Eddie Owens Martin (St. EOM)
In rural southwest Georgia, Highway 137 heads out of tiny Buena Vista (Bewna Vista to natives), past neatly kept lawns, then through patches of kudzu and stands of scrub pine. After crossing Big Sandy Creek, the next winding road on the right leads to Pasaquan, the flamboyant compound conceived and built by Eddie Owens Martin between 1957 and his suicide in 1986.
Adopting the acronym St. EOM, like the Hindu Om, Martin created an architectural environment embellished by a farrago of religious and archetypal symbols. They reflected Africa, Easter Island, Pre-Columbian Mexico, and Guatemala, as well as the legendary continents Mu and Atlantis. Given the name Pasaquan by spirit guides, Martin later learned that pasa is Spanish for 'pass,' and quoyan, in an Oriental language, means 'to bring the past and the future together'. Thereafter he interpreted his endeavor as transmitting the wisdom of the past into the future. At the same time that he claimed guidance by spirits from another realm, Martin also drew upon his knowledge of world religions gained from extensive reading and repeated exposure to art in New York City's museums. But perhaps the marijuana, rumoured to be cultivated in the countryside around his property, provided a primary catalyst to Martin's creativity.
Understanding Pasaquan demands acquaintance with its builder. Born in 1908 into an impoverished family of white sharecroppers, Martin was forced to work in the fields, his labor rewarded with regular beatings by an abusive father. Although kindly, Martin's mother was, in his words, 'never overly affectionate'. It was among blacks that the boy was most comfortable, adopting to some degree their accent and speech patterns for the rest of his life. Less 'uptight' than whites, blacks could, he said, 'laugh and talk', and they wore 'more colorful' clothes. Martin also relieved his bitter existence in precocious sexuality. Boasting that he was 'born ready to go', he remembered being seduced by a 'hot little baby' named Tessie when he was three.
Leaving home at fourteen, Martin hitchhiked first to nearby Columbus, then Atlanta, Washington, and finally New York City, supporting each stage of his northern migration by homosexual encounters. Martin thus began an education in survival against the odds, living the aleatory existence of a gay hustler in a tough city.
During one of several trips to the West Coast during the 30s, Martin discovered marijuana and credited the drug with a realization of his potential. 'Pot' he affirmed, 'broke down all my inhibitions and I began to believe in myself'. 'Well shit!' he said, 'this is what you left home for'. Another turning point in Martin's development was falling gravely ill while on a visit to Georgia in 1935. Describing his sickness in retrospect as a 'spiritual journey,' Martin recounted leaving his body and meeting 'this great big character sittin' there like some kinda god, with arms big around as watermelons'. Cautioned to follow the spirit's directives, Martin subsequently recovered his strength and returned to New York 'to reach for the occult' and 'man's lost rituals'. This search led him to frequent the Metropolitan Museum, the 42nd Street Library, and the Museum of Natural History.
In 1945, Martin hit upon a quasi-profession which, for the rest of his life, was to support his desire to make art. Adventitiously replacing a fortune-teller who had dropped dead the day before, Martin took a job in a tearoom. Soon a popular reader, he claimed the secret of success was to maintain 'good manicured nails'. Adding to this wisdom his mentor's advice 'to flatter them a lot', Martin honed his skills as 'a poor man's psychiatrist'&endash; his term. The relative prosperity afforded by tearoom soothsaying freed Martin to pursue art. 'I was paintin' like mad then, man', he later recalled. These paintings foreshadow in subject and in style Martin's work at Pasaquan. After he returned to Georgia, clients queued up every morning to have St. EOM tell their fortune, the modest fees financing Pasaquan's construction.
Several years after the death of his mother in 1950, Martin returned to Georgia to stay, settling on his inheritance &endash; four acres, with a house and a well. Realizing that he could make as much reading palms in Buena Vista as elsewhere, he thought, 'Shit! Fuck New York! I don't need it no more'.
The construction and elaboration of Pasaquan began. Although he denied 'any overall plan' saying, 'Everything was from day to day', the complex reveals a sophisticated sense of space which accommodates structure and decoration to purpose. Beginning with his mother's simple two&endash;room frame house, Martin added rooms in front and in back, building walls which integrate the central structure to the grounds and define areas for specific, often 'ritual' purposes. Working with several assistants, Martin began each wall with a foundation trench, which he filled with bricks and concrete blocks, building these up as a kind of core, to the desired height. He then parged the masonry with cement prepared from a packaged mix, before affixing precast concrete medallions to the wall. After washing the dried concrete with a vinegar solution, Martin parged more cement around each medallion, often drawing designs on the damp surface before it dried. Martin finally directed his helpers in the application of brightly colored Sherwin Williams house paint bought from the local hardware store.
Like a gaudy New Anti-Jerusalem set down in a lonesome scrub pine forest, Pasaquan startles the first-time visitor. Decorated with psychedelic medallions and mandalas of red, yellow, and green, a high wall delimits the compound. Guardian figures flank the entrance, noses and lips in relief against a columnar surface. Elaborate, colorful patterns decorating their brown 'skin' resemble the body paint of primitive people and, according to Martin, make visible human energy patterns which modern man has lost the ability to see.
The figures' hair is raised in a series of four circular 'pillows,' each smaller in diameter than the one below. This fanciful coiffure embodies another of Martin's favorite esoteric notions: the proper coiffing of a mystic. Citing the Sikhs' braiding of the hair and beard, Martin believed that the hair should be arranged upward to function as an 'antenna' to the universe. Martin's investigation of this mystery, while still in New York, coincided serendipitously with his overcooking of a pot of rice. Applying the starchy goo like a setting gel, he plastered his hair into a vertical thrust. During his shamanistic years at Pasaquan, Martin plaited beard and head hair together in an upward arc, with the intent of conjoining lower and higher bodily forces. As he grew older, however, and lost most of the hair on top of his head, hair-braiding became increasingly less practical!
Passing between the elaborately coiffeured figures at the entrance, the visitor proceeds toward the front door along a walkway bordered on either side by a low, undulating parapet. Medallions in relief &endash; sunburst patterns alternating with exotic flowers &endash; recall the shields adorning entryways in Antiquity at the same time that they embody the vitalism of Martin's occultist obsessions. The front door, ceremoniously guarded by totemesque heads, opens into a room added to the original house, in which Martin told fortunes almost daily until a week or so before his death. This 'public' space leads into the more private living areas, a dining room, bath, and bedroom &endash; this latter curiously almost free of its occupant's inveterate will to embellish.
In addition to fulfiling its expected practical function, the kitchen was also designed as a kind of recording studio. Against a deep lapis blue wall, a whirling mandala sunburst of orange, yellow, and turquoise is rimmed by yellow and orange dots, a configuration embodying the visual energy of a Vasarelly. The five stylized figures in relief on either side illustrate Martin's idea of a body suit for levitation. Crisscrossed with chartreuse-colored bands, the 'garment' allegedly presses on energy points of the anatomy, allowing its wearer to defy the forces of gravity. In this psychoactive room, Martin often played his guitar, filling audio cassettes with countless hours of chant in no known tongue.
The kitchen leads into the bamboo&endash;walled studio, which, because of its centrality to the structure, indicates that Martin indeed regarded art as his primary vocation. Among the materials left here are sixteen large barrels of beads which the artist used to have strung as necklaces by neighboring young people, whom he employed. The strands adorned his own person and were sold to his many clients.
Linked to the studio in the rear of the complex is a kind of oratory, somewhat analogous to the inner sanctum of an Egyptian temple, located far from the entrance and admitting only the priests. Shaped like the rounded prow of a ship, this space is seen before it is entered. A rectangular opening like an unglazed window offers a view of the mesmerizing wall paintings inside. The entrant must detour to the right or the left nonetheless in order to reach what he has been allowed to glimpse from a distance. In thus controlling his observer's response, Martin seems to be creating an architectural analogue of man's approach to religious mysteries. The room confronts the observer with hypnotic rhythms and lurid hues, as though swaying with the twelve dancers painted on the wall. Some of these androgynous figures hold their limbs in the stylized gestures of dance, while others pound tropical drums. With hair in Martin's prescribed cones, they all seem to oscillate against a visually active pattern of squares in light and dark turquoise, much as in Escher. Seven engaged columns, each painted totem-fashion with two gargantuan faces, punctuate the hallucinogenic scene....