Rabyn Blake’s “Mudpool” appeared on the cover of "WET"

Rabyn Blake’s “Mudpool” appeared on the cover of "WET"

Rabyn Blake’s seminal video, “Mudpool” [1976], came out of many artistic and environmental concerns. With the help of her artistic assistant David Allen, she dug a hole in the ground at her Topanga home and invited artists, family and friends to experience the sensual heated churn and perform for the camera or witness the moving sculpture people became in the actual mud and then reproduced as such on video works. Filmmaker Shirley Clarke, David Ross, dance troupe IDEA and many others attended events such as the “mud matinee.” Of her mudpool she said, “As it happened, the flux of mud, light and figures created an illusion that reads on video as a fusion of painting, sculpture and dance. Painters see painting, sculptors saw Ghiberti, and especially Hellenic bronzes, and embarrassment of Rodin. It was womblike, sensuous. You could project anything at all on to this imagery.” The dancers were like a Bosch vision out of the Garden of Earthly Delights. As she told WET in her feature: “The mudpool was conceived as a sculptural environment incorporating us as animate sculpture; a social earthwork.” The 8-minute black-and-white video featured male and female figures “rolling and coating themselves with the silvery stuff like sculptures out of the primae materia, undifferentiated yet fully formed” (from the Southland Anthology catalogue). The soundtrack for that version was otherworldly whale song conjuring primordial stirrings and creation.

("Artillery" magazine, 2016-01-05)

1976, 1977

Digital only

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"WET: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing," Issue 5, February / March 1977