A Little Recognition.

Was very happy to come home from vacation to see my name on the front page of the UMKC Art & Art History website this morning, for my work in the KCAC Exhibition. You can see the little blurb here.

Americana

24 hours in a sweaty car with 4 people.

9 junk food meals....or maybe more, who can count?

4 Smart Water bottles filled with vodka

1 bag of shitty mushrooms

3 nights spent on a living room floor...

....in the company of 7 other people at close proximity for 5 days.....

a little alone time feels fantastic, even if it means sacrificing a little sleep to get it. 

One thing that the drive to Austin, Texas did was to show my how much of this country is really still just cowboy country. It's hard to imagine people stacked one on top of the other in so many places in the world when you are driving through the Flint Hills of Oklahoma (or was it Kansas?), approaching the massive sprawling oil fields of southern Oklahoma and Texas. Looking out of a gas station window, eating cold pizza from under a heat lamp, seeing nothing but oil pumps and trees with no leaves...it's kind of the most American feeling I can really imagine. Every time I see a tumbleweed, I feel like I am in a Western movie, but one that has been artificially, digitally colored, so that everything is just a little too modern to feel believable. 

I just suddenly have an uncontrollable urge to decorate everything with dusty old bones and fake flowers, giant deer skulls and bat bones on delicate string. Charcoal grey, black, eggshell white, and whatever shade is just a touch lighter than sienna. The giant collection of trinkets at my desk looks to bright and garish after so many miles of empty, southern landscapes. 

4/23

Website finished. http://stephaniebloss.com

Books ordered. Because everyone needs a coffee table book of my ridiculous bullshit.

Still broke. Still probably drink too much. Still don't sleep enough.
Still expect too much of myself. Still think too much of myself. 
Tried my hand at modeling the other day as a favor. It was terrible.

ETC. ETC. ETC.

THIS IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO MAKE YOUR CULT WORK FOR YOU.

The earliest mention of Jesus of the Christian faith is debatably around 70CE as established by a variety of documents discovered around that time.

It's also highly unlikely that Christ actually existed when the evidence is examined. What most likely happened is the following:

After the Third Mithridatic War and Rome's conquest and establishment of Judeae in 63BCE, Judea (the region in which pretty much all Christian antiquity takes place) and the surrounding regions were going through a period of pretty heavy civil chaos. The Hesmonean dynasty was besieged by civil war and the Herodian dynasty was being established by the Romans (the most earth-shaking event being Herod the Great being named "King of the Jews" by the Roman Senate in 40BCE). The Roman influence and subsequent Roman slave culture had created a new class system that the citizens of Judea found foreign to their own slave and class systems. To make matters worse for the citizens of Judea, upward social mobility was almost impossible for those in the lower classes.

It's important to understand that this Roman conquest and culture invasion was a serious blow to the cultural ego of the citizens of Judea. After all, the most prolific religion Judaism had taken the Canaanite lesser war god (Yahweh) as their lone deity in the first successful example of monotheism in the world (It was attempted by the pharaoh Akhenaten with the sun god Aten in Egypt a millennia earlier with less successful results...). So being defeated in war and being subjugated was not something sitting right with the citizens of Judea.

It's also important to understand that religion was much more fluid in those days. The low literacy rates in ancient Judea meant that most history was carried out by rabbinical elders and scribes and the religious and anthropologic histories were blended together and altered further by oral histories. So it was very common all across humanity, but especially in Judea, for cults and wild interpretations to pop-up. These new religious cults, some brought into Judea by the Romans and the Zoroastrians from Persia, were starting to gain popularity (such as Mithraism). The rabbinical leaders in Judea were no strangers to this practice and one of the best examples of such religious evolution can actually be seen in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

One of the more popular aspects of Judaism was the prophecy of the coming of a Messiah. With their culture and religion under duress from the Roman occupation, this prophecy became a guiding light for many Jews who wished for the Messiah to come and deliver them from the Romans (This also factors into why the Romans are such a central player in the New Testament all the way into Revelations). The Dead Sea Scrolls are an example of this playing up of the Messiah myth and one of the earliest examples of rabbinical leaders asserting that he had come. The Dead Sea Scrolls never mention the Messiah by name, which is an important fact, and many of the foundations for the Messiah myth can actually be found in those scrolls.

So, we now have rabbinical leaders claiming the Messiah has in fact already come, you have a citizenry in Judea that's disenfranchised, poor, culturally hurt, uneducated, lacking in social mobility and are hearing rumblings from more extreme rabbinical leaders that the Messiah has come. This brings us to our next important aspect of Judaic culture under the Roman empire: social mobility. In ancient Judea it was virtually impossible to move up from the lower classes unless you could become a member of the more illustrious cults or religious movements such as Mithraism under the Mithraic Mysteries. However, abandoning your one true god in favor of a cult wasn't a very attractive prospect for most Jews (especially when you consider how vindictive the Abrahamic god happens to be) so most felt there was no path for upward social mobility outside of abandoning their religion.

It was this frustration that led the myths of this new Messiah to gain traction. People began hearing about the Messiah that had come and the new religion he was preaching. This Messiah took care of the poor, healed the sick, fed the hungry and surrounded himself by those most disregarded by society. It was a narrative that should be obvious to its appeal to the Judaic citizenry. These myths began to blended with actual historical figures like Juda of Nazareth, a man who actually went into a Jewish temple, kicked over a changemaking station and challenged to the Romans to battle. He was defeated by the Romans a short while later and subsequently crucified for crimes against the Empire and I imagine this story is starting to sound familiar isn't it?

Characters like Juda that took care of the sick and challenged the Roman establishment were blended together with the popular Messiah myths and a character emerged from the smoke when it cleared: Jesus of Nazareth. That mythical man became the pillar of a new kind of religion where class didn't matter, but only belief was necessary for salvation. No needing to learn complicated rabbinical texts, no obscure Jewish rules and no matter for your lot in life. If you believed, you could be saved. That became the birth of Christianity. Around 100-120CE the newly formed Christian cults encountered a number of historians such as Pliny the Younger, Josephus (whom encountered the earliest forms of Christians and whose work suffered from alterations and interpolations by the subsequent Catholic Church), Tacitus and others.

Pliny the Younger is particularly interesting because he has the earliest recording of the Jews and Christians claiming that the Jews were slaves in Egypt. Modern historical records let us know that the Egyptians didn't actually use slaves for construction and actually paid their workers quite well, even burying many of them in quite nice graves and the most exemplary being given spaces in smaller pyramids. What most likely happened is that the Jews and Christians started working slavery into their history as the cults and religions were evolving during the period of Roman rule. They would do this because it A) Erases the shame of being defeated in war and subjugated and B) Played up to their history and culture of slavery. It's actually much more likely that the brutality they attributed to the Egyptians was actually practiced in Canaan.

This all happened between 30BCE and 10CE and from there Christianity spread at the normal rate at which cults traditionally expand until it was made the official religion of the Roman Empire under Constantine (an act he did for political and personal reasons, the political being to quell the problems the Christians were creating in the Empire and the personal being that his mother, Hera, had converted to the faith and he had a close relationship with her. Though there's little evidence to support Constantine actually gave a shit about Christianity, or religion in any form for that matter, as he didn't get baptized till shortly before his death.)

A hundred years later the Roman Church was founded and from there Catholicism was born under the Roman Empire which then spread out at a meteoric rate due to the Colonial Imperialism the Roman Empire was so skilled at. From there you had the establishment of the modern Catholic Church, the slow collapse of the Roman Empire, the conversion of Europe to Christianity, the rise of Protestantism and finally the worldwide spread of Christianity through the various European Empire's colonialism (the British, Dutch, Spanish and French being the largest of the serial offenders.)

For pretty much the last 1500 years, the study of history, particularly history in the Middle East and specifically historical Judea, was done by either members of the Catholic Church (as they generally were one of the few organizations that had the money and the most to gain from such historical study) or Christians/Abrahamic faiths (it's not hard to imagine that the vast majority of historians studying the subject even today are themselves Christian).

So there's obviously a pretty glaring conflict of interest, even more so when you consider the fact that historical study is itself incredibly subjective since so much of ancient history was left to be recorded by a small group of literate individuals usually in positions of political and/or clerical power across multiple Abrahamic faiths. So yeah, that's a short history of Christianity and where it came from.

4/17/2013

Today on talk radio, a politician from the city where the bombs went off told the story of a woman who had her legs nearly torn off by shrapnel. After she had been rushed to an emergency station, she was comforted by a twenty-something, a war veteran, most likely one who had come home to an angry country after fighting what he once told himself was "the good fight". He was able to finally comfort this hysterical, panicking woman by showing her the shrapnel wounds on his own mangled legs.
Just two people who will never fully recover.
I wonder when I will get used to the growing pains and small tragedies that occur while our history writes itself.

SKETCHBOOK THEMES VOL. 4

THE INEVITABLE DISAPPOINTMENT OF EVER THINKING I COULD BE A REAL THING  //  THE INSURMOUNTABLE, UNFORGIVABLE HE  //  A MASSIVE DEFLECTION //  PRESSING DISEASE INTO SOFT DISEASE  //  A POTENTIAL TO TAKE AND L EAVE   N  O  T   H  I  N  G    //  I WILL BLOW IT ALL AWAY //  MORE COMFORTABLE THAN IT SHOULD BE  //  BAD PRAYERS OR WISHES MADE AGAINST YOU //  B L O W F L I E S  //  VERTEBRAE BEING SEWN APART SMELLS LIKE THIS  //  THE    U B I Q U I T Y    AND      H U M A N I T Y    OF THE   I N H U M A N

I AM BUILDING AN ATOMIC BOMB FOR A CULTURE I CAN NOT ESCAPE FROM.

update: creating content the hard way..

while I am sure that it would be infinitely more simple to only worry about the execution of this series, the problem that has become most overwhelming is the changing dynamic of my mental state and how it lends itself in so specific a way to the project.

while I view this series as an study in empathy, the tumultuous nature of my current situation is overwhelming, to say the least. from a first person perspective, I am able to actually feel the knots in my stomach and to visualize their tangles, creating limitless possibilities for new work, new colors, new shapes. however, from a third person perspective, the project has crept uncomfortably close to home. while I creep closer to my understanding of certain individuals, others pull away from me, sinking deeper into their self indulgant ways. visually, I translate this into the shape of stones, reflecting the colors around them but revealing no content, unaffected by their environment, unmoved. physically I am brought closer to the growing mass of anxiety inside of myself.

it is all so uncomfortable.