Interview, Emily Pothast

Emily Pothast is one of those triple-threat phenomenons-- she's a musician and writer in addition to being a visual artist. Authoring words and keen observations on her blog, Translinguistic Other , she also sings them with partner David Golightly in their joint project Midday Veil. Meanwhile, she still manages to squeeze in enough time to show her work, most recently in a solo show at Grey Gallery on Capitol Hill.

I've included only the first question in the early part of the interview; if you're curious what the others were you can check out some of the past interviews.

Enjoy!

Whether or not it's conscious, people seem to expect a certain thing when they think of "erotic art". What was the greatest challenge or stereotype for you to overcome in making an erotic piece in your own voice?

This is a complex question. Like most people, I think my personal attitudes toward "erotic art" are pretty tied up in my notions about sexuality in general.

I think there is a silent taboo against sexual openness and expression within my generation, at least within the social groups I tend to identify with. I was in elementary school during the 1980s, and I remember being indoctrinated from a very young age to be deathly afraid of sex; that I would get a disease and die a horrible, scandalous death if I ever had any sex, ever. These kinds of cultural attitudes go through cycles, and I think the AIDS epidemic--combined with a backlash against the sexual revolution--imprinted my generation with a peculiar conservatism.

Ironically, we also watched the rise of the Internet, which suddenly gave everyone in the world access to a vast spectrum of possibilities limited only by the human imagination. So now each of us can be a kid in a candy store when it comes to exhibitionism, voyeurism, and even anonymous hookups without ever having to address the psychosexual hangups that are our collective birthright, let alone work through them. The result has been, in too many cases, a society whose sexual self-image is largely in denial. Perhaps this becomes most evident when some sex-loathing religious or political figure gets caught indulging in his deep dark fantasies, but it also plays itself out in small subtle ways in all of our lives.

I think healthy sexuality must be rooted in a healthy spirituality, and by spirituality I don't mean anything necessarily having to do with invisible gods or the supernatural (though those things are great, in their proper place!) There are plenty of mythological systems all over the world that are content to create a meaningful and dignified place for the individual human life to unfold against the backdrop of the cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that we are constantly witness to in the natural world. All life-affirming spiritual systems embrace sexuality as the sacred and mysterious source of life. Many of us in the West flirted with these kinds of ideas in the 60s and 70s only to slip into a reactionary conservatism over the past few decades. But now I want to believe that even while old institutions and certainties collapse around us, we are on the brink of a renaissance of sorts, where both spirituality and sexuality may be increasingly approached with open minds and hearts.

This is not to say that I didn't go into this with any negative stereotypes of erotic art. I certainly had them, mostly because I've seen so much shallow, boring stuff given this label in the past. But just as I don't think human beings need to give up on religion and mythology to punish ourselves for prominent bad examples, I don't think "erotic art" can possibly be a bad idea in and of itself. So in overcoming my personal resistance to the idea of making erotic art, I found myself building a narrative in which the erotic becomes fused with the sacred and celebratory.

The collage/drawings I've been doing recently show an influence of sacred geometry, folk art, and manuscript painting. My geometry started off more literal, with direct reference to Pythagoras and Platonic solids, but has become increasingly organic and intuitive. When I decided I was going to be a part of this show, I started thinking about the potential of geometry and abstraction to suggest physicality. The mandorla (or yoni, Sanskrit for "source") is an ancient symbol for female genitalia or the entrance to the womb. The shape also occurs in relation to death, for instance in Christian depictions of the Last Judgment and Buddhist Mahakalas. Thus it is both physical and metaphysical; a doorway that connects life to the void at both ends.

There is a concept in Tantric cosmology that describes the relationship of Shiva and Shakti, his consort/feminine element. The masculine and feminine aspects of the deity represent the constitutive elements of the universe and the dynamic potency of those elements come to life, respectively. The two are sometimes represented as hermaphroditic halves of the same being, and sometimes depicted as engaged in cosmic coitus (yab-yum, literally "father-mother"). When the two are united, all is infinite divine potentiality and insight. But when they separate, Shakti's movements give rise to maya, the illusory fragmentation and separation of the wholeness of reality.

The colors I'm using in the new pieces refer to these opposites perennially coming together and falling apart. The yab-yum is often depicted as a female human figure representing the transitory nature of matter engaged in coitus with a dark blue deity, representing the eternal abyss we all emerge from and return to. Flesh and blue-black.

Buddhist yab-yum

Emily Pothast, Eternal Return 2008 collage and drawing
image courtesy of the artist

You mention scare tactics in sex education, and it strikes me that our learning about sex is clinical and completely separate from cultural identity. Do you think there would be less of a stigma around sex/art about sex if we were more rooted in a [cultural] significance of sexuality in storytelling?

Definitely. Unfortunately, finding a way to communicate openly and honestly with young people about the facts of life is an exercise most adults dread because it's something many of us have yet to do with ourselves. So kids end up piecing together notions about sex from disparate sources, often perpetuating the unhealthy divisions that characterize our cultural identity.

The first step of getting well is always admitting that you have a problem. This is a cycle that must be consciously recognized and admitted to before we can do anything about it. Unfortunately, our society isn't really set up to make this kind of self-reflection easy. I grew up in Texas, where the vast majority of adults sincerely believe that God created the earth from scratch a few thousand years ago and Jesus is literally going to come back someday to send all the people who don't worship God the same way they do to Hell, where they will be punished eternally. Now, many liberal, educated people hear that, and they have no interest in trying to figure out where these beliefs come from and how they are able to spread and survive. All they can hear is the intense wrongness of it, and they react emotionally. Some, like the "New Atheists" that have been gaining ground in recent years, will go so far as to imagine that they can or should somehow free humanity from religion and spirituality altogether; declaring a War on Religion that's about as useful and well-defined (not to mention impossible) as a War on Terror. So we end up with two factions that are becoming increasingly polarized and decreasingly capable of having the slightest idea where the other side is coming from.

Our collective sexual identity is caught in the crossfire of all that trauma. Is it any wonder it gives us so much trouble?

In your artist statement you say: "My work is rooted in an interest in myth, ritual, and the human desire to unite the thing that experiences with the source of experience itself." Is the connection your work has to folk art, mysticism, and mythology grounding you?

I suppose so. In absence of a strong identification with the culture in the places I've lived, I've amassed something of a one-woman culture of objects and ideas I identify with, and this is something I think a lot of artists do. For me, the strongest identification I've found is with the various mystic traditions throughout human history, running through the diversity of religious and cultural forms like rivers back to the same eternal and infinite source. The mystics are the ones who are able to quiet even the spiritual mind; to make the transition from asking "why am I here?" to transcending the notion of an indivisible "I." So, paradoxically, I guess, the thing that grounds me is the same thing that removes the need for a ground! Again, I think this is the case for many artists, whether they define it this way or not.

You speak of building a narrative in which the erotic becomes fused with the sacred and celebratory. Is this a part of what you were talking about in our earlier conversation about this series challenging you in unexpected ways?

Indeed. Specifically, the incorporation of forms, colors and textures that make clear references to the human body has infused the geometry I've been working through for awhile with a kind of uncanny aliveness that I probably wouldn't have arrived at if I hadn't set out to make "geometric formalist erotica." So, thanks!

What do you most look forward to in this year's Seattle Erotic Art Festival?

I am looking forward to seeing how the other artists you selected respond to this challenge. You've put together an excellent group, and I'm glad to be a part of it. I am also looking forward to giving a slide talk on the subject of Art, Sex, and Spirituality on Sunday, May 3rd at 2:30 p.m. See you there!

Give us one thing you think is unexpectedly sexy:

Religions. All of them.

Emily, thanks for being part of this conversation!

Emily Pothast, Cauda Pavonis II (detail) 2009 collage and drawing
image courtesy of the artist

As always, you can visit SeattleErotic.Org to read up on the artists, Festival calendar, and performances.