Efficacious Grace
"dispenser, god, protective spirit"
My mind’s eye traces the edges of shadows, carving up a half-lit embankment. Rhythms emanate from a bluetooth speaker on the carpeted floor, snares tucked between frothy hats and a distorted bass groove. My thoughts wander toward the role of pleasure and beauty in my life; how they’ve been edging out the cold familiarity of anhedonia, restriction, and isolation that once stood in their place.
I’ve had various aesthetic trust issues. In a past era of my life (absolutely attributable to my environment at the time, but saying “in New York…” all the time gets old), aesthetics seemed to flow freely, in a constant state of unrest, morphing in myriad directions every month, from the ironic takes at the downtown openings and after-hours parties in the dim sum restaurant, to the “naive sentimentality” of the effervescent underground, to the exchanges and reinventions of the subway commuters and Broadway stores.
Positioning myself so many years ago within this landscape of ever-renewing, shifting signifiers, I adopted a mask of detachment expressed in a work-friendly yet edgy 2010s downtown girl look: American Apparel mesh, Alexander Wang x GAP khaki, proto-health goth Y3, designer hand-me-downs from my boss, jewelry from my then-husband, and finds from consignment stores, sample sales and tiny LES shops. My performance look involved a slight twist: fewer, more see-through clothes, and higher platforms.
My young self’s desires and motivations now seem as familiar, agreeable and obsolete as my old wardrobe. I sometimes forget that my mental frameworks fluctuate over the years in the same way that my wardrobe dies and renews itself: piece by piece, sometimes slowly, by natural entropic causes; other times in a flash precipitated by complex forces like modulations in body size, seasons, activities. I am no longer the same person, with the same thoughts, moods, and reactions.
Back then I was dealing with intense internalization of my desires, a kind of bodily and spiritual dysmorphia spurred by the inability to express what I didn’t know I wanted. At a warehouse art show down the street from my house, a sample sale of sorts from artists whose work is normally more expensive to obtain, I selected a jar of homemade pickles, the leftovers of a conceptual installation. The label, printed in a gothic font and ornamented with a stock “tribal tattoo” design, read Efficacious Grace.
Suggestive of a rightful orderliness attained via modest piety, it makes me think of Julia Cameron’s 12-step-addled admonition for artists to apply to a benevolent demigod for assistance with creative tasks (“GOD = Good Orderly Direction”). But I’m also reminded of jar spells, captive spirits, and gods in the minor sense: the Ancient Greek daimon as “dispenser, god, protective spirit.”
The installation where my bootleg pickle jar originated appeared to have been art directed for maximally based (“brutal nihilist puckish venomous”) aesthetics, with vinyl sticker text covering much of the front windows to spell out a freeform poem inscribed in a sort of graffiti/calligraphy hybrid font resembling Cyrillic script: soft network/grindcore de muerte/embedded mulch…
Somehow, my particular pickle jar had made it full circle from the art gallery to the anarchists’ warehouse, de- or re-sacralized into the sphere of direct action and sincere intentions before coming into my hands. I kept my pickle jar on a real altar, next to actual spells, where its system of symbols and keys intermingled with various others, inherited and improvised, forming a link between detachment and devotion.