as a naked Orthodox Jew and the portrait of A.D. Coleman, touching himself nude on Easter Sunday.  Can you explain how your concept of “the nudity of mind” works in these portraits, and whether they are indeed sacrilegious?

Irene Caesar: My portrait of A.D. Coleman, called “The Easter Sunday of A.D. Coleman” clarifies my concept of the nudity of mind further.  This portrait was shot on Easter Sunday 2010 in Allan’s house on Staten Island.  It undertakes the illumination of the major concept of culture - the value of man.  The image shows how nude Allan is touching his right hand with his left hand.  He is completely focused on this action.  Even more, he is consumed by almost religious reverie towards his nude body.  His contemplative ecstasy is irreducible to just auto-eroticism (though eroticism is surely present): it is the climax of self-appreciation that goes beyond self-interest.  This Easter portrait is sacrilegious from the standpoint of the institutional religions.  Nonetheless, it is close in spirit to the Hellenistic apostolic and Gnostic Christianity, or Buddhism with their belief in the immanence of the divine in the world.
I agree with Aristotle that mind is identical with the object of its thought.  When mind thinks of the infinite Light, it produces the infinite wave or vibration that coincides with the infinite Light.  That is why people go to churches - to participate in this unison with the infinite Light.  This identity with the infinite Light is very important for human life.  It has healing effect; it literally saves and grants life, love, and success.  But it is not necessary to go to the Church to achieve this.  That is why the early Christianity or Buddhism teach that man can achieve the identity with the infinite Light on his or her own.  So Christ taught that the church is inside us, and Buddha achieved Enlightenment, i.e., illumination or the identity with the infinite Light, despite the ritual - inside the very routine of common life, simply sitting under the tree.  That is what Allan is doing in this image - he coincides with the infinite Light.  He arrives at illumination, enlightenment, revelation that is higher than any institutional church of the present time.  This ultimate illumination consists in the realization that the infinite Light (called God by religion) is immanent within the world and the man.  Nudity in this portrait is necessary because it emphasizes that any finite objects, including clothes, dissolve when man identifies himself with the infinite Light.  Allan’s nudity is the nudity of his mind coinciding with the infinite Light.  The nudity of mind is the infinity of mind.
Another portrait-in-the-nude from the project “People of Art as Objects of Art,” which might be considered by some to be sacrilegious, is my portrait of Larry Litt, called “Larry Litt Contributes to Realism.”  It depicts Larry as a naked Orthodox Jew, who still has his hat on.  (In between, this portrait does not express Larry’s or mine religious convictions.  We both, as conceptual artists, use role-games to produce ideological illumination).  I asked Larry to think of all Jews burnt in gas chambers in the concentration camps during the World War II.  Larry sits with his legs wide open, his hands on his knees, and with his huge eyes turned up to the heavens.  Nudity in this portrait is necessary because it emphasizes that man is bare-naked - completely open, vulnerable and defenseless - in the ruthless flow of history.  Nudity here also emphasizes that man’s suffering and sorrow is bigger than cultural codes, norms and taboos.  When an orthodox Jew thinks of all Jews burnt alive, his mind produces the wave that encompasses all those burnt alive.  This flaming wave of sorrow burns any finite objects, including clothes.  So the true, realistic depiction of the Orthodox Jew, mourning his tribesman burnt alive, should show him nude.  That is why this portrait is called “Larry Litt Contributes to Realism.”  The nudity of body is the symbol of the nudity of mind.  And there is nothing sacrilegious in this nudity of mind.  It is sublime.

qi peng: You tend to use props in your shoots.  What is the role of props in the project “People of Art as Objects of Art” and your other projects?

Irene Caesar: I use props as symbolic objects.  I create minimalist conceptual continuums for my actors to enact some concept.  These continuums are rather situations than simply set-ups.  I produce action and experience, rather than simply a scene.  If my actors do not act upon themselves, they act upon some symbolic object.  This object symbolizes the very essence of the specific conceptual continuum - either directly, literally, or indirectly, metaphorically; either as a contrasting symbol or as a complementary symbol.  The super-hero fights with plastic; two old people look hypnotized how water is slowly poured down like a thread of life; a nude woman holds red tinsels in between her legs.  The symbolic object has two functions.  It engages actor in the conceptual action, so that actor concentrates all his attention on this action.  As a result, the symbolic object takes actor’s attention off camera.  That is why my images look genuine though the action is more often than not is unnatural, absurd.  Action with the symbolic object creates the closed continuum around the actor, as if his own world.  This world has its own purpose, its own time and space.  I am a part of this continuum as its participant rather than an estranged viewer.
For example, my portrait of Dan Cameron from the project “People of Art as Objects of Art” utilizes a children’s construction kit.  The portrait is called “Dan Cameron Contributes to Suprematism.”  The portrait was done on the day when Kandinsky created his first abstract painting.  It depicts how Dan, a very well-known New York curator and the former director of the New Museum, is destroying a structure that he first builds out of a children’s construction kit.  Bright-colored cubes and rectangles fly to all sides creating a suprematist composition caught by my camera in the midair.  The composition of the geometric shapes from the children’s kit in the air perfectly reminds of abstract compositions by Kandinsky or Malevich.
I asked Dan to think about the cosmism of Kandinsky and Malevich, who conceived of their abstractions as of creating and destroying the worlds.  The portrait collides cosmos with the children’s construction kit - the most intimate and fragile with the most global.  This collision emphasizes that the meaning of the abstraction is indeterminate - indeterminate in its message, scale and purpose.  And this indeterminacy of meaning makes abstraction ambivalent.  Any image of Malevich can be interpreted as a composition made of the children’s construction kit, or as a garbage can being emptied out.  Any abstract image can be essentially reduced to a joke or a trifle or a child’s play.  Nonetheless, this portrait is not grotesque.  I asked Dan to think of the cosmism of Malevich and Kandinsky in the context of the recent catastrophe in New Orleans (with which Dan deals in his art non-profit).  Dan’s face expresses solemn inspiration - genuine awe in front of human tragedy of such a scale.  This concrete (not abstract) thought makes meaning determinate - definite in its message, scale and purpose.  The portrait makes it evident that image (painting or photograph) can be meaningful only when it combines both the particular and the general - both the abstract and the representational forms.   This combination of the abstract and the representational reflects the very nature of human thinking - going in induction and deduction from the particular to the universal, and vice versa. This thinking is exactly what Dan did.  He actually took some time before every take - to concentrate on thinking as such before action.
My portrait of Valera and Natasha Cherkashin is called “They put on White Gloves.”  The portrait depicts how they are sitting on the floor, both in white gloves, with their legs and arms intertwined in a tight knot, and with their fingers intertwined with each other’s hair.  They are caught in the moment when they are totally consumed with moving each other’s hair with their white-gloved fingers.  This intertwining of all the major structural elements of the image creates a symbol of two minds intertwined.  White-gloved fingers moving the hair make the entire intertwined knot of two people move and vibrate.  Faces express the moving state of the mind, when it dwells on the other mind.  Paradoxically, the symmetry of four white gloves expresses both the uniformity of two minds, and their desperate separateness.  Fingers tenderly moving the hair of the beloved make the entire image very intimate, but the gloved fingers leave the tender unity ultimately unachievable.

qi peng: To start off on a lighter note, what are some of your favorite artists, books, television shows, sports, art magazines, toys, video games, movies, and other cultural artifacts that you wish to share with your fans of your work here?

Irene Caesar: My favorite artist is Hieronymus Bosch.  I admire his ability to create cosmic visions that show the reality and the mind from all their sides.  In fact, my next project “Apocrypha” will continue the same tradition.  I will create large murals consisting of many story lines in one and the same art piece. I will first shoot these story lines in the studio, and then combine them via Photoshop.  I would love to produce this project both as prints and paintings. I am attracted to this conceptual approach because I believe that it is impossible to express any side of reality, including the mind, without showing its opposite. I go even farther than that. I believe that it is impossible to use the expressive power of some style in art without colliding it with the opposite style in one and the same artwork, for example colliding non-representational vision with the representational one.  For me, abstractionism, expressionism, realism are simply different stages and forms of materialization and dematerialization of energy.
My favorite books are books on philosophy and esoterics.  I have Ph.D. in philosophy and am a specialist in ancient Greek philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics. My art is inseparable from my philosophy.  I am the ideological fighter, and I participate in the ideological struggle in all the forms available and interesting to me.  Philosophy helps me to formulate the struggle of ideas in the most clear argumentative form.  And art allows me to stage probabilistic / prophylactic situations, in which people enact these ideas.  In this way, art helps me to see the existential consequences of the ideas before they get enacted in real life.  I am a philosopher-artist, rather that simply a philosopher and an artist.
Recently, I got interested in the ideas of post-humanism, and, by implication, got engaged with philosophy of science. In fact, I became an exclusive representative of the celebrity Russian molecular biologist, Dr. Peter Gariaev, the Father of Quantum Genome.  His revolutionary research promises the treatment of human illnesses via DNA quantum matrices, including illnesses, which are incurable now.  His theory provides the most systematic and fundamental explanation of human life.  I believe that without its understanding, it is impossible to function as a human in optimal way, whatever you do in your life.  As a mystic, I came to the same conclusions at the end of 1980s.  His theory is the scientific ground for my philosophy and art.  My entire life is a systematic whole based upon ideology, which finds its justification in his scientific data.  Here is its very short overview in relation to art.
Matter constitutes only 4% of everything that exists; the rest consists of waves or vibrations.  Energy vibrations constitute the holographic quantum contexts or matrices, mathematically and linguistically expressible.  Quantum contexts are called by some the info-matter, or informational quantum fields of energy.  Our DNA are antennae that both transmit and receive the informational vibrations.  DNA are engaged in materialization and dematerialization of energy in the human body, synthesizing and metabolizing proteins according to these quantum contexts.  I believe that if art does not conform with this process, it becomes the powerful mechanism of dehumanization and self-destruction of humankind.  The essence of this process is precisely to go all the way from the matter (representational art) to the vibration (abstract art), and vice versa.  If this process of materialization and dematerialization of energy is interrupted and got stuck on some stage (on the stage of abstraction, or the stage of representation), it becomes self-destructive.
Besides books on philosophy and mysticism, I also like Russian classical literature - Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others - and precisely because it has the quality of the universal vision possessed by Bosch. I spent a few years listening to audio books on my iPod almost non-stop - while driving, cleaning, resting, riding public transportation, doing yoga, etc., and I found nowhere in the world literature the same powerful strive of the disinterested service for the sake of the common good, as I found in the Russian classical literature.  This systematic vision of the society was first expressed by the Ancient Greeks, inherited by Romans, and then passed through Byzantium (the Second Rome) to the Ancient Russia, which became The Third Rome - the true heir of the Ancient Greece and Rome.  To my great disappointment, I rarely find the vision of the society as a systematic whole in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition or culture in general, including art.  In the US and UK, the systematic vision of society is often substituted by pragmatism, utilitarianism, and social Darwinism - the values that were considered by the Ancient Greeks and Romans to be barbaric and vulgar.  As regards Europe with its continental philosophical tradition, I often see there the caste and racial narrow-mindedness of the hierarchical world-view.
I do not have a favorite television show, for I do not watch TV in order to preserve the outsider quality of my attitudes. But I am a news freak, and can watch news 24/7 when I get hold of TV.  Because I participate in the ideological struggle, I preserve and sustain a very vulnerable sensitivity to everything happening in the world.  In fact, visual art, philosophy and literature are interesting to me only to the extent they express the struggle of the ideas.
I have no interest in watching sports or playing video games simply because I live for the end-result, and game for the sake of the game does not engage me. This is the mind-set I have, and in this sense, my life is very frugal and ascetic. But I have a few stuffed toys in my room, yes, and my buddy says I am a very affectionate rabbit…
As for the movies, I like extreme entertainment, which is both emotionally and intellectually very intense, like the movie “Irreversible” by Gaspar Noé.

qi peng: Do you have any recent galleries or exhibitions that you have seen and would recommend to us?  What things in those shows inspired your artistic eye and tastes?

Irene Caesar: The only memorable show I have seen this year was the solo show of Marina Abramović at the MoMa.  It might seem we are very close in what we are doing.  We both stage some conceptual action in a very minimalist manner, trying to achieve the most intense expression of some important idea.  For both of us, art is the weapon of ideological struggle, and we both are ideological provocateurs in creating important and extreme, even shocking images.  We both shoot explicit nudity not only for the erotic, but also for non-erotic images.  My art and her art are ideological subversions against the institutionalized Church, and had we belonged to the Christian Church by birth, we would have been both excommunicated.  We both aim at the enacted universal vision - transpersonal and transhistorical - which in its intensity becomes a new type of magic ritual.
Nonetheless, there is a crucial difference between the two of us.  Marina has taken the left path of magic. I clearly sense in her art the presence of the dark force.  Her art produces the zombie effect - all those forcedly or repetitiously moving automata only looking like humans - humanoids without individuation - cyborgs; all this fascination with sculls and bones as symbols of sacrificing one human being for the sake of another one, more powerful.  Yes, it looks fascinating as an art exhibit at the MoMa - but just imagine a drunken Bacchante who tears apart the flesh of her own infant son with her teeth.  Not only does Marina Abramović depict the coded people transformed into the living dead, but her entire exhibition was a black magic ritual of putting the audience into trance, and influencing the viewers on the subconscious level in the direction of the dark force.  Yes, the show was powerful…. But the effect was not the liberation, individuation and revelation of the mind - enlightenment.  The gruesome effect produced was the establishment and re-enforcement of the machine-like, zombie-like mechanisms of the mind.
In fact, the lower animals are the more exemplary cyborgs than any cyborgs of Sci-Fi literature. They function automatically, on the sub-conscious level.  They are manipulated by the external forces, superior to their understanding.  It is very important to realize that the exploitative / predatory social mechanisms are functioning like machines - via lowering the human minds to the level of the beast, that is, the biological machine, bio-computer.   Accordingly, the populations of the lower animals are the more exemplary expressions of social Darwinism than any social Darwinism that humans are capable of.
In this respect, I believe that Adonay and Lucifer, Christianity and Satanism are the sides of one and the same coin.  They are both rooted in the alienated, machine-like hierarchy. If a man renounces his power over himself for the sake of some superior power, whether of the Christian or the Satanic nature, he does inevitably turn into a machine, manipulated by the superior force - that is, he lowers himself to the level of the more primitive animals.  That is why Satanism is always a left path in magic. Both the institutionalized Christianity and Satanism serve for submitting people to the power of the strong, and transforming them into slaves.
Contrary to this, the right path of magic is the gate to the quantum reality, which has the quality of non-locality. This was very well expressed by Nicholas of Cusa, who stated that the universe is entirely in its every point. Quantum physics expresses the same vision in its postulating the holographic nature of everything that exists, with every part of the universal hologram, however small, having the blueprint of the entire universal Matrix within itself.
This vision requires the abolishment of the hierarchy, of the division of people into priests and laymen, along with the rejection of initiation and its gradations in mysticism, and, overall, the abandonment of the institutionalized forms of religion and mysticism.  The connection to the eternal and infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient universal info-matter, which has quasi-mind of its own, can be only unique for every unique human being. Everybody is entitled to his or her own religion, and mythology.  In other words, religion and mysticism should be transformed into the forms of creativity - similar to the forms of art and art making.
All this said, I consider Marina Abramović to be more dangerous and destructive than the institutionalized Christianity - in creating slaves and transforming humans into machine-like beasts on the sub-conscious level.  She is my worse adversary than the holy inquisition.  She subverts the right path, and falsifies the quantum matrices of info-matter. Her destructive subversion is much more subtle, than Christianity, much more enticing and manipulative.  In the Ancient Greece, philosophers despised the Cult of Bacchus / Dionysus, which became the foundation of Luciferianism of the freemasonry.  Enlightened ancients rejected it precisely for making the human mind dark, sub-conscious, beast- or machine-like.  Dionysian mysteries were the marginal cult practiced by the most uneducated and unrefined - by the plebs or those who are slaves by nature.
In its ritual of communion, Christianity inherited from this disgusting cult the belief that one can achieve the oneness with the Highest Power via literally eating the flesh and literally drinking the blood of the half-divine half-human God Bacchus / Dionysus. Satanism differs from the institutionalized Christianity only by making this belief LITERAL - that is performing a real sacrifice, and eating real flesh and drinking real blood.  To paraphrase this, Christianity differs from Satanism only by masking this bestial ritual in eating the implied flesh and drinking the implied blood.  But alas, the eating of flesh and the drinking of blood is what the lower animals do, and it has nothing to do with the immediate (a priori) knowledge of the non-local quantum reality of the vibrational info-matter.  I will never forget the self-portrait of Marina Abramović sitting over the heap of half-eaten bloody bones that are so big that they look like human bones.  She wears a black garment of a witch… But, indeed, her dress can be a black garment of a nun, against whom she protests… Or it can be a uniform of the SS officer.  How is the taste of human blood, Marina?

qi peng: Do you have any favorite cuisine or dishes that you enjoy?  Considering that food is essential for the artistic soul, what things do you enjoy about meals either prepared in a restaurant or home setting?

Irene Caesar: I eat based upon my knowledge of physiology and medicine. I put this knowledge above taste and sensual pleasure, and I am very disciplined in this sense. I eat mostly raw - organic food, and consume big quantities of vitamins.  I am a vegetarian, though I eat fish once in a while.  I strongly believe that food is very important for sustaining artistic ability - not simply in the sense of refining and training sensitivity and taste, but, rather, in the sense of providing the correct types of energy in sufficient and balanced amounts.

qi peng: Are there any restaurants or hangouts such as bookstores around New York City, where you are based out of or anywhere else that you wish to recommend us?  What are the qualities that you enjoy best about the places that you have chosen?

Irene Caesar: I use local Barnes & Noble as my office, simply because I cannot stand sitting at home for the entire day, and I like its vast brightly lit spaces, and the constant flow of people.  I am highly sensitive to the quantum matrices, and Barnes & Noble is a powerful battery of highly intellectual energies.  I like also to hang out in galleries, MoMa and the Met.  Till 30 years old, I have lived in Peterhof, Russia, the summer residence of Russian Emperors.  I walked every day in magnificent parks, designed by the Imperial designers on a grand scale; among nude Greek and Roman statues, each one being a world famous master-piece of art; by the beautiful fountains and centennial trees.  This beauty kept me in the state of awe all the daylong.  This awe is more than artistic inspiration or meditative tranquility.  I owe to this place everything that is great in my mind.  It is still with me, wherever I go.  And I look for the places similar to this Imperial grandeur - vast, sublime, powerful, beautiful on the edge of being transcendent.

qi peng: Do you have any favorite hobbies, which you enjoy in your spare time?  How do these activities inform the work that you pursue?  With your personal interests, are your artistic projects a mirror of those hobbies you enjoy best?

Irene Caesar: When I do not work, I am listening to the classical music non-stop.  I agree with Aristotle that music harmonizes mind on the level of quantum matrices.  But I do not think it is a hobby.  I am incapable of having any hobbies.  It is not simply that I do not have time for anything else besides my work.  Even when I am not present in the museum or gallery, and when I am not creating my art, I am still in the studio.  I experience life as my studio.  And my art studio is rather a disputation hall, where I examine my every idea.  Even more - I like the extreme states of stress and pressure; I am over-worked every day.  I cannot live without resistance and going against convention and routine.  I am a fanatic by nature - I always pursue idea fix; and my art and philosophy allow me being a fanatic in the least destructive way.  My only true desire is to make a great contribution into the development of humankind.  I would do what I do even had I known that I could be killed for it, or could die poor and unknown.

qi peng: How do you think that the new media, ranging from video art to Internet-based projects, will impact people’s appreciation of paintings and photography, which seem to be part of a more traditional and established media, and which are interacting now with new media in terms of visual motifs and archetypes?  Do you feel that as people interact with new media, they will be able to critique the clichés of mainstream media and have a profound understanding of what it means to be human in a world where relationships are created on MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube?

Irene Caesar: In the 1990s, Russian conceptual artists Komar and Melamid produced so-called Elephant Paintings by making elephants create abstractions.  It was a nice joke about the automatism / mechanization implicit in abstract art, because the lower animals are true biological machines - cybors without individuation.  But, at the present moment, Internet ridicules abstract art in a much more effective and merciless manner.
The Internet provides the ultimate multiplication for any work of art, from the ancient to the modern.  And when you see not two, but two million two abstract pieces of art on the Internet, you but understand the repetitious, automatic, inhuman and anti-human nature of abstract art.  It is even more clear to a digital artist, who like myself, uses computer programs like Photoshop for post-production.  Computer programs for visual arts reveal that nobody would ever know for sure which abstract work of art on the Internet is created by the computer according to a specific algorithm and which abstraction is created by a human hand.
I would say: machines pushed mechanization out of art, out of human thinking.  Internet begs people for individuation and human touch.  You can be noticed on the Internet social networks only if you are highly individuated, simply because of the new nature of social networking.  The old routine of self-promotion via participating in sex, drugs and rock-n-roll within a selected circle of gallerists and art collectors does not work any more.  The so-called “art crowd” is gone - for good.  A highly individuated artist can create his presence in the art world in the matter of a month via the Internet social networks - something that required years and years before.
The same goes for personal relationships.  It only seems that the Internet social networks encourage people to go virtual instead of creating real friendships and real love relationships.  Contrary to this common illusion, had you attempted to control the informational stream on a social network, you would inevitably acquire some kind of transpersonal vision.  You learn how to see the whole of the other person just in one or two posts on Facebook or  Twitter.  You learn how to see different stages of virtual disguise, and how to distinguish the real from the pretended.  When you achieve sufficient multiplication in interacting with virtual friends, you cannot help but see the virtual or pretended friendship as a kind of prostitution (shallow satisfaction for shallow interaction).  On the deeper level, what is happening with social networks is indeed natural selection.  People, who will go completely virtual in the near future, will become the parts of the computer Matrix, and lose their humanity.  They will be more controlled in the future, than they are controlled now.
Sooner or later, your attempt to control social networks will make you see them as a systematic whole. Then, you cannot help but notice that what is happening now is the very REAL consolidation of society via the game-like virtual space of social networks.  Social networks are used as the most extreme form of political and ideological census.  This virtual consolidation of society is a new form of the old struggle for the class and race survival.  It is the most radical consolidation of the human society than ever before, because the coming transition is most radical - the transition into the post-human society via the current technological revolution of nano biotech and quantum genetics.  People of power - and they dominate social networks - are gathering information on people and ideas on a scale unimaginable just a few years ago.  They are testing various paradigms of the coming post-human society in direct and indirect discussions within virtual think tanks.  They are implementing highly efficient ideological and political provocations and subversions, like the Twitter revolution in Iran, and Facebook revolution in Egypt, which was started and fueled on Facebook.
The transition to the post-human society is so serious that Facebook witnesses how the most powerful open their ears to anybody capable of contributing to a think tank notwithstanding caste and background.  There are two paradigms of the post-human society to choose from.  The first model is so-called Matrix.  Its major characteristic is the division into two races: rulers and slaves, who are distantly controlled via bio nanobots capable of rewiring even their brains if needed.  Control over the society via nanobots presupposes the existence of super computer - the powerful artificial intellect, which will be capable of keeping and manipulating all the data.  According to the prognosis of leading scientists in cybernetics, this artificial intellect will become self-conscious and more powerful than human intellect within our lifetime.  I believe that this delegation of power to the artificial intellect will create a danger of termination for human race à la Terminator movie.
The second scenario is the mastering of quantum genome. This model of the post-human society is based not upon the merger with the machines and artificial intellect, but upon the acquired or recalled ability of controlling the matter via vibrations (waves) on the quantum level - and first of all, via our own DNA, which are the vibrational antennae.  I believe that this model is superior to the first one, though it has also some dangers of abuse.
In this context, the mission of art is to document humanity in its present form - before it gets changed.  Art should finally transcend its enchantment with dehumanization, mechanization, and automatism under the disguise of pop-art, minimalism or abstractionism - all these infinite and senseless play of non-representational shapes and drips of paint, or made-in-china readymades.  Art should finally turn to man as its inspiration.

qi peng: Do you have anything else which you would like to share with your readers and fans of your conceptual photographs and upcoming exhibitions?

Irene Caesar: I will have a major mid-career solo show at the Moscow House of Photography this year, which is the important art museum in Europe.  In April, Eduard Planting Gallery, which exclusively represents me in the Netherlands, will show my artworks at the Artantique Art Fair in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
For more gossip or dishing me the art scoop: E-mail me at qipengart@gmail.com