Owen Land ‘I Grog and its alternatives’ (2003) card 7 Les Paul, more Jesus

Looking around the web, it seems that this joke is thinly recognised amongst some acoustic guitar teachers. A poster of it can be purchased from Etsy, here, alongside rainbow unicorns and Christian fan art:

https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/771509717/more-jesus-les-paul-instant-download

Acoustic guitar fans know this joke, as the Gibson Les Paul electric guitar was seen as gold standard of guitars, and 1970s christian sing-ins seem to be documented with acoustic guitars.

The “Father of Christian Rock,” Larry Norman, performing at the Hollywood Paladium ca. 1970. Courtesy of Archives, Hubbard Library, Fuller Theological Seminary.

[P. Adams Sitney, writing for Artforum, described Land’s search for the detritus of commercial culture: ‘the more banal, the more spiritually immanent.’]

But the design of this joke is such that it can be viewed also from the other side (or mutually inclusive other), a theological perspective. I went to Foyles bookshop to look at the theological section, and the Pauline Epistles do dominate! Some of the letters of Paul are debatably not written by Paul, there is a diffusion of naming again, like Owen.

Amongst the recent books on Paul, this anthology stands out as worth the read:

Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles

Edited by Joseph A. Marchal

‘Saint Friday Angel’ Mark Aerial Waller (2022) oil pastel on paper, 21cm x 29cm

Here is a sample from the chapter, ‘Dionysus, Disidentifications, and Wandering Pauline Epiphanies’ by Timothy Luckritz Marquis, following Muñoz’ writing on Disidentification, of the performance and film work of Jack Smith, “whose mission was to “destabilize the world of ‘pasty normals’ and help us imagine another time and place.”(Muñoz, 1999)

This essay follows, with [José Esteban] Muñoz and some other writers as traveling partners, a disidentificatory Bacchic scene less obvious than [Jack] Smith’s—that is, 2 Corinthians, viewing Paul’s writing as a style of performance that makes room for new ways of being. In so following Dionysus, Paul, Smith, and Muñoz, I contend that future study of Paul’s letters and communities should pay more attention to productive moments of misrecognition in Pauline interpretation—from his first communities’ reception of his message and mission to our own attempts to map his rhetoric—since such moments are, in most new social movements, the ones that join to build a previously unseen community. (Marquis)

Avantgarde filmmaker Michael Snow writes about the cinema experience of watching a Jack Smith movie in The Collected Writings of Michael Snow, by Michael Snow, Louise Dompierre:

I’m not sure if he is swearing about the noise, or if the audience were all having noisy sex, except for Snow, who was not grooving, but this does highlight a relationship between the screen and what is beyond it. A present tense experience was rubbing up against the timeless, out of time, film.

So, I am ‘more Paul’, but at least the saint brings us back to experimental cinema, via Muñoz. Thinking about Disidentification, there is an important place for Owen Land’s work, to carve out a space for the psychologically queer, where his transformation of the world, a world born though the performance of his characters as a ritual, allows for what Muñoz writes as ‘rich alternative treasure troves of queer possibility’. Here not sexually queer, but definitely giving a voice to crazy, in a way that Dali was less able to identify with:


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