Author Archives: E.A.R.T.H. Lab

Zen For Head In Blue

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Zen For Head In Blue

We loved being in the green year so much that when it came time to go on to our blue year we were having trouble making the change. So when our friend Penny Slinger was planning a big event as a benefit for her Goddess Temple called Shockra!, we chose to use the opportunity to get our heads wrapped around BLUE. She was also presenting the world premiere of her amazing new film, Rainbow Body Awakening which she co-created with her talented lover Dhiren Dasu, and we wanted to be supportive of their great work. Chakra artists unite!

We needed some blue costumes made. So we called artist Sarah Stolar, who was not only willing to make our costumes, but to assist us in our performance as well. We decided to re-stage a Fluxus piece called Zen For Head, originally created by La Monte Young. At a big club in San Francisco, we dunked our heads in big bowls of blue paint and painted a long line on a scroll of white paper about 25 feet long. We left the painting displayed for people to enjoy.

After the performance, we finally felt like we had finally entered the blue year and have had blue on the brain ever since.

Photos by Randal Alan Smith

Desert Tour For Lovers

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Desert Tour For Lovers - The Earth As Valentine

Finding Our V-Spots on February 14, 2009 On Valentine’s Day we led a group of artists, academics, ecologists and activists on a special lover’s tour/walk in the Southern California desert. Absolutely everyone can have a beautiful Valentine, and delicious day of eco-sexual lovemaking with the Earth as lover. (Text about our tour continued below the photos.)

The Love Art Lab participated in the Luminous Green Desert, a conference at a University of California desert research retreat facility near Palm Desert. About thirty-five people were in attendance, mostly artists involved in environmental art.

At 2:30 P.M. a dozen of us gathered and walked into the desert. First we read our “25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth” (LINK) then had everyone introduce themselves and tell us anything that came to mind regarding Earth as lover. We were delighted to hear some very erotic stories from our colleagues, and to know that everyone had had an erotic experience with the earth at some point in their lives.

Artist couple Paula Poole and Brett Stalbaum collaborated on the tour with us. Paula invited us to each locate and share our V-spot; a View, or a plant, or a place that we found particularly erotic. One by one we did, and Paula gifted us each a beautiful hand beaded necklace that she made. Brett, her husband, photographed our spots, which Paula translated into beautiful pencil drawings later that night.

For some people a cactus was their V-spot. For others it was a particular view. For Annie it was a few grains of sand because she said, “In every grain of sand is an entire erotic universe waiting to be explored.” She then ate and swallowed the grains of sand with great pleasure. Beth was a total eco-slut, as she had no less than five V-spots.

As tour guides, we pointed out other points of interest; a multitude of phallic and vulvular shapes, a gray granite rock with a white heart, sensuous textures, eyegasmic colorful delights, the scents of lavender, creosote and more more more. Annie demonstrated the joys of licking and hugging rocks. Beth and artist Larry Bogad picked up a watermelon-sized rock and licked it simultaneously. It licked them back! Further down the path was a rock with a big wet spot.

We moseyed and meandered for a couple of miles. At the end of the trail we stood in a circle for some ‘ecstasy breathing’ circulating energy with the north, south, east and west, which brought us to an energetic climax with the Earth. Then we made our way back to base camp as the sun sank behind a breast shaped mountain. We basked in the afterglow while sucking on the dried mangos and figs we had brought for everyone (healthier than bon bons). We communicated with each other about our various environmental art projects. Pillow talk as it were. The desert was a fine lover this fine day.

We hope you will join us on our next lover’s tour.

Blue Wedding to the Sea Video and Photos

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Blue Wedding to the Sea Video and Photos

In Venice, Italy, we married our lover the Sea at the water’s edge. Friends artist collaborators, plus some people we had never met, traveled from nine different countries to join us. It was a very hot, sweaty August day. The ceremony happened in four parts/scenes. First there were many fantastic, uninhibited, very blue performances outside the Fear Society Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Then we processed through Venice for about a half hour to a very scenic plaza where we had food and drinks and everyone blessed the rings for the Sea. Next some gondolas arrived to take carry us by water to the Sea. We then gathered by a bridge. Our anti-priest Beatriz Preciado gave her stirring sermon about liquid community. Then everyone made our promises to love, honor and cherish the Sea forever and eternity. We threw our beautiful blessed wedding rings into the water. (A more detailed story to follow soon. For more info about the collaborators view the press release and the program.) Photos by Gigi Gatewood, Mark J. Snyder and Graham Bell Tornado

Articles about the Wedding to the Sea:
Carnal San Francisco - A Birthday and a Wedding
The Believer - 2009 Art Issue
Pornoterrorismo - After Wedding

Blue Wedding to the Sea Homily by Beatriz Preciado

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Blue Wedding to the Sea Homily by Beatriz Preciado

We welcome you all, humans and animals, bio and trans, men and women, transgender bodies, mutants and survivors. You've been invited by Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens to celebrate the blue year of their love and together, forming a liquid community in order to marry the Sea.

We are here today to marry the Mediterranean Sea, stage of human traffic, colonization, war, but also of travel and communication.

To marry the Sea today, in 2009, is to embrace a sick being.

The Sea we are going to marry is, as we ourselves are,  polluted, sick, but alive and historically charged.

During the last two hundred years the human species has contributed to poisoning the water, killing fish and water mammals, threatening the health of the Sea and therefore putting at risk the survival of the planet.

For this, we come here today, to Venice, a city made of water, to ask the Sea for forgiveness.  We are here to give our love back to the Sea.

I thank Annie and Beth for inviting me, and for inviting us all, enter into their 7 year chronology of love, and for asking me   I also thank them for asking me to be the Anti-Priest for this wedding.

In their love chronology this is the year of the Visuddha chakra. The chakra of the throat. Let us all now touch our throat and feel the Visuddha chakra.

COMMUNICATION

This is the chakra of communication.
But communication is not just talking and hearing.  It is not only a matter of exchanging information, a practice transformed now into a consumer commodity.

The word communication comes form the latin root “munus”, meaning “ a gift that is given by someone to whom it doesn’t belong”. A gift that nevertheless doesn’t belong to the one who gives. Communication is a gift, something given, never a property.

Comunicare is “making common”, sharing the gift. This is the same root as the word community, immunity and meaning.

To communicate is to build community. But the political risk is to think that community can only be achieved through immunity.

The anxiety to be immune comes from the fear of the other. From the fear of not to be and not to have in common. The other is here seen as a threat to the community. An immune community is a community of Fear.

As we marry the sick Sea today, let us get rid of fear of the other, fear of queerness, fear of sickness, fear of ugliness, fear of the grotesque, fear of the virus, fear of death.

As we marry the sick Sea today, let us remember to construct community on “the social and biological vulnerability of the body” rather than on immunity and fear of the other.

For those of us who come from the civil rights fights concerning racial equality, for those of us who come from feminism and from the fight for gender and sexual freedom, for those of us who come from queer and differently abled politics we feel the need to ask anew the question of community, of what is common to all of us, of what can we live without fearing the other.

Let us take this occasion to ask ourselves how do we want to live together, what is the community that we want to build.

I propose that we think of community as water. The most expanded chemical substance of the planet, present in every living being, though never having the same form: the water is changing constantly through a cycle of evaporation, becoming steam, and then becoming liquid, solidifying and becoming ice, the sky being just the sea in an altered form.
To get married to the water means to abandon identity and nationality and to become a liquid community able to permeate different soils and to cross political and moral frontiers without fear.

Let us communicate, build community and live together with all living human and non-human organisms.

As we marry the sick Sea today, let us be bound by a love bigger than human love, reaching non-human animals, the elements and the earth.

As we marry the Sea today, let us make love to water, have non-human sex with the elements.

As we marry the Sea today, we invite you to open your mouth, yours hands, yours vaginas, urethras and anuses to non-human love.

Annie and Beth I will now ask you to say your vows

BETO: Annie and Beth, are you ready to make your vows to each other?

Beth:  YES

Annie:  YES

Artists’ Statement

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Artists' Statement

WE ARE THE LOVE ART LABORATORY, an artist couple dedicated to doing art projects that explore, generate, and celebrate love. We orchestrate performance art weddings in collaboration with various international communities. Each wedding is site-specific, interactive, and utilizes a different theme and color based on the seven chakra system (inspired by artist Linda Montano's 14 Years of Living Art.) The Love Art Laboratory grew out of our response to the violence of war, the anti-gay marriage movement, and the corporate greed causing the destruction of our planet. Our projects are symbolic gestures, which aim to instill hope, to be an antidote to fear, and act as a call to action.

THIS PAST YEAR, WE MARRIED the Earth in a magnificent redwood tree grove in California, we married the Sky in Oxford, England, and we had what may have been the first queer wedding in the Balkans, in Zagreb, Croatia. Hundreds of people attended these weddings and helped to create them through their generous collaborations.

FOR OUR SEVENTH WEDDING, AND IN OUR BLUE YEAR we will marry the Sea. We are passionately in love with her and desire to take care of her in order to help save her. We are eco-sexuals, meaning that we find nature incredibly romantic, extraordinarily sensual, and an exquisite lover. Additionally, we are "sexecologists," who combine sexology and ecology, and we intend to make the environmental movement a little sexier.

WHY MARRY THE SEA IN VENICE? During the Renaissance, the Doge (chief magistrate) decreed that, "Venice must marry the sea as a man marries a women and thus become her Lord." So each year the Doge would go out on a boat and drop a ring into the water. But can people really Lord over the Sea? What is perfectly clear is that people do have the power to destroy her, and are rapidly doing so. We will follow the tradition of marrying the Sea in Venice—as two women who have moved beyond the dominant-male and submissive-female dynamic, as seductive eco-sexual artists, and as global citizens who care deeply about the welfare of our planet.

THE FEAR SOCIETY PAVILION IS THE PERFECT PLACE for this wedding as we are afraid of the total destruction of our beautiful environment. The Sea has a fast growing cancer made of islands of plastic the size of Texas. She is suffocating from gasses caused by our pollution. Globally, 90% of her large fish have been wiped out. She's overheating. Her reefs have been brutally destroyed. She's being raped and... Need we go on? And we simply can't live without her.

LOVING THE SEA EROTICALLY takes us all deliciously deep, deep, deep inside our primordial selves. Our bodies are made largely of water so in fact we are the Sea. We hope that our guests will take vows to love and protect Sea along with us. Now let's get wet!

ANNIE M. SPRINKLE & ELIZABETH M. STEPHENS

Blue Wedding to the Sky Video and Photos

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Blue Wedding to the Sky Video and Photos

At the historic Grove House in Oxford, England, we married our lover the Sky. We asked for no material gifts, but invited people to collaborate on the creation of the wedding. Many wonderful creative people were extraordinarily generous in their offerings. The wedding was produced by Luke Dixon of the International Workshop Festival. So we also did a five-day workshop that led up to the wedding. Fourteen people attended our Making Love into Art and Art into Love Workshop, then presented their creations at the wedding. It poured rain most of the five days, and cleared up just in time for the wedding. Our Mistress of Ceremonies was Veronica Hart, the lovely adult film star and director. The owner of Grove House, Polly McLean, provided a beautiful environment in which to do the wedding. As some folks wanted to bring their children, we decided to stretch our boundaries and try to do a “family friendly” performance event. Something we have never done before! It was a real challenge, but we all pulled it off without a glitch. (A more detailed story to follow soon. For more info about the collaborators view the program.) Photos by Del La Grace Volcano, Sarah Ainsley, and Petra Joy

Blue Wedding to the Sky Homily

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Blue Wedding to the Sky Homily

Written and Performed by Luke Dixon

In southern Africa the Xhosa people call a sky without clouds a lonely sky. We are here today to ensure that the sky will never be lonely again. We are here today to marry the sky. The blue of the sky reminds us of the blue of the fifth chakra. The chakra of open clear communication, of feelings and of thoughts and of creativity. It is the chakra of releasing and of breathing. It is the chakra of the life-force and of healing. As we look at the sky above us, let us remember the power and importance of communication – of being free to speak what is in our hearts and listen to what is in the hearts of others. Annie and Beth I will now ask you to say your vows.