A STATEMENT ABOUT THE FIRST NATIONAL CHURCH OF THE EXQUISITE PANIC, INC.

By the Founder of the Church,

ROBERT DELFORD BROWN

"I must understand in order
that I may believe.
By doubting we come to
questioning, and by
questioning we perceive
the truth."

- PeterAbelard 1122A.D.

In 1960 I could have said that I knew a great deal about art. By 1970 I could only have said that I knew a very little bit about art. A sheet of lined notebook paper had become a serial composition. Marcel Duchamp's prophecy had come to pass. Life had become art. Every one had become an artist. Modernism had sputtered out in a profusion of styles that had been adumbrated earlier in the 20th century. Everything was now seen as an event, as a relationship, as a process. DILEMMA! If you really wanted to be a real artist, (A REAL MODERN ARTIST), where was there to go? You had to find a limb to crawl out on! All the formal innovations for the communication of contemporary events had been completed. In addition, the role of the lone experimenter had come to an end. The only frontier open to innovation was in the area of content in a social context.

The most challenging project I could imagine was to choose as my medium the creation of a religion. For the previous 20 years I had yearned for a religion which could give me some comfort and direction, a raucous, exuberant religion that explained the hectic discord and frenzied changes I saw taking place all around me. The one defining characteristic of the 20th century has been total confusion, but in my opinion, the yiddish word fablonjet gives a much more substantial feel to this disordered state. I have chosen to anglicize the term, "Pharblongence", and use it as the central concept in the teachings of the church.

I felt that there was a real need to reexamine, renovate, and therefore revitalize religion. When the major religions of the world were created nothing was known of the earth as a planet possessing an extraordinary range of climates and inhabited by an astonishing variety of people.

Astronomers, the earliest scientists in human experience, thought only 60 years ago that the Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy in existence. We now know that it is simply one among billions. It has only been in the past 150 years that the scientific disciplines of anthropology and geology have existed. Since that time we have discovered that all these different looking people are all of the same species, and that there are certain archetypal similarities between all of these widely varying cultures which were completely unknown before the advent of anthropology. We have also learned that the world has undergone colossal changes during the past 4 1/2 billion years of its existence. Mountain ranges and oceans have appeared and disappeared and then reappeared again. The ancient notion that stasis was the norm persisted until the discovery of relativity in the first decade of this century. We have only been aware of the electro-magnetic spectrum for less than 90 years. For two million years information traveled no faster than a running man. For only the life of a long lived man, information has been traveling at 700 million miles an hour, the speed of light. Reality is becoming much wilder than the wildest dreams that human beings have ever dreamt.

The Eminence Grise of the The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. is Buckminster Fuller. His teachings have given me the courage to live my life with assurance. His optimism is grounded in fact. He clearly shows that humanity is on a clear path of ever progressive development. The confusion is short term. We have the advantage of knowing what has gone before us for thousands of years. We also know what is happening around the world on a daily basis. We must had unimpeded information exchange. Fear comes from not knowing. You can take action once you know the nature of a problem.

When I decided to found the The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. in 1964 it had been incubating for over half my life. I had hoped that its rituals and ikons would serve as an endless source of subject matter for my work as a painter and sculptor, and it would also help me to explain to myself a world that was totally overwhelming in its complexity and completely different from the world's that had given birth the established religions.

The idea for the creation of a church began when Allan Kaprow asked me to play the role of The Painter in Karlheinz Stochausen's "Originale". I wanted to do something visually interesting. Jackson Pollack had thrown paint, Georges Mathieu had dressed funny and squirted paint from tubes, and Yves Klein had dragged naked women covered with paint across canvases, and had used a flame thrower to paint with fire. I decided that I would wear a firefighter's suit and drop eggs and red powder from a ladder. I suddenly realized that I was coming up with a creation myth that had similarly occurred to people for millions of years. At the same time I was also preparing to do an environment which I entitled "MEAT SHOW". It entailed the use of thousands of pounds of meat. It was a work of desperation, and rage. I knew that the world that I prepared to enter had ceased to exist. I was looking for something and I didn't know what to do, but as Immanuel Kant advised; "when you don't know what to do DO SOMETHING!

The "MEAT SHOW" which took place in a refrigerated room 14 feet wide and 90 feet long in the Washington Meat Market in New York City could only be open from Friday afternoon through Sunday afternoon, because the area was too busy during the week. I knew that the art world would probably not review the show, because of the brief time span of its existence, so I decided that the only way to get its occurrence documented was to send out a press release and thereby gain media coverage. I knew very well that the statement had to sound interesting, and that the world at large was not very concerned with aesthetic matters; therefore, I decided to write an inflammatory statement of the kind that had served the dadaists so well. I proclaimed that "the MEAT SHOW was The First Grand Opening Service of the The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc." The name was natural. The release declared that I was "attempting to bring religion, sex and art into the same vital relationship that existed prior to the degenerative plague that Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Moses, Gautama Buddha, and Lao-tse visited upon humanity. The Meat Show will be created to induce startling spiritual, sexual and aesthetic revelations in the viewer. It is my belief that even the most totally bereft wretch will be jolted into some kind of consciousness when confronted by the fearsomely beautiful sight of tons of meat, gallons of blood, hundreds of yard of lingerie fabric and other sights as yet undisclosed, which will be organized into a harmonious and inspirational work at art."

The response from the media and city officials astounded me. There were as many as eight uniformed police officers in the meat cooler at one time looking for sex. Charles McHarry of the Daily News quoted my press release verbatim. The English and Australian papers also covered the show and quoted my release. I knew I really had hit pay dirt with the church, but I also knew that it had to be a real church, not just a burlesque.

During the past 28 years that I have been working at developing the church I have many times tried desperately to find a way out from that commitment. In 1965 there was a big to do over pornography. That looked like a good opportunity to "epater les bougeosie". I took a cue form Marcel Duchamp who had once said that he as "a teintre not a peintre". I found illegal fetish photographs from a set of German text books on sexual perversions which a psychoanalyst had to import for me. I had these postage stamp size reproductions enlarged to life size at Modernage photo studios. In order to get this done I had to have a letter from Lawrence Alloway, who was then a curator at the Guggenheim Museum, stating that I was a legitimate artist and that my motives were serious. To color them I used Marshall's tinting oils which at that time were considered to be a totally obsolete technique. When I showed them to fellow artists the response was silence. A few years later everyone rediscovered tinting, but the subject matter never caught on.

The most desperate attempt at finding something that would obviate my continuing with the religion was the Great Building Crack-Up. Never has a work of art been conceived with more anxiety, or realized with more anxiety. It was the "SUPREME DADAIST GESTURE". I decided that by colliding a 19th century building with a 20th century building something might happen that would be akin to colliding sub-atomic particles in a cyclotron. I hoped that this totally reckless act would result in some manifestation that would be recognized as "ART". The method which I chose to accomplish this feat was to introduce a live architect, Paul Rudolph, to a dead architect, Richard Morris Hunt. I knew the bricks would fly, and I was hoping for something besides a heap of rubble. This renovation was one of the first attempts at contemporizing an old building in New York City. It has consequently been very influential, but I was looking for something more.

All attempts at circumventing my inevitable destiny failed. THE GREAT BUILDING CRACK-UP became the International Headquarters of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. It became increasingly clear that I had to be come an artist-religious leader.

I decided that The Doctrine of Orthodox Paganism which would be the faith professed by The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. would be a funny doctrine, as levity has been a rare commodity in western religion since the protestant reformation. It would delight in humanity's fallibility and play lightly with the awesome infinity, the incomprehensibility of a universe which was essentially unknown to us 100 years ago; a universe of pulsars and quasars; a universe which emanates gamma rays and X-rays; a universe that functions at intensities which make ancient mythologies seem miniature.

Since I have always had a great appetite for laughter, I chose as prophets, my two favorite comedians, Charlie Chaplin, whose little man embodied quintessentially the flexibility that is absolutely necessary for creative living; and Ed Wynn, who taught us the profound truth that being foolish was not disabling, but actually a path toward liberation and discovery.

For the requisite saints I chose eight gifted people who were extraordinarily inspiring to me in my adolescence and for whom I have always felt great affection and admiration; the jazz musicians Frank Teschemacher, Leon Rapollo, Herbie Fields, Stuff Smith, and PeeWee Russell; the poet Chidiock Tichborne; the comedian Hornsby; and the opera singer manque Florence Foster Jenkins.

In addition to these charter saints I have also sanctified friends who have been important in offering their talent and moral support in the development of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc.. These have been to this date, Lynda Hartigan, Donna Stein, A.D. Coleman, Marc Simon, Madlen Simon, Bob Hughes, David Zatz, Edie Solow, Doug Johns, Charles Hovland, Blackeyed Susan, the late Charles Ludlum, Carol Cone, Peggy Cone, and my wife Rhett Delford Brown. The ritual of Sanctification consists in the making of a collaborative collage relief painting in which the Saint to be is the message and I am the medium.

The biggest obstacle to my founding a religion was that I really had great difficulty getting along with people. Socializing was something that totally mystified me. One of the major reasons I had gone into art initially was that I could pursue it in solitude.

The most serendipitous event in my life was my meeting with Rhett Cone. She had founded the Cricket Theater on Second Ave. and Tenth St. where she showcased new material, presented Blanche Marvin's "Merry Mimes" children's theater, and produced and directed plays by such writers as Edward Albee, and Samuel Becket. For the past 27 years Rhett has been my most fervent admirer.

For the past 25 years she has been my wife and enthusiastic collaborator, as well as co-conspirator. I have never doubted that if I needed a tap dancing camel for an event she could find it. I was astonished at her ease with people. For years I let her do my socializing. She was like a ventriloquist and I was the dummy. This didn't bother me at all, but I knew that as a religious leader I had to learn how to get along with people. Undoubtedly, the most difficult task that I have had to accomplish is learning this skill. It has taken me 25 years to achieve.

In my search for an identifying symbol for Orthodox Paganism I came upon two extraordinarily handsome decorations hanging on an ironworkers fence in Connecticut in 1976. The owner of the shop told me that the design of the pieces had been very popular in the 1930's, and that his father had made them. It made good sense to declare them to be the symbols of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. because my aesthetic position maintained that everyone was an artist. These works flanked the entrance to the Great Building Crack-up until recently.

However, for the past twelve years I have been working very hard at developing the faith of Orthodox Paganism, and having decided that the supreme deity is WHO?, the puzzled look of crossed eyes was a more appropriate symbol than the noncommittal look of an anonymous decoration; consequently, I asked the sculp David Zatz to make the new symbol of the church "The Visage Pharblongent". From now on the "weltanschaung" of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. will be clearly communicated. WE DON'T KNOW WHERE WE'RE GOING, BUT WHO? DOES! When I talked to David Zatz about doing the cross eyes sculpture he mentioned that one of his favorite possessions was a photograph of Ben Turpin, the cross eyed silent film comedian. In the picture he was weirdly encumbered with some kind of hair curling machine from the early "Modern Ages." It looked like a lunatic attempt at attaining instantaneous electrically induced transcendance It was for me the absolute unadultered embodiment of "Phlarblongence". I decided that Ben Turpin should be the Prophet of Prophets. WHY NOT? The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. is voracious for growth, for change. The only real prohibition is, ONE SHOULD NEVER STAY WITH ONE SOLUTION WHEN A BETTER ONE HAS BEEN FOUND!

The style which has evolved for the sacred art of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. evokes the rambunctious nature of the spirit in which the church was founded. The pearlescent pigments and glitter extrusions are for me a very startling contradiction to the rigorously traditional art education which I sought in the 1950's. These materials, in combination with dinosaurian dream forms, space age hieroglyphics, names of actual places, images from everyday life, along with psychosymbolic road maps generate a labyrinthine swirl of kaleidoscopic complexity. They slam dance the unimaginable immensity of our knowledge into an intimate form which quiets our apprehension and helps us gain power over fearfully strange phenomena.

The strongest apparent influence is H.C. Westermann, who was a very close friend from 1965 until his death in 1981. However, I have been an assiduous student of art for the past 40 years and nave been influenced by every artist I've ever looked at. Picasso declared that no artist is a bastard. Originality is culturally determined.

Modern art was born and raised in Europe. American artists had to transplant it to America. It was a tremendously difficult endeavor. Artists like Arthur Dove, Marsden Hartley, Niles Spencer, and Stuart Davis, all of whom, worked in almost complete isolation have always had my most profound regard. The artists who have influenced me have ranged from the famous such as Picasso, Braque, Duchamp, and Picabia to the little known such as O. Louis Guglielmi, Arnold Friedman, and Fannie Hillsmith. I have always been most attracted to artists who are generally described as naive. This is why I was drawn to Clarence Schmidt and James Hampton who both committed their entire lives to creating immense environments which transcended all reasonable limitations. They were truly visionaries. They were artists who were in love with art, and in love with life.

The celebrations of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. which have been named Grand Opening Services all focus on image making. Everyone participates to the degree to which they feel comfortable. No one is coerced or made to feel that they should be doing more than they are doing. The materials used in making the images are conventional materials that have been used in the festivals of other religions hundreds or thousands of years. The focus is on playing, on doing. Achievement and competition are ignored. The purpose of the image making is to give the participants a feeling of being part of a group, and at the same time finding out who they are as individuals. People can make extraordinary discoveries about themselves when they're not being pressured with techniques that intimidate them. Carving a pumpkin in the fall Grand Opening Service Pumpkin Circumstance, is something that most people have done as children. It is not a task that engenders trepidation, but it engages all the problems with which a sculptor is confronted. The exception being that the pumpkin is perishable and will be either thrown away or used to make a pie. Coloring eggs in the spring Grand Opening Service, Eggs Post Facto, is usually seen as an even more casual undertaking. The decorating of cakes in Victory Over Dumbness Day is a still more easily approached task, and the winter Grand Opening Service, the Tree of Pharblongence, is really simple. Anyone can hang a string of lights on a tree. Suggestions for other Grand Opening Services are welcomed. The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. is a baby religion which strives for inclusivity and tolerance.

Because previously established religions have all been very aggressive in issuing commandments, I though that it would be novel to have only one commandment: LIVE! After all, this is the one fundamental irreducible requisite for LIFE.

The one prohibition, DO NOT EAT CARS!, even though it's nonsensical, gives The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. an air of legitimacy since all other religions have an abundance of prohibitions. It also suggests that all knowledge and experience should be questioned and reexamined, since it is the position of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. that all human beings are now engaged in a totally new beginning. The ultimate answer to every line of inquiry is the question WHO KNOWS?. All human knowledge will forever be bracketed by mystery; since this is the case, I feel that the best way to deal with that situation is to claim the mystery for knowledge by declaring the supreme deity of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. to be WHO?. We may not know, but we always know -------- that WHO? KNows! It's funny, it's true, and it gives one a tremendous sense of omniscience. YOU ALWAYS HAVE AN ANSWER!

There are some religions which teach that there is one way. There are other religions which teach that there is the way. In advocating FOUR WAYS; THE RIGHT WAY, THE WRONG WAY, THE OTHER WAY, and the SOUFFLE, The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. thoroughly covers every line of action within and beyond conceptualization in the grand tradition of classic burlesque. IN COMEDY ALL THINGS ARE POSSIBLE!

Many religions tell you how to get to Nirvana. They all give very complicated directions. The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. tells you how to get to Nevada. It sounds close and it's simple. YOU TAKE A BUS! I chose Nevada rather than Nirvana as the ultimately desired destination because the sonic similarity was comic and it was conceptually ironic, as Nevada is the major site for nuclear testing and America's official capitol of profligacy. Life runs the spectrum from happy to sad, from serious to funny. When this range of experience is expurgated the living experience is severely disabled.

The central concept in the teachings of The First National Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. is the THEORY OF PHARBLONGENCE. "Pharblongence" is an ancient word of yiddish origin translating as "total confusion". It is a humorous way of reminding ourselves that the only way we have of learning is through trial and error. Confusion and miscalculation have always been a part of life, but as anyone can see the long view reveals astounding progress that will accelerate as information exchange becomes ever more efficient with even more highly developed methods of communication and information retrieval.

As Buckminster Fuller has written, "a 500 lb. communication satellite is now outperforming the previously used 175,000 tons of trans Atlantic cables. It is providing greater message carrying capacity and transmission fidelity, as well as using vastly fewer kilowatts of operational energy."

In a mere 10,000 years in a universe that functions on a time scale of billions of years human beings have gone from stone tools to space stations. The frustration today is caused by the extraordinary rate of change which leaves everyone feeling ill prepared.

For the first time in human experience, the entire species is encountering the same reality, the same sets of problems. The levels of competence for the solving of these problems covers a vast range but no culture is prepared to handle them easily. As the 1987 World Watch Institute Report states, "Never have so many systems vital to the earth's habitability been out of equilibrium simultaneously. New environmental problems also span time periods and geographic areas that stretch beyond the authority of existing political and social institutions."

HUMANITY'S FUNDAMENTAL PASSION IS UNRESTRAINED INQUIRY. HUMAN BEINGS ARE BEYOND ANYTHING ELSE QUESTION ASKERS. THE FIRST NATIONAL CHURCH OF THE EXQUISITE PANIC, INC CELEBRATES THE FACT THAT THERE WILL ALWAYS BE MORE QUESTIONS THAN ANSWERS; CONSEQUENTLY, THERE WILL ALWAYS BE A REASON FOR LIVING!