| THE WORKS OF WARREN CRISWELL (Continued) |
| At the same time
I was drawing strippers and the men who watched them, working
in the dark with white charcoal on black paper. I did hundreds
of these drawings, taking the best of them to Cantrell Gallery
in a large box, where one day some people from the Taiwan Art
Center came in and bought all of them. This is how I happened
to have a solo show in Taiwan. I loved the topless bars for their
unashamed eroticism, but they are also linked in my mind to a
year-long research project I did on the pre-patriarchal cultures
of Europe and the Middle East. Before the invasions of herding
societies from the northern steppes and southern deserts around
the 1st millennium BCE, the civilizations around the Mediterranean
were predominantly matrilineal if not matriarchal. They worshiped
various forms of the Great Goddess (Mother Nature), and women
evidently enjoyed a social and economic status unheard of in
the patrilineal cultures that have dominated the world since
that time. Beginning with Plato and continuing in Christianity,
our own culture sets body and spirit against each other in an
eternal struggle. But in the time of the Goddess, when she was
represented by the ishtaritu--holy women, or temple prostitutes--of
Sumer, Babylon and Canaan, no such antagonism existed between
the erotic and the spiritual. Sexuality was considered a divine
communion between the body and the spirit. This is an alien concept for us, but I always treated the strip joints like surviving remnants of that time, now almost erased from history. Like the ancient temples these are places of female power and are feared and hated for that reason by many today just as the temples were feared and hated by the ancient invaders. They threaten the fundamental concept of patrilineal descent, which lies silent but awake just under the surface of our political correctness--the concept that women are the divinely ordained property of men. The collection of Taiwan drawings was called "Ulysses at Circe's." Homer's Circe was modeled on a priestess of the Goddess in the pre-Greek period. Then as now, men are sometimes turned into pigs. The two works here which best represent this period are the pastels Watching Sandy, Blue Corners (both 1987) and the pen and ink drawing The Dressing Room (1990). But The Crab King Crossing is probably the most accurate picture of my state of mind in those years. |
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 The Crab King Crossing, 1991, oil on linen, 48 x 55 inches |
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Title Page,
Copyright, Installation
Views, Page 1, 2,
3, 4,
5, 6,
7, 8, 9, 10,
Contact
Warren Criswell All images and text on this Web site |
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