Up, down and all around

One of the big inflection points of my upcoming "Religion of Trees" course will be the encounter with the banyan. A kind of fig tree which starts as a vine on some other tree and eventually drops branches which become rooted trunks of their own, in endlessly expandable number, it explodes the idea that a tree has a single trunk, and basically moves upward. The largest banyans are like forests, and in their enveloping proliferating upward- and downward spatiality offer a wonderful alternative to the stacked hierarchy of axis mundi-like "world trees." I've used them for years to challenge artificial family-tree like histories of religions, and am excited to explore with the class what it would be to conceive of divinity this way...

So imagine my delight at discovering not only that someone published a book about them, Michael Shanahan's Gods, Wasps, and Stranglers: The Secret History and Redemptive Future of Fig Trees (the original English edition was called Ladders to Heaven!), but that this work inspired a banyan-like art project which, during the pandemic, inspired interconnected work by 900 artists in 72 countries! The Seattle-based project, which welcomed work in genres from poetry to sculpture to dance to film - was called Telephone, like the game, where people whisper a message to someone who whispers what they heard to a third person and on and on until the message emerges as something completely different. The original message was taken from an article Shanahan wrote about his book - though he only learned about this once the ideas had already, banyan-like, spread! 

This

 was the first Telephone painting. The rather fantastic print is from Shanahan's article.