How to wear a dress in the name of art, the occult and finding yourself

I view myself as a multi-disciplinary artist, who started life as a cassette DJ in my teens. I finally left the music industry (selling CDs) in 2008 to pursue Tarot as I was always writing about my magickal self since I was a child.

Then Tarot opened up my long lost love for doodling. The last five years have been about developing all my loves – art, music, writing, magick and now performance. One area is not enough for me – I get bored easily. But the inspiration never goes away for good, so I always need to switch between many loves in order to sustain my creative life as a whole.

My strongest suit would be spirituality. That feeds all my art. Writing has been an intimate friend since childhood.  Music has always been a source of power, so that’s a constant. Art is fairly new in my life, so I’ve got some way to go.

Now, I find myself somewhere between the cusp of art and all those passions I’ve bathed myself in.

The infamous western occult magickian and ‘wickedest man in the world’, Aleister Crowley, said: “All Art is magick (sic).” After all, that is what magick is all about, not changing the world per se, but changing yourself.

In just under an hour, I was going to spread my legs and expose myself in Artistry café. in Singapore for artists to draw me. I was going to be a subject of art. It was going to be a mixture of several performance pieces, even though I’d be completely still. Various “concepts of self” I’ve developed over the years will be revealed to the public, along with my particular taste for the transgressive, left-of-field attitude to life and art.

“They say changing your perspective changes your life but I think it wasn’t enough to shift my perspective on my own. I wanted the public and fellow artists to help me out.”

I had with me my brown monkish bag filled with fantasy objects; a balaclava, black winter gloves, a kitchen knife, a coconut shaped into a head, my sister’s porcelain doll and my mother’s dress. I was carrying a large branch, painted blue and gifted to me by a Californian witch whose body was covered with star tattoos. It looks like a hardened tentacle from some creature off the Cthulhu mythos. If the cops checked my bag, I’ll have a lot of explaining to do.

But I had forgotten my shorts. I should’ve worn them under my business trousers and over the $5 white thong panties I was wearing. I’ll have to improvise on my last pose.

Author Alan Moore talks about art and magick being “pretty much synonymous”.

I personally feel strongly aligned with imbuing art and culture with the sensibility of magic, so when I was invited to pose as a life drawing model for the 40th edition of the Singapore Art Salon, I saw it as a chance to crystallise some self-concepts, to inject some meaning into my creative life. I asked: “Can I be whoever I want?”

“Yes. you could,” the organiser replied.

Days before the event, I started plotting “my drama”. I wanted to create “four selves”, and I spent a lot of time sitting topless in front of my laptop camera looking at my mounds of flesh fold into each other, trying to make peace with it amid the voices of society saying “it’s not celebrity” or “that’s disgusting”.

They say changing your perspective changes your life but I think it wasn’t enough to shift my perspective on my own. I wanted the public and fellow artists to help me out with that.

People started coming in to the café. I was feeling anxious but knew I always felt this way before any performance. My anxiety had given way to a state of ‘empty mind’ or zen, almost a total surrender to whatever would happen next.

The first two poses would be five minutes each, followed by two more sets of ten minutes. It was time to start.

THE OCCULTIST

Magick is faceless but visually symbolic. The body is a temple. With these in mind, I sat for the first pose. I was in full black trousers and a long-sleeved shirt. I draped a long, purple “tablecloth” with pentagram designs over my head. I used my moldavite and labradorite pendants to secure the cloth around my neck and let the rest of it fall down the front of my body. In my left hand I held the head shaped coconut. In my right, I wore my magickal rings and held up the blue tentacle, my magickal staff. I sat with legs touching each other, the way Pharaohs sit on their thrones. I had just finished producing new music, so that was the soundtrack, filled with electrical sounds and cavernous bass.

I sat there and within the first minute, my muscles started vibrating. I had no control over the shaking in my left arm but I didn’t see it as physiological. I chose to see it as an energetic download of cosmic forces coursing through my body, an anchoring of higher dimensional realities upon this earth. That was my intention anyway.

Focus is the key to magickal thinking and intention. Power follows thought, so I concentrated on the act, on what I was becoming and being – an artefact, a statue, an installation and a Holy temple.

I felt grounded and safe and empowered. As a magician, I felt a bit more real than before and was ready to engage in the next character, one that was far more dangerous and tricky to conceptualise.

THE SERIAL KILLER

“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.”
– Jean Genet, Querelle

I’ve always considered myself an outsider. Outsider artist, outsider musician, outsider poet. I’ve always positioned myself against the status quo. I’m an occultist conversing with Lucifer in dreams like he was a friend. I don’t exactly strive to be different; I feel it’s a natural occurrence and sometimes, the price paid is a sense of aloneness, of separateness from the rest of society.

I stood there on stage, masked in a black balaclava, my black gloves and a really long knife from Daiso. I stood there with a deep sense of “I’m coming to get you, to scare you into waking up to the true life, to jolt you into awareness, to be an unforgiving mirror to the heartless, money grubbing dumb being that you really are. To free this land from you who wastes its space and its air with your mediocre, uninspired life. This is my design.”

Yes, I was being highly judgmental but the catharsis was worth it. There was power standing there like that. All I had to do was transfer that power into reinforcing belief in myself as an artist, as a person. It was deeply satisfying to change energies into something productive and pose without actually needing to spill any blood.

THE CROSS-DRESSING MOTHER. WITH DOLL.

There were many layers of my self to consider with this concept and definitely a lot more complex than the other ‘characters.’ Undercurrents of sexuality, eroticism, perversion, spirit dolls and romantic isolation all ran deep in my psyche. Personally, I knew these currents well, but to show them off to the public? To make a statement about them? That was another thing.

I wasn’t sure what was going through my mom’s head when I asked for a dress she didn’t need anymore. “I need it for an art project,” I told her. She gave me a frilly cyan dress. I have to admit, I was turned on.

Not particularly because it was my mother’s dress, but because it was a dress in a colour that represented nubile innocence, youthfulness and tenderness. You see, I love women, no, I adore them, I worship them, as mother, maiden and crone (three aspects of the Goddess). But I’ve have never been involved with a woman, romantically.

“Even when I heard people come in and start laughing, I felt relaxed, unashamed. I think there’s victory in that and I was very thankful I was free.”

What was I confronting? What drive was I indulging in? If I couldn’t stand close, could I stand in? Did the fantasy of dressing like a woman mean I could be closer to that which I adore? These ideas made sense, but were they ‘genuine’? The only way to find out was to see how I felt during the pose, when I was actually in the act itself and not just theorising about it.

By 10pm that night, there was a crowd in the café. I gingerly pulled out a doll from my bag, walked up to stage in my black socks, cyan dress and white thongs, put on my plastic Japanese mythical chubby woman mask (from Daiso) sat down and deliberately opened my legs for everyone to see. Ten minute pose.

I’ve never felt so comfortable in my life.

Time vanished. It felt like I was truly holding a child while comfortably being an exhibitionist. It felt like even if the doll had a disembodied spirit in her, I was all right with that. It wasn’t weird to be part of the spirit doll sub-culture. It wasn’t ‘sinful’ to be erotic anymore, especially when I’ve spent most of my life feeling the terror of Catholic guilt that was stronger than my natural drives. On stage, up there, exposing myself, I felt natural and proud of what I was doing. Even when I heard people come in and start laughing, I felt relaxed, unashamed. I think there’s victory in that and I was very thankful I was free.

The pose ended too soon. I wish it was longer. I personally feel it was the best act of the entire night.

THE TOPLESS MAN.

So I had forgotten my shorts. I decided, never mind, I’ll go topless with business trousers on. There was something interesting there. I ended up looking like an ah-pek, bearded, in semi-thinker pose, angled profile. Ten minutes.

It didn’t even occur to me I was showing off my flesh. I think, I got over that shyness at home, when I decided to do this. Something else was happening here altogether. I was no longer hiding being a mask or tablecloth or a balaclava. This was me, identity revealed, the end game that started as silent abstraction and ended with human noise. I had to distract myself from the cramps, so I started raving. My nose was leaking for some reason but I couldn’t move to wipe it off.

I started shouting.

“DO NOT MAKE SENSE! DO NOT MAKE DOLLARS! DO NOT BELIEVE IN HEAVEN! DO NOT BELIEVE IN HELL! WHY ARE YOU HERE? WHY ARE WE HERE? WHAT IS THE MEANING!? WHEN WILL IT STOP?”

I didn’t know what came over me but I had to ask the serious questions. I’ve forgotten most of what I said now but when I was saying it, it felt necessary, it felt like I was summing up the entire night. “What is beauty? What is the grotesque? “What do you fear? What do you love?” “What is your fetish?”

It all felt conclusive, as if I was tying up loose ends. The pose ran on for nearly 15 minutes, my music playing in the background ended, giving me more room to vocalise, to say what the universe wanted me to say. It was an intense ending to the whole night.

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How many people judged me that night? Would I even care? Posing on stage like that gave me the answer. I’ve affirmed myself as a magician, as pervert, as a lover of serial killers, as a man without a sexually appealing body (according to status quo) but that is okay.

Fuck the status quo.

What I did that night, to a certain degree, completed a transition along this unending spiral of evolution. I’m no longer the same today, and I won’t be the same tomorrow. That’s just the way it is in this cycle of creation and destruction. I don’t know yet what else I will become. The narrative isn’t over. I only know that I’ve taken a few steps closer towards my true self, while slowly finding more peace with what and who I am.

By posing for art.

To learn more about Paul’s multi-disciplines in tarot card reading, writings, music, poetry, spoken word and more, visit his site here.

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