Paper Crowns

A Court Class On Portraiture, Visuality and Power.

5 week intensive, Sundays, Starting Jan. 12 2025, 1pm PST, $300 admission

“The face is the index of the mind”- Old Verity

Even students who study tarot for years will tell me they still struggle with the Court cards. While our current engagement with visual culture is done via the omnipresent selfie, I consider the challenge practitioners have with reading the Court comes from being unacquainted the history of portraiture. For most of the modern era, only the wealthy and powerful, only royals, would maintain the possibility to see an image of oneself. The royals in the tarot court represent this compressed, reworked history by showing us ourselves through these imagined images of the powerful, of the select few who would actually be able to commission portraiture. In this course we will consider how the selfie resonates so strongly because it is an evolution of the self-portrait that was once the preserve of a highly skilled few.

Tarot presents a unique entry into visual culture that is the relation between what is visible and the names that we give to what is seen. And what we visualize, as with the aid of the cards, is not always visible:

“Visuality is an old word for an old project. It is not a trendy theory word meaning the totality of all visual images and devices, but is in fact an early-nineteenth-century term meaning the visualization of history. This practice must be imaginary, rather than perceptual, because what is being visualized is too substantial for any one person to see and is created from information, images, and ideas. This ability to assemble a visualization manifests the authority of the visualizer.” - Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right To Look

At stake for visual culture is simply how to see the world, when the world is changing so dynamically while exponentially expanding just how much there is to see and oh so many different points of view. Red tarot reading engages visual culture as an active way to create change, more than just a means to visualize what is happening.

Thus Paper Crowns will explore the court cards as an archive of the portraits of the powerful. Within these compositions we will contend with the myriad ways one can face - and be faced with - our own subjectivity. We will concern the visibility of the historically invisible, the politics of the gaze, the construction of new archives; the tarot reader as visual activist generating new ideas about community and citizenry. In looking at these images we will acknowledge and enrich our own impressions of agency and power. By expanding the regard portraiture affords, we will assert our status as significant. This reading of the court will not be not photography-as-death, of transforming subject into museum object, as Roland Barthes describes in Camera Lucida but its opposite.

Paper Crowns will make these royal portraits in the court cards come alive as a subjectification of the objectified. This course is a reclamation of the historically laden image for those who have come before.

WHEN, WHERE & HOW

COURSE SCHEDULE

Jan 12 - Sept 8 / Sundays, 1pm pst / $300 admission (payment plans are set up with an additional $25)

Week 0 - The Pose Pretends

Sunday Jan. 12, 1pm pst, Zoom

Introductions are in order. We will meet face-to-face mediated via our screens and our cards. Each student will divine a court card to guide their studies. Before divining into each of the court cards we will look more broadly at the stories portraits tell: they are interpretations of their sitters, visual narratives for which we assume sitters and painters are, in varying degrees, responsible. The skilled reader, or art-historian, is understood to be able to assess the subjects inner nature by means of their external expression. But what of the fiction of the pose? How can adapting and complicating the drama of the scopic interaction shake off the death of inauthenticity so that as the sitter and seer of the portrait we may be roused to resist objectification.

Week 1 - The Royal Mirror & the Imperial Portrait

Sunday. Jan 19, 1pm pst, Zoom

The Imperial Mirror is made to maintain le majeste of the king, and this mirror does not obey the laws of optics but the laws of absolutist power. White sight is incarnated in the figure of the “king” and attendant kingship. As we examine the portraits of kings and presidents through the mirror in the court cards we cross the visual bridge between past, present and future. This optically incorrect visualization will open a doorway for us to see ourselves, our clients in these royal reflections. We will see Sovereignty anew and break it apart from the white male body while we contemplate the postures of power.

Week 2: The Queen’s Oppositional Gaze

Sunday Jan. 26, 1pm pst, Zoom

To be a woman in the world was/is to be the object of the male gaze. Giovanni Bocca writes that to 'appear in public' is 'to be looked upon.' Portraits of women maintain constructions of genders and are not natural, neutral images. So what happens when we see a woman seeing herself? And when she sees you seeing her, there is no escaping her gaze. To learn from the Queens of the Court we will hail the dark lioness, Zanele Muholi. With so many faces and so many phases we will see her powerful self-portraiture as proxy for each of the Queens, and we will be emboldened in our right to look.

Week 3 : Look At That Horse

Sunday Feb. 2, 1pm pst, Zoom

Black Cowboys, Cowgirls and Vaqueros will make sense of the chivalric knight. We will be tarot readers as riders and we’ll be buckin. Who is a hero and how does the horse entwine our consciousness in a ‘prostheses’ like tarot? With the knights we will undo the strictures of Cartesian dualism to reconcile thought with embodiment. Let us shift our perception toward the nonhuman to arm ourselves against the westward expansion working in perpetuity to colonize consciousness and country alike.

Week 4 - The Squire’s Selfie

Sunday Feb 9, 1pm pst, Zoom

The selfie is remaking the global self-portrait. It adopted the machine-made aesthetic of postmodernism and then adapted it for a global online audience. We will end with pages insisting upon their inscription upon the pages of the visual archive. Led by artists like Rotimi Fani-Kayode and activists like Bisan Owda, the Pages will affect future histories with their prescriptions for visual interventions. Students will present their self-portraits leaving our court cards all the more curated for liberatory consciousness.

 READY TO CONFRONT THE CROWN?

Committing to this offering is to accept invitation to a field and frequency of devotion, right relations and revelation. Payments can be processed on an automatic monthly basis once you sign up, or made in-full upfront for a discount.