MAGNIFICAT AND PSALMS IN POLARI
"--the effect is one of peace and reverence." - Paul Baker
“Erving’s work is not at all an attack on Christianity, but a very genuine expression of the artists’s faith.” - Phil Robovsky
"When religious texts are translated into Polari, the result can be unexpectedly beautiful and poetic. Most people don’t understand Polari, so the words become as mysterious as a Latin Mass." - Kittredge Cherry
Lathe cut plexiglass with screen printing and spray paint.
"Magnificat and Psalms in Polari" is a lathe cut record, a picture-disc with the Magnificat and Psalms as recorded at the 2016 "Polari Evensong" done at Yale. The image on the disc is the traditional schema of the Holy Trinity, a didactic diagram explaining the relation between the three persons of the Godhead with any text translated into Polari. This image is presented in dark pink, almost red, on a black background with white lettering. The orientation reminds the viewer of the pink triangle used by the Nazis to mark homosexuals in the 1930s and then claimed by members of ACT UP in the 1980s to proclaim that Silence = Death. This is no silent object, but a playable record that proclaims the greatness of God and a radical welcome to the disenfranchised.
"Polari Evensong” was a liturgical experiment meant to explore what happens when a language of, for and from the fringe, a language that may be considered transgressive, is used to express worship and prayer: an attempt at queering the liturgy of Evening Prayer, locating the queer within the compass of faith, and recovering for Christian tradition a sense of its own intrinsically subversive jouissance. The hope was that just as Jesus welcomed the outcast (tax collectors, widows, and sex workers, people on the fringe, people often overlooked by the Church), those participating in an Evensong in Polari might follow in the footsteps of his daring, boldly and outrageously welcoming the Queer (both human and divine) in a way never before attempted.
Polari is a mixture of languages and slangs as diverse as Yiddish, Lingua Franca, Molly Slang, a Traveler language called Palare, Italian, Rhyming Slang, and Thieves’ Cant that were all spoken in and about English cities. It is the language of those in and on the fringes of the fringes: gay folks. A cipher idiom used in Britain at a time when the crime of “Gross Indecency” (homosexuality) was punishable by imprisonment and hard labor, Polari was a way for gay people to identify each other and communicate with each other (see the recent short film Putting on the Dish). Polari can also be quite camp as depicted in the Julian and Sandy sketches from the 1960s BBC Radio program Round the Horn. Although Polari has enjoyed a bit of popularity of late, it all but died out after the repeal of the English sodomy laws in 1967 until it made news when a group of seminarians conducted a service of evening prayer in Polari in the Spring of 2017. For more information on Polari, Erving recommends "Fabulosa! The Story of Polari, Britain's Secret Gay Language", by Paul Baker.
