The Sculptural Poetry of "Body Psalms"

As a lifelong figurative sculptor I became intensely interested in the threats to the human body that I see around us. One of those is the commodification of the flesh in capitalist culture, where the body– like a coal seam–is mined for its energy, largely the sexual kind (mostly images of young women used to sell products). But there are plenty of other questionable motivations to go around, all of them reducing the wonder of the beautiful and mysterious human body to a kind of factory-farmed meat for sale.
I wanted to reaffirm the sacred quality of the human body to try to counter this base hustling of the flesh surrounding us every day in advertising. It was this concern that prompted me to launch a huge exploration into film, (pretty radical for a sculptor!) So in 1996 I began constructing a whole new arena of my art. I called it Body Psalms, a series of short films in which I paint lines of mystical texts from various traditions on the skin of my friends and family. As my models move, this beautiful mystical idea unfolds across their bodies like a kind of sculptural poetry. The result I've found was not only a new art form, but the results were captivating and quite stunning! But I wasn't prepared for what happened next.

When I tried to share this work, which I find utterly positive, beautiful and life-affirming, I encountered a surprisingly heavy resistance, a consequence of what I feel is America's "Puritan-porn culture". I've told the story in my TED talk, The Erotic Crisis, but in short, finding places that would show the films was nigh impossible. I'm still trying, but I'm running out of energy. 

After producing about 20 finished films, only a few of which have ever been screened in public, I've grown tired of this Sisyphean task. Each film took about a year to complete all told, cost me a great deal, produced almost nothing and, though I taught some classes and used the material in my own presentations, the project's netted a grand total of $1500. That's a very expensive venture, even for the art business! The films will have to speak to another age, I'm afraid.
I'm not likely producing new films, but I have the material and to see it go to waste hurts too much. So it is that I am opening up my extensive archives of footage and distributing some of the parts of the many unfinished films and snippets of the gorgeous work my dedicated army of friends has contributed over the years. So over the past months I've quietly released short snippets of unfinished films (the less controversial stuff) just so they get to breathe the air. If anyone would like more depth than what is on my web, please contact me. Bless you; and please cherish bodies!