Psychic Telephone · 47
Phoenix
Not sure what Psychic Telephone is all about? Check out our first and second posts for an introduction to the project.
Phoenix’s art—she sometimes struggles with describing it. When she’s working, she’s always invoking spiritual energies, making the work in concert, in collaboration, with certain deities. It doesn’t look spiritual, but she is at least starting from a spiritual point and generally extrapolating her anthropological knowledge of Yoruba culture. She’ll give you an example: It’s sort of strange, a piece called Joy’s Ogede. It is a six-by-six-foot room made of red yarn, and you can enter it, and there’s a red bench and a box, and in the box is a cushion on which sits a black porcelain banana that has a human ear on it. So she’s playing with the word ogede, which in Yoruba can mean banana but in another tonal form is incantation.
One of the early sculptural, spiritual elements that the Yoruba or pre-Yoruba people made were these objects with multiple ears on them. So they were basically saying either Listen to me or Someone is listening. And, We will speak, and so forth. And she has some pieces that are voice-activated, so if it hears you it’ll start talking to you, and make other pieces start talking to you. It’ll say, Mumbo, which is a very colloquial phrase, and they use it in different inflections that give you the clue as to how it’s meant to be interpreted. It means, I hear you.
In her daily life, Phoenix communicates with her ancestors quite often. She greets them when she comes and goes, tells them how her day is going, yada yada yada. And in terms of maybe confirmation of having some kind of psychic whatever-whatever, she did have an aunt who did tarot cards. And as she grew up, there was a certain closeness, some kind of affinity between them. And both of them are related, she says, in the same lineage as her great-great-great-grandfather who was a nineteenth-century prophet. He was called Prophet Jones. He died just before her mom was born, but there would always be these conversations about Prophet Jones, these wonderful stories—he seemed to always prophesize catastrophe of some sort, like war. And recently she’s started researching him, and there are all these newspaper clippings about him in terms of his prophecies.
He would be invited to people’s churches, and he would give a sermon and prophesize or whatever. All along the Eastern Seaboard. The farthest north that she has documentation of is Providence, Rhode Island, in 1919, in a Baptist church that still exists. And then he was in Brooklyn and Newark and Pennsylvania. In general, she says, prophecy was a big thing in America at that time. But she thinks her curiosity is wanting to explore what was taking place for Black Americans. To her it seems like a transitional phase, from having had certain African tendencies of religious activity into more mainstream Christian activities. From enslavement to freedom, what then becomes a really heavily Christianized group of people.
And if there is some sort of blood lineage as an influence upon her, it would be that as well. But she has to say that she doesn’t actually have a lot of communication with Prophet Jones, like when she feeds her ancestors—you know, It’s dinnertime. But he’s not one who pops in. She never hears him go, Hey how ya doing? or anything like that. Whereas others are more vocal, or will offer advice when she asks, or when she needs to find out something, they are more forthright in answering. But she can’t say he ever answers. So she finds that interesting. Of all the people, don’t you think he’d be the one who would come and chat?