being tricky

Loki, Squid, Coyote, Maui, Hermes, Hanuman are the many names and faces of Trickster.

Trickster is a messenger between worlds – a god of portals and crossroads, and of unusual meetings and meeting places. Trickster is the patron of this blog and therefore worth some discussion.

According to anthropologist Lewis Hyde (Trickster Makes This World, 1998), Trickster is a transformative creature that has been set among us to help us develop and grow. Although it must be said that the activities that feed this growth are often unpleasant and disturbing experiences.

Through sneaky acts and hilarious mistakes, Trickster forces us to question dichotomies of right and wrong, private and shared, pure and dirty, true and false.

Often inducing embarrassment and shame with his lack of ability to keep secrets, Trickster also reveals hidden truths. But he also routinely reveals the obvious, the things that all of us know, but conspire not to talk about.

By helping us see our world with new eyes, the Trickster inspires both innovation, and dissolution.

Ungenreable games, installations, experiences and experiments confound our functionalist categories and force us to open our minds to new ways of knowing and understanding. Cross-boundary collaborations create unusual entanglements and become portals to different realities and possibilities. Trickster inspires all of these activities, playing with our understanding of truth and beingness for his or her own pleasure. Trickster made the Wachowski Brothers, created Hide and Seek, provoked Watergate and confused Baudrillard.

Trickster is the patron saint post post modernism, and is worth more than a little respect.