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- "Birth,"
by Bobby Beausoleil, courtesy of Clair Obscur Gallery
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- I was blown away by Beausoleil's
enlightened description of this place where society puts the
monsters it can't bear to look at: "It is the physical manifestation
of all the fears and insecurities of the world coagulated and
boiled down to this concentrated form. It's a containment field
energized by the collective fears of a culture." This could
not have been more antithetical from the prison I had visited
in Amsterdam-where guards and inmates joked; the latter free
to walk around the halls, to wear their own clothes, cook their
own meals. There at the Bijlmer prison, halfway around the world
from Beausoleil's prison, a high tax system and socialized democracy
ensured that inmates would be on the road to reform and not perdition.
Because these men were not treated like animals, quite simply,
they did not behave like animals.
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- "I'm living in one of the
most destructive environments designed to make a person feel
hopeless and powerless," Beausoleil told me. It was in creating
art (both musically and visually) that he faced and tried to
conquer those fears, and addressed the gender imbalance that
seemed to feed them. A musician prior to entering prison, Beausoleil,
tapped into his creativity as a visual artist in the early days
on Death Row, and later in seclusion when at a lock-up at the
Deuel Correctional Institution in Tracy, Calif. where he was
not permitted to have a musical instrument. This was the same
place where he recorded the Lucifer Rising soundtrack with the
help of fellow inmates.
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- "In that music I personified
that spirit of the rebel," he recalled. "I took this
iconic archetypal figure as something representative of me creatively,"
said Beausoleil, whose own spiritual inclinations today combine
ideas from the Vedanta, Hermetic Tradition, Paganism and Buddhism.
- After parting ways with Anger,
in 1967, Beausoleil continued his own anti-hero journey, heading
south for Los Angeles. Always lurking around the peripheries
of 'the scene,' his likeness made its way into another cinematic
cult classic that year. Mondo Hollywood is a gritty survey of
the cultural climate in 60's Hollywood, which also featured Zappa,
and ironically enough, Jay Sebring (the hairdresser who would
later be one of the victims in the Tate/Labianca slayings). To
this day, Zappa remains one of his great creative influences,
not so much based on the style of his music but for his pioneering
spirit. "I'm fascinated with anything that's breaking new
ground," explained Beausoleil.
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- Not long after, hanging out
at a house in Topanga Canyon-a rustic area near Malibu popular
with bohemian types-he met Manson. Though the latter was more
than a decade his senior, the two shared the common interests
of the time-namely, rock n' roll, girls and the psychedelic experience.
Manson had plenty of young women around him, members of his group
The Family. Beausoleil was nicknamed 'Cupid,' due to his reputation
as something of a lothario. Manson kept tabs on friend Dennis
Wilson of the Beach Boys, who he hoped could help him with a
music career. Beausoleil was already entrenched in the music
scene. It wasn't long before the psychedelic component of that
trilogy of shared interests would take center stage, and ultimately
have life-altering affects for Beausoleil. "There were a
lot of different ways of being a casualty in the 60's, drugs
was one of them," said Beausoleil, "I did it by committing
suicide in a sense by killing another man."
- Just two years after The San
Francisco Summer of Love, the flower power generation began to
wilt. A new era marked by chaos and upheaval was imminent. What
better footsoldier to march in the anti-establishment war than
the motorcycle warrior? It seemed, then, that this rumbling urban
outlaw reflected the ethos of the times, as if they were to the
60's what Odin and Thor were to early Nordic cultures. "We
were coming out of the 50s and the monochromatic reality that
had been developed for us," Beausoleil remarked.
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- That year, the Rolling Stones
had hired a motorcycle gang to police their concert in Hyde Park,
London. Then, again months later, they made the mistake of employing
the Hell's Angels as security at another free concert at Altamont
Speedway in Livermore, Calif., resulting in the slaying of a
fan by an Angel, and major havoc. "It was the time in our
history as a culture when we threw everything out the window
in terms of our values and belief systems," explained Beausoleil.
"The Id came out in the youth, the counter culture and the
backlash. I became a representative of that process."
Indeed, the then-21 Beausoleil would find himself at the crescendo
of the upheaval. "I had lost my way," he said, "Everyone
in my generation was struggling with many of the same things
I was struggling with." At that time, Manson was shacked
up in the old western film location, called Spahn Movie Ranch
in Topanga Canyon. Among the visitors to his 'compound,' was
the motorcycle gang the Straight Satans. When Beausoleil had
acted as the middleman in their mescaline deal with Hinman, his
life took a downward spiral. "The point at which my life
had gone on a destructive road was when I suspended my natural
creativity. I was not expressing myself creatively," recalled
Beausoleil. "In a way, I had lost my music. I wasn't doing
art."
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- On April 18, 1970, a seven-woman,
five-man Superior Court jury in Los Angeles found Beausoleil
guilty of first-degree murder. He was sent to San Quentin State
Prison in California at the age of 22. Beausoleil recalled the
early years, before he spiritually came of age in prison. "I
was a bitter young man," he said, "I didn't really
have any clear philosophy about anything." The beginning
of that personal evolution came after he'd been inside about
seven years. It was at that point that he made "the decision
between destructiveness and creativity." He chose creativity.
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- Beausoleil's current paintings
for the LA show are like subconscious Polaroids of his life.
They appear to be an amalgam of his history, a journey through
his psyche. All the elements are there: a sense of abandon to
forces beyond human control, the precise and structured lines
symptomatic of confinement, archetypal imagery of the occult
variety, and a divine tribute to the feminine influences he once
cavorted with but now reverently eulogizes in fantasy.
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- Beausoleil said that his current
work, in comparison to the early erotic drawings was, "more
mature in the sense that I've evolved as a human being since
I was doing that earlier work." And more spiritually charged,
one might note when looking at pieces like "Birth,"
which depicts an ethereal tunnel of hues, with a bright white
light at its center. He explained how he had to develop his own
innovative artistic medium, Prismacolor pencils and baby oil,
"to be able to create painterly effects," despite being
prohibited from using wet media in prison.
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- "[The pieces are] ritualistic
in a sense," he explained. "The art itself is not the
end in and of itself. It's a representation of the process of
manifesting desire." Sometimes, Beausoleil paints while
making a conscious effort to focus on the image as it's being
created. "This is itself magic. It's a process much akin
to making love. You're bringing into being the object of your
desire."
- The process of creating this
series evolved in part alongside recording music for a companion
CD, "Dream Ways of the Mystic." "The art is the
extension of the music," he said. Mysticism and dreams seem
to figure into both. Another of his paintings, "Uni,"
uses strong archetypal visuals, in the form of clearly defined
geometrical symbols-pyramids making up a six-pointed star.
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- It seems as if the archetype
is something that Beausoleil (and we human beings in general,
C.G. Jung might say) has found it difficult to escape. He has
been able, for example to conjure up the most delicate of feminine
forms and sensibilities in an all-male environment by tapping
into that side of himself. "I'm drawing from something that
is a part of me, from the female," he said. "I'm not
separate from anyone in existence." He has also been able
to see his whole prison experience in a similar light through
the lens of archetypes. "I see it in the people. I see archetypes
in the staff and in my fellow inmates," he explained, adding
that they were both, "warriors, and victims of various kinds."
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- That sort of perception of convicted
criminals might be difficult for many people to swallow. It was
difficult for my editor at Salon to swallow. Against his instructions
for a neutral Q&A I ended up turning in a slanted profile
that was open to the idea that Beausoleil might have in fact
found redemption in his art. The piece was rejected as an absolute
no-go. I was given another chance to re-write it in the originally
requested form but declined, hoping to push the envelope. After
sleepless nights of turning it over in my head and trying to
ascertain whether I had been seduced by a sociopath or was in
fact being an enlightened humanist, I opted to write this personally
cathartic essay.
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- It is unlikely that society
will ever forgive Beausoleil or even for one moment think of
him as human. It gives all of our weary heads much-needed peace
to be able to put people in confining categories: 'with us or
against us,' 'good' or 'evil.' Would it be a mental and emotional
overload if we were forced to process the idea that human beings
are complex creatures, capable of being good, evil and everything
in between? Playing devil's advocate-which in this case is a
tricky thing to semantically handle-are there not some people
who are genetically pre-conditioned to feel no remorse? And does
this, coupled with a traumatic childhood, an unstable society
and a trigger incident bring out the previously dormant killer
within?
At 57, Bobby Beausoleil has now been in prison more years than
he was alive when he was first convicted of the murder at the
tender age of 22. Part of the challenge, in his confinement has
been to forgive, "people like Charles Manson, Kenneth Anger
to some degree..." He added, "It's important that I
am forgiven by myself." Beausoleil said that he has indeed
both let his grievances go, and finally forgiven himself. "It
seems like the prison thing is letting me go," he said.
"I may still be in here but I don't feel as confined because
I'm free in myself." "[My] mythological story is one
of reconciliation-of which redemption is a part-- where a human
or spiritual being can fall to the bottom, lose himself and then
reinvent himself and come out of that and learn," he concluded.
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- After immersing myself in Beausoleil's
words, story and artwork, and then discussing it with my peers
and editors, I never one hundred percent came to a certain conclusion
of my perception him. Was he a sociopath, cold-blooded killer,
reluctant foot soldier of a dark and tumultuous 'bridge era'
or a repentant and reformed spiritualist? Anti-hero or Anti-Christ?
It was difficult to say with total conviction either way.
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- One characteristic of the 60's
'bridge era,' I happened to notice was the pop cultural elevation
of the anti-hero-the flawed outsider who was human enough to
screw up, and divine enough to admit to his failings and attempt
to make amends for them. There was a reason that a film like
the sleeper Billy Jack (1971) reached the level of popularity
that it did. Perhaps, there was a sense that the system, the
government, the father figure had failed.
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- Maybe it was similar
to that moment in a man's life when he returns to 'meet his maker,'
to confront his father for all of his wrongdoings. That's when
he ostensibly tells the patriarch that his flaws and failings
are partly attributable to what he has been taught, and says
something like, "you made me in your image." The above
scenarios resonate with me today. Like the 60's, I have a sense
that the day of reckoning is coming. We who grew up reared by
media images, and other pop cultural affectations that served
to distance us from profundity and meaning, will perhaps one
day collectively rise as anti-heroes. For some of us the causes
will be noble; for others unconscionable. I suspect though, that
unlike in the 60's, our anti-heroes will not so much come in
the form of cowboys, outlaws, or political revolutionaries; but
rather as subversive artists, computer hackers and BLOGgers.
BACK TO
CLIPS
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- BACK
TO PAGE 2
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- Copyright © 2005
Shana Ting Lipton
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