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AHN NEWS: February 2004
This month's news is dedicated to ARTISTS' RESPONSES TO CONSUMERISM. We feature an interview with Bill Talen about his alter-ego Reverend Billy from the Church of Stop Shopping. We also include a review of Jerry Wennstrom's book The Inspired Heart: An Artist's Journey of Transformation and a link to Betsy Rosenberg's Eco Talk.
AHN INTERVIEW: Bill Talen, Artist and Activist
 Bill Talen is an artist and activist who, as Reverend Billy, has adopted the tone and mannerisms of a Baptist preacher from the Deep South. However he preaches something no fundamentalist would say. As the head of the Church of Stop Shopping, Reverend Billy (accompanied by his Stop Shopping Gospel Choir) preaches in places like Starbucks, the Disney Store, and Nike, urging customers to "Save your soul my childÉBack away from that silly little product on the shelf." Bill's clever use of performance and parody very effectively calls into question America's mindless consumption of resources. As such he is a model of an artist willing to take risks and move out into the public sphere to make a relevant and important statement. He lives and preaches in New York City, and the Arts and Healing Network interviewed him this past January.
AHN: What is the message of the Church of Stop Shopping?
 Talen: We're addicted to a dance with products, the whole cycle from the advertising through to the driving the product home in the traffic jam -- we're in real deep. Our consumption destroys our communities, malls our schools, cuts us off from one another, and drives a violent foreign policy. The message? When you stop and pull your hand off the product, and back away, and let your own stuff come up and fill the space that the product intended to fill, something really powerful happens. I wouldn't use the word "spiritual" because that's a phrase that has been turned into a product as well. But you know what I mean.
AHN: Tell me about Reverend Billy's first public appearance.
Talen: It was harrowing. I joined the sidewalk preachers in Times Square in the summer of 1997 and stationed myself outside of the Disney Store. The sidewalk preachers come there from all over, but a lot of them have no institutional sponsorship. These folks are shouting in public space, pretty much on their own crazy assignment from some god or another. The human voice there in that logo vortex is such a brave, fragile thing. I couldn't agree with much of what they were saying. I mean, I'm in recovery from Dutch Calvinism and organized religion generally. But once I had my own pulpit, and I started shouting at the blur of shoppers, I felt better. My voice got louder and louder. Then after a year I started going INSIDE the stores.
AHN: What inspired your "interruptions" -- preaching inside places like Starbucks and the Disney Store?
 Talen: I began writing plays for the charged stage of the sweatshop store -- retail spaces like GAP, Nike, Disney, Starbucks -- where the company is guilty of people and earth abuse, and their evil leaves something incomplete-feeling in their stores. When you look around, something is out of wack. That's because we can never really put the sweatshops into a blind trust. Those 15 year old girls are in the room. Good political actors pick up on this. These stores are great stages, and we have had some dramatic improvisatory flights where all the customers begin to applaud.
AHN: What gave you the courage to speak out in a voice that runs against the mainstream?
Talen: What I've done takes the description "courageous" only in retrospect. And we will not change society now by doing what we think is merely courageous. The emergency is too pressing for this. It's too late. There is no ego. Running against the mainstream is just my effort to survive.
AHN: What do you see as the current role of art in society? Do you believe art can be a catalyst for positive change?
 Talen: I just don't use the word Art anymore. The Arts section of the New York Times isn't interested in the Church of Stop Shopping. Our coverage has come from the Style section and the Business section -- renegades in those conservative fortresses join our subversive worship. I was an artist in the theater world once, but the theater world is at a great distance now from the emergency in our lives. Art is a word to hide behind.
AHN: What excites or inspires you most about your work as Reverend Billy?
Talen: Feeling useful. And, you know, preaching with a 25 voice choir harmonizing with you is such a privilege. My god.
AHN: What advice do you have for others wishing to use creativity to initiate positive change?
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| This book by Bill Talen was published in 2003. Order here. |
Talen: Embrace your exalted Oddness. Don't be afraid of whatever it takes, including inactivity, danger, and boredom. Be willing to lose friends. Be willing to give yourself up to confusion. Let stories that you've hid inside your left back-thigh come roaring up through you. Don't be an artist until the word comes to you down the road. Learn the traditions, the histories of expression, but minimize your involvement with the priesthood of a tradition. Better to go right to the hot prophet who was utterly out of category at the beginning. Remember Jesus was never a Christian. Strange-a-lujah!!
To learn more about Bill Talen and Reverend Billy, please visit www.revbilly.com
FEATURED BOOK
The Inspired Heart: An Artist's Journey of Transformation
by Jerry Wennstrom
 In 1979, Jerry Wennstrom, a rising star in the New York art world, destroyed his paintings, gave away his possessions and money, and began consciously to empty himself of his identity. He relinquished the role of "Artist" to engage in the art of living deeply and fully. By letting go of resistance to whatever life would bring, he was led to the heart of the miraculous. When he eventually returned to making art again after many years, it was with a new and enriched understanding of his true place in the world. This book is his inspirational story.
As Jerry explains in the book's introduction, "I ate when I had food and fasted when I did not. I accepted whatever came into my life. It was that simpleÉ. Eventually I saw the ways in which the miracle carried my life. I could never have continued on this strange and lonely journey if I had not seen that. My joy and my ability to help others were the gifts of that miracle and the only tools for disarming the fears that were inevitably projected onto meÉ.Living this way brought fear to the surface, but it also brought the elimination of fear by a kind of graceÉ."
The Inspired Heart was published in paperback by Sentient in 2002 and has
189 pages. Click here to order.
FEATURED LINK
EcoTalk by Betsy Rosenberg:
The Green Art of Radio Programming
Six years ago, Betsy Rosenberg started EcoTalk, an award winning radio program that helps connect the dots between our individual habits and actions to their impact on the environment, and then back to our personal health and well being. EcoTalk airs as a sixty-second feature nine times a week on KCBS (740 AM) in Northern California. Each week host and producer Betsy Rosenberg reports on exemplary people, programs and products helping to reduce waste and increase sustainability, and she addresses topics and events from the environmental front lines.
The EcoTalk web site complements the program by making the information accessible online for those outside of Northern California. In addition, the web site serves as a fabulous resource for everything you need to know about living lighter on earth, but did not know where to ask.
Please visit their web site at www.EcoTalk.net
A FINAL THOUGHT
This quote by Lewis Hyde is from his book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property
"The more we allow such commodity art
to define and control our gifts, the less
gifted we become, as individuals
and as a society. The true commerce of art
is a gift exchangeÉ to a creative spirit
whose fertility is not exhausted in use,
to the sense of plenitude which is the mark
of all erotic exchange, to a storehouse
of works that can serve as agents of
transformationÉ But none of these fruits
will come to us where we have converted
our art into pure commercial enterprisesÉ.
Sprinkles of gold flakes will not free the genius
of our race."
READERS RESPOND
Please send your thoughts and feedback on this month's news page to ahn@artheals.org. We would love to hear from you.
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