Pioneering the Avant-Garde - Lisa Paul Streitfeld

Music, the purest of all the artistic mediums, was at the forefront of avant-garde experimentation throughout the 20th century. The collaborations between Beat poets and jazz musicians in the 50s gave rise to the 60s counterculture movement that was propelled by avant-garde experiments with music arising from chance encounters in everyday life and the popularity of rock, with its ideals of the sacred marriage through projection. The following decade, punk broke down gender boundaries along with popular forms made sterile through disco. The New Age movement of the 80s delivered musicians who consciously used sound to move the kundalini through the charkas of the body. In the 90s, grunge was a valve for the emotional fallout from the toxic marriage arising from the chaotic breakdown of gender roles.

My personal search for the hieros gamos in millennial art forms began with my absorption in Peter Gabriel's CD, US, prior to a visit to his Real World Studio in 1994. Last spring, I became acquainted with the genius of Darryl Tookes. Like Gabriel, Tookes is a pioneering Aquarian artist integrating heaven and earth through a personal narrative aligned with a 21st century icon...