Urban Shaman to lead Greenwich Village Halloween Parade

By Wickham Boyle | The Villager

Urban Shaman is not an easy job title, or even a moniker that can be absorbed facilely at cocktail parties or class reunions.

But after three decades of producing public artwork, this is how Donna Henes describes herself. “It’s been 33 years now and I see myself as a shaman… a person who intercedes between the community and the spirit world. The shaman goes back and forth to make sure that the community — in this case, NYC — is connected.”

Henes was trained as an artist and educator, but was always drawn by multi-cultural ceremonies, rituals and rites. So it is only natural that she would lead and bless the Annual Greenwich Village Halloween Parade.

In an email invitation to join her in her latest endeavor, Henes wrote: “I have been asked to lead the Village Halloween Parade with blessings. I will have a troupe of blessers, all wearing white. We will lead the parade the entire route and bless the streets of NYC and all of the participants and audience with blessings of connectivity, community and peace. Our ceremony will transform the secular city into sacred space. We will do the blessings with smudge (fire, earth, air) and bubbles (water) as well as glitter and bells. Sweepers who will literally sweep the streets clean of negativity will follow our blessing troupe. It should be wonderful.”

According to Ralph Lee, the founder of the Halloween Parade, sweepers were a mainstay of the event when it began in 1973. “I’m glad to see that the sweepers are participating in the Halloween parade. For many years we had a group of nine sweepers who were performers dressed as ancient crones on stilts at the head of the parade, sweeping the bad vibes out of the street and making room for good ones. Thanks to my old friend Donna Henes this tradition is being continued.”

Being an Urban Shaman means that Henes is constantly attempting to gather people in a positive way, a theme that is echoed in her original artwork. “When I began as a performance artist, and sculptor, I was creating webs — creating installations that were actual physical webs that the audience could be in. Then I segued to making conceptual webs as a performance artist — these were like communication networks. My work now is about connecting the community with positive energy that has the same symbolism.”

Donna Henes is perhaps most well known for her “Eggs on End” event, which was held on the plaza of the World Trade Center for 18 years and hosted as many as 10,000 people annually. According to lore (and I have witnessed this enumerable times) at the precise moment of planetary alignment on the Spring Equinox, raw eggs can be made to stand on end, due to the unique gravitational force exerted. Henes used this physical event to welcome the change of season and push hapless audiences to perhaps be a witness to their own inner balance and seasonal change. Henes felt a special loss after September 11 as her “spring altar was also consumed.”

Henes has written numerous books on creating rituals in everyday life, and she operates a business in, as she says, “exotic Brooklyn” where she offers classes, drumming circles and sells charms, herbs and the power of hope (www.Donnahenes.net). Says Henes, “We have a real dearth of spiritual terminology in our modern lives. And I feel it was my assignment, if you will, to create connections among people. That was my assignment almost 35 years ago and it put me on the path to create connections among people… to access their own best selves and perhaps for them to connect with the cosmos.” According to that mission, all of Henes’s events attempt to operate simultaneously on all three levels.

Jeanne Fleming has been the artistic and producing director of the Village Halloween Parade for 27 years, and calls herself a celebration artist. “I feel the sweepers were important for the safety in an incredible night of release in the streets before winter sets in. It is an amazing night of creativity where all revelers look into their imaginations and come out. And we continue in an iconic way to bring this creativity into the avenues. The sweepers open the path, they clear the route of the work energies and open the path for the people of the city of New York to play in their city.”

According to Fleming, “There have been many incarnations of the sweepers. Rich Thompson made 13 for the 13 moons of the Native American moons [that] also honored the Celtic tradition that he works out of as a Celtic priest. Now the sweepers are no longer on stilts — they are now walking with brooms. These groups have all understood their ritual purpose.”

This year the parade’s theme is Wings of Desire, and Fleming decided that Donna Henes would be involved in an obviously ritualistic way, so it is clear that there is a blessing of the route and the community.

Henes see being a shaman of the streets as “a big important ritual and that the city is really the future of the world. We New Yorkers see that vividly. Here there are hundreds of nationalities living together in total peace and I see that as the future. I think the true transformation in urban ritual occurs person by person as they open to that experience.”

Head to Head

Writers of art history have long kept different cultures on separate shelves, but the modern world has shown how they relate to one another. Julian Bell on why he has gone global with his Mirror of the World: A New History of Art

by Julian Bell | Saturday, October 20, 2007 | The Guardian

These two heads belong to traditions as far separated as any in world history. The stone carving is from ancient Mexico and the pen drawing from Renaissance Germany. Mexico was first peopled a good 15,000 years ago by migrations that entered the Americas from Siberia. There is scant evidence for any later contact between the civilisations that grew up there and those that grew up in Europe, Asia and Africa.

The stone head, carved by a Totonac living on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, draws on shamanic thinking. Shamans can transmute from human to animal because they can reach back and tap the primal stuff of which everything is composed. For other mortals, such categories are fixed: but to gain wisdom is to understand that all opposites derive from unity. As cities and priesthoods developed in Mexico, an emblem for these doctrines was developed. From around 650 BCE, we start to encounter the image of a fleshly face that morphs into a grinning bare skull: the right side and the left side of Ometeotl, the “lord of duality.”

The drawing is by the German artist Albrecht Dürer. It was done when he was a 20-year-old trying to make his way in print-making, Europe’s new growth industry of the late 15th century. It’s on the back of an unresolved trial design for a print of Mary, Joseph and the infant Jesus — and it seems likely that Dürer turned to look in his mirror initially because he wanted to work out a better pose for his Joseph figure. So his drawing started out in the context of a Christian art that was moving into a new technological era, in which identical, mass-produced, devotional images could pour from the presses into pious burghers’ homes. Dürer was riding a further trend: during the 15th century, European artists had taken to sketching themselves, typically inserting the resulting self-portrait as a head in a crowd of worshippers.

These two artworks, then, were made in very different circumstances, and it has been the habit of art historians to respect this. They have tended to keep distinct traditions on separate shelves. In fact, art history has chiefly meant the study of just one of these traditions. The European art scene to which Dürer belonged is traced back to its earliest known ancestor, ancient Egypt — after which Africa, not to mention Asia, Oceania and the Americas, veers more or less out of sight. For very natural reasons: what we now call art history is a type of storytelling invented in Italy and Germany to tackle regional subject matter. The term Renaissance stems from Giorgio Vasari claiming in the mid-16th century that classical standards had lately been “reborn” in Italy thanks to the genius of his Tuscan fellow countrymen, from Giotto to Michelangelo. Centuries later, the Renaissance itself was set within a whole history-spanning scheme of styles and periods by German-language writers such as Heinrich Wölfflin, but the art these academics were rationalising remained principally European.

Ernst Gombrich did his best to shake off this period-plotting when he published The Story of Art in 1950. What kind of intellectual interest was his story left with? The title he chose for his chapter on early 15th-century Europe suggests the answer: “The Conquest of Reality.” Gombrich’s main yardstick for art was how it related to how things look. From that perspective, what happened first in ancient Greece and then in Renaissance Italy and Flanders became all the more crucial. Though Gombrich devoted a courtesy chapter or two to Asia, European art had to be pre-eminent because it was more concerned than any other tradition with naturalistic, factual observation. The warmhearted lucidity of The Story of Art secured it a firm niche in 20th-century art education. Yet its outlook ran counter to the grain of 20th-century art. The route from cubism to abstract expressionism and minimalism could only look like a detour, if “conquering reality” had really been art’s grand project.

A larger problem for Gombrich’s classic of exposition is that, since 1950, the world has drastically altered in shape. Television, migration and the internet have brought separate continents into far greater proximity. Cultural references ranging from Jamaica to Japan are instantly available anywhere, while the search for the historical roots behind each seems to head down a hundred different wormholes. How do you tell a story of art that addresses these new conditions? You don’t. That has been the emerging consensus. You produce compendious historical surveys. The World History of Art that Hugh Honour and John Fleming published in 1982 is, for me, the finest of these. But a forward-moving tale, in the Gombrich sense, it is not. Each eloquent chapter is a world sufficient to itself: “what happened next” doesn’t count. Some would now say that even such surveys are too presumptuous, imposing an intrusive western viewpoint on incompatible systems of belief and aesthetics. “The single story of art is too flawed to function as the repository for the current sense of art history,” the Chicago art historian James Elkins claimed five years ago. Perhaps we should content ourselves with specialisms: perhaps there just is no big narrative when it comes to what humans have created to look at.

Perhaps. It’s certainly true that every would-be historian is tied to a limited viewpoint. Mine is that of a painter who started lecturing on art history after 20 years of studio work, partly because I wanted to investigate the broad historical situation in which I found myself. (My own painting is often described as “panoramic”.) The approach I took when I developed these lectures into a book was that of a painter hanging a show. I pasted photocopies of as much visual material as I could gather on my studio wall and asked: “Which of these images will speak for itself, when reproduced in a book? Which of them will speak to one another?” The resulting sequences became the initial basis for what I wrote. That is how the Totonac carver’s head came to accompany the head of Dürer. Visual instinct led the way: that, plus a slight presumption to fellow feeling. I dared guess at what drove these artists because on some level I, too, have known the daily work that preoccupied them, of coordinating hand and eye to make something that for some hard-to-define reason looks right.

Instinct led, research followed, stories started to emerge. Each of these images stands revealed, the more one investigates, as a work of powerful originality. When the brilliant young print-maker turned to record that pose in the mirror, self-portraiture developed, for the first time in the historical record, into self-exploration. There he stares, a proud contender for fame, exulting in his own calligraphic prowess as the quill pen dances his features on to the paper. And yet that pride flips over unmistakably into disquiet. Are his ambitions not spiritual also? Has he yet achieved the true seriousness of soul demanded by 15th-century self-help books such as Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ? “If you desire peace of mind and true unity of purpose, put all things behind you, and look only upon yourself.” That might be one plausible caption; but in effect, the little circle of ink that describes Dürer’s left pupil opens up a tunnel of introspection with no end in sight. How strange, to be this consciousness, in this flesh! How strange to translate one’s own being to a flat surface! Those thoughts, still alive in today’s art culture, are activated for the first time here by the artist who would go on to become Europe’s first mass-media celebrity, reaching with his prints into thousands of private homes where no frescoist or sculptor could go.

If Dürer’s drawing seems a harbinger of modernity, the Totonac stone — carved with chisels of bronze, or of fire-toughened oak — might seem to embody art’s more ancient conditions of fixed and sacred significance. That is exactly why many 20th-century artists (for instance, Henry Moore) liked to turn for inspiration to Mexican sculpture. But the carving here marked a departure from the region’s old tradition of heads switching into skulls: its meditation on mortality had a novel accent. Here is the voice of Nezahualcoyotl, a near-contemporary Mexican poet:

Will I have to go like the flowers that perish? Will nothing remain of my name? Nothing of my fame on earth? At least my flowers, at least my songs! Earth is the region of the fleeting moment . . . Or is it only here on earth We come to know our faces?

What we see here could almost be a response to that elegy’s final line. Death has become facelessness. And note what enacts the transition from that nothing to a something of life: the jagged hack of the sculptor’s chisel. I would suggest that, like Nezahualcoyotl seeking consolation in the fame of his songs, the sculptor here was self-consciously creative. Tracing the edge between formlessness and form, this is a work of art that considers what art consists of.

These Mexican meditations on transience would prove fatefully apt. Needless to say, I paired this “ancient” sculpture with the Renaissance drawing not just for visual, but for good chronological reasons. They were probably made at the same time. Dürer was drawing within a year or so of Columbus’s American landfall in 1492, and the Totonac sculpture has been assigned a similar date. Twenty-seven years later, when the Spanish launched their assault on Mexico, the Totonacs became their first allies, since for two generations this coastal people had been unwilling vassals of the bloodthirsty Aztec empire. That empire and the 2,500-year-old cultural system that underpinned it collapsed. By 1520, art from Spain’s new conquest had been brought back to Europe, to the court of Charles V — to be admired by Dürer. “I have seen the things brought to the king from the new golden land,” he wrote. “In all my life I have seen nothing which gladdened my heart so much. For I have seen among them wonders of art and have marvelled at the subtle inventiveness of people in foreign lands.”

What Dürer inspected so openheartedly is unknown: it was probably goldsmithery, soon melted down to fill Charles V’s coffers. By such reductions, art from the Americas helped swell the fortunes of a monarchy that would line the pockets of some of Europe’s greatest painters. Working for the kings of Spain, Titian, Rubens and Velázquez became beneficiaries of a conquest that impoverished and decimated the descendants of the Totonac sculptor.

This is not a tale about artistic styles, or periods, or influences. It cuts across the meaning of terms like Renaissance. It is, however, exactly the type of tale that my forays into world art history have kept uncovering — brutal cultural collisions that were once relatively local in scale, more recently more global. Time habitually does brutal things, forcing what had been separate into proximity. In a sense, a book that coerces the world’s major art traditions into a single interwoven story can only be another agent in that process. Yet, that way, I’ve found a story I can trust; and one that still allows me, like Dürer, to marvel at the subtle inventiveness of people in foreign lands.

Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

By WALTER GIBBS, The New York Times

Published: October 13, 2007

OSLO, Oct. 12 — The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded today

to

Al Gore, the former vice president, and to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its work to alert the world to the threat of global warming.

The award is likely to renew calls by some of Mr. Gore’s supporters for him to run for president in 2008, joining an already crowed field of Democrats. Mr. Gore, who lost the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, has said he is not interesting in running but has not flatly rejected the notion.

Mr. Gore “is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted,” the Nobel citation said. The United Nations committee, a network of 2,000 scientists, has produced two decades of scientific reports that have “created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming,” the citation said.

Mr. Gore, who was traveling in San Francisco, said in a statement that he was deeply honored to receive the prize and planned to donate his half of the prize to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a nonprofit climate group of which Mr. Gore chairs the board.

“We face a true planetary emergency,” Mr. Gore said in the statement. “The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.”

Kalee Kreider, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, said he received the news with his wife, Tipper, early this morning in San Francisco, where he spoke on Thursday night at a fundraiser for Senator Barbara Boxer of California, a fellow Democrat.

Ms. Kreider said Mr. Gore will hold strategy meetings with the Alliance for Climate Protection in San Francisco today and return to his home in Nashville over the weekend.

In New Delhi, Rajendra K. Pachauri, an Indian scientist who leads the United Nations committee, said he was overwhelmed at the news of the award. “I expect this will bring the subject to the fore,” he said.

“I’m only a symbol of a much larger organization, the I.P.C.C., and it’s really the scientific community that contributed to the work of the I.P.C.C.,” Dr. Pachauri said, according to Reuters. “They’re the real winners of this award,’” he said.

The Nobel award carries political ramifications in the United States, which the Nobel committed tried to minimize after its announcement today.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, addressed reporters after the awards were announced and tried to dismiss repeated questions asking whether the awards were a criticism — direct or indirect — of the Bush administration.

He said the committee was making an appeal to the entire world to unite against the threat of global warming.

“We would encourage all countries, including the big countries, to challenge, all of them, to think again and to say what can they do to conquer global warming,” he said. “The bigger the powers, the better that they come in front of this.”

He said the peace prize is only a message of encouragement, adding, “the Nobel committee has never given a kick in the leg to anyone.”

In this decade, the Nobel Peace Prize has been given to prominent people and agencies who differ on a range of issues with the Bush administration, including former President Jimmy Carter, who won in 2002, and Mohamed ElBaradei, the director of the United Nations’ nuclear monitoring agency in Vienna, in 2005.

Global warming has been a powerful issue all this year, attracting more and more public attention.

The film documenting Mr. Gore’s campaign to increase awareness of climate change, “An Inconvenient Truth,” won an Academy Award this year. The United Nations committee has issued repeated reports and held successive conferences to highlight the growing scientific understanding of the problem. Meanwhile, signs of global warming have become more and more apparent, even in the melting Arctic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming “may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth’s resources.”

“Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world’s most vulnerable countries,” it said. “There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states.”

The Bay Area has been the staging area for an online movement to draft Mr. Gore to mount another campaign for the White House. A San Francisco-based Web site, www.Draftgore.com, claims more than 165,000 signatures and comments on an online petition, including several placed early this morning congratulating Mr. Gore on his win.

The same group also placed a full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Wednesday, pleading with Mr. Gore to rectify his bitter defeat in 2000, when he won the national popular vote but lost the electoral college after the Supreme Court ruled against a recount in Florida.

“I’ll actually vote for you this time,” wrote one signee, Joshua Kadel of Virginia, on the Web site this morning. “Sorry about 2000!”

The Gores keep an apartment in San Francisco, where their daughter Kristin lives. The city is also the headquarters of Current TV, Mr. Gore’s Emmy-award winning television and online news venture.

Others dedicated to the fight against global warming said the winners were at the head of efforts to investigate and draw attention to the issue.

Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is based in Bonn, Germany, and oversaw negotiations that led to the Kyoto Protocol, said recent moves by political leaders around the world to find ways of reducing emissions would have been hard to imagine without the contributions made by both the I.P.C.C. and Mr. Gore.

“We can recommend ways for policymakers to move forward, but without the I.P.C.C. data being there, this would be next to impossible,” said Mr. de Boer. He said Mr. Gore could use his enhanced stature from winning the Peace Prize to focus on parts of the developing world where politicians need support to spread knowledge about the dangers of climate change. “It’s very difficult to advance on these issues without support from the general public,” he said.

Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former senior United Nations official for humanitarian affairs, called climate change more than an environmental issue.

“It is a question of war and peace,” Mr. Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo, told the Associated Press. “We’re already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa.” He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.