My Art Mentors, Collaborators & Artistic Inspirations
Aesthetic Arrest
Iona Miller, 2010 Retrospective
From Smelly Art to Hyperdimensional Art
From Smelly Art to Hyperdimensional Art
Artful MENTORING: Where are you in the process of realizing your art, of becoming a Master of Art? Mentor relationships foster creativity. Master Mentors understand that every student has an art inside him or her, and has a Master who is meant to come out. The term Master comes from the model of apprenticeship, leadership education and from the Renaissance. Masters strive to learn how to recognize those elements in the world that emanate beauty, have symmetry and synergy. They are trained to feel and act authentically. They strive to find strength through balance. A Master is more than well-trained and much more than an expert. A Master has both a broad and deep understanding of his Art, recognizing patterns in history, in humanity, and connections between people throughout time and various cultures. A Master understands how his Art connects to the world as a whole. By mastering one Art, a Master becomes a Master in life in general.
There is a Master and an Art Inside Everyone - Michelangelo wrote, “Beauteous art, brought with us from heaven, will conquer nature; so divine a power belongs to him who strives with every nerve. If I was made for art, from childhood given a prey for burning beauty to devour, I blame the mistress I was born to serve.” All of us bring an art from heaven. Each of us has a specific vocation or mission in life -- to fulfill or realize our unique potential. The aspirant is a receptacle that needs to be filled. Master Mentors understand that every student has an art inside him or her, and has a Master who is meant to come out. They understand that they are not really the teacher. The Master within the student is the true teacher. They see their role as bringing the art or the Master to the surface.
There is a Master and an Art Inside Everyone - Michelangelo wrote, “Beauteous art, brought with us from heaven, will conquer nature; so divine a power belongs to him who strives with every nerve. If I was made for art, from childhood given a prey for burning beauty to devour, I blame the mistress I was born to serve.” All of us bring an art from heaven. Each of us has a specific vocation or mission in life -- to fulfill or realize our unique potential. The aspirant is a receptacle that needs to be filled. Master Mentors understand that every student has an art inside him or her, and has a Master who is meant to come out. They understand that they are not really the teacher. The Master within the student is the true teacher. They see their role as bringing the art or the Master to the surface.
Ken Hassrick - Avant-Garde Sculptor & Painter - "The Body Electric"
Prominent painter and sculptor Ken Hassrick has created works in abstract metal sculpture, wax, clay and plaster, most recently with a focus on evocative semi-abstract paintings of the female form. The female body has long been one of the classic subjects for artists and is without a doubt one of the most complicated and ever variable. Hassrick’s drawings and paintings reveal the classic subject of the female body, with its never-ending variations of form and interpretation. Whidbey painter, Ken Hassrick (1921-2004) spent more than 30 years exploring this evocative subject. "The Body Electric" showcased some of Hassrick's noted figurative compositions, ranging from realism to abstract. The artist, who died in 2004, spent more than 30 years exploring this evocative subject.
While I was his model, Ken Hassrick taught me about art and what it means to be an artist. Because they were Ken & Barbara, his wife was called 'Doll', instead of Barbi. Ken always had the best studio in the area in which he lived. The Hassrick's were originally from Philadelphia, Boulder, Co. and West LA before coming to So. Oregon to raise Morgan horses for show. Though he is known for abstract scuptures, Ken did both head and full figure sculptures of me, and painted me in his studio as well. They raised Morgan horses and rare birds. Later they moved with son Matt to Whidbey Island, Washington.
Ken Hassrick benefit exhibit at Rob Schouten Gallery on Whidbey Island- Feb. 1, 2010 -The Body Electric, a Ken Hassrick retrospective fundraising exhibit to benefit the Whidbey Island Arts Council. The exhibit was open to the public February 5 through March 3. In keeping with Hassrick's wish to have his work benefit the artists of Whidbey Island, his son Matt Hassrick and Matt's wife, Vicky, generously donated a large body of Ken's paintings to the Whidbey Island Arts Council. Proceeds from this retrospective went to the WIAC and be used for their many fine programs including scholarships and the development of arts education in our island schools.
What an artist leaves behind, besides his family, is the work that becomes his legacy. Longtime South Whidbey resident Ken Hassrick was an accomplished and prolific painter and sculptor. When he died in 2004, he left behind a large body of work that spanned more than 30 years, mainly paintings and drawings of the female form. In 2002, Hassrick was seriously stricken with a neurological disease which prevented him from producing more work. At that time, he told his family and friends that he wanted the proceeds from his work to benefit the art community on Whidbey Island after his death. In keeping with his father’s request, islander Matt Hassrick and his wife, Vicky, have generously donated many of Ken Hassrick’s paintings to the Whidbey Island Arts Council. Now, a show of the artist’s work is revealed in the spirit of giving back to all of the island’s artists.
“My father lived and breathed doing his art,” Matt Hassrick said. “For my entire life with him, his main focus was his art. But he was very interested in other people, too, and what they were doing,” the artist’s son said. “His door was always open for people to come over and visit, have a martini and talk about the meaning of life.” That interest in others spilled over into Ken Hassrick’s interest in art. When he moved to the island in 1978, Hassrick, along with his wife Doll, plunged into a life of art and support of the arts on Whidbey. Doll Hassrick served as president of what was then the Island Arts Council for three years. In lieu of the artist’s wishes, proceeds from this retrospective will go to the Whidbey Island Arts Council and will be used for its various supportive programs including artists’ scholarships, grants and the development of arts education in island schools.
In addition to satisfying his intent to support other artists, Hassrick probably would have appreciated the title of the show. The paintings celebrate the beauty of what the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman called “The Body Electric,” the vessel through which one’s spirit experiences the world. “I have chosen at this time in my life to express my ideas by means of the female figure,” Hassrick said when interviewed during his career. “It is without doubt one of the most complicated and ever-variable subjects. I hope you will find some of the excitement and enjoyment that I found in creating them.” Hassrick would spend almost half a lifetime exploring the evocative nature of the figure. The female body has long been one of the classic subjects for artists, and is both luminous and illuminating when it is mastered by a skilled artist. This retrospective of his work features figurative compositions that range from realism to the abstract. Hassrick developed a distinctive technique using layers of acrylic paint and charcoal that resulted in a unique quality of diffused light and depth of color. Strong compositions and a keen eye for cropping out unnecessary elements give the paintings a sensitivity of form. But his technique didn’t come without hard work.
In the course of his career, Hassrick studied with several renowned artists, including Joseph Presser, Richard Lehey, Hobson Pitman and Fernand Legar. He also traveled extensively in Europe, Mexico, Central America and New Zealand, where he sought out other artists and cultures, and tried to absorb different techniques. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Foster White Gallery and the Davidson Gallery in Seattle, the Cammara Gallery in Los Angeles and the Childers Proctor Gallery in Langley. “Ken was not only a very fine artist, but he and his wife Doll generously served the community through countless events and activities that supported the arts on Whidbey,” said gallery owner Rob Schouten. “We are honored to host this retrospective of his paintings and to help in raising funds for the WIAC,” Schouten said.
While I was his model, Ken Hassrick taught me about art and what it means to be an artist. Because they were Ken & Barbara, his wife was called 'Doll', instead of Barbi. Ken always had the best studio in the area in which he lived. The Hassrick's were originally from Philadelphia, Boulder, Co. and West LA before coming to So. Oregon to raise Morgan horses for show. Though he is known for abstract scuptures, Ken did both head and full figure sculptures of me, and painted me in his studio as well. They raised Morgan horses and rare birds. Later they moved with son Matt to Whidbey Island, Washington.
Ken Hassrick benefit exhibit at Rob Schouten Gallery on Whidbey Island- Feb. 1, 2010 -The Body Electric, a Ken Hassrick retrospective fundraising exhibit to benefit the Whidbey Island Arts Council. The exhibit was open to the public February 5 through March 3. In keeping with Hassrick's wish to have his work benefit the artists of Whidbey Island, his son Matt Hassrick and Matt's wife, Vicky, generously donated a large body of Ken's paintings to the Whidbey Island Arts Council. Proceeds from this retrospective went to the WIAC and be used for their many fine programs including scholarships and the development of arts education in our island schools.
What an artist leaves behind, besides his family, is the work that becomes his legacy. Longtime South Whidbey resident Ken Hassrick was an accomplished and prolific painter and sculptor. When he died in 2004, he left behind a large body of work that spanned more than 30 years, mainly paintings and drawings of the female form. In 2002, Hassrick was seriously stricken with a neurological disease which prevented him from producing more work. At that time, he told his family and friends that he wanted the proceeds from his work to benefit the art community on Whidbey Island after his death. In keeping with his father’s request, islander Matt Hassrick and his wife, Vicky, have generously donated many of Ken Hassrick’s paintings to the Whidbey Island Arts Council. Now, a show of the artist’s work is revealed in the spirit of giving back to all of the island’s artists.
“My father lived and breathed doing his art,” Matt Hassrick said. “For my entire life with him, his main focus was his art. But he was very interested in other people, too, and what they were doing,” the artist’s son said. “His door was always open for people to come over and visit, have a martini and talk about the meaning of life.” That interest in others spilled over into Ken Hassrick’s interest in art. When he moved to the island in 1978, Hassrick, along with his wife Doll, plunged into a life of art and support of the arts on Whidbey. Doll Hassrick served as president of what was then the Island Arts Council for three years. In lieu of the artist’s wishes, proceeds from this retrospective will go to the Whidbey Island Arts Council and will be used for its various supportive programs including artists’ scholarships, grants and the development of arts education in island schools.
In addition to satisfying his intent to support other artists, Hassrick probably would have appreciated the title of the show. The paintings celebrate the beauty of what the 19th century American poet Walt Whitman called “The Body Electric,” the vessel through which one’s spirit experiences the world. “I have chosen at this time in my life to express my ideas by means of the female figure,” Hassrick said when interviewed during his career. “It is without doubt one of the most complicated and ever-variable subjects. I hope you will find some of the excitement and enjoyment that I found in creating them.” Hassrick would spend almost half a lifetime exploring the evocative nature of the figure. The female body has long been one of the classic subjects for artists, and is both luminous and illuminating when it is mastered by a skilled artist. This retrospective of his work features figurative compositions that range from realism to the abstract. Hassrick developed a distinctive technique using layers of acrylic paint and charcoal that resulted in a unique quality of diffused light and depth of color. Strong compositions and a keen eye for cropping out unnecessary elements give the paintings a sensitivity of form. But his technique didn’t come without hard work.
In the course of his career, Hassrick studied with several renowned artists, including Joseph Presser, Richard Lehey, Hobson Pitman and Fernand Legar. He also traveled extensively in Europe, Mexico, Central America and New Zealand, where he sought out other artists and cultures, and tried to absorb different techniques. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Philadelphia Art Alliance, the Foster White Gallery and the Davidson Gallery in Seattle, the Cammara Gallery in Los Angeles and the Childers Proctor Gallery in Langley. “Ken was not only a very fine artist, but he and his wife Doll generously served the community through countless events and activities that supported the arts on Whidbey,” said gallery owner Rob Schouten. “We are honored to host this retrospective of his paintings and to help in raising funds for the WIAC,” Schouten said.
Victor King Thompson - Architect, Painter, Art Professor, Polo Player
Victor King Thompson - Architect, Painter [1913 - 2007]
March 20, 2007/ Victor King Thompson, 93, Stanford University professor emeritus of architecture, died at his home in Portola Valley on March 1. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1948, coordinating Stanford's architecture program and teaching art history for 25 years. Thompson also actively kept a private practice during those years, designing many private residences, the Ladera Community Church, and a planned residential community in Columbus, Ohio. During some of these years, he formed a partnership with former architecture student, Robert Peterson. Victor Thompson was born June 18, 1913 in Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio State University with degrees in fine arts and architecture, and as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army ROTC. He then completed a year of postgraduate study at Cranbrook, Michigan, studying with Elieo Saarinen (son is Eero). He and Marianne Randall, also of Columbus, Ohio, were married June 18, 1940 in the First Congregational Church. Starting in 1941, Thompson served in the Army Corps of Engineers as an area engineer, then a post engineer, and was stationed in Lexington and Richmond, Kentucky, and then in Douglas, Arizona for three years. At the conclusion of WWII, he returned to Columbus to work for a year with an architectural firm while teaching night classes in architecture at OSU.
In l948, he was hired by Stanford University where he pioneered in the development of Stanford's architecture program. One of his innovations was to invite practicing architects as guest lecturers. His retirement years since the mid-1970s were full and rewarding ones in which he pursued numerous interests and activities. He was a member of the Filoli Gardens' first docent class in 1975, and then served as a docent trainer while continuing to lead tours for more than 10 years. He also served as treasurer on the board of directors for Friends of Filoli. He also volunteered as a docent for Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Throughout his life, Thompson was an avid horseman, riding until his mid-80s. He was a member of the Los Altos Hunt Club and of the Menlo Polo Club. He will be remembered for his lively, generous spirit and his kind ways. He never lost his enthusiasm for life, his love of nature, and delight in travel. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Marianne, four children, a son-in-law, and a grandson. http://www.flickr.com/photos/uaarchives/4686291010/
Thompsons Establish Scholarship Victor King Thompson 34 and Marianne Randall Thompson BA 38 have made a commitment to endow a scholarship fund for architecture students who have financial need, strong academic performance, and a talent for design. Victor has had a lifelong dedication to the study of architecture, both as an architect and as a professor at Stanford University, from which he is now retired. Marianne received a B.A. in Music from Ohio State in 1938, and is the granddaughter of William Oxley Thompson, who served from 1899 to 1925 as the fifth president of Ohio State. We have a long-term relationship with Ohio State. When I was a student in fine art, I even studied sculpture under Professor Erwin Frey, who created the sculpture of President Thompson in front of the library, Victor said. We are delighted to help a talented and deserving student. The Victor King Thompson and Marianne Randall Thompson Scholarship is a wonderful gift from a couple deeply entwined in the history of Columbus and Ohio State. With their lifelong commitment to architectural education, interdisciplinary studies, and the arts, the Thompsons exude the well-rounded knowledge with which we strive to provide the students at the Knowlton School. This scholarship will provide significant support for aspiring architects and honor the Thompsons dedication to education. Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture KSA
DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY REGION
Richard B. Freeman [Introduction] Richard B. Freeman [Introduction]: DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY REGION. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949. First edition. Tall quarto. Pictorial tan boards letterpressed in black and red. Unpaginated [44 pp.] Plates and essays on a variety of paper stocks: text on pale blue uncoated pages, followed by16 pages of black and white plates on coated stock. A fine copy with very faint sunning to board edges and a slight bump to the lower corner. An uncommon and important exhibition catalog. 8.75 x 11.5 catalog from the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Civic Center, San Francisco, September 16 to October 30, 1949. An important document in the history of Bay Area design, capturing a crucial moment in the development of California Architecture when the indigenous styles and imported European elements -- both contemporary (International Style) and earlier influences (Beaux Arts through Maybeck, Morgan and others) -- were being melded into a truly unique regional signature.
Contents: Introduction by Richard B. Freeman
Victor King Thompson, J. Francis Ward, Bolton White & Jack Hermann, and Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons.
March 20, 2007/ Victor King Thompson, 93, Stanford University professor emeritus of architecture, died at his home in Portola Valley on March 1. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1948, coordinating Stanford's architecture program and teaching art history for 25 years. Thompson also actively kept a private practice during those years, designing many private residences, the Ladera Community Church, and a planned residential community in Columbus, Ohio. During some of these years, he formed a partnership with former architecture student, Robert Peterson. Victor Thompson was born June 18, 1913 in Columbus, Ohio. He graduated from Ohio State University with degrees in fine arts and architecture, and as a first lieutenant in the U.S. Army ROTC. He then completed a year of postgraduate study at Cranbrook, Michigan, studying with Elieo Saarinen (son is Eero). He and Marianne Randall, also of Columbus, Ohio, were married June 18, 1940 in the First Congregational Church. Starting in 1941, Thompson served in the Army Corps of Engineers as an area engineer, then a post engineer, and was stationed in Lexington and Richmond, Kentucky, and then in Douglas, Arizona for three years. At the conclusion of WWII, he returned to Columbus to work for a year with an architectural firm while teaching night classes in architecture at OSU.
In l948, he was hired by Stanford University where he pioneered in the development of Stanford's architecture program. One of his innovations was to invite practicing architects as guest lecturers. His retirement years since the mid-1970s were full and rewarding ones in which he pursued numerous interests and activities. He was a member of the Filoli Gardens' first docent class in 1975, and then served as a docent trainer while continuing to lead tours for more than 10 years. He also served as treasurer on the board of directors for Friends of Filoli. He also volunteered as a docent for Stanford's Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Throughout his life, Thompson was an avid horseman, riding until his mid-80s. He was a member of the Los Altos Hunt Club and of the Menlo Polo Club. He will be remembered for his lively, generous spirit and his kind ways. He never lost his enthusiasm for life, his love of nature, and delight in travel. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Marianne, four children, a son-in-law, and a grandson. http://www.flickr.com/photos/uaarchives/4686291010/
Thompsons Establish Scholarship Victor King Thompson 34 and Marianne Randall Thompson BA 38 have made a commitment to endow a scholarship fund for architecture students who have financial need, strong academic performance, and a talent for design. Victor has had a lifelong dedication to the study of architecture, both as an architect and as a professor at Stanford University, from which he is now retired. Marianne received a B.A. in Music from Ohio State in 1938, and is the granddaughter of William Oxley Thompson, who served from 1899 to 1925 as the fifth president of Ohio State. We have a long-term relationship with Ohio State. When I was a student in fine art, I even studied sculpture under Professor Erwin Frey, who created the sculpture of President Thompson in front of the library, Victor said. We are delighted to help a talented and deserving student. The Victor King Thompson and Marianne Randall Thompson Scholarship is a wonderful gift from a couple deeply entwined in the history of Columbus and Ohio State. With their lifelong commitment to architectural education, interdisciplinary studies, and the arts, the Thompsons exude the well-rounded knowledge with which we strive to provide the students at the Knowlton School. This scholarship will provide significant support for aspiring architects and honor the Thompsons dedication to education. Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture KSA
DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE
OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY REGION
Richard B. Freeman [Introduction] Richard B. Freeman [Introduction]: DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE OF THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY REGION. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Art, 1949. First edition. Tall quarto. Pictorial tan boards letterpressed in black and red. Unpaginated [44 pp.] Plates and essays on a variety of paper stocks: text on pale blue uncoated pages, followed by16 pages of black and white plates on coated stock. A fine copy with very faint sunning to board edges and a slight bump to the lower corner. An uncommon and important exhibition catalog. 8.75 x 11.5 catalog from the exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, Civic Center, San Francisco, September 16 to October 30, 1949. An important document in the history of Bay Area design, capturing a crucial moment in the development of California Architecture when the indigenous styles and imported European elements -- both contemporary (International Style) and earlier influences (Beaux Arts through Maybeck, Morgan and others) -- were being melded into a truly unique regional signature.
Contents: Introduction by Richard B. Freeman
- The Architecture of the Bay Region by Lewis Mumford
- Backgrounds and Beginnings by Elizabeth Kendall Thompson
- A Personal View by William W. Wurster
- The Post-War House by Gardner Dailey
- The Contribution of the Client by Francis Joseph McCarthy
- The Japanese Influence by Clarence W. W. Mayhew
- 26 black and white plates of some of the 51 houses selected for the exhibition, then descriptions of each house.
- Chronology
- A Catalogue Raisonne Of The Exhibition.
Victor King Thompson, J. Francis Ward, Bolton White & Jack Hermann, and Wurster, Bernardi & Emmons.
Victor King Thompson - Docent, Filoli
Victor's love of beautiful surroundings was reflected in his long-term volunteer relationship with Filoli House and Gardens. The facade was made famous as the Carrington House on Dynasty and the estate has appeared in many films and TV shows. The Gardens are internationally known.
The visitors map was rendered by Thompson and artfully describes the various settings of the property and grounds.
Thompson and his wife traveled extensively and he amassed a huge photographic archive of the art and architecture of Europe and elsewhere. For a time, he lived at Clivedon House in Britain with his family in a visiting residency for Stanford.
The visitors map was rendered by Thompson and artfully describes the various settings of the property and grounds.
Thompson and his wife traveled extensively and he amassed a huge photographic archive of the art and architecture of Europe and elsewhere. For a time, he lived at Clivedon House in Britain with his family in a visiting residency for Stanford.
Morris Graves - American Master, Mystic
" I paint to evolve a changing language of symbols, a language with which to remark upon the qualities of our mysterious capacities which direct us toward ultimate reality." --Morris Graves
Morris Cole Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American expressionist painter. Along with Guy Anderson, Kenneth Callahan, William Cumming, and Mark Tobey, he founded the Northwest School. Graves was also a mystic .Graves moved to Loleta, California, near Eureka in 1964 where he eventually had a home constructed that was designed by Ibsen Nelson. Internationally recognized Northwest artist Morris Graves was a resident of Humboldt County from 1964 until his death in 2001. Mr. Graves was an enduring supporter of the Humboldt Arts Council and in 1999 endowed the art museum in his name. Much of his personal collection and seven of his major and minor paintings are part of the Humboldt Arts Council's permanent collection.
His later paintings were increasingly abstract, and while they retained their delicacy, the Asian influence was gone. In later years and especially at the end of his notable career, Graves returned to sculpture, originally created forty years earlier, and received critical acclaim for his "Instruments of a New Navigation," works inspired by NASA and space exploration.Morris Graves died the morning of May 5, 2001 at his home in Loleta, hours after suffering a stroke.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/graves_morris.html The inspiration for the Mystic Sons is Morris Graves himself, an octogenarian artist residing in blissful isolation on a picturesque estate in northern California. A Seattle native and struggling regional artist, Graves rose to national attention as the focus of a feature article in LIFE magazine in 1953 titled "Northwest Mystics." The story detailed an emerging art movement, with Graves at the center, informed by Eastern philosophies and the natural beauty of the Pacific Rim in a charming and mysterious genre. The impact of this "Northwest Mystics School" was felt for decades, enhanced by the elegance and eloquence of its primary practitioner. Graves became something of a fixture in global high society. His work was featured in galleries and museums throughout the world, and his entourage included the biggest celebrities of the day, from movie stars to royalty. In 1957 he became the only American artist to be honored with the prestigious Windsor Award, presented personally by the Duke and Duchess themselves.
His later paintings were increasingly abstract, and while they retained their delicacy, the Asian influence was gone. In later years and especially at the end of his notable career, Graves returned to sculpture, originally created forty years earlier, and received critical acclaim for his "Instruments of a New Navigation," works inspired by NASA and space exploration.Morris Graves died the morning of May 5, 2001 at his home in Loleta, hours after suffering a stroke.
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/graves_morris.html The inspiration for the Mystic Sons is Morris Graves himself, an octogenarian artist residing in blissful isolation on a picturesque estate in northern California. A Seattle native and struggling regional artist, Graves rose to national attention as the focus of a feature article in LIFE magazine in 1953 titled "Northwest Mystics." The story detailed an emerging art movement, with Graves at the center, informed by Eastern philosophies and the natural beauty of the Pacific Rim in a charming and mysterious genre. The impact of this "Northwest Mystics School" was felt for decades, enhanced by the elegance and eloquence of its primary practitioner. Graves became something of a fixture in global high society. His work was featured in galleries and museums throughout the world, and his entourage included the biggest celebrities of the day, from movie stars to royalty. In 1957 he became the only American artist to be honored with the prestigious Windsor Award, presented personally by the Duke and Duchess themselves.
"THE LAKE" in Loleta - NO VISITORS -
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/pacificnw/2001/1209/cover.html
The House That Morris Graves Built
Aside from one picture featuring the artist, no photographs of Morris Graves' California retreat at The Lake have ever been published. The ones accompanying this story - taken by Pacific Northwest magazine photographer Benjamin Benschneider - are the first.
Much of Morris Graves’ work of the last 30 years was created in this studio, a few steps from the main house. Both the house and studio were built facing north to receive soft, even light. Graves built his final home in the late 1960s on a 195-acre estate he called “The Lake,” in a secluded Northern California forest. On a cloudy afternoon, the lake looks dense and as silver-black as a pool of mercury. Miniature islands sprout from the deep, and clusters of water lilies hug the shore against a fringe of cattails, ferns and giant skunk-cabbage leaves. A crystalline reflection of islands and sky shimmers on the surface, even as the surrounding forest dissolves into fog. It feels as though we've arrived at some mythic fen at the edge of the world. This is my first glimpse of the habitat of that rare and elusive creature, Morris Graves. One of the Northwest's most revered artists — and certainly the most legendary — Graves spent the last 35 years of his life at The Lake, this remote 195-acre estate in Loleta, Calif. Graves died here in May at the age of 90 and set off a tsunami of nostalgia for the glory days of Northwest art, the days when the Museum of Modern Art and its employees bought up Graves paintings by the dozens and Life magazine made famous "The Mystic Painters of the Northwest." A charismatic personality and world-renowned artist, Graves lived a life that vacillated between the utter seclusion of his several forest abodes and a glamorous dalliance with the cream of international society. For a time during the 1950s, Graves and his companion Richard Svare lived in Ireland and were entertained by such celebrities as the Rothschilds, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and American movie director John Huston. Throughout his house are notes Graves wrote to himself and to Lake manager Robert Yarber, some inspirational, some funny, some sad. In the Northwest, Graves became as famous for the amazing houses he built as for his introspective paintings. But few ever saw these places, and the public was generally excluded. At the California home that was his last, Graves maintained a heavy veil of secrecy. Stories abound about his reclusiveness: He would bodily throw out guests who displeased him, and he kept handwritten signs posted at the entrance to the property. One of them read, "No visitors today, tomorrow, or the day after." The signs stayed up year-round.
So it was with gratitude that I accepted an invitation to visit this special place with Svare and Graves' friend Jan Thompson, both of Seattle. Graves' executor, Robert Yarber, who lives at The Lake and has managed it since the early 1970s, extended the offer as a way of allowing us to pay our final respects. But the invitation presented another opportunity. To truly understand the artist's work, it's important to know something about how he lived. The trip would give us the chance to publish the first documentation of Graves' houses, a rare look at the artist's personal and most encompassing art. COURTESY OF ROBERT YARBER In a 1940s snapshot, Graves sits in the bay window of his legendary studio, The Rock, on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes. Just weeks after Graves’ death in May, The Rock burned to the ground. ALTHOUGH WE'VE arrived in California, our story begins in the Northwest, where Graves was born and grew up. Everywhere he lived as an adult — whether in a burnt-out house in La Conner, a country estate in Ireland, or the three houses he built for himself in Western Washington and California — he created something extraordinary. As his artistic fame grew, he spent progressively more of his energy and funds adapting his surroundings to suit his compulsive inner vision.
Sadly, we can't go back to see the very earliest studio the artist built for himself — it's long since been lost. Built with the help of Graves' brothers on the family property in Edmonds, it was a place his friend, the painter Guy Anderson, remembered as "a very excellent studio" in a French-provincial style. The small stone, lumber and shake structure burned down in 1935, the same year it was built. Graves was 25 at the time, and the following year he had his first solo show at the Seattle Art Museum.
For a while, Graves hung out in Seattle, living the Bohemian life. He camped out in the servant's quarters of an old mansion, shared a home on Capitol Hill with some artist friends, lived in a derelict house near Pioneer Square. He traveled a lot, but was always drawn back to this city.
It wasn't until the late 1930s that the legends about Graves' living spaces really took hold. That's when he moved to La Conner and set up residence in an abandoned two-story Victorian partly gutted by fire. The bank of windows that overlooks the lake from the drawing room was designed to mimic the look of a Japanese screen. From his favorite chair in the corner of the room, Graves composed the landscape and the miniature islands that dot the lake.
I've never found a photograph of it, but stories about that house remain an integral part of Northwest art lore. It was a ghostly place. Graves covered the floor of one room with sand and placed rocks and driftwood to make a kind of indoor garden. He painted a huge, lifelike eye on the ceiling. Several fledgling crows that Graves kidnapped had free run of the place. One enterprising local boy found the house so bizarre that, when the artist was away, he sold tours of it for a quarter. But by living there rent-free, Graves was able to scrape together money to buy his own tract of land. At that time, 40 bucks was enough to buy him some acreage on a wooded hilltop near Deception Pass, where Graves built his first house. He called it The Rock.
It was an austere cabin — no electricity, no running water — sited on a solid stone promontory overlooking Campbell Lake. Every aspect — the Japanese-style gardens, the rough-hewn lumber of the house, the spare furnishings — had meaning to Graves. This remote house, the first Graves created from the ground up, was to change his outlook and his art. He told one writer, "I had found a way of life."
By this time he was already a mythic figure in Northwest art circles: tall, handsome, reclusive, both charming and outrageous in his social dealings. The Rock came to epitomize both Graves' startling sense of beauty — always incorporating something provocative or unexpected — and his taste for opulent asceticism. The artist owned very little furniture at the time, but the odd, worn pieces he scavenged were unfailingly gorgeous. Decades after Graves had left The Rock, that cabin and property remained an emblem of his style and a site of pilgrimage for other artists. While hitch-hiking through Northern California in 1973, Yarber met Graves and has worked for him ever since, now as director of the Morris Graves Foundation. One never-ending part of his work involves keeping the lake clear of milfoil and other prolific water plants. From then on, Graves alternated cycles of painting with the intensive labor of building and gardening. He believed that every aspect of life should be creative, whether it was plumbing or making paintings. And in each of his houses thereafter, Graves had the means to carry his vision a step further.
In the late 1940s, Graves moved to Woodway Park in Edmonds, and built a more ambitious house. He called it Careläden. (Graves added the umlaut and pronounced it "Carelahden" for added drama.) Set among acres of trees, the graciously proportioned cement-block structure was designed with help from architects Robert Jorgensen and Robert Shields. "Serene" is the word Svare uses to describe the house, where Graves was living when they first met. "The house at Woodway was so beautiful. The inside was all wood that we rubbed with lye and waxed by hand: It created a warmth," Svare recalls. The extensive grounds included a gatehouse, courtyard, pond and garden pavilion. Eventually, though, the postwar building boom drove Graves away from the idyllic spot, when bulldozers and chainsaws began ripping up the woods around his property for new development. The artist's anger over the encroachment is documented in his powerful "Machine Age Noise" paintings from this period. When Graves and Svare left there in 1954 to move to Ireland, poet Theodore Roethke and his wife Beatrice rented the house. The drawing room is filled with some of Graves’ favorite objects, including, in the foreground, a few of his last works, the series of sculptures called “Instruments for a New Navigation,” which he began in the 1960s. In Ireland, Graves and Svare eventually purchased an abandoned 35-acre country estate, Woodtown Manor, with a large stone house, built in 1750, that had fallen into ruin and was being used to shelter livestock. "The floors were all gone; we put in central heating, windows, all that," Svare recalls. Unlike Graves' rustic homes in the Northwest forest, this country gentleman's house and walled garden allowed Graves, with his increasing celebrity and resources, to live in a more princely style. He and Svare began to accumulate objects — Chippendale sofas and a chaise upholstered in plum velvet, 18th-century Hogarth chairs and beautiful Sheffield silver candlesticks.
In 1965, Svare left Ireland to start a theater company in Scandinavia. A year later, Graves sold Woodtown Manor and returned to Seattle. He'd already heard about a fabulous piece of property near Eureka, and soon focused his attention on acquiring it. Built in 1984, the Tea House sits on pilings just a foot above the surface of the lake. The windows fold up and latch to the ceiling to frame the lake’s beauty.
acific Northwest magazine staff photographer.
Aside from one picture featuring the artist, no photographs of Morris Graves' California retreat at The Lake have ever been published. The ones accompanying this story - taken by Pacific Northwest magazine photographer Benjamin Benschneider - are the first.
Much of Morris Graves’ work of the last 30 years was created in this studio, a few steps from the main house. Both the house and studio were built facing north to receive soft, even light. Graves built his final home in the late 1960s on a 195-acre estate he called “The Lake,” in a secluded Northern California forest. On a cloudy afternoon, the lake looks dense and as silver-black as a pool of mercury. Miniature islands sprout from the deep, and clusters of water lilies hug the shore against a fringe of cattails, ferns and giant skunk-cabbage leaves. A crystalline reflection of islands and sky shimmers on the surface, even as the surrounding forest dissolves into fog. It feels as though we've arrived at some mythic fen at the edge of the world. This is my first glimpse of the habitat of that rare and elusive creature, Morris Graves. One of the Northwest's most revered artists — and certainly the most legendary — Graves spent the last 35 years of his life at The Lake, this remote 195-acre estate in Loleta, Calif. Graves died here in May at the age of 90 and set off a tsunami of nostalgia for the glory days of Northwest art, the days when the Museum of Modern Art and its employees bought up Graves paintings by the dozens and Life magazine made famous "The Mystic Painters of the Northwest." A charismatic personality and world-renowned artist, Graves lived a life that vacillated between the utter seclusion of his several forest abodes and a glamorous dalliance with the cream of international society. For a time during the 1950s, Graves and his companion Richard Svare lived in Ireland and were entertained by such celebrities as the Rothschilds, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and American movie director John Huston. Throughout his house are notes Graves wrote to himself and to Lake manager Robert Yarber, some inspirational, some funny, some sad. In the Northwest, Graves became as famous for the amazing houses he built as for his introspective paintings. But few ever saw these places, and the public was generally excluded. At the California home that was his last, Graves maintained a heavy veil of secrecy. Stories abound about his reclusiveness: He would bodily throw out guests who displeased him, and he kept handwritten signs posted at the entrance to the property. One of them read, "No visitors today, tomorrow, or the day after." The signs stayed up year-round.
So it was with gratitude that I accepted an invitation to visit this special place with Svare and Graves' friend Jan Thompson, both of Seattle. Graves' executor, Robert Yarber, who lives at The Lake and has managed it since the early 1970s, extended the offer as a way of allowing us to pay our final respects. But the invitation presented another opportunity. To truly understand the artist's work, it's important to know something about how he lived. The trip would give us the chance to publish the first documentation of Graves' houses, a rare look at the artist's personal and most encompassing art. COURTESY OF ROBERT YARBER In a 1940s snapshot, Graves sits in the bay window of his legendary studio, The Rock, on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes. Just weeks after Graves’ death in May, The Rock burned to the ground. ALTHOUGH WE'VE arrived in California, our story begins in the Northwest, where Graves was born and grew up. Everywhere he lived as an adult — whether in a burnt-out house in La Conner, a country estate in Ireland, or the three houses he built for himself in Western Washington and California — he created something extraordinary. As his artistic fame grew, he spent progressively more of his energy and funds adapting his surroundings to suit his compulsive inner vision.
Sadly, we can't go back to see the very earliest studio the artist built for himself — it's long since been lost. Built with the help of Graves' brothers on the family property in Edmonds, it was a place his friend, the painter Guy Anderson, remembered as "a very excellent studio" in a French-provincial style. The small stone, lumber and shake structure burned down in 1935, the same year it was built. Graves was 25 at the time, and the following year he had his first solo show at the Seattle Art Museum.
For a while, Graves hung out in Seattle, living the Bohemian life. He camped out in the servant's quarters of an old mansion, shared a home on Capitol Hill with some artist friends, lived in a derelict house near Pioneer Square. He traveled a lot, but was always drawn back to this city.
It wasn't until the late 1930s that the legends about Graves' living spaces really took hold. That's when he moved to La Conner and set up residence in an abandoned two-story Victorian partly gutted by fire. The bank of windows that overlooks the lake from the drawing room was designed to mimic the look of a Japanese screen. From his favorite chair in the corner of the room, Graves composed the landscape and the miniature islands that dot the lake.
I've never found a photograph of it, but stories about that house remain an integral part of Northwest art lore. It was a ghostly place. Graves covered the floor of one room with sand and placed rocks and driftwood to make a kind of indoor garden. He painted a huge, lifelike eye on the ceiling. Several fledgling crows that Graves kidnapped had free run of the place. One enterprising local boy found the house so bizarre that, when the artist was away, he sold tours of it for a quarter. But by living there rent-free, Graves was able to scrape together money to buy his own tract of land. At that time, 40 bucks was enough to buy him some acreage on a wooded hilltop near Deception Pass, where Graves built his first house. He called it The Rock.
It was an austere cabin — no electricity, no running water — sited on a solid stone promontory overlooking Campbell Lake. Every aspect — the Japanese-style gardens, the rough-hewn lumber of the house, the spare furnishings — had meaning to Graves. This remote house, the first Graves created from the ground up, was to change his outlook and his art. He told one writer, "I had found a way of life."
By this time he was already a mythic figure in Northwest art circles: tall, handsome, reclusive, both charming and outrageous in his social dealings. The Rock came to epitomize both Graves' startling sense of beauty — always incorporating something provocative or unexpected — and his taste for opulent asceticism. The artist owned very little furniture at the time, but the odd, worn pieces he scavenged were unfailingly gorgeous. Decades after Graves had left The Rock, that cabin and property remained an emblem of his style and a site of pilgrimage for other artists. While hitch-hiking through Northern California in 1973, Yarber met Graves and has worked for him ever since, now as director of the Morris Graves Foundation. One never-ending part of his work involves keeping the lake clear of milfoil and other prolific water plants. From then on, Graves alternated cycles of painting with the intensive labor of building and gardening. He believed that every aspect of life should be creative, whether it was plumbing or making paintings. And in each of his houses thereafter, Graves had the means to carry his vision a step further.
In the late 1940s, Graves moved to Woodway Park in Edmonds, and built a more ambitious house. He called it Careläden. (Graves added the umlaut and pronounced it "Carelahden" for added drama.) Set among acres of trees, the graciously proportioned cement-block structure was designed with help from architects Robert Jorgensen and Robert Shields. "Serene" is the word Svare uses to describe the house, where Graves was living when they first met. "The house at Woodway was so beautiful. The inside was all wood that we rubbed with lye and waxed by hand: It created a warmth," Svare recalls. The extensive grounds included a gatehouse, courtyard, pond and garden pavilion. Eventually, though, the postwar building boom drove Graves away from the idyllic spot, when bulldozers and chainsaws began ripping up the woods around his property for new development. The artist's anger over the encroachment is documented in his powerful "Machine Age Noise" paintings from this period. When Graves and Svare left there in 1954 to move to Ireland, poet Theodore Roethke and his wife Beatrice rented the house. The drawing room is filled with some of Graves’ favorite objects, including, in the foreground, a few of his last works, the series of sculptures called “Instruments for a New Navigation,” which he began in the 1960s. In Ireland, Graves and Svare eventually purchased an abandoned 35-acre country estate, Woodtown Manor, with a large stone house, built in 1750, that had fallen into ruin and was being used to shelter livestock. "The floors were all gone; we put in central heating, windows, all that," Svare recalls. Unlike Graves' rustic homes in the Northwest forest, this country gentleman's house and walled garden allowed Graves, with his increasing celebrity and resources, to live in a more princely style. He and Svare began to accumulate objects — Chippendale sofas and a chaise upholstered in plum velvet, 18th-century Hogarth chairs and beautiful Sheffield silver candlesticks.
In 1965, Svare left Ireland to start a theater company in Scandinavia. A year later, Graves sold Woodtown Manor and returned to Seattle. He'd already heard about a fabulous piece of property near Eureka, and soon focused his attention on acquiring it. Built in 1984, the Tea House sits on pilings just a foot above the surface of the lake. The windows fold up and latch to the ceiling to frame the lake’s beauty.
acific Northwest magazine staff photographer.
Sheila Farr; The Seattle Times art critic
On a cloudy afternoon, the lake looks dense and as silver-black as a pool of mercury. Miniature islands sprout from the deep, and clusters of water lilies Water Lilies (or Nympheas) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926). The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years hug the shore against a fringe of cattails, ferns and giant skunk-cabbage leaves. A crystalline reflection of islands and sky shimmers on the surface, even as the surrounding forest dissolves into fog. It feels as though we've arrived at some mythic fen at the edge of the world.
This is my first glimpse First Glimpse is a monthly consumer electronics magazine published by Sandhills Publishing Company in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. The magazine was known as CE Lifestyles before a name change in early 2006. of the habitat of that rare and elusive creature, Morris Graves Morris Cole Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American painter and a founder of the Northwest School (art). Early years
Born the sixth son of a Methodist family in Fox Valley, Oregon, Graves was a country boy. . One of the Northwest's most revered artists -- and certainly the most legendary -- Graves spent the last 35 years of his life at The Lake, this remote 195-acre estate in Loleta, Calif. Graves died here in May at the age of 90 and set off a tsunami of nostalgia for the glory days of Northwest art, the days when the Museum of Modern Art and its employees bought up Graves paintings by the dozens and Life magazine made famous "The Mystic Painters of the Northwest." A charismatic personality and world-renowned artist, Graves lived a life that vacillated between the utter seclusion seclusion Forensic psychiatry A strategy for managing disturbed and violent Pts in psychiatric units, which consists of supervised confinement of a Pt to a room–ie, involuntary isolation, to protect others from harm of his several forest abodes and a glamorous dalliance with the cream of international society. For a time during the 1950s, Graves and his companion Richard Svare lived in Ireland and were entertained by such celebrities as the Rothschilds, the Duke and Duchess For the real-world peerages, see Duke.
The Duke and Duchess of Boxford are people featured in the Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends TV Series. of Windsor, and American movie director John Huston.
In the Northwest, Graves became as famous for the amazing houses he built as for his introspective paintings. But few ever saw these places, and the public was generally excluded. At the California home that was his last, Graves maintained a heavy veil of secrecy. Stories abound about his reclusiveness
To cause annoyance or displeasure. him, and he kept handwritten signs posted at the entrance to the property. One of them read, "No visitors today, tomorrow, or the day after." The signs stayed up year-round.
So it was with gratitude that I accepted an invitation to visit this special place with Svare and Graves' friend Jan Thompson, both of Seattle. Graves' executor, Robert Yarber Robert Yarber (born Dallas, Texas, 1948) is an American painter and Distinguished Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1971, and a MFA from Louisiana State University in 1973. , who lives at The Lake and has managed it since the early 1970s, extended the offer as a way of allowing us to pay our final respects. But the invitation presented another opportunity. To truly understand the artist's work, it's important to know something about how he lived. The trip would give us the chance to publish the first documentation of Graves' houses, a rare look at the artist's personal and most encompassing art. THE WAY GRAVES integrated the buildings and landscape at The Lake is spectacular. We stand transfixed in the spacious drawing room of the main house, which cantilevers over the water on pilings and seems to drift among the reeds and water lilies. A bank of tall windows stretches the expanse of the 50-foot room, like the panels of a Japanese screen. This is where, from a chair in the south corner, the artist would sit, overlooking his floating world. A few steps out a side door would take the painter to his studio and a small boat house. From there a trail leads on to Yarber's house. On the opposite shore stands a guest house and a Japanese-style teahouse, tucked among the cattails. Behind the L-shaped main house, Graves' formal garden, composed around a geometry of boxwood boxwood
see buxus sempervirens. hedges, lies abandoned where his leeks, flowers and vegetables once grew. Even when he was actively gardening, though, Graves liked a little disorder. He built his gardens on Japanese principles, emphasizing mystery, rustic solitude and a reminder that whatever grows also dies.
"He liked the look of an abandoned garden that had been tended and formalized for·mal·ize
tr.v. for·mal·ized, for·mal·iz·ing, for·mal·iz·es
1. To give a definite form or shape to.
2.
a. To make formal.
b. , then let go -- but not too far," Yarber says.
Thompson, who drove down with Graves from Seattle when he purchased the property, recalls his fascination with the site. "We drove up to the top of that little hill, then walked in because the road wasn't built. He was absolutely in a trance. He squatted by the lake for hours just looking -- it was full of logs and junk. To me, it was a mess: He had a vision of it that I couldn't see." The first order of business was clearing the lake, and Graves worked at it to the point of exhaustion, diving down and pulling out logs and weeds. "He composed it to be serene," Yarber says.
Now, when you look out from the drawing room, the view is otherworldly. Sighs of mist lift off the lake like spirits rising from the deep. The remains of an ancient, submerged forest lie here, and each miniature island sprouts from the decaying mass of a tree whose trunk, preserved by water, still reaches down some 30 feet to the lake floor. Yarber explains that an earthquake 300 years ago created a sag-pond. "That's when the land gives way, forming a bowl that fills with water. Over the decades and centuries, the tree trunks rotted down and formed humus and then wind and birds dropped native seeds. It's very fertile, but because of the limited space, they've taken a stunted growth It's a natural bonsai garden."
You can see why Graves had to have this piece of land. It's the same kind of secluded, forest landscape he always chose for himself when he lived and painted in the Seattle area -- only more so. By the time Graves purchased the extravagant piece of property, he was in his 50s, and commanded high prices for his work. The scale of this project was huge compared with the two other houses he built. Here at The Lake he could shape an entire landscape: He owned everything his eye could see. When he bought the property, he told Thompson, "I have one more house in me."
Building the place to suit his exacting vision took everything Graves had, and then some. An audacious man, he was always willing to spend all his resources of strength, money, inspiration and time to create something of exceeding beauty. But this time, with unforeseen construction bills piling up, the artist, desperate, had to ask his friends to help by selling pictures he had given them as gifts. Both Thompson and Svare complied. And Graves himself parted with the entire contents of a trunk containing hundreds of his early drawings, sketches, studies and paintings, which he sold en masse to Portland collector Virginia Haseltine. She donated the work to the University of Oregon The University of Oregon is a public university located in Eugene, Oregon. The university was founded in 1876, graduating its first class two years later. The University of Oregon is one of 60 members of the Association of American Universities. .
The runaway budget was the source of a major falling out between Graves and Seattle architect Ibsen Nelsen, who collaborated with him on the house. Graves chose Nelsen impetuously. administration building that Nelsen designed in the early '60s near the UW campus, he was swept away. "He saw this building, walked in and asked who built it, then went straight over to Ibsen's office and asked to talk to him," Hans says. The architect and the artist began their collaboration enthusiastically. As construction progressed, however, each blamed the other for cost overruns as the budget ballooned to twice the original amount.
Part of that was because Graves insisted on the house being sited within six feet of the shore, even when it turned out the ground was unstable. Graves acknowledged responsibility for that initial expense, but told Thompson and other friends that Nelsen had opted for more expensive building materials than they had agreed on. Whatever happened, by the end of the project, the two weren't speaking. Graves never paid the architect his fee, although he did, some years later, send him a painting. Despite the problems, Nelsen told a Seattle art historian he didn't regret doing it. "It was the best house that he did without a doubt, and he knew that," Hans says. "And it was Morris's influence. The way that building worked and how it was sited, its whole feeling and ambience -- a lot of that was Morris." Still estranged the two men died within months of each other this year.
WRITING ABOUT Graves' houses is a difficult task. I hesitate to breach the privacy he so strenuously maintained, and yet his estate at The Lake is at the brink of a new incarnation. As director of the Morris Graves Foundation, Yarber, 50, will open up the house and studio by invitation to select artists, writers and musicians for work and study. He is planning to selectively log some trees, replace the redwood shingle roof with metal, and install skylights to illuminate the house. With its northern exposure and steep, overhanging roof, the house stays perennially dark and prone to dampness, even with its several fireplaces and woodstoves crackling constantly to keep off the chill.
Although The Lake will remain, perhaps it's fitting that traces of its enigmatic owner disappear. Thirty years ago Graves complained to a critic about performance artists who felt the need to record their work for posterity. He said documentation was the antithesis of his purpose, which he maintained was spontaneous and private. Some of Graves' old friends recalled his philosophy last May when, eerily, just weeks after Graves' death, his cabin at The Rock caught fire and burned to the ground. Its caretaker, Terry Smith, died in the blaze.
Graves eventually sold Careladen in Edmonds, and, though still beautiful having passed through several owners, it exists in a much different style from the days of its first inhabitant INHABITANT. One who has his domicil in a place is an inhabitant of that place; one who has an actual fixed residence in a place.
2. A mere intention to remove to a place will not make a man an inhabitant of such place, although as a sign of such intention he .
As for Woodtown Manor, Graves sold it to a member of the Guinness brewery clan. When Svare last visited, the house had been rented to a famous rock band, its lovely interior and furnishings trashed trashed adj. Slang Drunk or intoxicated.
Our Living Language Expressions for intoxication are among those that best showcase the creativity of slang. .
Seeing The Lake as Graves left it -- where every object, every piece of furniture, every view evokes him -- has been a rare privilege. But I also found it a little depressing. By the end of his life, the austerity of the artist's early environments had given way to an accumulation of beautiful objects, too many to fully appreciate. He had ordered a vast estate to suit his need for a harmonious environment, yet that serenity remained outside him. "Morris was surrounded by so much beauty, and still it wasn't enough," Yarber said. "You could say his whole life was a three-dimensional painting -- just composing things."
On a cloudy afternoon, the lake looks dense and as silver-black as a pool of mercury. Miniature islands sprout from the deep, and clusters of water lilies Water Lilies (or Nympheas) is a series of approximately 250 oil paintings by French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840-1926). The paintings depict Monet's flower garden at Giverny and were the main focus of Monet's artistic production during the last thirty years hug the shore against a fringe of cattails, ferns and giant skunk-cabbage leaves. A crystalline reflection of islands and sky shimmers on the surface, even as the surrounding forest dissolves into fog. It feels as though we've arrived at some mythic fen at the edge of the world.
This is my first glimpse First Glimpse is a monthly consumer electronics magazine published by Sandhills Publishing Company in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA. The magazine was known as CE Lifestyles before a name change in early 2006. of the habitat of that rare and elusive creature, Morris Graves Morris Cole Graves (August 28, 1910 – May 5, 2001) was an American painter and a founder of the Northwest School (art). Early years
Born the sixth son of a Methodist family in Fox Valley, Oregon, Graves was a country boy. . One of the Northwest's most revered artists -- and certainly the most legendary -- Graves spent the last 35 years of his life at The Lake, this remote 195-acre estate in Loleta, Calif. Graves died here in May at the age of 90 and set off a tsunami of nostalgia for the glory days of Northwest art, the days when the Museum of Modern Art and its employees bought up Graves paintings by the dozens and Life magazine made famous "The Mystic Painters of the Northwest." A charismatic personality and world-renowned artist, Graves lived a life that vacillated between the utter seclusion seclusion Forensic psychiatry A strategy for managing disturbed and violent Pts in psychiatric units, which consists of supervised confinement of a Pt to a room–ie, involuntary isolation, to protect others from harm of his several forest abodes and a glamorous dalliance with the cream of international society. For a time during the 1950s, Graves and his companion Richard Svare lived in Ireland and were entertained by such celebrities as the Rothschilds, the Duke and Duchess For the real-world peerages, see Duke.
The Duke and Duchess of Boxford are people featured in the Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends TV Series. of Windsor, and American movie director John Huston.
In the Northwest, Graves became as famous for the amazing houses he built as for his introspective paintings. But few ever saw these places, and the public was generally excluded. At the California home that was his last, Graves maintained a heavy veil of secrecy. Stories abound about his reclusiveness
To cause annoyance or displeasure. him, and he kept handwritten signs posted at the entrance to the property. One of them read, "No visitors today, tomorrow, or the day after." The signs stayed up year-round.
So it was with gratitude that I accepted an invitation to visit this special place with Svare and Graves' friend Jan Thompson, both of Seattle. Graves' executor, Robert Yarber Robert Yarber (born Dallas, Texas, 1948) is an American painter and Distinguished Professor of Art at Pennsylvania State University. He received a BFA from Cooper Union in 1971, and a MFA from Louisiana State University in 1973. , who lives at The Lake and has managed it since the early 1970s, extended the offer as a way of allowing us to pay our final respects. But the invitation presented another opportunity. To truly understand the artist's work, it's important to know something about how he lived. The trip would give us the chance to publish the first documentation of Graves' houses, a rare look at the artist's personal and most encompassing art. THE WAY GRAVES integrated the buildings and landscape at The Lake is spectacular. We stand transfixed in the spacious drawing room of the main house, which cantilevers over the water on pilings and seems to drift among the reeds and water lilies. A bank of tall windows stretches the expanse of the 50-foot room, like the panels of a Japanese screen. This is where, from a chair in the south corner, the artist would sit, overlooking his floating world. A few steps out a side door would take the painter to his studio and a small boat house. From there a trail leads on to Yarber's house. On the opposite shore stands a guest house and a Japanese-style teahouse, tucked among the cattails. Behind the L-shaped main house, Graves' formal garden, composed around a geometry of boxwood boxwood
see buxus sempervirens. hedges, lies abandoned where his leeks, flowers and vegetables once grew. Even when he was actively gardening, though, Graves liked a little disorder. He built his gardens on Japanese principles, emphasizing mystery, rustic solitude and a reminder that whatever grows also dies.
"He liked the look of an abandoned garden that had been tended and formalized for·mal·ize
tr.v. for·mal·ized, for·mal·iz·ing, for·mal·iz·es
1. To give a definite form or shape to.
2.
a. To make formal.
b. , then let go -- but not too far," Yarber says.
Thompson, who drove down with Graves from Seattle when he purchased the property, recalls his fascination with the site. "We drove up to the top of that little hill, then walked in because the road wasn't built. He was absolutely in a trance. He squatted by the lake for hours just looking -- it was full of logs and junk. To me, it was a mess: He had a vision of it that I couldn't see." The first order of business was clearing the lake, and Graves worked at it to the point of exhaustion, diving down and pulling out logs and weeds. "He composed it to be serene," Yarber says.
Now, when you look out from the drawing room, the view is otherworldly. Sighs of mist lift off the lake like spirits rising from the deep. The remains of an ancient, submerged forest lie here, and each miniature island sprouts from the decaying mass of a tree whose trunk, preserved by water, still reaches down some 30 feet to the lake floor. Yarber explains that an earthquake 300 years ago created a sag-pond. "That's when the land gives way, forming a bowl that fills with water. Over the decades and centuries, the tree trunks rotted down and formed humus and then wind and birds dropped native seeds. It's very fertile, but because of the limited space, they've taken a stunted growth It's a natural bonsai garden."
You can see why Graves had to have this piece of land. It's the same kind of secluded, forest landscape he always chose for himself when he lived and painted in the Seattle area -- only more so. By the time Graves purchased the extravagant piece of property, he was in his 50s, and commanded high prices for his work. The scale of this project was huge compared with the two other houses he built. Here at The Lake he could shape an entire landscape: He owned everything his eye could see. When he bought the property, he told Thompson, "I have one more house in me."
Building the place to suit his exacting vision took everything Graves had, and then some. An audacious man, he was always willing to spend all his resources of strength, money, inspiration and time to create something of exceeding beauty. But this time, with unforeseen construction bills piling up, the artist, desperate, had to ask his friends to help by selling pictures he had given them as gifts. Both Thompson and Svare complied. And Graves himself parted with the entire contents of a trunk containing hundreds of his early drawings, sketches, studies and paintings, which he sold en masse to Portland collector Virginia Haseltine. She donated the work to the University of Oregon The University of Oregon is a public university located in Eugene, Oregon. The university was founded in 1876, graduating its first class two years later. The University of Oregon is one of 60 members of the Association of American Universities. .
The runaway budget was the source of a major falling out between Graves and Seattle architect Ibsen Nelsen, who collaborated with him on the house. Graves chose Nelsen impetuously. administration building that Nelsen designed in the early '60s near the UW campus, he was swept away. "He saw this building, walked in and asked who built it, then went straight over to Ibsen's office and asked to talk to him," Hans says. The architect and the artist began their collaboration enthusiastically. As construction progressed, however, each blamed the other for cost overruns as the budget ballooned to twice the original amount.
Part of that was because Graves insisted on the house being sited within six feet of the shore, even when it turned out the ground was unstable. Graves acknowledged responsibility for that initial expense, but told Thompson and other friends that Nelsen had opted for more expensive building materials than they had agreed on. Whatever happened, by the end of the project, the two weren't speaking. Graves never paid the architect his fee, although he did, some years later, send him a painting. Despite the problems, Nelsen told a Seattle art historian he didn't regret doing it. "It was the best house that he did without a doubt, and he knew that," Hans says. "And it was Morris's influence. The way that building worked and how it was sited, its whole feeling and ambience -- a lot of that was Morris." Still estranged the two men died within months of each other this year.
WRITING ABOUT Graves' houses is a difficult task. I hesitate to breach the privacy he so strenuously maintained, and yet his estate at The Lake is at the brink of a new incarnation. As director of the Morris Graves Foundation, Yarber, 50, will open up the house and studio by invitation to select artists, writers and musicians for work and study. He is planning to selectively log some trees, replace the redwood shingle roof with metal, and install skylights to illuminate the house. With its northern exposure and steep, overhanging roof, the house stays perennially dark and prone to dampness, even with its several fireplaces and woodstoves crackling constantly to keep off the chill.
Although The Lake will remain, perhaps it's fitting that traces of its enigmatic owner disappear. Thirty years ago Graves complained to a critic about performance artists who felt the need to record their work for posterity. He said documentation was the antithesis of his purpose, which he maintained was spontaneous and private. Some of Graves' old friends recalled his philosophy last May when, eerily, just weeks after Graves' death, his cabin at The Rock caught fire and burned to the ground. Its caretaker, Terry Smith, died in the blaze.
Graves eventually sold Careladen in Edmonds, and, though still beautiful having passed through several owners, it exists in a much different style from the days of its first inhabitant INHABITANT. One who has his domicil in a place is an inhabitant of that place; one who has an actual fixed residence in a place.
2. A mere intention to remove to a place will not make a man an inhabitant of such place, although as a sign of such intention he .
As for Woodtown Manor, Graves sold it to a member of the Guinness brewery clan. When Svare last visited, the house had been rented to a famous rock band, its lovely interior and furnishings trashed trashed adj. Slang Drunk or intoxicated.
Our Living Language Expressions for intoxication are among those that best showcase the creativity of slang. .
Seeing The Lake as Graves left it -- where every object, every piece of furniture, every view evokes him -- has been a rare privilege. But I also found it a little depressing. By the end of his life, the austerity of the artist's early environments had given way to an accumulation of beautiful objects, too many to fully appreciate. He had ordered a vast estate to suit his need for a harmonious environment, yet that serenity remained outside him. "Morris was surrounded by so much beauty, and still it wasn't enough," Yarber said. "You could say his whole life was a three-dimensional painting -- just composing things."
Artful Landscape
THE WAY GRAVES integrated the buildings and landscape at The Lake is spectacular. We stand transfixed in the spacious drawing room of the main house, which cantilevers over the water on pilings and seems to drift among the reeds and water lilies. A bank of tall windows stretches the expanse of the 50-foot room, like the panels of a Japanese screen. This is where, from a chair in the south corner, the artist would sit, overlooking his floating world. A few steps out a side door would take the painter to his studio and a small boat house. From there a trail leads on to Yarber's house. On the opposite shore stands a guest house and a Japanese-style teahouse, tucked among the cattails. Behind the L-shaped main house, Graves' formal garden, composed around a geometry of boxwood hedges, lies abandoned where his leeks, flowers and vegetables once grew. Even when he was actively gardening, though, Graves liked a little disorder. He built his gardens on Japanese principles, emphasizing mystery, rustic solitude and a reminder that whatever grows also dies. PHOTO BY RICHARD SVARE, COURTESY OF ROBERT YARBER In 1958, painters Jan Thompson and Richard Gilkey visit Graves (standing) at his house in Ireland called Woodtown Manor. "He liked the look of an abandoned garden that had been tended and formalized, then let go — but not too far," Yarber says.
Thompson, who drove down with Graves from Seattle when he purchased the property, recalls his fascination with the site. "We drove up to the top of that little hill, then walked in because the road wasn't built. He was absolutely in a trance. He squatted by the lake for hours just looking — it was full of logs and junk. To me, it was a mess: He had a vision of it that I couldn't see." The first order of business was clearing the lake, and Graves worked at it to the point of exhaustion, diving down and pulling out logs and weeds. "He composed it to be serene," Yarber says.
Now, when you look out from the drawing room, the view is otherworldly. Sighs of mist lift off the lake like spirits rising from the deep. The remains of an ancient, submerged forest lie here, and each miniature island sprouts from the decaying mass of a tree whose trunk, preserved by water, still reaches down some 30 feet to the lake floor. Yarber explains that an earthquake 300 years ago created a sag-pond. "That's when the land gives way, forming a bowl that fills with water. Over the decades and centuries, the tree trunks rotted down and formed humus, and then wind and birds dropped native seeds. It's very fertile, but because of the limited space, they've taken a stunted growth. It's a natural bonsai garden."
You can see why Graves had to have this piece of land. It's the same kind of secluded, forest landscape he always chose for himself when he lived and painted in the Seattle area — only more so. By the time Graves purchased the extravagant piece of property, he was in his 50s, and commanded high prices for his work. The scale of this project was huge compared with the two other houses he built. Here at The Lake he could shape an entire landscape: He owned everything his eye could see. When he bought the property, he told Thompson, "I have one more house in me." From the deck of the guest house, Graves’ house — designed by Seattle architect Ibsen Nelsen — seems to float on the lake surface. “Ibsen Nelsen was famous for his roofs,” Yarber said. “It hovers like a brooding hen over the land.” Building the place to suit his exacting vision took everything Graves had, and then some. An audacious man, he was always willing to spend all his resources of strength, money, inspiration and time to create something of exceeding beauty. But this time, with unforeseen construction bills piling up, the artist, desperate, had to ask his friends to help by selling pictures he had given them as gifts. Both Thompson and Svare complied. And Graves himself parted with the entire contents of a trunk containing hundreds of his early drawings, sketches, studies and paintings, which he sold en masse to Portland collector Virginia Haseltine. She donated the work to the University of Oregon.
The runaway budget was the source of a major falling out between Graves and Seattle architect Ibsen Nelsen, who collaborated with him on the house. Graves chose Nelsen impetuously, according to artist Hans Nelsen, the architect's son. When Graves first saw the low, clean lines of the YMCA administration building that Nelsen designed in the early '60s near the UW campus, he was swept away. "He saw this building, walked in and asked who built it, then went straight over to Ibsen's office and asked to talk to him," Hans says. The architect and the artist began their collaboration enthusiastically. As construction progressed, however, each blamed the other for cost overruns as the budget ballooned to twice the original amount. In 1957, Graves and Svare leave Seattle for Ireland, where they remodeled an abandoned 18th-century country house called Woodtown Manor. Svare revisited The Lake to pay his final respects to his friend and do research for a book on Graves’ houses and gardens. Part of that was because Graves insisted on the house being sited within six feet of the shore, even when it turned out the ground was unstable. Graves acknowledged responsibility for that initial expense, but told Thompson and other friends that Nelsen had opted for more expensive building materials than they had agreed on. Whatever happened, by the end of the project, the two weren't speaking. Graves never paid the architect his fee, although he did, some years later, send him a painting. Despite the problems, Nelsen told a Seattle art historian he didn't regret doing it. "It was the best house that he did without a doubt, and he knew that," Hans says. "And it was Morris's influence. The way that building worked and how it was sited, its whole feeling and ambience — a lot of that was Morris." Still estranged, the two men died within months of each other this year.
WRITING ABOUT Graves' houses is a difficult task. I hesitate to breach the privacy he so strenuously maintained, and yet his estate at The Lake is at the brink of a new incarnation. As director of the Morris Graves Foundation, Yarber, 50, will open up the house and studio by invitation to select artists, writers and musicians for work and study. He is planning to selectively log some trees, replace the redwood shingle roof with metal, and install skylights to illuminate the house. With its northern exposure and steep, overhanging roof, the house stays perennially dark and prone to dampness, even with its several fireplaces and woodstoves crackling constantly to keep off the chill. Famously reclusive, Graves made it clear that visitors weren’t welcome at The Lake. A few of his handmade signs still hang at the ready in the garage. Since Graves’ death, interest in The Lake has rekindled, and foundation director Robert Yarber is flooded with requests to visit. “I may have to put them back out,” he says. Although The Lake will remain, perhaps it's fitting that traces of its enigmatic owner disappear. Thirty years ago Graves complained to a critic about performance artists who felt the need to record their work for posterity. He said documentation was the antithesis of his purpose, which he maintained was spontaneous and private. Some of Graves' old friends recalled his philosophy last May when, eerily, just weeks after Graves' death, his cabin at The Rock caught fire and burned to the ground. Its caretaker, Terry Smith, died in the blaze.
Graves eventually sold Careläden in Edmonds, and, though still beautiful having passed through several owners, it exists in a much different style from the days of its first inhabitant.
As for Woodtown Manor, Graves sold it to a member of the Guinness brewery clan. When Svare last visited, the house had been rented to a famous rock band, its lovely interior and furnishings trashed.
Seeing The Lake as Graves left it — where every object, every piece of furniture, every view evokes him — has been a rare privilege. But I also found it a little depressing. By the end of his life, the austerity of the artist's early environments had given way to an accumulation of beautiful objects, too many to fully appreciate. He had ordered a vast estate to suit his need for a harmonious environment, yet that serenity remained outside him. "Morris was surrounded by so much beauty, and still it wasn't enough," Yarber said. "You could say his whole life was a three-dimensional painting — just composing things."
Sheila Farr is The Seattle Times’ art critic.
Graves Residence, "The Lake," Loleta
A MOMENT WITH MORRIS by Iona Miller, 2000
Venerable elder, so ready to graduate,
Would life and fate leave body to deteriorate.
A facile exercise in the art of rapport,
We revel in emptiness, silence at the core.
Such as it is, it's culminating just right,
So get ready for that One Taste of final delight.
Even "instruments of celestial navigation,"
Can't compensate for constant mortal aggravation.
Still, you're entitled to your vocal ambivalence,
But you flame's still alive through your vibrant sibilants.
Informing others of the mysterious essence of this 3-D drama,
Never wrapping up sentences, keep ending with a comma.
Left now with a bitter pill and metallic pacemaker,
With longing he yearns for the final heartbreaker.
Asks, "what do you know of Freud and Jung?"
How about you, whose work was never unsung?
A vital legacy so much larger than life;
A creative fountain beyond pearl's greatest price.
The golden bridge between worlds is finally dissolving,
All will soon meet its own precessional revolving.
Tell me your dreams of metaphysical illumination,
One foot in each world, the source of pain and elation.
In the Tao and the now, fascination in the process of decay,
From now to "the bitter end," each day the Buddha you'll slay.
Once a project's well done, there's no need to do over,
The work will live on, you'll be eternity's lover.
So, here it is back at you, in your own metaphorms,
Permission for relinquishing, surrendering all norms.
Were you talking to yourself; was I just another dream?
Isn't it all just another wave in the consciousness stream?
Graves, Morris (1910-2001) HistoryLink.org Essay 5205 :The painter Morris Graves was certainly the most eccentric of the "Northwest Mystics" -- artists of the Northwest School that also included Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. Graves was an idiosyncratic artist from the beginning, going about life in an interesting, just out-of-societal-bounds manner. Burdened by early fame, then just as quickly disparaged, he chose to separate himself from society in his quest to paint symbolic representations of consciousness. For him, consciousness often assumed the form of a bird, or of a chalice. This biography also tells of the homes Graves built and created: his unsung, unseen masterpieces. It is reprinted from Deloris Tarzan Ament's Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
Northwest Born
For Morris Graves, the softness of Northwest light was a given. He understood its moods in his very pores. Graves's family moved to the Seattle area in 1911 from a homestead farm in Fox Valley, Oregon, when he was a year old. His mother said, "He was a beautiful baby -- big brown eyes and dark hair, with a little faraway look in his eye -- and very friendly. We named him after Morris Cole, our favorite minister." She had prepared a pink layette, certain that after five sons, this would be a daughter.
She noted in his baby book, "He first laughed on Oct. 3; his first tooth appeared on Jan. 17, 1911, and his first word the following September was ‘See' " (Wally Graves). By then the family had returned to Seattle. The Oregon homestead farm lay abandoned, having lasted little more than a year, bankrupting his father's once-thriving paint and wallpaper store in Seattle.
Born An Artist
Morris is remembered as a moody child, repeatedly ill with pneumonia. He amused himself during recuperation by watching birds and mentally designing gardens. By the time he was 10, he could recognize and identify as many as 40 kinds of wildflowers. He entered wildflower bouquets in competitions at country fairs when he was between the ages of 10 and 13, and he arranged flowers for the Methodist church he attended with his family. His mother remembers an eight-foot-high Easter cross covered with flowering cherry blossoms that he made for the church when he was 11 (Kass).
Years later, Graves recalled that he was 10 when he first felt strongly about an artist. A picture spread in Century magazine showed allegorical murals painted at Yale University. Although Graves could no longer remember the artist's name, the murals lingered in his mind: "There was something about the volume of those forms on a two-dimensional plane that impressed me greatly" (Kuh).
The Northwest Light
The look of transparent duskiness that marks so many early Graves paintings may well have emerged from wilderness evenings. At Northwest latitudes, summer sunsets can last for as long as an hour. The effect is unknown in tropical areas, where the sun plunges over the horizon in brief red glory. Northwest twilights linger. The sky glows a deeper blue as the low sun spills golden light against trees and walls. This light is in no hurry. Gradually it deepens, until finally the sun slips down as if reluctant to leave. Malcolm Roberts, active as a Surrealist painter in the 1930s, called this daily magical interval the "Hour of Pearl." French painters know a similar phenomenon on the Riviera as l'heure bleue. This long leave-taking of light is a time of transformation. Such light is visible in Graves's early paintings, which seem to be set neither at night nor in daylight, but in some charged intermediate illumination. They carry a sense of consciousness transforming and refining itself to more idealized levels. Faint perfect forms echo crisp imperfect ones; gray shapes spill into color. They are permeated with longing.
His View of the World
Graves lived by the Gothic intuition that no sanity or fulfillment lies in pretending to be an integrated part of humanity. Rather, happiness and survival depend upon remaining isolated, and deploying evasive tactics. On one occasion, he shocked guests at a dinner party by suggesting that money set aside for public art at the airport be spent instead to influence legislation to legalize marijuana. (That predilection may help to explain his later choice of Humboldt County as a place to live, and his almost pathological insistence on barring visitors.)
Despite his occasional antisocial behavior and shock tactics, Graves was a genteel man with highly refined taste, loyal to friends, intolerant of pretension and noise. But he was contemptuous of social expectations. James Washington Jr. recalled that Graves sometimes caused a stir of disapproval when he showed up at art openings with a dead flower in the lapel of his tattered coat, and badly worn-out shoes. "I think he realized that the essence of life lay in simplicity, and he kept testing how far down he could go into that" (Washington Interview).
Venerable elder, so ready to graduate,
Would life and fate leave body to deteriorate.
A facile exercise in the art of rapport,
We revel in emptiness, silence at the core.
Such as it is, it's culminating just right,
So get ready for that One Taste of final delight.
Even "instruments of celestial navigation,"
Can't compensate for constant mortal aggravation.
Still, you're entitled to your vocal ambivalence,
But you flame's still alive through your vibrant sibilants.
Informing others of the mysterious essence of this 3-D drama,
Never wrapping up sentences, keep ending with a comma.
Left now with a bitter pill and metallic pacemaker,
With longing he yearns for the final heartbreaker.
Asks, "what do you know of Freud and Jung?"
How about you, whose work was never unsung?
A vital legacy so much larger than life;
A creative fountain beyond pearl's greatest price.
The golden bridge between worlds is finally dissolving,
All will soon meet its own precessional revolving.
Tell me your dreams of metaphysical illumination,
One foot in each world, the source of pain and elation.
In the Tao and the now, fascination in the process of decay,
From now to "the bitter end," each day the Buddha you'll slay.
Once a project's well done, there's no need to do over,
The work will live on, you'll be eternity's lover.
So, here it is back at you, in your own metaphorms,
Permission for relinquishing, surrendering all norms.
Were you talking to yourself; was I just another dream?
Isn't it all just another wave in the consciousness stream?
Graves, Morris (1910-2001) HistoryLink.org Essay 5205 :The painter Morris Graves was certainly the most eccentric of the "Northwest Mystics" -- artists of the Northwest School that also included Mark Tobey, Kenneth Callahan, and Guy Anderson. Graves was an idiosyncratic artist from the beginning, going about life in an interesting, just out-of-societal-bounds manner. Burdened by early fame, then just as quickly disparaged, he chose to separate himself from society in his quest to paint symbolic representations of consciousness. For him, consciousness often assumed the form of a bird, or of a chalice. This biography also tells of the homes Graves built and created: his unsung, unseen masterpieces. It is reprinted from Deloris Tarzan Ament's Iridescent Light: The Emergence of Northwest Art (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002).
Northwest Born
For Morris Graves, the softness of Northwest light was a given. He understood its moods in his very pores. Graves's family moved to the Seattle area in 1911 from a homestead farm in Fox Valley, Oregon, when he was a year old. His mother said, "He was a beautiful baby -- big brown eyes and dark hair, with a little faraway look in his eye -- and very friendly. We named him after Morris Cole, our favorite minister." She had prepared a pink layette, certain that after five sons, this would be a daughter.
She noted in his baby book, "He first laughed on Oct. 3; his first tooth appeared on Jan. 17, 1911, and his first word the following September was ‘See' " (Wally Graves). By then the family had returned to Seattle. The Oregon homestead farm lay abandoned, having lasted little more than a year, bankrupting his father's once-thriving paint and wallpaper store in Seattle.
Born An Artist
Morris is remembered as a moody child, repeatedly ill with pneumonia. He amused himself during recuperation by watching birds and mentally designing gardens. By the time he was 10, he could recognize and identify as many as 40 kinds of wildflowers. He entered wildflower bouquets in competitions at country fairs when he was between the ages of 10 and 13, and he arranged flowers for the Methodist church he attended with his family. His mother remembers an eight-foot-high Easter cross covered with flowering cherry blossoms that he made for the church when he was 11 (Kass).
Years later, Graves recalled that he was 10 when he first felt strongly about an artist. A picture spread in Century magazine showed allegorical murals painted at Yale University. Although Graves could no longer remember the artist's name, the murals lingered in his mind: "There was something about the volume of those forms on a two-dimensional plane that impressed me greatly" (Kuh).
The Northwest Light
The look of transparent duskiness that marks so many early Graves paintings may well have emerged from wilderness evenings. At Northwest latitudes, summer sunsets can last for as long as an hour. The effect is unknown in tropical areas, where the sun plunges over the horizon in brief red glory. Northwest twilights linger. The sky glows a deeper blue as the low sun spills golden light against trees and walls. This light is in no hurry. Gradually it deepens, until finally the sun slips down as if reluctant to leave. Malcolm Roberts, active as a Surrealist painter in the 1930s, called this daily magical interval the "Hour of Pearl." French painters know a similar phenomenon on the Riviera as l'heure bleue. This long leave-taking of light is a time of transformation. Such light is visible in Graves's early paintings, which seem to be set neither at night nor in daylight, but in some charged intermediate illumination. They carry a sense of consciousness transforming and refining itself to more idealized levels. Faint perfect forms echo crisp imperfect ones; gray shapes spill into color. They are permeated with longing.
His View of the World
Graves lived by the Gothic intuition that no sanity or fulfillment lies in pretending to be an integrated part of humanity. Rather, happiness and survival depend upon remaining isolated, and deploying evasive tactics. On one occasion, he shocked guests at a dinner party by suggesting that money set aside for public art at the airport be spent instead to influence legislation to legalize marijuana. (That predilection may help to explain his later choice of Humboldt County as a place to live, and his almost pathological insistence on barring visitors.)
Despite his occasional antisocial behavior and shock tactics, Graves was a genteel man with highly refined taste, loyal to friends, intolerant of pretension and noise. But he was contemptuous of social expectations. James Washington Jr. recalled that Graves sometimes caused a stir of disapproval when he showed up at art openings with a dead flower in the lapel of his tattered coat, and badly worn-out shoes. "I think he realized that the essence of life lay in simplicity, and he kept testing how far down he could go into that" (Washington Interview).
Graves's California Redwood Retreat
Graves Gets Out of Town
Graves traveled to England in the fall of 1949 as a first class passenger on the Mauritania, the guest of British art collector Edward James (said to have been the illegitimate son of Edward VII). James wanted to commission Graves to paint murals in lunettes at his mansion at West Dean Park. Portrait painter Carlyle Brown, a guest along with Graves, painted a portrait of Graves. Graves stayed with James in England for more than a month, and in the end turned down the commission.
He traveled on to France; his destination was Chartres, where he arrived on September 2, 1949. He rented three rooms in part of a building that had been a seventeenth-century abbot's residence, for the equivalent of $30 a month. He spent three winter months there in near solitude.
Poet Kenneth Rexroth has recorded that Graves painted at Chartres Cathedral every day, taking in details, fragments of statues, bits of lichened masonry, and making several pictures of the interior of the cathedral in the early morning, with the great vault half filled with thick fog, and dawn beginning to sparkle in the windows. It is not improbable that in the cathedral's great circular stained glass windows, Graves found resonance with the mandalas of Buddhist tanka paintings. He regarded the cathedral as "a great diagram of how to enter heaven, but to enter requires tremendous skill, and this I must acquire through the act of painting" (Harper's Bazaar).
Brassai, the noted French photographer, captured Graves's portrait one day at Chartres. Cigarette in hand, with a tousle of uncombed dark hair and an ample black beard, he gazes at the camera with an air of consternation, looking like nothing so much as a hollow-eyed political prisoner. A sheepskin vest over a worn sweater protects him from the cathedral's dank chill. Behind his head, a partially completed painting is visible, showing the chalky outline of a short, wide-rimmed vase, whose opening is tipped sharply toward the viewer. A closed white bud droops to the right, while a few other flowers have begun to take shape against the rim.
It is the only record extant of his paintings that winter, and it bears no resemblance to the subjects mentioned by Rexroth. Later, in Seattle, deeply dissatisfied with his work, he destroyed nearly everything he had painted at Chartres. Elizabeth Willis, who saw the body of work before Graves destroyed it, wrote, "I vaguely remember that the work was sort of hard drawings and a few paintings of gargoyles; in fact nothing that I wanted him to show to anyone." She recalled that after Graves came back from Chartres, "He was never the same again. All the old and beautiful sensitivity had faded, the Inner Eyes, the consciousness, all that was gone" (Willis papers). Others close to Graves disagree with this assessment. Graves returned to Seattle in 1950 with tastes for possessions that he had not had before, and with a desperate need for money to fund the ongoing work on Careladen. Willis, on whom he had relied for sales in both Seattle and New York, had become acting assistant director at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco. She continued to sell work by both Graves and Tobey, but rarely produced enough money to satisfy Graves.
Practicing Voodoo
In December, infuriated that Dr. Fuller was stalling about buying a couple of paintings he had offered, Graves wrote to her jubilantly: "I made a little likeness of [Dick Fuller] out of mud, and thrust long cedar splinters through it and stomped & stomped & stomped on it & then threw it into the stove. Next day the paper said Dr. F. was jailed for drunken driving, and the next day it said Dr. F. refused bail, and the next day it said his house had caught on fire and burned the telephone wires so he couldn't call the fire department .... I'll wait until he's out of jail. Then if he wants to go ahead and buy the two paintings, I'll send him a note of acceptance & also tell him that I'll leave his mother alone too! All this about Dick Fuller is true" (Willis Papers, 1-3). "Morris used to get sick rages when no one would buy his paintings," Willis said (Willis papers, 5-14). But, if he was sometimes childish and petty, he could also take the high ground. In 1950, he wrote a much-quoted letter to Melvin Kohler, then associate director of the Henry Art Gallery. It said, in part:
"There are three 'spaces': Phenomenal Space (the world of nature, of phenomena), the space outside of us; Mental Space, the space within which dreams occur and the images of the imagination take shape; Space of Consciousness, the space within which is revealed (made visible upon subtle levels of the mind) the abstract principles of the Origin, operation, and ultimate experience of consciousness. It is from this Space of Consciousness that comes the universally significant images and symbols of the greatest of religious works of art. The observer can readily see from which 'space' an artist has taken his ideas and forms .... The majority of artists along with the majority of laymen have either no inclination to understand their own ability to segregate these "spaces' and be informed by them, or they 'enjoy the confusion and unintelligibility which results from blindly mixing these three spaces. The value of enjoying the arts is that the energy channeled into the esthetic emotions refines and sensitizes the mind so that it can more skillfully seek and more readily grasp, an understanding of the Origin of Consciousness. In great religious works of art, the unique value of the revealed images and symbols is that they become supports for the mind of the person who is seeking knowledge of the cause (and ultimate goal) of this mad-sublime dance we call LIFE. Secular and scientific 'art' is concerned with evolution. Religious art is concerned with involution" (Graves to Melvin Kohler).
California Beckons
His stay in the Northwest was brief. Later that year, he bought property in Loleta, some seventeen miles south of Eureka, in northern California. He told Wesley Wehr: "When I was very young, I drove through this area with my family. I remember looking out the car window at this landscape and telling myself, 'Someday I'm going to live here.' Several years ago I learned that there was some property here with a private lake, and surrounded by virgin redwood trees. The woman who owned the property, I was told, would not consider selling any of it to anyone. Then she heard somehow that it was I who wanted to buy her property to live on. She had heard of me, and she said I would, as an artist, respect the pristine beauty of her property and take good care of it" (Wesley Wehr, unpublished notes). He built a house off a dirt road through a gate, past a farmhouse, through a second gate, down a narrow dirt road through a forest. The secluded new house was designed by Seattle architect Ibsen Nelsen.
The Shift Toward Incandescence
The move marked a dramatic shift in Graves's paintings. No longer was any metaphysical intuition implied in his images. Gone were the black and gray washes. In their place, he produced still life paintings that glowed with incandescent yellows, and rosy pinks, and deep, jewel-like carmine. Against chalky, fading surfaces reminiscent of aged fresco, he set small, intimate objects: a bottle or two of wildflowers and perhaps a bowl of plums, so placed as to suggest that each is an individual treasure, an icon. A line of single blossoms, each in its own simple container, radiated a sense of "beingness" that is little short of reverential. As still lifes, they were profoundly still. The subjects seem to be not flowers or fruit, but light. They are painted so delicately that the pigment seems breathed into place. Graves projected intensity into them by rendering the images veiled and shimmering, suggesting not only the fleeting life of blossoms, but the evanescence of life itself.
Coming Full Circle
The still life paintings came at a point in Graves's life when he was no longer interested in embedding a message in his paintings. "My first interest is Being -- along the way I am a painter," he said. "As a painter I am aware of the ‘Sky of the Mind' " ("Morris Graves: Vessels of Transformation, 1932-1986") In returning to wildflowers, Graves had come full circle from his childhood. But this time, he conveyed a heightened awareness of Beauty as an absolute concept. In 1979, he returned to the theme of birds, rendering Spirit Bird and Moon Bird centered in chalky tondos. He also produced what is perhaps his most beautiful bird painting ever, the tripartite Waking, Walking, Singing in the Next Dimension. Three birds are enclosed in sumi-style circular sweeps of white, their bodies translucent against a softly glowing rainbow ground. Although many artists have put form to states of mind, it is difficult to think of another painter as involved as Graves was for most of his career in symbolic representations of consciousness. For him, consciousness often assumed the form of a bird, or of a chalice -- a form of the Holy Grail, a time-honored symbol of the search for truth and redemption.
No small part of Graves's talent lay in the matter of titling his paintings. Attach a mundane title such as Spring Study to the painting Graves titled Bird Maddened by Machine Age Noise, or Crane to Conscious Assuming the Form of a Crane, and you diminish it by half. Art critic Mark Daniel Cohen called Graves's title The Opposite of Life Is Not Death; The Opposite of Life Is Time, 1962/99 "the best title for a work of visual art I have encountered" (Cohen). No discussion of Graves would be complete without mention of the time and extraordinary energy he devoted to creating aesthetic living environments, especially with limited means. Always unique, rarefied well beyond the usual constraints of low income, they were exemplary havens of beauty and serenity. Known only to his intimate friends, the succession of his homes -- The Rock, Careladen, Woodtown Manor in Ireland, and The Lake in Loleta -- are his least-known and most unsung works of art.
In a recent accolade, in January 2000, the Humboldt Arts Council rededicated Eureka's old Carnegie Library as the Morris Graves Museum of Art. It would have been fitting for a Graves Museum to be sited in the Northwest, near Seattle. But, like the abortive plans for a Mark Tobey Museum, it was not to be. Graves died peacefully at home May 5, 2001, a few hours after suffering a stroke. His longtime companion Robert Yarber reported that at the moment of Graves's death, a heron cried out from the lake outside his window. Just 19 days later, The
Dr. Paul Henrickson
Painter, Sculptor, Art Critic, Art & Creativity Educator, Gozo, Malta
Creativity Packet is an innovative puzzle that liberates creative spirit. Dr. Paul and I both share an aesthetic and a vital interest in the nature and expression of creativity, based on the works of our respective mentors, Dr. E. Paul Torrence and Dr. John Curtis Gowan and Dr. Stanley Krippner (all experts on creativity and taxonomies of creative states or the continuum of creativity). Through his juxtapositions of art with commentary, I've learned as much from Dr. Paul about pattern recognition as I have from my intelligence contacts though in a much different way. He also has plenty to say about educational practice and art production. His works are luminous.
Dr. Paul Henrickson was born in Massachusetts, (USA). He attended The Rhode Island School of Design, The University of Massachusetts (Boston), Clark University (Worcester), Statens Kunstakademiet (Oslo, Norway), The University of Oslo, and got his doctorate at The University of Minnesota. Dr. Paul Henrickson offered art criticism seminars in New Mexico, has administered Art Departments and Divisions of Fine Arts at Vallet City State College, (North Dakota), Radford University, (Virginia), The University of Guam, (M.I.) and was on research assignments at The University of Minnesota and the University of Northern Iowa where the background for The Creativity Packet was originated. Dr. Henrickson has also published articles in several professional journals in the areas of education, art and archeology, and presented research results, along with Dr. R.E.Taylor, at the South Eastern Psychological Association meeting in Miami, Florida.
http://www.tcp.com.mt/henrickson.htm
Dr. PAUL HENRICKSON'S CREATIVITY PACKET
INSTRUCTION vs. MAIEUSIS
This is a letter to both the teacher and the educator. The teacher being one who teaches a process and the educator one who is the midwife for the person.
At various levels of sophistication and with different intensities or sharpness of focus those interested in the phenomenon of DIFFERENCE, something being different, are aware, at some point along the way, that there is a range of difference from the shiny yellow buttercup to the exotic orchid.
. Wild buttercup c. Greg Allikas
Perhaps the metaphor is too inept. Let’s say, simply, that if anything can be measured the units in the measurement can be arranged along a line or continuum so that one can see, at a glance, that at both ends of this continuum the units have less of the quality or characteristic being measured than the units in the middle. That is true, that is, if the display takes the form of a normal “bell” curve.
It is not doubted that each unit has its particular characteristics, uses, values etc, and have them in considerable variety BUT, for the characteristic being studied the linear arrangement mentioned is the easiest to understand. Add to the linear arrangement the idea of frequency of occurrence and we get what is called a “bell curve” which shows us that at one end of the line there are few units, in the middle there are many, and at the other end of the line there are also few units. Therefore, if one is interested in the average behavior or characteristic one looks at the numbers of units in the middle. On the other hand if it is the rarer occurrence of a characteristic one seeks one looks to either end of the line. If there has been a qualitative factor imbedded in the study then, usually, the most desirable characteristics of the units will be found at the right end of the line.
In our studies on creativity the characteristics that have interested us have been evidences of flexibility, fluency, elaboration, manipulations, in short, evidence of the subject’s involvement with the task.
To continue with the, perhaps, inadequate metaphor all of the subjects, or units have their uses and their special attractiveness and it is probably equally without doubt that there are probably more buttercups than there are orchids. I haven’t made the count recently, but when I had roamed the fields and woods I found more buttercups than I did lady slippers. The quality I was looking for was structural complexity.
A woodland lady slipper
The point of all this being that in order to find the rare we have first to find the more usual. And reality being what it is in order to accomplish that goal a survey of some sort must take place.
In the area of identifying the person with the creative mind set and subsequently assisting that person to bring into form the product of his imagination it has long been acknowledged that it is helpful to take notice of how the person responds to experiences. This is very different from evaluating a person’s performance on a test where the correct answers have been pre-determined. It is important to remember that the one predetermining the correct answer is not the subject but some exterior unit. This means, in effect, that the subject’s value in whatever quality or characteristic is being tested is in terms of an application of alien values upon the subject . This is precisely the approach used in the vast majority of school systems and it underscores the difference I like to make between being a teacher and being an educator. The teacher teaches a process and evaluates his own and the student’s success by the number of predetermined correct responses. The educator carefully evaluates the behavior of the subject and attempts to coach the subject in appropriate elaborations of the behavior.
There have been several tasks developed to help the observing educator determine who in his environment may be the unusually creative thinker. Among these are two of my designs that have been successfully used by researchers (E.P.Torrance and R.E. Taylor) from time to time in their work. These are The Creativity Design Task and The Just Suppose Task. Both of these, in various forms, are used in the services offered at the website THE CREATIVITY PACKET.
Out of these earlier studies came a new slant on the awareness that part of the explanation for a limited response to non-verbal graphic material was due to the absence of exposure to and experience with such material and that if such experience were more often available and a value placed upon it that performances with the material would be enhanced. We still believe that to be true.
As a way of increasing a subject’s experience in this area and keeping in mind the perennial problem of school budgets we have designed a number of puzzles which are based on the sciences of color, pattern, and vision. These puzzles are also unconventional as compared to the traditional puzzle in that they lack a recognizable subject matter and the convolutions in shape characteristic of most puzzles, educational or otherwise, available presently.
These differences in shape and subject matter have their distinct educational values however. Both shape and subject matter in the traditional puzzle provide clues as to the predetermined solution to the puzzle. While the absence of a recognizable subject matter itself encourages the puzzle solver or player to look more closely at the characteristics of the image for clues, the pieces of the puzzle, being simple squares without extrusions and indentations expands by many time the available choices which may lead to a solution. While in the traditional puzzle there is only one predetermined way of fitting the piece of the puzzle into the system in the creativity puzzle these choices range from 4-64 depending upon how far along one had progressed. These more intense and more concentrated efforts of puzzle solution provide a portion of the needed experience in visual education
A series of forty or more unconventional puzzles have been designed and are now set up for production. and can be viewed in the educational section of that same web site, The Creativity Packet www.tcp.com.mt . Examples are shown here
The puzzle above is assembled. The white lines between the squares indicate the edges of the smaller squares. In the original the small squares measure 2” on a side. The completed puzzle measures c. 8”x8”.
The above represents an unassembled puzzle. You are invited to try your luck in assembling it and for yourself experience the thought processes a less experienced mind would encounter. Print it out, cut out the pieces and assemble them into a square the way you think the artist intended the image to look.
In summary, this set off forty puzzles is graded and ranges from the simple to the complex , but what remains the same in each and all of them and is untraditional to their design is that they lack the involved in and out configuration of most puzzles which provide the player with additional clues to the solution. They also lack a subject matter which also provides a clue to the player and because these usual clues to the puzzle solution are absent the player is thrown back upon his ability to reconstruct using purely non-objective graphic clues to arrive at what the designer’s original intention may have been. There are many times more choices to be considered and made in this puzzle format than in the traditional puzzle format thus providing an enriched learning experience for the player…young or old. Learning, that is, in the detection of a visual logic a talent as valuable to the military expert as it is to the art critic.
For additional information please refer to THE CREATIVITY PACKET at www.tcp.com.mt in the section on education.
____________________________
IN BROAD DAYLIGHT
By Paul Henrickson © 2003
PREFACE
Different approaches to looking, when viewed in an unbiased way, enable the viewer to considerably enlarge, however temporarily, the stockpile of available interpretations of whatever it is that is being viewed and judged. That is why one of the major aims of this book is to assist in the process of education, that is, that is, the drawing out of one’s perception.
What happens whenever this approach is used to look at the reality of our environment is that the process of making a decision is drawn out like a fine thread more sensitive to breezes, a final decision is delayed and a greater richness in the components of that decision assured.
The black and white illustration here was selected to attempt to demonstrate at least one Image aspect of the process of perception. It is alleged to have been what a troubled man believed he saw when in some anxiety of spirit over whether God existed, or not, he took a lonely walk in an isolated wood on a snowy evening, fell to his knees upon the ground and in considerable desperation buried his face in his hands and groaned “Oh God, if you exist, SHOW yourself to me!” He, then, opened his eyes and this image is what he saw. Is the reader willing to speak out what it is, he thinks, this man saw?
Various approaches to looking when viewed in an unbiased way enable the viewer to considerably enlarge the stockpile of available temporary interpretations of what ever it is being viewed or judged.
What happens whenever this approach is used to assess one’s environmental reality is that the process of making a final decision is delayed and a greater richness in the components of that final decision is assured.
There are times when I think looking at objects which purport to be art, the serious observer goes through a similar experience of frustrating self doubt which can, from time to time reach the level of anti-social behavior in retaliation to having one’s world-view challenged.
That, for example, seemed to have been what afflicted the late President Truman who, infuriated by a music critic who made an uncomplimentary remark about the President’s daughter, Margaret’s, vocal recital threatened to give the critic a black eye and the need for a truss for the support of his genitalia. So much for presidential subtlety. The President’s image of his only daughter was obviously not in line with that of the music critic, but then, should we expect them to be in line? Passions do mount.
I’ve recounted the above anecdote to prepare the reader for the possibility of my making remarks, which may, at the very least, be challenging. It is my hope, to be sure, that most of my remarks will be found to be challenging (otherwise why bother to write?), and that, consequently, this dialogue may mature.
INTRODUCTION
While many surveys of the history of art automatically include a section on what is generally called prehistoric in the reasonable assumption that such works can be understood as providing some sort of base line for the hypothesis that art is one way in which man communicates with man, and, even more importantly, that that communication has experienced development, progression, and enrichment. This last, which is one of my aims, is often undeveloped in most texts dealing with the subject and a logically evolving spinning of factual content avoided. This neglect I hope to remedy.
I have accepted the legitimacy of that hypothesis for additional reasons as well. While in the beginning of the twenty-first century Santa Fe, New Mexico had incontestably attained the reputation of being a center for the arts very little, beyond a survey of numbers, had been attempted in the area of formulating an understanding of the hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs which are to be found through out the entire south west United States. While, to my knowledge, no prehistoric art site has been discovered in the area which compares in pictorial grandeur to the caves at Lascaux even in the relatively limited geographical area in the environs of Santa Fe the possibility for identifying a range of subject matter, probably intent and technical expertise in recording sophisticated perception is, without any doubt whatever, possible.
The petroglyphs which are handily available within an hour’s drive of Santa Fe have provided me with sufficient graphic material, some of which I present in this book, to call the reader’s attention to their existence and to point out some critical areas of attention which might be helpful in understanding the probable mindsets of their creators.
The few that I have chosen to illustrate here are, in my opinion, extremely valuable documents, not merely in their being able to help us understand how the artistic techniques and the symbolisms involved evolved as well as the purposes to which the petroglyphs were put but some of the raise questions in yet another area of human experience in that some of the images seem to offer evidence that European man, namely the Vikings of Norway, were here more than a millennium ago, or, even more awesomely, that aliens from other planets may have been here as well.
Ellis Paul Torrance, "The Creativity Man," is know throughout the world for his work in developing ways to assess and nurture creativity in all human beings. He developed the most widely used tests of creativity, created the Future Problem Solving Program, developed the Incubation Model of Teaching, and continued his study of the Minnesota participants in his longitudinal study of creativity. By the tim he retired from the University of Georgia as a Professor Emeritus, he had published 1,117 books, articles, chapters, tests, and book reviews, as well as delivered countless speeches and workshops at national and international sties. Best known books include Guiding Creative Talent, Rewarding Creative Behavior, The Search for Satori and Creativity, The Incubation Model of Teaching, Mentor Relationships, and Why Fly. His most recent books are such co-authored works as Gifted and Talented Children in the Regular Classroom, Multicultural Mentoring of the Gifted and Talented, Making the Creative Leap Beyond, and Spiritual Intelligence: Developing Higher Consciousness.
Dr. Paul Henrickson was born in Massachusetts, (USA). He attended The Rhode Island School of Design, The University of Massachusetts (Boston), Clark University (Worcester), Statens Kunstakademiet (Oslo, Norway), The University of Oslo, and got his doctorate at The University of Minnesota. Dr. Paul Henrickson offered art criticism seminars in New Mexico, has administered Art Departments and Divisions of Fine Arts at Vallet City State College, (North Dakota), Radford University, (Virginia), The University of Guam, (M.I.) and was on research assignments at The University of Minnesota and the University of Northern Iowa where the background for The Creativity Packet was originated. Dr. Henrickson has also published articles in several professional journals in the areas of education, art and archeology, and presented research results, along with Dr. R.E.Taylor, at the South Eastern Psychological Association meeting in Miami, Florida.
http://www.tcp.com.mt/henrickson.htm
Dr. PAUL HENRICKSON'S CREATIVITY PACKET
INSTRUCTION vs. MAIEUSIS
This is a letter to both the teacher and the educator. The teacher being one who teaches a process and the educator one who is the midwife for the person.
At various levels of sophistication and with different intensities or sharpness of focus those interested in the phenomenon of DIFFERENCE, something being different, are aware, at some point along the way, that there is a range of difference from the shiny yellow buttercup to the exotic orchid.
. Wild buttercup c. Greg Allikas
Perhaps the metaphor is too inept. Let’s say, simply, that if anything can be measured the units in the measurement can be arranged along a line or continuum so that one can see, at a glance, that at both ends of this continuum the units have less of the quality or characteristic being measured than the units in the middle. That is true, that is, if the display takes the form of a normal “bell” curve.
It is not doubted that each unit has its particular characteristics, uses, values etc, and have them in considerable variety BUT, for the characteristic being studied the linear arrangement mentioned is the easiest to understand. Add to the linear arrangement the idea of frequency of occurrence and we get what is called a “bell curve” which shows us that at one end of the line there are few units, in the middle there are many, and at the other end of the line there are also few units. Therefore, if one is interested in the average behavior or characteristic one looks at the numbers of units in the middle. On the other hand if it is the rarer occurrence of a characteristic one seeks one looks to either end of the line. If there has been a qualitative factor imbedded in the study then, usually, the most desirable characteristics of the units will be found at the right end of the line.
In our studies on creativity the characteristics that have interested us have been evidences of flexibility, fluency, elaboration, manipulations, in short, evidence of the subject’s involvement with the task.
To continue with the, perhaps, inadequate metaphor all of the subjects, or units have their uses and their special attractiveness and it is probably equally without doubt that there are probably more buttercups than there are orchids. I haven’t made the count recently, but when I had roamed the fields and woods I found more buttercups than I did lady slippers. The quality I was looking for was structural complexity.
A woodland lady slipper
The point of all this being that in order to find the rare we have first to find the more usual. And reality being what it is in order to accomplish that goal a survey of some sort must take place.
In the area of identifying the person with the creative mind set and subsequently assisting that person to bring into form the product of his imagination it has long been acknowledged that it is helpful to take notice of how the person responds to experiences. This is very different from evaluating a person’s performance on a test where the correct answers have been pre-determined. It is important to remember that the one predetermining the correct answer is not the subject but some exterior unit. This means, in effect, that the subject’s value in whatever quality or characteristic is being tested is in terms of an application of alien values upon the subject . This is precisely the approach used in the vast majority of school systems and it underscores the difference I like to make between being a teacher and being an educator. The teacher teaches a process and evaluates his own and the student’s success by the number of predetermined correct responses. The educator carefully evaluates the behavior of the subject and attempts to coach the subject in appropriate elaborations of the behavior.
There have been several tasks developed to help the observing educator determine who in his environment may be the unusually creative thinker. Among these are two of my designs that have been successfully used by researchers (E.P.Torrance and R.E. Taylor) from time to time in their work. These are The Creativity Design Task and The Just Suppose Task. Both of these, in various forms, are used in the services offered at the website THE CREATIVITY PACKET.
Out of these earlier studies came a new slant on the awareness that part of the explanation for a limited response to non-verbal graphic material was due to the absence of exposure to and experience with such material and that if such experience were more often available and a value placed upon it that performances with the material would be enhanced. We still believe that to be true.
As a way of increasing a subject’s experience in this area and keeping in mind the perennial problem of school budgets we have designed a number of puzzles which are based on the sciences of color, pattern, and vision. These puzzles are also unconventional as compared to the traditional puzzle in that they lack a recognizable subject matter and the convolutions in shape characteristic of most puzzles, educational or otherwise, available presently.
These differences in shape and subject matter have their distinct educational values however. Both shape and subject matter in the traditional puzzle provide clues as to the predetermined solution to the puzzle. While the absence of a recognizable subject matter itself encourages the puzzle solver or player to look more closely at the characteristics of the image for clues, the pieces of the puzzle, being simple squares without extrusions and indentations expands by many time the available choices which may lead to a solution. While in the traditional puzzle there is only one predetermined way of fitting the piece of the puzzle into the system in the creativity puzzle these choices range from 4-64 depending upon how far along one had progressed. These more intense and more concentrated efforts of puzzle solution provide a portion of the needed experience in visual education
A series of forty or more unconventional puzzles have been designed and are now set up for production. and can be viewed in the educational section of that same web site, The Creativity Packet www.tcp.com.mt . Examples are shown here
The puzzle above is assembled. The white lines between the squares indicate the edges of the smaller squares. In the original the small squares measure 2” on a side. The completed puzzle measures c. 8”x8”.
The above represents an unassembled puzzle. You are invited to try your luck in assembling it and for yourself experience the thought processes a less experienced mind would encounter. Print it out, cut out the pieces and assemble them into a square the way you think the artist intended the image to look.
In summary, this set off forty puzzles is graded and ranges from the simple to the complex , but what remains the same in each and all of them and is untraditional to their design is that they lack the involved in and out configuration of most puzzles which provide the player with additional clues to the solution. They also lack a subject matter which also provides a clue to the player and because these usual clues to the puzzle solution are absent the player is thrown back upon his ability to reconstruct using purely non-objective graphic clues to arrive at what the designer’s original intention may have been. There are many times more choices to be considered and made in this puzzle format than in the traditional puzzle format thus providing an enriched learning experience for the player…young or old. Learning, that is, in the detection of a visual logic a talent as valuable to the military expert as it is to the art critic.
For additional information please refer to THE CREATIVITY PACKET at www.tcp.com.mt in the section on education.
____________________________
IN BROAD DAYLIGHT
By Paul Henrickson © 2003
PREFACE
Different approaches to looking, when viewed in an unbiased way, enable the viewer to considerably enlarge, however temporarily, the stockpile of available interpretations of whatever it is that is being viewed and judged. That is why one of the major aims of this book is to assist in the process of education, that is, that is, the drawing out of one’s perception.
What happens whenever this approach is used to look at the reality of our environment is that the process of making a decision is drawn out like a fine thread more sensitive to breezes, a final decision is delayed and a greater richness in the components of that decision assured.
The black and white illustration here was selected to attempt to demonstrate at least one Image aspect of the process of perception. It is alleged to have been what a troubled man believed he saw when in some anxiety of spirit over whether God existed, or not, he took a lonely walk in an isolated wood on a snowy evening, fell to his knees upon the ground and in considerable desperation buried his face in his hands and groaned “Oh God, if you exist, SHOW yourself to me!” He, then, opened his eyes and this image is what he saw. Is the reader willing to speak out what it is, he thinks, this man saw?
Various approaches to looking when viewed in an unbiased way enable the viewer to considerably enlarge the stockpile of available temporary interpretations of what ever it is being viewed or judged.
What happens whenever this approach is used to assess one’s environmental reality is that the process of making a final decision is delayed and a greater richness in the components of that final decision is assured.
There are times when I think looking at objects which purport to be art, the serious observer goes through a similar experience of frustrating self doubt which can, from time to time reach the level of anti-social behavior in retaliation to having one’s world-view challenged.
That, for example, seemed to have been what afflicted the late President Truman who, infuriated by a music critic who made an uncomplimentary remark about the President’s daughter, Margaret’s, vocal recital threatened to give the critic a black eye and the need for a truss for the support of his genitalia. So much for presidential subtlety. The President’s image of his only daughter was obviously not in line with that of the music critic, but then, should we expect them to be in line? Passions do mount.
I’ve recounted the above anecdote to prepare the reader for the possibility of my making remarks, which may, at the very least, be challenging. It is my hope, to be sure, that most of my remarks will be found to be challenging (otherwise why bother to write?), and that, consequently, this dialogue may mature.
INTRODUCTION
While many surveys of the history of art automatically include a section on what is generally called prehistoric in the reasonable assumption that such works can be understood as providing some sort of base line for the hypothesis that art is one way in which man communicates with man, and, even more importantly, that that communication has experienced development, progression, and enrichment. This last, which is one of my aims, is often undeveloped in most texts dealing with the subject and a logically evolving spinning of factual content avoided. This neglect I hope to remedy.
I have accepted the legitimacy of that hypothesis for additional reasons as well. While in the beginning of the twenty-first century Santa Fe, New Mexico had incontestably attained the reputation of being a center for the arts very little, beyond a survey of numbers, had been attempted in the area of formulating an understanding of the hundreds of thousands of petroglyphs which are to be found through out the entire south west United States. While, to my knowledge, no prehistoric art site has been discovered in the area which compares in pictorial grandeur to the caves at Lascaux even in the relatively limited geographical area in the environs of Santa Fe the possibility for identifying a range of subject matter, probably intent and technical expertise in recording sophisticated perception is, without any doubt whatever, possible.
The petroglyphs which are handily available within an hour’s drive of Santa Fe have provided me with sufficient graphic material, some of which I present in this book, to call the reader’s attention to their existence and to point out some critical areas of attention which might be helpful in understanding the probable mindsets of their creators.
The few that I have chosen to illustrate here are, in my opinion, extremely valuable documents, not merely in their being able to help us understand how the artistic techniques and the symbolisms involved evolved as well as the purposes to which the petroglyphs were put but some of the raise questions in yet another area of human experience in that some of the images seem to offer evidence that European man, namely the Vikings of Norway, were here more than a millennium ago, or, even more awesomely, that aliens from other planets may have been here as well.
Ellis Paul Torrance, "The Creativity Man," is know throughout the world for his work in developing ways to assess and nurture creativity in all human beings. He developed the most widely used tests of creativity, created the Future Problem Solving Program, developed the Incubation Model of Teaching, and continued his study of the Minnesota participants in his longitudinal study of creativity. By the tim he retired from the University of Georgia as a Professor Emeritus, he had published 1,117 books, articles, chapters, tests, and book reviews, as well as delivered countless speeches and workshops at national and international sties. Best known books include Guiding Creative Talent, Rewarding Creative Behavior, The Search for Satori and Creativity, The Incubation Model of Teaching, Mentor Relationships, and Why Fly. His most recent books are such co-authored works as Gifted and Talented Children in the Regular Classroom, Multicultural Mentoring of the Gifted and Talented, Making the Creative Leap Beyond, and Spiritual Intelligence: Developing Higher Consciousness.
Genesis P. Orridge
Radical Artist & Musician; Cultural Engineer
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson 22 February 1950) is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. His early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution, pornography, serial killers, occultism and his own exploration of gender issues, generated controversy. Later musical work with Psychic TV received wider exposure, including some chart-topping singles. P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases. In 1971, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs after a brief correspondence. One of the most significant outcomes of these exchanges was Burroughs' introduction of P-Orridge to Brion Gysin.[4] Gysin would become a major influence upon P-Orridge's ideas and works and was his primary tutor in magic. (P-Orridge, 2003)
Genesis relocated to Brooklyn, New York City with his second wife, Lady Jaye, née Jacqueline Breyer, and began an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one pandrogynous being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge".[citation needed] Genesis P-Orridge received breast implants and began referring to himself as s/he. A book of GP-O writings, poems and observations, called Ooh, You Are Awful... But I Like You!, was published in Nepal[.In the mid-1990s, GP-O collaborated with different people in music, including Pigface, Skinny Puppy, and Download. GP-O also performed with Nik Turner and a reinvention of Hawkwind, a band with whom he'd shared bills in the early 1970s.[citation needed]
In June 1998, GP-O won a $1.5 million lawsuit against producer Rick Rubin and his American Recordings label for injuries he sustained while trying to escape a fire at Rubin's home in April 1995.[5] According to P-Orridge's attorney, David D. Stein, P-Orridge was staying at Rubin's home as a guest of Love and Rockets when the fire broke out. P-Orridge tried to escape the house by crawling through a second-story window and fell onto concrete stairs. P-Orridge suffered a broken wrist, broken ribs and a pulmonary embolism, as well as a shattered left elbow that will prevent him from playing guitar or keyboards, according to Stein. The jury found that the liability for the fire rested with Rubin and American Recordings and awarded P-Orridge $1,572,000 for his injuries.[citation needed]
In 1999, Genesis performed with the briefly reunited late 1980s' version of Psychic TV for an event at London's Royal Festival Hall, called Time's Up. This is also the title of the first CD by Thee Majesty, Genesis' spoken word project with noise guitarist Bryin Dall. The MC for the event, via pre-recorded video, was Quentin Crisp. A DVD was made of this event, which included the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Question Mark & the Mysterians, Billy Childish, and Thee Headcoats. The aforementioned Thee Majesty CD Time's Up was released by The Order of the Suffering Clown via World Serpent Distribution. Jaqueline Megson is credited as providing Point Of View, Bryin Dall for Frequency Of Truth and Genesis as Divination Of Word.
In December 2003, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, calling himself Djinn, unveiled PTV3, a new act drawing upon the early "Hyperdelic" work of Psychic TV with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff among its members. On 16 May 2004 all four former members of Throbbing Gristle performed at the London Astoria for the first time in 23 years. Genesis P-Orridge appears in the 1998 film and 2000 book versions of Modulations, in the 1999 film Better Living Through Circuitry, in the 2004 film DiG!, the 2006 documentary Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback, and in Nik Sheehan's 2007 feature documentary on the Dreamachine entitled 'FLicKeR'.
On 11 October 2007, it was announced that Lady Jaye had died. This message was posted on the official Genesis P-Orridge website: "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and her reactivated Psychic TV aka PTV3 are terribly sad to announce the cancellation of their November North American tour dates. This decision is entirely due to the unexpected passing of band member Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. Lady Jaye died suddenly on Tuesday 9 October 2007 at home in Brooklyn, New York from a previously undiagnosed heart condition which is thought to have been connected with her long-term battle with stomach cancer. Lady Jaye collapsed and died in the arms of her heartbroken "other half" Genesis Breyer P-Orridge."[6] Psychic TV's current incarnation, PTV3, has recently released the new CD/DVD set, Mr. Alien Brain vs. The Skinwalkers. The album, which was released on 9 December 2008, was the first full length release since the death of Genesis' "other half". The two had previously embarked on a years-long pursuit of pandrogyny, undergoing painful plastic surgery procedures in order to become gender-neutral human beings that looked like each other[7].
We started out, because we were so crazy in love, just wanting to eat each other up, to become each other and become one. And as we did that, we started to see that it was affecting us in ways that we didn't expect. Really, we were just two parts of one whole; the pandrogyne was the whole and we were each other's other half. [8] On 04 November 2009, it was announced that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is retiring from touring in any and all bands including Throbbing Gristle & Psychic TV to concentrate on art, writing and music. P-Orridge is now represented by the New York gallery, Invisible-Exports.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is a true legend of the Anglo-American underground, an avant-garde anti-hero whose remarkable body of work reminds us that what is dangerous and what is important are never far apart—and that, when you believe something, artistic integrity demands that you live by it too. P-Orridge first achieved recognition with the 1969 founding of COUM Transmissions, a confrontational performance collective heavily influenced by Dada, which was later transformed into the band Throbbing Gristle. (P-Orridge would, in 1981, found the ground-breaking band, Psychic TV.) By the time COUM disbanded in 1976, it had helped push the boundaries and shatter the definitions of performance and contemporary art, paving the way for later transgressive work. The culmination of COUM was the 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA in London, which featured a stripper,used Tampax sculptures, repurposed pornography and transvestite guards, and caused such a commotion that the British Parliament reconsidered government funding for public art and labeled P-Orridge and h/er collaborators . “Wreckers of Civilization”.
In the early 1970s, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs, who introduced h/er to Brion Gysin, marking the beginning of a seminal and influential collaborative relationship. Burroughs, under Gysin’s tutelage, repopularized the “cut-up ”technique of the early 20th century Surrealists, in which text, or narrative imagery, is cut up and re-organized, creating a new, non-linear formulation. The supremely Dadaist practice would influence P-Orridge throughout h/er career and remains an integral element of h/er work.
P-Orridge was an early participator in Fluxus and Mail Art, applying the theories of John Cage (upon which the foundations of Fluxus are built) on the pressed recording “Early Worm” in 1968, and exchanging works with Ray Johnson among others. Responding to P-Orridge’s Mail Art, the British General Post Office charged h/er in 1976 with sending “indecent and offensive material” through the mail, including desecrated images of the Queen. Like many artists at this time, P-Orridge rejected market-driven work, choosing instead to maintain an artist-centered creative nucleus in which work was shared within a community, and was never intended to enter the commercialized art world. P-Orridge later began an occultist practice influenced by the theories of the artist Austin Osman Spare. The “sigils” they performed explored the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self through magical techniques such as automatic writing, drawing and actions, relics of which can be found in many of P-Orridge’s collage work.
In the 1990s, P-Orridge began a collaboration with the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer, which focused on a single, central concern—deconstructing the fiction of self. Influenced again by “cut-up” techniques and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity and on the language of true love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied the strategy of “cutting-up” to their own bodies, in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, “pandrogynous” character, “BREYER P-ORRIDGE".They embraced a painterly, gestural approach to their own bodies, making expressive and startling use of signifiers like eyebrows, lips, and breasts, in order to resemble one another as much as possible. The work was an exercise in elective, creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousnesses, a symbolic gesture towards evolution and true union. Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, the project continues with Genesis embodying the entirety of BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Genesis P-Orridge and BREYER P-ORRIDGE have exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain.
Genesis relocated to Brooklyn, New York City with his second wife, Lady Jaye, née Jacqueline Breyer, and began an ongoing experiment in body modification aimed at creating one pandrogynous being named "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge".[citation needed] Genesis P-Orridge received breast implants and began referring to himself as s/he. A book of GP-O writings, poems and observations, called Ooh, You Are Awful... But I Like You!, was published in Nepal[.In the mid-1990s, GP-O collaborated with different people in music, including Pigface, Skinny Puppy, and Download. GP-O also performed with Nik Turner and a reinvention of Hawkwind, a band with whom he'd shared bills in the early 1970s.[citation needed]
In June 1998, GP-O won a $1.5 million lawsuit against producer Rick Rubin and his American Recordings label for injuries he sustained while trying to escape a fire at Rubin's home in April 1995.[5] According to P-Orridge's attorney, David D. Stein, P-Orridge was staying at Rubin's home as a guest of Love and Rockets when the fire broke out. P-Orridge tried to escape the house by crawling through a second-story window and fell onto concrete stairs. P-Orridge suffered a broken wrist, broken ribs and a pulmonary embolism, as well as a shattered left elbow that will prevent him from playing guitar or keyboards, according to Stein. The jury found that the liability for the fire rested with Rubin and American Recordings and awarded P-Orridge $1,572,000 for his injuries.[citation needed]
In 1999, Genesis performed with the briefly reunited late 1980s' version of Psychic TV for an event at London's Royal Festival Hall, called Time's Up. This is also the title of the first CD by Thee Majesty, Genesis' spoken word project with noise guitarist Bryin Dall. The MC for the event, via pre-recorded video, was Quentin Crisp. A DVD was made of this event, which included the Master Musicians of Jajouka, Question Mark & the Mysterians, Billy Childish, and Thee Headcoats. The aforementioned Thee Majesty CD Time's Up was released by The Order of the Suffering Clown via World Serpent Distribution. Jaqueline Megson is credited as providing Point Of View, Bryin Dall for Frequency Of Truth and Genesis as Divination Of Word.
In December 2003, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, calling himself Djinn, unveiled PTV3, a new act drawing upon the early "Hyperdelic" work of Psychic TV with media theorist Douglas Rushkoff among its members. On 16 May 2004 all four former members of Throbbing Gristle performed at the London Astoria for the first time in 23 years. Genesis P-Orridge appears in the 1998 film and 2000 book versions of Modulations, in the 1999 film Better Living Through Circuitry, in the 2004 film DiG!, the 2006 documentary Monks: The Transatlantic Feedback, and in Nik Sheehan's 2007 feature documentary on the Dreamachine entitled 'FLicKeR'.
On 11 October 2007, it was announced that Lady Jaye had died. This message was posted on the official Genesis P-Orridge website: "Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and her reactivated Psychic TV aka PTV3 are terribly sad to announce the cancellation of their November North American tour dates. This decision is entirely due to the unexpected passing of band member Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. Lady Jaye died suddenly on Tuesday 9 October 2007 at home in Brooklyn, New York from a previously undiagnosed heart condition which is thought to have been connected with her long-term battle with stomach cancer. Lady Jaye collapsed and died in the arms of her heartbroken "other half" Genesis Breyer P-Orridge."[6] Psychic TV's current incarnation, PTV3, has recently released the new CD/DVD set, Mr. Alien Brain vs. The Skinwalkers. The album, which was released on 9 December 2008, was the first full length release since the death of Genesis' "other half". The two had previously embarked on a years-long pursuit of pandrogyny, undergoing painful plastic surgery procedures in order to become gender-neutral human beings that looked like each other[7].
We started out, because we were so crazy in love, just wanting to eat each other up, to become each other and become one. And as we did that, we started to see that it was affecting us in ways that we didn't expect. Really, we were just two parts of one whole; the pandrogyne was the whole and we were each other's other half. [8] On 04 November 2009, it was announced that Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is retiring from touring in any and all bands including Throbbing Gristle & Psychic TV to concentrate on art, writing and music. P-Orridge is now represented by the New York gallery, Invisible-Exports.
Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE is a true legend of the Anglo-American underground, an avant-garde anti-hero whose remarkable body of work reminds us that what is dangerous and what is important are never far apart—and that, when you believe something, artistic integrity demands that you live by it too. P-Orridge first achieved recognition with the 1969 founding of COUM Transmissions, a confrontational performance collective heavily influenced by Dada, which was later transformed into the band Throbbing Gristle. (P-Orridge would, in 1981, found the ground-breaking band, Psychic TV.) By the time COUM disbanded in 1976, it had helped push the boundaries and shatter the definitions of performance and contemporary art, paving the way for later transgressive work. The culmination of COUM was the 1976 “Prostitution” exhibition at the ICA in London, which featured a stripper,used Tampax sculptures, repurposed pornography and transvestite guards, and caused such a commotion that the British Parliament reconsidered government funding for public art and labeled P-Orridge and h/er collaborators . “Wreckers of Civilization”.
In the early 1970s, P-Orridge met William S. Burroughs, who introduced h/er to Brion Gysin, marking the beginning of a seminal and influential collaborative relationship. Burroughs, under Gysin’s tutelage, repopularized the “cut-up ”technique of the early 20th century Surrealists, in which text, or narrative imagery, is cut up and re-organized, creating a new, non-linear formulation. The supremely Dadaist practice would influence P-Orridge throughout h/er career and remains an integral element of h/er work.
P-Orridge was an early participator in Fluxus and Mail Art, applying the theories of John Cage (upon which the foundations of Fluxus are built) on the pressed recording “Early Worm” in 1968, and exchanging works with Ray Johnson among others. Responding to P-Orridge’s Mail Art, the British General Post Office charged h/er in 1976 with sending “indecent and offensive material” through the mail, including desecrated images of the Queen. Like many artists at this time, P-Orridge rejected market-driven work, choosing instead to maintain an artist-centered creative nucleus in which work was shared within a community, and was never intended to enter the commercialized art world. P-Orridge later began an occultist practice influenced by the theories of the artist Austin Osman Spare. The “sigils” they performed explored the relationship between the conscious and unconscious self through magical techniques such as automatic writing, drawing and actions, relics of which can be found in many of P-Orridge’s collage work.
In the 1990s, P-Orridge began a collaboration with the performance artist Lady Jaye Breyer, which focused on a single, central concern—deconstructing the fiction of self. Influenced again by “cut-up” techniques and frustrated by what they felt to be imposed limits on personal and expressive identity and on the language of true love, P-Orridge and Lady Jaye applied the strategy of “cutting-up” to their own bodies, in an effort to merge their two identities, through plastic surgery, hormone therapy, cross-dressing and altered behavior, into a single, “pandrogynous” character, “BREYER P-ORRIDGE".They embraced a painterly, gestural approach to their own bodies, making expressive and startling use of signifiers like eyebrows, lips, and breasts, in order to resemble one another as much as possible. The work was an exercise in elective, creative identity, and a test of how fully two people could integrate their own lives, bodies, and consciousnesses, a symbolic gesture towards evolution and true union. Although Lady Jaye passed away in 2007, the project continues with Genesis embodying the entirety of BREYER P-ORRIDGE. Genesis P-Orridge and BREYER P-ORRIDGE have exhibited internationally, including recent exhibitions at Deitch Projects, Mass MOCA, Centre Pompidou, Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, Barbican Museum, the Swiss Institute and White Columns, amongst others. Work was recently acquired for the permanent collection of the Tate Britain.
Bob Judd
Multimedia Artist, Filmmaker
Interactive Animation: http://www.subcutaneous.org Bob Judd began working in digital media in 1993 and now hosts Subcutaneous Productions. Both cinematography and electronic animation, as well as interactive webart, help to mirror the inner life of the post-Transgressive filmmaker.
Nothing other term so clearly captures the living essence of the psyche as the aptly named ANIMAtion. The anima is not only the “inner feminine” of man and his soul guide according to Jung, but also the embodiment of the World Soul – that restless panoply of imagery and pervasive mystification that is evident in the anthropological insights about animism. A spirit animates every object. The world and cosmos is alive, not merely dead matter. The secret of the Universe is that “It’s Alive.”
Video-wizard, animator Bob Judd has used psychosexual dreamlike imagery in his award-winning film work (Down, Bovine Vendetta and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America) and his Flash MX projects. He combines highly manipulated still composites with languid dissolves that reveal layer after layer of meaning and hypnotic ambient texture with mind-bending provocative reveals. Buried beneath the interactive presentational montage are an array of “gotchas” that dive into the psyche of the observer causing visceral reactions.
This is true cyberotica – not in the pedestrian sense of internet sex, cheesy skin flicks, or even canned virtual reality fantasies. This is art, in the classical sense that truly moves us from where we are toward where the artist wants to take us. It captivates, enchants, even seduces. It triggers the sensual self. We journey as close as we may come to peering inside the head of another and sharing their dream life in an intimate form of co-consciousness.
The transformative processes, including art, pull us into states of rapport, confrontation, and identification. Even beyond that – it can take us out of ourselves into an expanded awareness. Instead of mundane sorcery like “I Dream of Jeannie” it exalts us and hurls us toward our own potential, more like “I Dream of Genius.” Great art speaks to our own inner Daemon, in the Platonic sense of the word. It changes not only our brain chemistry, but can modify our hardwiring.
Judd has worked in both the corporate and maverick art arenas. He was a lip-synch animator for the smash comedy show and movie, ‘Southpark’ during its first two years. Disenchanted with the Hollywood factory environment, he returned to his own vision, creating award-winning films (one judged by Coppola).
Cinema of Transgression as an invisible movement, pioneered by Nick Zed, came out of NYC with roots in the ‘60s, including the film work of Warhol. Its risk-taking extreme thematics, aesthetic of shock and humour, Dionysian sexual and political alignment, confrontational nihilism, psychodrama, and liberatory strategy warranted this new category. Its therapeutically subversive influences included Warhol, with roots in Dadaism and Nietsche, combining it with Punk. It represented a clear break with ‘70s avant garde film schools. This expanded cinema, including its use as a backdrop for performers, offered transformation through transgression: quasi-existential anarchism.
Judd’s contributions to this contemporary underground cinema include: ‘Down’ (2000), ‘Bovine Vendetta’ (shown on SciFi Channel), and the ironic ‘Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America.’ His work is covered in the Bible of underground cinema, Deathtripping: the Cinema of Transgression, by Jack Sargeant (1999, Creation Books). Judd has returned to dreams for some of his inspiration while remaining true to transgressive sexual and political subversiveness.
I was urged by my high school teachers to go into the arts, but it would be like "taking basket-weaving" according to my father, so I began college as a Journalism major. I found Journalism incredibly boring and quickly changed my major to "Intermedia" one of the newest art majors that were available at ASU at the time. I then noticed that it was much the same as Journalism except I enjoyed what I was doing with the core art classes and I especially liked Art History. I found that creating art was much like being a "reporter of culture". If I could try to express what is happening RIGHT NOW as an American Artist I would have to create versions of 'The Scream' because THAT is the only thing that I can report that I hear on the news --- one massive primal "scream of consciousness". All I see in the world when I view media news is nothing but pain, war and division. This is what I must report. I think you'll see that I ONLY use collage even in my drawings. I always would look at images from different sources and draw them as one composition. Political juxt-a-position with sexual and ancient and medical imagery has ALWAYS been there and likely stay there because that is the way I like to communicate. I don't really see any other way except for my newer "Narsissy" series that are all self portraits where I do the same thing. Like the tumor in my lung that I put Dahmer's dog skulls underneath to scare away any malignancy. I think it worked because after the PET scan there was no cellular activity. Collage work on self is self-surgery. There are some filmmakers who have produced work which, whilst having no relationship to the Cinema of Transgression, nevertheless explores and negates contemporary taboos, moreover they do so in their own style, and by mobilizing their own iconography. The following are merely a soupcon of underground filmmakers currently producing works that may be regarded as transgressive due to its engagement with cultural, social, and psychological taboos.
These filmmakers include Bob Judd who has directed two award- winning experimental shorts using digitized video and computer animation, Bovine Vendetta (1998) and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America (1999). Inspired by a dream, Bovine Vendetta features footage of a house-fly intercut with a cow’s head. (“a 4-H competitor and winning heifer at the Arizona State Fair, 1996,” states Judd) on which a human mouth is superimposed. These images are intercut with effected stills and dissolves of people in preparation for elective surgery. A voice is frantically discussing the absolute state of the now. The voice, the audience are informed in the closing credits is that of pop icon Charles Manson. The film – Judd suggests – is a “satire on people’s infatuation with Manson.
Judd’s second video Jesse Helms Is Cleaning Up America (1999), is a satirical look at ‘Helms’ ‘war on the arts’. Like its predecesor the film was dream-inspired, although Judd acknowledges the film was also motivated by his own desire to attack the Senator. This film once again focuses on dislocated body parts; legs, lips, and penises mix with morphing images of Helms’ head and squirming maggots. The soundtrack was to have been supplied by Hustler founder Larry Flint, but unfortunately this was not possible, and Judd utilized Don Bolles’s audio-archive as a soundtrack source. Like the Cinema of Transgression filmmakers, Judd’s work confronts America with the matrices of death and sex that lay confined within the darkest recesses of the media psyche.
Judd’s third millennium shows include web-based (www.onenationundergods.com) interactive computer installations (blown up screens with Proxima projectors) co-created with multimedia phenom and digital diva, Iona Miller, in Gartel’s Miami Cyberotica show (Dec, ’03). He reprised the show, ‘Forbidden Fruits & Technoshamanism’ in downtown Phoenix (Febuary ’04) at Icehouse Gallery with a screening of his films.
Judd is currently (2004) composing a website for gay icons, The Cockettes, collaborating with founding members Kreemah Ritz and Sweet Pam. He sees himself, and his alter persona ‘Precious’, as the spiritual heir to the legacy of ‘Angel of Light’, Hibiscus, who shared his deep love of free-spirited Isadora Duncan, a cultural harbinger of what became the ‘underground’ spirit. He considers himself an ‘Isadorable.’
• Skilled animator and video/web compositor with emphasis on digital imaging and sound design
• Flash MX animator
• Collaboration Master
• Printmaking/Lithography Skills
• Strong Conceptualization Skills
Studio MX
Gif-Animation
Vector Animation
Java Scripting
Flash Scripting
HTML
Adobe Photoshop/Image Ready • Go Live
Final Cut Pro
Adobe After Effects
Media 100
Alias Power-Animator 8.5
3/4" Linear Editing
Garage Band, Sound Edit 16 --> many other sound applications
Photography (digital, hi-8, beta-cam)
All phases of video production
Nothing other term so clearly captures the living essence of the psyche as the aptly named ANIMAtion. The anima is not only the “inner feminine” of man and his soul guide according to Jung, but also the embodiment of the World Soul – that restless panoply of imagery and pervasive mystification that is evident in the anthropological insights about animism. A spirit animates every object. The world and cosmos is alive, not merely dead matter. The secret of the Universe is that “It’s Alive.”
Video-wizard, animator Bob Judd has used psychosexual dreamlike imagery in his award-winning film work (Down, Bovine Vendetta and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America) and his Flash MX projects. He combines highly manipulated still composites with languid dissolves that reveal layer after layer of meaning and hypnotic ambient texture with mind-bending provocative reveals. Buried beneath the interactive presentational montage are an array of “gotchas” that dive into the psyche of the observer causing visceral reactions.
This is true cyberotica – not in the pedestrian sense of internet sex, cheesy skin flicks, or even canned virtual reality fantasies. This is art, in the classical sense that truly moves us from where we are toward where the artist wants to take us. It captivates, enchants, even seduces. It triggers the sensual self. We journey as close as we may come to peering inside the head of another and sharing their dream life in an intimate form of co-consciousness.
The transformative processes, including art, pull us into states of rapport, confrontation, and identification. Even beyond that – it can take us out of ourselves into an expanded awareness. Instead of mundane sorcery like “I Dream of Jeannie” it exalts us and hurls us toward our own potential, more like “I Dream of Genius.” Great art speaks to our own inner Daemon, in the Platonic sense of the word. It changes not only our brain chemistry, but can modify our hardwiring.
Judd has worked in both the corporate and maverick art arenas. He was a lip-synch animator for the smash comedy show and movie, ‘Southpark’ during its first two years. Disenchanted with the Hollywood factory environment, he returned to his own vision, creating award-winning films (one judged by Coppola).
Cinema of Transgression as an invisible movement, pioneered by Nick Zed, came out of NYC with roots in the ‘60s, including the film work of Warhol. Its risk-taking extreme thematics, aesthetic of shock and humour, Dionysian sexual and political alignment, confrontational nihilism, psychodrama, and liberatory strategy warranted this new category. Its therapeutically subversive influences included Warhol, with roots in Dadaism and Nietsche, combining it with Punk. It represented a clear break with ‘70s avant garde film schools. This expanded cinema, including its use as a backdrop for performers, offered transformation through transgression: quasi-existential anarchism.
Judd’s contributions to this contemporary underground cinema include: ‘Down’ (2000), ‘Bovine Vendetta’ (shown on SciFi Channel), and the ironic ‘Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America.’ His work is covered in the Bible of underground cinema, Deathtripping: the Cinema of Transgression, by Jack Sargeant (1999, Creation Books). Judd has returned to dreams for some of his inspiration while remaining true to transgressive sexual and political subversiveness.
I was urged by my high school teachers to go into the arts, but it would be like "taking basket-weaving" according to my father, so I began college as a Journalism major. I found Journalism incredibly boring and quickly changed my major to "Intermedia" one of the newest art majors that were available at ASU at the time. I then noticed that it was much the same as Journalism except I enjoyed what I was doing with the core art classes and I especially liked Art History. I found that creating art was much like being a "reporter of culture". If I could try to express what is happening RIGHT NOW as an American Artist I would have to create versions of 'The Scream' because THAT is the only thing that I can report that I hear on the news --- one massive primal "scream of consciousness". All I see in the world when I view media news is nothing but pain, war and division. This is what I must report. I think you'll see that I ONLY use collage even in my drawings. I always would look at images from different sources and draw them as one composition. Political juxt-a-position with sexual and ancient and medical imagery has ALWAYS been there and likely stay there because that is the way I like to communicate. I don't really see any other way except for my newer "Narsissy" series that are all self portraits where I do the same thing. Like the tumor in my lung that I put Dahmer's dog skulls underneath to scare away any malignancy. I think it worked because after the PET scan there was no cellular activity. Collage work on self is self-surgery. There are some filmmakers who have produced work which, whilst having no relationship to the Cinema of Transgression, nevertheless explores and negates contemporary taboos, moreover they do so in their own style, and by mobilizing their own iconography. The following are merely a soupcon of underground filmmakers currently producing works that may be regarded as transgressive due to its engagement with cultural, social, and psychological taboos.
These filmmakers include Bob Judd who has directed two award- winning experimental shorts using digitized video and computer animation, Bovine Vendetta (1998) and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America (1999). Inspired by a dream, Bovine Vendetta features footage of a house-fly intercut with a cow’s head. (“a 4-H competitor and winning heifer at the Arizona State Fair, 1996,” states Judd) on which a human mouth is superimposed. These images are intercut with effected stills and dissolves of people in preparation for elective surgery. A voice is frantically discussing the absolute state of the now. The voice, the audience are informed in the closing credits is that of pop icon Charles Manson. The film – Judd suggests – is a “satire on people’s infatuation with Manson.
Judd’s second video Jesse Helms Is Cleaning Up America (1999), is a satirical look at ‘Helms’ ‘war on the arts’. Like its predecesor the film was dream-inspired, although Judd acknowledges the film was also motivated by his own desire to attack the Senator. This film once again focuses on dislocated body parts; legs, lips, and penises mix with morphing images of Helms’ head and squirming maggots. The soundtrack was to have been supplied by Hustler founder Larry Flint, but unfortunately this was not possible, and Judd utilized Don Bolles’s audio-archive as a soundtrack source. Like the Cinema of Transgression filmmakers, Judd’s work confronts America with the matrices of death and sex that lay confined within the darkest recesses of the media psyche.
Judd’s third millennium shows include web-based (www.onenationundergods.com) interactive computer installations (blown up screens with Proxima projectors) co-created with multimedia phenom and digital diva, Iona Miller, in Gartel’s Miami Cyberotica show (Dec, ’03). He reprised the show, ‘Forbidden Fruits & Technoshamanism’ in downtown Phoenix (Febuary ’04) at Icehouse Gallery with a screening of his films.
Judd is currently (2004) composing a website for gay icons, The Cockettes, collaborating with founding members Kreemah Ritz and Sweet Pam. He sees himself, and his alter persona ‘Precious’, as the spiritual heir to the legacy of ‘Angel of Light’, Hibiscus, who shared his deep love of free-spirited Isadora Duncan, a cultural harbinger of what became the ‘underground’ spirit. He considers himself an ‘Isadorable.’
• Skilled animator and video/web compositor with emphasis on digital imaging and sound design
• Flash MX animator
• Collaboration Master
• Printmaking/Lithography Skills
• Strong Conceptualization Skills
Studio MX
Gif-Animation
Vector Animation
Java Scripting
Flash Scripting
HTML
Adobe Photoshop/Image Ready • Go Live
Final Cut Pro
Adobe After Effects
Media 100
Alias Power-Animator 8.5
3/4" Linear Editing
Garage Band, Sound Edit 16 --> many other sound applications
Photography (digital, hi-8, beta-cam)
All phases of video production
Cover collaboration - Bob Judd & Iona Miller
Phoenix Art Show - Judd & Miller
Miami Cyberotica Show: Gartel; Judd & Miller - Electronica & Wall Art Commentary
Laurence Gartel
Digital Art Pioneer, Miami
LAURENCE GARTEL, Digital Media PioneerArtistic Background:
Mr. Gartel is considered to be the "FATHER" of the Digital Art movement around the world for over 30 years. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Joan Whitney Payson Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Princeton Art Museum, PS 1, Norton Museum, Palm Beach Photographic Center and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History and the Bibliotheque Nationale. His biography for his pioneering efforts is included in "Who's Who," "Who's Who in the East," "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Art," and "Who's Who in the World." Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Gartel taught Andy Warhol how to use the Amiga Computer, when he got the commission to do the cover of Debbie Harry's (Blondie) album cover. Gartel went to School of Visual Arts and associated with fellow student, graffiti artist Keith Haring, where he earned his BFA degree majoring in Graphics. Garel went to CW Post College going for his MA in photography studying under Arthur Liepzig. Gartel started his electronic career working side by side with Nam June Paik at Media Study/Buffalo in upstate New York in 1975. Gartel had many associations with musicians such as Debbie Harry (Blonde) Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols), Stiv Bators (Dead Boys) Johnny Thunders (New York Dolls) Ace Frehley (Kiss) and Wendy O Williams (Plasmatics). Recently, Gartel has created artwork for such Pop Culture stars such as Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. His ABSOLUT GARTEL commission for Absolut Vodka is perhaps his most well known artwork gracing the pages of “ART-IN-AMERICA,” “Artforum,” “Sothebys,” “Art and Auction,””Art and Antiques,” “ArtByte,” “Scientific American,” “Technology Review,” “WIRED,” & “NY Magazine.. It is known as the first Digital Photographc ever ever created for this famous advertising campaign and is included in ABSOLUT BOOK by Richard Lewis.
He has several monograph books on his work:
"Laurence Gartel: A Cybernetic Romance" published by Gibbs Smith, (c) 1989 Utah. Introduction to the book is written by video guru Nam June Paik. "GARTEL: Arte & Tecnologia" published by Edizioni Mazzotta, (c) 1998 Milan, Italy. Introduction to the book is written by noted art historian and critic Pierre Restany. 250 pages over 400 color plates. Mr. Gartel is included in the Italian Art History Textbook: "La Storia Dell Arte" published by Editions Giunti (c) 2001, Florence. Michelangelo at the front of the book; GARTEL being the last page representing "NEW VISUAL LANGUAGES." Gartel is also included in the book “Art Of the Digital Age” written by Professor Bruce Wands” and published by Thames and Hudson, 2006, as well as “Digital Art” published by Ullman, Germany 2009 and “The Digital Print” published by The Getty Museum, Malibu, California 2009 to name a few.
GARTEL has organized Digital Long Island in November 2007: A Digital Arts Festival showcasing four (4) core exhibitions: Local High School Art Show, National Juried Exhibition, International Invitational Exhibition from established artists from all over the world, as well as a Digital Video Festival.projecting motion graphics projects. The show yielded a full page Sunday New York Times editorial. Returning from London, October 2007 the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum acquired an early (circa 1978) digital video piece for it’s permanent collection. It was both exciting and a most humbling experience. His newest series titled “AUTO MOTION” inspired by the Ferrari automobile has just been shown at the Robert Rauschenberg Museum in Ft. Myers, Florida from August 28- October 10, 2009. GARTEL's new book "AUTO MOTION" published at the same time as the Rauschenberg Gallery exhibition is an oversized, limited edition, gold embossed book. The Introduction is written by Jason Castriota, Designer of the Ferrari 599 and Maserati Gran Tourismo. The book is limited to 2,000 examples, signed and numbered. Artist’s Personal Website: www.gartelmuseum.com
Mr. Gartel is considered to be the "FATHER" of the Digital Art movement around the world for over 30 years. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Joan Whitney Payson Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Princeton Art Museum, PS 1, Norton Museum, Palm Beach Photographic Center and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History and the Bibliotheque Nationale. His biography for his pioneering efforts is included in "Who's Who," "Who's Who in the East," "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Art," and "Who's Who in the World." Born and raised in New York City, Mr. Gartel taught Andy Warhol how to use the Amiga Computer, when he got the commission to do the cover of Debbie Harry's (Blondie) album cover. Gartel went to School of Visual Arts and associated with fellow student, graffiti artist Keith Haring, where he earned his BFA degree majoring in Graphics. Garel went to CW Post College going for his MA in photography studying under Arthur Liepzig. Gartel started his electronic career working side by side with Nam June Paik at Media Study/Buffalo in upstate New York in 1975. Gartel had many associations with musicians such as Debbie Harry (Blonde) Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols), Stiv Bators (Dead Boys) Johnny Thunders (New York Dolls) Ace Frehley (Kiss) and Wendy O Williams (Plasmatics). Recently, Gartel has created artwork for such Pop Culture stars such as Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears. His ABSOLUT GARTEL commission for Absolut Vodka is perhaps his most well known artwork gracing the pages of “ART-IN-AMERICA,” “Artforum,” “Sothebys,” “Art and Auction,””Art and Antiques,” “ArtByte,” “Scientific American,” “Technology Review,” “WIRED,” & “NY Magazine.. It is known as the first Digital Photographc ever ever created for this famous advertising campaign and is included in ABSOLUT BOOK by Richard Lewis.
He has several monograph books on his work:
"Laurence Gartel: A Cybernetic Romance" published by Gibbs Smith, (c) 1989 Utah. Introduction to the book is written by video guru Nam June Paik. "GARTEL: Arte & Tecnologia" published by Edizioni Mazzotta, (c) 1998 Milan, Italy. Introduction to the book is written by noted art historian and critic Pierre Restany. 250 pages over 400 color plates. Mr. Gartel is included in the Italian Art History Textbook: "La Storia Dell Arte" published by Editions Giunti (c) 2001, Florence. Michelangelo at the front of the book; GARTEL being the last page representing "NEW VISUAL LANGUAGES." Gartel is also included in the book “Art Of the Digital Age” written by Professor Bruce Wands” and published by Thames and Hudson, 2006, as well as “Digital Art” published by Ullman, Germany 2009 and “The Digital Print” published by The Getty Museum, Malibu, California 2009 to name a few.
GARTEL has organized Digital Long Island in November 2007: A Digital Arts Festival showcasing four (4) core exhibitions: Local High School Art Show, National Juried Exhibition, International Invitational Exhibition from established artists from all over the world, as well as a Digital Video Festival.projecting motion graphics projects. The show yielded a full page Sunday New York Times editorial. Returning from London, October 2007 the Victoria and Albert (V&A) Museum acquired an early (circa 1978) digital video piece for it’s permanent collection. It was both exciting and a most humbling experience. His newest series titled “AUTO MOTION” inspired by the Ferrari automobile has just been shown at the Robert Rauschenberg Museum in Ft. Myers, Florida from August 28- October 10, 2009. GARTEL's new book "AUTO MOTION" published at the same time as the Rauschenberg Gallery exhibition is an oversized, limited edition, gold embossed book. The Introduction is written by Jason Castriota, Designer of the Ferrari 599 and Maserati Gran Tourismo. The book is limited to 2,000 examples, signed and numbered. Artist’s Personal Website: www.gartelmuseum.com
Professor Roy Ascott
Computer Art Pioneer & Technoetics Theoretician, Great Britain
Roy Ascott was born in Bath, England. He was educated at the City of Bath Boys' School. His National Service was spent as an officer in the Royal Air Force working with radar defence systems[2]). From 1955-59 he studied Fine Art at King's College, University of Durham (now Newcastle University). On graduation he was appointed Studio Demonstrator (1959–61). He then moved to London, where he established the radical Groundcourse at Ealing Art College, which he subsequently established at Ipswich Civic College, in Suffolk. Notable alumni of the Groundcourse include Brian Eno, Pete Townshend, and more.
He taught in London (Ealing[5], and was a visiting lecturer at other London art schools throughout the 1960s. Then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art and Design[6], Toronto, before moving to California as Vice-President and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute, during the 1970s. He was Professor for Communications Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna[7] during the 1980s, and Professor of Technoetic Arts at the University of Wales, Newport in the 1990s.[6]
He has advised new media arts organisations in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Europe and North America [7], as well as UNESCO[8], and since 2000 has been a Visiting Professor in Design/Media Art[8] at the UCLA School of the Arts. He is the founding editor of Technoetic Arts, journal of speculative research.[9], and an Honorary Editor of Leonardo Journal. Ascott was an International Commissioner for the XLII Venice Biennale of 1986 (Planetary Network and Laboratorio Ubiqua [10]).
He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium an advanced research center which he set up in 2003 at the University of Plymouth, UK, where he is Professor of Technoetic Arts. The Collegium currently has nodes (linked centers) in Zurich [11], and Milan[12]. Since the 1960s, Roy Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic and telematic art.[13]
In his first show (1964) at the Molton Gallery, London [9], he exhibited Analogue Structures and Diagram Boxes, comprising change-paintings and other works in wood, perspex and glass. In 1964 Ascott published "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" in Cybernetica: journal of the International Association for Cybernetics). In 1972, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Ascott has shown at the Venice Biennale, Electra Paris, Ars Electronica, V2 Institute for the Unstable Media [10], Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az at Graz, Austria. His first telematic project was La Plissure du Texte (1983), [11] an online work of "distributed authorship" involving artists around the world. The second was his "gesamtdatenwerk" Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989),an installation for the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, discussed in The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge, 2007.
In 1968, he was elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London. Interactive computer art: Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a working with interactive computer art, telematic art.[14] and systems art. Ascott built a theoretical framework for approaching interactive artworks, which brought together certain characteristics of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, and Pop Art with the science of cybernetics.
He taught in London (Ealing[5], and was a visiting lecturer at other London art schools throughout the 1960s. Then briefly was President of Ontario College of Art and Design[6], Toronto, before moving to California as Vice-President and Dean of San Francisco Art Institute, during the 1970s. He was Professor for Communications Theory at the University of Applied Arts Vienna[7] during the 1980s, and Professor of Technoetic Arts at the University of Wales, Newport in the 1990s.[6]
He has advised new media arts organisations in Brazil, Japan, Korea, Europe and North America [7], as well as UNESCO[8], and since 2000 has been a Visiting Professor in Design/Media Art[8] at the UCLA School of the Arts. He is the founding editor of Technoetic Arts, journal of speculative research.[9], and an Honorary Editor of Leonardo Journal. Ascott was an International Commissioner for the XLII Venice Biennale of 1986 (Planetary Network and Laboratorio Ubiqua [10]).
He is the founding president of the Planetary Collegium an advanced research center which he set up in 2003 at the University of Plymouth, UK, where he is Professor of Technoetic Arts. The Collegium currently has nodes (linked centers) in Zurich [11], and Milan[12]. Since the 1960s, Roy Ascott has been a practitioner of interactive computer art, electronic art, cybernetic and telematic art.[13]
In his first show (1964) at the Molton Gallery, London [9], he exhibited Analogue Structures and Diagram Boxes, comprising change-paintings and other works in wood, perspex and glass. In 1964 Ascott published "Behaviourist Art and the Cybernetic Vision" in Cybernetica: journal of the International Association for Cybernetics). In 1972, he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.
Ascott has shown at the Venice Biennale, Electra Paris, Ars Electronica, V2 Institute for the Unstable Media [10], Milan Triennale, Biennale do Mercosul, Brazil, European Media Festival, and gr2000az at Graz, Austria. His first telematic project was La Plissure du Texte (1983), [11] an online work of "distributed authorship" involving artists around the world. The second was his "gesamtdatenwerk" Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989),an installation for the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, discussed in The Total Work of Art: from Bayreuth to Cyberspace, New York: Routledge, 2007.
In 1968, he was elected Associate Member of the Institution of Computer Science, London. Interactive computer art: Since the 1960s, Ascott has been a working with interactive computer art, telematic art.[14] and systems art. Ascott built a theoretical framework for approaching interactive artworks, which brought together certain characteristics of Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, Happenings, and Pop Art with the science of cybernetics.
Robert Bruce Newman
Poet, Artist, Teacher, Wellness Advocate
Fluxus Artist, Poet, Lama, Calm Birth, Calm Healing: Robert Bruce Newman is the developer of Calm Birth. From his years of work with doctors, childbirth educators, midwives, nurses, and doulas, has come a new childbirth method. It's based on methods he learned and was authorized to teach during his more than 20 years of apprenticeship with Tibetan meditation teachers and doctors. He has presented more than 100 hospital and conference training seminars in the Calm Birth method since 1997. He has presented the method twice at the world congress of the Association of Pre and Perinatal Psychology and Health (2/02, 3/05), at the University of Michigan Medical School (3/04), and at Bastyr University (4/05). He has taught at the University of Colorado, Naropa University, and the City University of New York. His books include: Calm Birth: New Method for Conscious Childbirth (North Atlantic Books, 10/05); and Calm Healing: Methods for a New Era of Medicine (North Atlantic Books, 11/06). Published feature articles include: The Emergence of Mind/Body Medicine (Sentient Times, 8/99). DISCIPLES OF THE BUDDHA,Living Images of Meditation - with an introduction by Chogyam Trungpa by Robert Newman :
The book Disciples of the Buddha brings together the imagery of the eight surviving "Lohan" statues, from arguably the most renowned of all surviving ceramic works of Eastern art. The complete original work probably consisted of 16 or 18 statues and was a consummate achievement of human ability. They reveal stages and states of meditation. This book gives us a vivid sense of art traditions crucial to the understanding of human skill, the realization of art and a glimpse into a period of history in which those traditions appeared and largely disappeared. Newman, founder and president of the World Health Foundation, has written an unusual and highly engaging text on eight famous statues of the Lohans, principal disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha. The book includes not only plates depicting each of these highly distinctive works of art but also historical backgrounds, reflections by Chogyam Trungpa as well as Newman himself, and a translation of a Tibetan Buddhist text dealing with these and other legendary Buddhist teachers. Pleasing to the eye as well as the mind, this is highly recommended where there is a strong interest in Buddhism or Eastern arts. Introduction to Disciples of the Buddha (2001) is an in-depth interview with Chögyam Trungpa, conducted by Robert Newman and included in Newman's book by that title. Trungpa Rinpoche discusses the meditative realization that can be seen in the I-chou Lohans, Chinese statues of the disciples of the Buddha, which Trungpa felt were powerful expressions of the meditative state of mind. "I think that these statues are expressions of nonverbal experience that the artist had in the state of arhathood. The statues are powerful because they are filled with a state of experience....We could say that these images present the particular realization of Buddha's sanity in his disciples...The images are done with a sense of awe and reverence, in a very sacred application. And so the images are very human at the same time kind of superhuman".- Chogyam Trungpa (from the introduction)
"Robert Newman's Disciples of the Buddha results from many years of study from both inside and outside the Buddhist community. This thoughtful study of the remarkably life-like ceramic sculptures of the Tang Dynasty casts a searching light on a tradition long lost. Are these images more than their physical substance? Can one define their spirituality? This work teases us into an urgent sense of reality. " -Ronald M. Bernier, Professor of Art History, University of Colorado. Several ceramic statues of Lohans, legendary disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha, were brought into the Peking art market in 1913. They had been found by pirates in a secluded shrine cave, high on a mountain, not easily accessible, near I-Chou, Hopei Province. The statues may have been in the cave for centuries. They are called the "I-Chou Lohans". All are distinguished by a dramatic life-like presence. We do not know who made the statues or where they were made. There were probably 16 or 18 in the original set. They may have been made in a ceramic factory or in a monastary. We will never know the external circumstances of their creation and yet these disciples look as fresh and alive as if they just came out of the kiln. We can sense from them the depth and range of the entire original work.
The original set of statues was a large scale work representing direct connection to the Buddha. The statues are human images with superhuman features. They are living portraits of meditation that connect us to our potential, the awakened state. Fredrick Perzynski remembers when the first of the I-Chou Lohan statues appeared in the Peking art market. "At the time we called him a priest since, despite his traditionally elongated ears, he emanated the striking pictoral power of a portrait." Upon discovering another of the I-Chou Lohans he notes: "His neck is broken off, as well as a piece from his shoulder and his feet. In his hands he holds a scroll. His head leans against the wall next to the torso. In its coloring of faded ivory it appears like the head of a decapitated man. As on the previous occasions in seeing [I-Chou Lohan statues] its powerful expression affects me like an electric shock." * Sometime in 1969, I was wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I walked into the presence of two of the I-Chou Lohan statues. At the moment that I started to step closer to one of them, I had what is the most remarkable experience I've ever had with a work of art. I saw something impossible, something miraculous. The statue was alive. I thought what I was seeing was a living form. I was then moved by the sense of flesh, the tissue quality in the throat, in the mouth, up into the cheekbones, into the enlarged brows, over and between the eyes. The statue had large buddha ears. The mouth was closed and the expression was silent. The eyes were open and I felt that they were seeing me. There seemed to be a force in the eyes, and knowledge of flesh and mind; a real sense of the world; a haunting smile; and stillness. I began to ask about the statues. People thought they were extraordinary, and some had striking experiences with them, seeing them as alive.
* See Marion Wolfe's article, "The Lohans From I-Chou" Oriental Art, Vol. XV, #1, Spring 1969. Perzynski's involvement in the discovery of the I-Chou Lohans is described there. He seems to have been centrally responsible for the placement of several of the I-Chou Lohans in western museums.
The Inner Meaning of Legendary Works of Buddhist Art slide lecture presents life-like images of renowned statues of the disciples of the Buddha (Lohans, Chinese; Arhats, Sanskrit). The ceramic statues constitute the remaining half of the greatest single work of art from the Orient. These are the famous statues that embody the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha reflected in his direct disciples. They reveal many qualities of realization. The images are from the book, Disciples of the Buddha; Living Images of Meditation by Robert Bruce Newman. It has an extensive introduction by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the revered Buddhist meditation master. He said of these lohan-disciples: "I think that the statues are expressions of nonverbal experience that the artist had in the state of arhathood. The statues are powerful because they are filled with a state of experience. We could say that these images present the particular realization of the Buddha's sanity in his disciples. The images are done with a sense of awe and reverence, in a very sacred application. And so the images are very human and at the same time kind of superhuman." Robert Bruce Newman worked closely with Tibetan meditation masters and doctors for more than 20 years. He was authorized to teach the meditation practice embodied in the work he is presenting. He taught at the University of Colorado, Naropa University, and the City University of New York. His publications include: The Lohan Statues and the Stages of Realization; Loca, Random House, 2/75 Disciples of the Buddha; Living Images of Meditation; Cool Grove Press, 4/01The I-Chou Lohan Statues; Shambhala Sun, Halifax, NS; 5/01 Calm Birth; New Method for Conscious Childbirth; North Atlantic Books; 10/05 Calm Healing; Medicine for a New Era; North Atlantic Books; 11/06 Mr. Newman is president of Medigrace, which has been researching and developing programs in the medical uses of meditation since 1991. He has presented more than 100 training seminars in West Coast hospitals since 1997.
The book Disciples of the Buddha brings together the imagery of the eight surviving "Lohan" statues, from arguably the most renowned of all surviving ceramic works of Eastern art. The complete original work probably consisted of 16 or 18 statues and was a consummate achievement of human ability. They reveal stages and states of meditation. This book gives us a vivid sense of art traditions crucial to the understanding of human skill, the realization of art and a glimpse into a period of history in which those traditions appeared and largely disappeared. Newman, founder and president of the World Health Foundation, has written an unusual and highly engaging text on eight famous statues of the Lohans, principal disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha. The book includes not only plates depicting each of these highly distinctive works of art but also historical backgrounds, reflections by Chogyam Trungpa as well as Newman himself, and a translation of a Tibetan Buddhist text dealing with these and other legendary Buddhist teachers. Pleasing to the eye as well as the mind, this is highly recommended where there is a strong interest in Buddhism or Eastern arts. Introduction to Disciples of the Buddha (2001) is an in-depth interview with Chögyam Trungpa, conducted by Robert Newman and included in Newman's book by that title. Trungpa Rinpoche discusses the meditative realization that can be seen in the I-chou Lohans, Chinese statues of the disciples of the Buddha, which Trungpa felt were powerful expressions of the meditative state of mind. "I think that these statues are expressions of nonverbal experience that the artist had in the state of arhathood. The statues are powerful because they are filled with a state of experience....We could say that these images present the particular realization of Buddha's sanity in his disciples...The images are done with a sense of awe and reverence, in a very sacred application. And so the images are very human at the same time kind of superhuman".- Chogyam Trungpa (from the introduction)
"Robert Newman's Disciples of the Buddha results from many years of study from both inside and outside the Buddhist community. This thoughtful study of the remarkably life-like ceramic sculptures of the Tang Dynasty casts a searching light on a tradition long lost. Are these images more than their physical substance? Can one define their spirituality? This work teases us into an urgent sense of reality. " -Ronald M. Bernier, Professor of Art History, University of Colorado. Several ceramic statues of Lohans, legendary disciples of Shakyamuni Buddha, were brought into the Peking art market in 1913. They had been found by pirates in a secluded shrine cave, high on a mountain, not easily accessible, near I-Chou, Hopei Province. The statues may have been in the cave for centuries. They are called the "I-Chou Lohans". All are distinguished by a dramatic life-like presence. We do not know who made the statues or where they were made. There were probably 16 or 18 in the original set. They may have been made in a ceramic factory or in a monastary. We will never know the external circumstances of their creation and yet these disciples look as fresh and alive as if they just came out of the kiln. We can sense from them the depth and range of the entire original work.
The original set of statues was a large scale work representing direct connection to the Buddha. The statues are human images with superhuman features. They are living portraits of meditation that connect us to our potential, the awakened state. Fredrick Perzynski remembers when the first of the I-Chou Lohan statues appeared in the Peking art market. "At the time we called him a priest since, despite his traditionally elongated ears, he emanated the striking pictoral power of a portrait." Upon discovering another of the I-Chou Lohans he notes: "His neck is broken off, as well as a piece from his shoulder and his feet. In his hands he holds a scroll. His head leans against the wall next to the torso. In its coloring of faded ivory it appears like the head of a decapitated man. As on the previous occasions in seeing [I-Chou Lohan statues] its powerful expression affects me like an electric shock." * Sometime in 1969, I was wandering through the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. I walked into the presence of two of the I-Chou Lohan statues. At the moment that I started to step closer to one of them, I had what is the most remarkable experience I've ever had with a work of art. I saw something impossible, something miraculous. The statue was alive. I thought what I was seeing was a living form. I was then moved by the sense of flesh, the tissue quality in the throat, in the mouth, up into the cheekbones, into the enlarged brows, over and between the eyes. The statue had large buddha ears. The mouth was closed and the expression was silent. The eyes were open and I felt that they were seeing me. There seemed to be a force in the eyes, and knowledge of flesh and mind; a real sense of the world; a haunting smile; and stillness. I began to ask about the statues. People thought they were extraordinary, and some had striking experiences with them, seeing them as alive.
* See Marion Wolfe's article, "The Lohans From I-Chou" Oriental Art, Vol. XV, #1, Spring 1969. Perzynski's involvement in the discovery of the I-Chou Lohans is described there. He seems to have been centrally responsible for the placement of several of the I-Chou Lohans in western museums.
The Inner Meaning of Legendary Works of Buddhist Art slide lecture presents life-like images of renowned statues of the disciples of the Buddha (Lohans, Chinese; Arhats, Sanskrit). The ceramic statues constitute the remaining half of the greatest single work of art from the Orient. These are the famous statues that embody the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha reflected in his direct disciples. They reveal many qualities of realization. The images are from the book, Disciples of the Buddha; Living Images of Meditation by Robert Bruce Newman. It has an extensive introduction by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the revered Buddhist meditation master. He said of these lohan-disciples: "I think that the statues are expressions of nonverbal experience that the artist had in the state of arhathood. The statues are powerful because they are filled with a state of experience. We could say that these images present the particular realization of the Buddha's sanity in his disciples. The images are done with a sense of awe and reverence, in a very sacred application. And so the images are very human and at the same time kind of superhuman." Robert Bruce Newman worked closely with Tibetan meditation masters and doctors for more than 20 years. He was authorized to teach the meditation practice embodied in the work he is presenting. He taught at the University of Colorado, Naropa University, and the City University of New York. His publications include: The Lohan Statues and the Stages of Realization; Loca, Random House, 2/75 Disciples of the Buddha; Living Images of Meditation; Cool Grove Press, 4/01The I-Chou Lohan Statues; Shambhala Sun, Halifax, NS; 5/01 Calm Birth; New Method for Conscious Childbirth; North Atlantic Books; 10/05 Calm Healing; Medicine for a New Era; North Atlantic Books; 11/06 Mr. Newman is president of Medigrace, which has been researching and developing programs in the medical uses of meditation since 1991. He has presented more than 100 training seminars in West Coast hospitals since 1997.
EXCERPT FROM DR. LIFE VASE by Robert Bruce Newman
THE EMERGENCE OF BOOKWORK ART
In 1966 I began working on a book centered on photographs of human eyes, using headlines and captions, as in advertising design. It was a process that was to take almost two years to perfect. By the time it was finished I had generated two distinctly new kinds of art work, one in the form of a book, and the other in the form of rooms with electric mirrors. [For the information that follows I've relied on the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition Alternatives In Retrospect presented at the New Museum of Art, NYC, NY, April, 1981, curated by Jackie Apple. The catalogue, with an essay by Mary Delahoyd, is my source for much of the data below.]
The book looked like a human head with prominent eyes. The cover and most of the pages centered on human eyes, given meaning by words above and below, telling a story about the human condition. The pages and the book size were 9 by 12 inches. On the cover, above my eyes, was the title, SIGNS. Below the eyes was my name. It was finished in May, 1967 and was featured in a Dwan Gallery exhibition called Language, just inside the entrance to the exhibition. It was the first exhibited work of bookwork art in a major midtown gallery.
At the same time that I was working with words and hundreds of photographs of the human face, I was also working with words on mirrors, getting language to function with living imagery, the live mirror image. The mirror work would need carefully designed and controlled exhibition space, where the space and timing of the use of language and image was well-managed. There was no existing presentation format for such work at that time, an exhibition space where language was a primary factor in the art.
I was very aware that various poet friends of mine were engaged in work best presented in a spatial format. In short, at that moment in history, poets needed an art gallery.
There was a studio space available for our purposes, definitely off the established gallery path. It was on East 81st Street , off Broadway. It was fated to be a successful off-Broadway art gallery, founded by poets. Since many of the art critics of the time were poets, and since many of them were interested in innovations in language working with visual processes, there was a good chance that such poets could bring such a gallery to life.
GAIN GROUND
The studio was at 269 East 81st Street , on the top floor of the building, the 7th floor, well above the street. The space was 40 feet by 40 feet in size, with an overhead skylight. It was leased by Naomi Dash, who became co-director with me, believing in the vision. At this point it just needed a name. It took me about 10 days. When it came, it came with a boom: Gain Ground. In reviewing our first one man show, John Perreault, a prominent art critic of that time, wrote that Gain Ground was the best name for an art gallery he’d ever heard.
After much preparation, in April, 1967, Gain Ground opened with a rocking first show, a large collection of art works made by poets. It was called: Bookwork Art, Objects Made by Poets, Word Art, and Poetic Visions. Among the talents represented were Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Michael Benedikt, Carol Berge, Charles Frazier, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Ron Gross, Bici Forbes Hendricks, Jackson MacLow, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Newman, John Perreault, Patricia Sloan, Hannah Weiner, and others.
John Giorno offered a fine silk-screened poster keyed on the repetition of the words “I’m tired of being afraid.”
I showed my first speaking mirror, catching the live image in the mirror with inescapable caption:
HERE’S A LIVE PHOTOGRAPH OF YOU
HOWEVER YOU THINK YOU LOOK
There were some very gifted original works. The panorama of word-operative art works was so rich that some visitors came two and three times to try to take it all in, over the 4 week installation period.
Besides works on the walls and free-standing works there were three reading tables. On one long table there were three artwork books, the first of that art form ever exhibited: my book SIGNS; Carol Skylark's brilliant 8 ½ by 11 inch book of exquisite cartoon-like drawings of human imagery with evocative hand-written legends; and a gifted book of cut-out words and images by Patricia Sloan. SIGNS was then exhibited at the Dwan Gallery in May 67.
ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC MIRRORS
A month later I followed with an eight-chambered magic theater called Rooms with Electric Mirrors. You entered through silver satin curtains in the gallery door into the first chamber, the Magic Well. Before you was a round lucite table with a mirror center. Above and below the mirror on the lucite were the words
LOOKING DOWN INTO THE MAGIC WELL
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WILD IMAGES IN THE FACE
You approached the table edge and looked down into the mirror, and as you bent over the face in the mirror came up to you, from below, alive with species implications. You could see your ancestors and new faces as fast as you could see.
You exited out the back of that chamber into a room of 7 glimmering silver satin chambers. Most people next entered the chamber to the immediate left. And there you were, well-lighted and framed raw in a live photograph machine consisting of a full-length mirror with words. The words were captions that caught your image:
LOOK WHO’S ALIVE
SEE WHO MOVES
The words alive and move worked with your live image to make you the dramatic subject of a work of pictorial art. And there were 6 other live photograph chambers in which, one by one, you were the dynamic subject.
POWER THRONE
In 1968 I produced another Gain Ground show reversing the subject-object relationship to get something alive in a work of art: Power Throne. The exhibition consisted of a series of rooms, for one person at a time, in which you were immersed in different fields of heart sound.
When it was your turn, an attendant guided you to the inner chamber and parted the curtains for you to enter a red fabric throne room. Two priestesses in ruby dresses came to you graciously to seat you in the power throne.
The throne itself was a transformed dentist's chair, with racks of electronic equipment behind it. A red velvet sash was placed across your chest and your hands were placed one over the other over your heart. What you didn't know was that you were holding a very fine electronic stethoscope over your heart, and concealed behind the throne was the technology called harmonic compression, developed by Bell Labs, that would help you hear in a new way.
After you were seated, microphoned, and relaxed, the priestesses disappeared behind you to work the equipment sensitively. In the first phase you heard your heart coming from 4 speakers in the walls of the chamber, with more information audible in the heart sound than anyone had ever heard. The sound system was designed by Norman Dolff of Columbia Records and engineered by Phillips Electronics. There was an immediately perceptible feedback field.
Then the priestesses placed a pair of fine hi-tec head phones over your ears and you heard the full expression of your heart in your brain. After a minute or so, a voice suddenly entered the electronic mix with your heart sound, a voice in harmonic compression, twice the speed as normal speech but with the same pitch as normal speech, so you hear twice as fast. And the words you hear tell what is beating in your heart:
YOU WON'T KNOW WHAT THE BLOODHEART IN YOU IS FROM MEDICAL
DEFINITIONS OF THE HEART, BUT THE DIAGRAMS OF ITS ELECTRIC
TISSUE WORKS ARE GOOD TO HAVE. THE ELECTRIC MECHANICS OF
THE POWERFUL ORGAN ARE HOT INTANGIBLE, BUT IF SOMETHINGGOES WRONG THERE THE WHOLE BODY OF LIFE HAS THE PAIN.
WHO KNOWS WHAT'S WORKING MIRACLES RED ALL LIVE IN YOU.
WHAT RUNS YOUR ORGANS GLEAMING WITH WHAT THEY DO.
WHO KNOWS WHAT ELECTRIC LIQUIDS CREATE IN YOUR HEAD.
THE UNIVERSE IS EMPTY WITH WHATEVER BEAT YOU HAVE.
HOW SHOULD YOU KNOW THE SPEED OF YOUR FLESH IN ITS ACTION.
IS IT REALLY BEST TO NOT KNOW YOUR ELECTRIC RUSH.
HAVE YOU EVER FELT YOUR HEART VIBRATE SUPERNATURAL TISSUES.
OR DO YOU ONLY FEEL YOUR HEART WHEN YOU'RE FRIGHTENED.
OR WHEN YOU MAY BE A LITTLE WORRIED YOU'VE OVERPUMPED IT.
OR AREN'T YOU THE ONE WHO'S PUMPING YOUR INCREDIBLE FLESH.
YOU MUST BE THE ONE WHO'S ALIVE IN YOUR HEART IN THE THROBBING,
OR AREN'T YOU BEING WORKED IN THE HEART YOU HAVE.
YOUR HEART IS SO RICH WITH BLOOD YOU MAY BE ALL LOVE IN IT,
NO MATTER WHAT YOUR GENES ARE DESIGNED TO BEAR.
THE BLOODFLESH OF YOU MAKES ITS CORONARY MAJESTY,
SO WHATEVER YOU CAN CATCH YOUR HEART WITH YOU BETTER GET.
DON'T HOPE THAT SLEEP WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE SOMETHING ELSE.
THE HEART BEATING IN YOU CAN GO EVEN FASTER IN SLEEP.
“…Two silent red-robed girls glide forward in the redness, seat you in a throne, wrap you in a (concealed) electronic stethoscope and from the speakers (in the walls of the chamber) you are surrounded by the sounds of your own heart beating steady erratic ever-changing hypnotic magnified beats, turning you inside out, making the chamber an enlargement of your body with you at its core…” --Kim Levin, Artnews, March, 1970
“…You are brought through several phases of a heartsound feedback system, encouraging psychic shift to the energies of your heart, to the sound energy mind of your heart…” --Carter Ratcliff, Art International, March, 1970
“Robert Newman’s Power Throne makes a very strong departure from Artaud by effecting a welcome return to the center theme, or ‘matrixed’ presentation…Human gesture punctuates the drama and modifies the effective dimensions of the performance area. All steps in your performance form are set and you complete them. The performance, the spectator-performer, and the author become one in live, nonrepeatable, majestic heart energy, which is THE WORK ITSELF.”
Rita Simon, Arts Magazine, March, 1969
At that time there was a respected art curator, Jim Harithas, who had been director of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC and who was a front-runner for the vacant position of director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jim had been told about my Rooms with Electric Mirrors show, but missed it. When he heard about Power Throne he came to New York to see it. He called a couple of days later and came over to hang out. He said that after he experienced Power Throne he gave a lecture on art history at Hunter College and spoke about the event, telling them it was “a turning point in art history, a major change of perspective.” He wanted to do the show at MOMA when he was appointed director, but that didn’t happen.
WOODSTOCK AT GAIN GROUND
Summer 1969 was vacation time for Gain Ground. The space wasn’t used much. I was upstate New York working on an optical sundial. Also upstate New York , about 50 miles south of where I was, from August 15-18th, the famous Woodstock music festival happened. About August 20th I returned to New York City and found that the largest studio on the same floor as Gain Ground was occupied by the people that had filmed the Woodstock Festival and now were working with great intensity to produce the movie. They were in dire need of more workspace. They came in to visit and talk to me as part of an inevitable move into our space. And so it was that the final editing of the successful movie was in reality done at Gain Ground, and that’s one Gain Ground installation that was like a gift from beyond. Plus they paid us a lot of money for the use of our space for five weeks, money which helped keep Gain Ground going a little longer.
In her chronicle for the New Museum catalogue, “Alternatives in Retrospect” Mary Delahoyd concluded:
“After early spring 1970 the activity at Gain Ground ceased, but this alternative space continued to sponsor programs elsewhere in New York .
A performance with installation by Juan Downey and a program of works by various poet film-makers took place at the Cinematique…Despite the transcient dimension of these last events sponsored by Gain Ground, this place had provoked a new symbiosis of verbal and visual expression.”
THE EMERGENCE OF BOOKWORK ART
In 1966 I began working on a book centered on photographs of human eyes, using headlines and captions, as in advertising design. It was a process that was to take almost two years to perfect. By the time it was finished I had generated two distinctly new kinds of art work, one in the form of a book, and the other in the form of rooms with electric mirrors. [For the information that follows I've relied on the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition Alternatives In Retrospect presented at the New Museum of Art, NYC, NY, April, 1981, curated by Jackie Apple. The catalogue, with an essay by Mary Delahoyd, is my source for much of the data below.]
The book looked like a human head with prominent eyes. The cover and most of the pages centered on human eyes, given meaning by words above and below, telling a story about the human condition. The pages and the book size were 9 by 12 inches. On the cover, above my eyes, was the title, SIGNS. Below the eyes was my name. It was finished in May, 1967 and was featured in a Dwan Gallery exhibition called Language, just inside the entrance to the exhibition. It was the first exhibited work of bookwork art in a major midtown gallery.
At the same time that I was working with words and hundreds of photographs of the human face, I was also working with words on mirrors, getting language to function with living imagery, the live mirror image. The mirror work would need carefully designed and controlled exhibition space, where the space and timing of the use of language and image was well-managed. There was no existing presentation format for such work at that time, an exhibition space where language was a primary factor in the art.
I was very aware that various poet friends of mine were engaged in work best presented in a spatial format. In short, at that moment in history, poets needed an art gallery.
There was a studio space available for our purposes, definitely off the established gallery path. It was on East 81st Street , off Broadway. It was fated to be a successful off-Broadway art gallery, founded by poets. Since many of the art critics of the time were poets, and since many of them were interested in innovations in language working with visual processes, there was a good chance that such poets could bring such a gallery to life.
GAIN GROUND
The studio was at 269 East 81st Street , on the top floor of the building, the 7th floor, well above the street. The space was 40 feet by 40 feet in size, with an overhead skylight. It was leased by Naomi Dash, who became co-director with me, believing in the vision. At this point it just needed a name. It took me about 10 days. When it came, it came with a boom: Gain Ground. In reviewing our first one man show, John Perreault, a prominent art critic of that time, wrote that Gain Ground was the best name for an art gallery he’d ever heard.
After much preparation, in April, 1967, Gain Ground opened with a rocking first show, a large collection of art works made by poets. It was called: Bookwork Art, Objects Made by Poets, Word Art, and Poetic Visions. Among the talents represented were Vito Acconci, Eleanor Antin, Michael Benedikt, Carol Berge, Charles Frazier, John Giorno, Dan Graham, Ron Gross, Bici Forbes Hendricks, Jackson MacLow, Bernadette Mayer, Robert Newman, John Perreault, Patricia Sloan, Hannah Weiner, and others.
John Giorno offered a fine silk-screened poster keyed on the repetition of the words “I’m tired of being afraid.”
I showed my first speaking mirror, catching the live image in the mirror with inescapable caption:
HERE’S A LIVE PHOTOGRAPH OF YOU
HOWEVER YOU THINK YOU LOOK
There were some very gifted original works. The panorama of word-operative art works was so rich that some visitors came two and three times to try to take it all in, over the 4 week installation period.
Besides works on the walls and free-standing works there were three reading tables. On one long table there were three artwork books, the first of that art form ever exhibited: my book SIGNS; Carol Skylark's brilliant 8 ½ by 11 inch book of exquisite cartoon-like drawings of human imagery with evocative hand-written legends; and a gifted book of cut-out words and images by Patricia Sloan. SIGNS was then exhibited at the Dwan Gallery in May 67.
ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC MIRRORS
A month later I followed with an eight-chambered magic theater called Rooms with Electric Mirrors. You entered through silver satin curtains in the gallery door into the first chamber, the Magic Well. Before you was a round lucite table with a mirror center. Above and below the mirror on the lucite were the words
LOOKING DOWN INTO THE MAGIC WELL
WHY ARE THERE SO MANY WILD IMAGES IN THE FACE
You approached the table edge and looked down into the mirror, and as you bent over the face in the mirror came up to you, from below, alive with species implications. You could see your ancestors and new faces as fast as you could see.
You exited out the back of that chamber into a room of 7 glimmering silver satin chambers. Most people next entered the chamber to the immediate left. And there you were, well-lighted and framed raw in a live photograph machine consisting of a full-length mirror with words. The words were captions that caught your image:
LOOK WHO’S ALIVE
SEE WHO MOVES
The words alive and move worked with your live image to make you the dramatic subject of a work of pictorial art. And there were 6 other live photograph chambers in which, one by one, you were the dynamic subject.
POWER THRONE
In 1968 I produced another Gain Ground show reversing the subject-object relationship to get something alive in a work of art: Power Throne. The exhibition consisted of a series of rooms, for one person at a time, in which you were immersed in different fields of heart sound.
When it was your turn, an attendant guided you to the inner chamber and parted the curtains for you to enter a red fabric throne room. Two priestesses in ruby dresses came to you graciously to seat you in the power throne.
The throne itself was a transformed dentist's chair, with racks of electronic equipment behind it. A red velvet sash was placed across your chest and your hands were placed one over the other over your heart. What you didn't know was that you were holding a very fine electronic stethoscope over your heart, and concealed behind the throne was the technology called harmonic compression, developed by Bell Labs, that would help you hear in a new way.
After you were seated, microphoned, and relaxed, the priestesses disappeared behind you to work the equipment sensitively. In the first phase you heard your heart coming from 4 speakers in the walls of the chamber, with more information audible in the heart sound than anyone had ever heard. The sound system was designed by Norman Dolff of Columbia Records and engineered by Phillips Electronics. There was an immediately perceptible feedback field.
Then the priestesses placed a pair of fine hi-tec head phones over your ears and you heard the full expression of your heart in your brain. After a minute or so, a voice suddenly entered the electronic mix with your heart sound, a voice in harmonic compression, twice the speed as normal speech but with the same pitch as normal speech, so you hear twice as fast. And the words you hear tell what is beating in your heart:
YOU WON'T KNOW WHAT THE BLOODHEART IN YOU IS FROM MEDICAL
DEFINITIONS OF THE HEART, BUT THE DIAGRAMS OF ITS ELECTRIC
TISSUE WORKS ARE GOOD TO HAVE. THE ELECTRIC MECHANICS OF
THE POWERFUL ORGAN ARE HOT INTANGIBLE, BUT IF SOMETHINGGOES WRONG THERE THE WHOLE BODY OF LIFE HAS THE PAIN.
WHO KNOWS WHAT'S WORKING MIRACLES RED ALL LIVE IN YOU.
WHAT RUNS YOUR ORGANS GLEAMING WITH WHAT THEY DO.
WHO KNOWS WHAT ELECTRIC LIQUIDS CREATE IN YOUR HEAD.
THE UNIVERSE IS EMPTY WITH WHATEVER BEAT YOU HAVE.
HOW SHOULD YOU KNOW THE SPEED OF YOUR FLESH IN ITS ACTION.
IS IT REALLY BEST TO NOT KNOW YOUR ELECTRIC RUSH.
HAVE YOU EVER FELT YOUR HEART VIBRATE SUPERNATURAL TISSUES.
OR DO YOU ONLY FEEL YOUR HEART WHEN YOU'RE FRIGHTENED.
OR WHEN YOU MAY BE A LITTLE WORRIED YOU'VE OVERPUMPED IT.
OR AREN'T YOU THE ONE WHO'S PUMPING YOUR INCREDIBLE FLESH.
YOU MUST BE THE ONE WHO'S ALIVE IN YOUR HEART IN THE THROBBING,
OR AREN'T YOU BEING WORKED IN THE HEART YOU HAVE.
YOUR HEART IS SO RICH WITH BLOOD YOU MAY BE ALL LOVE IN IT,
NO MATTER WHAT YOUR GENES ARE DESIGNED TO BEAR.
THE BLOODFLESH OF YOU MAKES ITS CORONARY MAJESTY,
SO WHATEVER YOU CAN CATCH YOUR HEART WITH YOU BETTER GET.
DON'T HOPE THAT SLEEP WILL MAKE YOUR LIFE SOMETHING ELSE.
THE HEART BEATING IN YOU CAN GO EVEN FASTER IN SLEEP.
“…Two silent red-robed girls glide forward in the redness, seat you in a throne, wrap you in a (concealed) electronic stethoscope and from the speakers (in the walls of the chamber) you are surrounded by the sounds of your own heart beating steady erratic ever-changing hypnotic magnified beats, turning you inside out, making the chamber an enlargement of your body with you at its core…” --Kim Levin, Artnews, March, 1970
“…You are brought through several phases of a heartsound feedback system, encouraging psychic shift to the energies of your heart, to the sound energy mind of your heart…” --Carter Ratcliff, Art International, March, 1970
“Robert Newman’s Power Throne makes a very strong departure from Artaud by effecting a welcome return to the center theme, or ‘matrixed’ presentation…Human gesture punctuates the drama and modifies the effective dimensions of the performance area. All steps in your performance form are set and you complete them. The performance, the spectator-performer, and the author become one in live, nonrepeatable, majestic heart energy, which is THE WORK ITSELF.”
Rita Simon, Arts Magazine, March, 1969
At that time there was a respected art curator, Jim Harithas, who had been director of the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC and who was a front-runner for the vacant position of director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jim had been told about my Rooms with Electric Mirrors show, but missed it. When he heard about Power Throne he came to New York to see it. He called a couple of days later and came over to hang out. He said that after he experienced Power Throne he gave a lecture on art history at Hunter College and spoke about the event, telling them it was “a turning point in art history, a major change of perspective.” He wanted to do the show at MOMA when he was appointed director, but that didn’t happen.
WOODSTOCK AT GAIN GROUND
Summer 1969 was vacation time for Gain Ground. The space wasn’t used much. I was upstate New York working on an optical sundial. Also upstate New York , about 50 miles south of where I was, from August 15-18th, the famous Woodstock music festival happened. About August 20th I returned to New York City and found that the largest studio on the same floor as Gain Ground was occupied by the people that had filmed the Woodstock Festival and now were working with great intensity to produce the movie. They were in dire need of more workspace. They came in to visit and talk to me as part of an inevitable move into our space. And so it was that the final editing of the successful movie was in reality done at Gain Ground, and that’s one Gain Ground installation that was like a gift from beyond. Plus they paid us a lot of money for the use of our space for five weeks, money which helped keep Gain Ground going a little longer.
In her chronicle for the New Museum catalogue, “Alternatives in Retrospect” Mary Delahoyd concluded:
“After early spring 1970 the activity at Gain Ground ceased, but this alternative space continued to sponsor programs elsewhere in New York .
A performance with installation by Juan Downey and a program of works by various poet film-makers took place at the Cinematique…Despite the transcient dimension of these last events sponsored by Gain Ground, this place had provoked a new symbiosis of verbal and visual expression.”
Excerpt from Carol Berge's Light Years Anthology
http://www.carolberge.com/Lightyears.html
Robert Newman : Gain Ground Opens New Territory
Light Years:
an Anthology on Sociocultural Happenings (Multimedia in the East Village, 1960-1966)
Introduction Vivid personal stories of the poets and writers who leaped out of the literary traditions of the 1950s, blending with other artists to create the excitement of a new art mix called multimedia.
Light Years tells the story of a unique group of poets, novelists, playwrights and book people who associated with visual and performing artists at the core of New York’s emerging East Village Scene in a creative renaissance during the 1960s. The memoirs illustrate how these writers took poetry off the page, how they developed the heady amalgam multimedia. Voices and words were thrust into perspectives where the body and the space around it became extensions of poetry; this is what made the Light Years poets different from others of its era: taking skills into the realms of audio and visual experimentation, and exercising freedom to reconstitute academic learning so as to create new arts. In the intervening decades, the people of Light Years, while achieving as professors, translators, editors, novelists, playwrights, actors, and filmmakers, have also received recognition for work in multimedia.
Their chapters intimate how the avant-garde becomes classical and is incorporated into culture, with innovative performances and adventurous objets d’art forming a basis for a mainstream of the future. No other anthology better illuminates how these poets’ words, music and bodies in motion helped transpose American and European consciousness about the possibilities of modern communication.
The Light Years assemblage was at the leading edge of the evolution into process art, conceptual art, and performance art, moving onto stages, art spaces and sites; therefore, it is entitled to be viewed as part of a First Generation of multimedia artists. Each artist’s chapter shows the development of their art in the years before making it into major museums, Documenta and high-visibility art expositions and publication by art presses, international media and literary presses. The mini-memoirs are like the people who wrote them: frank, brilliant, gossipy, bawdy, sweet, nasty, humorous, revealing, sensual, scholarly—filled with the discerning, variegated discoveries of people driven to be immersed in the art world.
THE GROUPS.
From 1960 to 1966, the poets and other artists who gathered at Tenth Street Coffeeshop, Les Deux Megots and Le Metro in Manhattan formed a Salon des Independants, a unit discrete from other non-academic arts groups in New York and from other groups of writers. It had its own individual texture and characteristics. It was the only cluster moving toward the evolution of a new art form which would jump literature rapidly in the direction of the new century at the edge of new technology, including development of the computer. Four of the larger groups outside of academia have already been given attention in studies and books: The Beats, of San Francisco’s North Beach; the Black Mountain College poets, who mostly read at university and bookshop venues; the original members of and descendants of the New York School as centered on the West Side in upper Manhattan and later at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village, who advocated a particular style of poetry related to glorifying personal events and details of one’s life in a cool, semi-humorous style similar to the elite linguistics of The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly; and Fluxus, “the radically democratic, proto-conceptualist, collective [international] art movement” (definition from Connoisseur Magazine).
At first glance, the Light Years group appears to be a random gathering, but an underlying configuration becomes evident. With a close look, one can establish “order, pattern, arcs of behavior… patterns other people can’t see…” (Shareen Joshi, The Joshi Effect, Santa Fe Institute). This would be the one New York group who propelled poetry onto stages, arenas, halls, lofts and garages as an ingredient of multimedia. Variety would seem this group’s most immediately perceptible characteristic, both as to personae and artistic product. Without a concise name by which it could be quickly identified, people referred to it by the name of the coffeeshop where the weekly readings took place. The other groups, each practicing a particular kind of writing, have been easier to label than one which covered the entire range of writing, from the classically sourced to the crisp corner of the avant-garde and even extending into the new merging of the arts.
There was a highly specialized energy held in common by over 180 apparently disparate artists. Armand Schwerner, a Light Years poet, used “a horde of elective affinities” to describe this group of writers and other artists who came together at three coffeeshops, sequentially from 1960 to 1966, to read their work aloud, exchange gossip and news of the tribe, and develop social relationships of every stripe imaginable (yes, the one you just thought of included). The artists in the Light Years arena were open to many visions and perspectives; they were in a period of intensive personal growth and outreaching in the development of their art. Concurrent groups influenced and had input toward the formation of the individual art being produced at Tenth Street and Deux Megots.
These were academia, Fluxus, experimental theater, multimedia, intermedia, happenings, Abstract Expressionist Art and Pop Art, dance, and contemporary film
QUESTIONS.
What drew these people together? What binding elements, common beliefs, and energy sources caused this group to unite and then keep up a bond for six years? These artists could be found living and working in an area of the city which was on the edge of gentrification—what effect did that locus have? What was the relationship of the Light Years group to the other arts groups of that era? What were the demographics of these people, i.e., what was the personal makeup of the participating artists: point of origin, background, education, spheres of interest, motivations for being involved intensely in producing art? And, very importantly, what were the ingredients that made these group readings internationally famous quite rapidly after the group coalesced?
NAMING NAMES.
At a poetry reading at the Deux Megots Coffeeshop in 1962, the poet Paul Blackburn observed to the editor that there was clearly a core cluster of some 35 writers who consistently showed up, and he used the word leitmotif, the musical form of a repeated theme associated with the appearance and reappearance of a person or idea. He then mentioned Jackson Mac Low’s early book Light Poems; later, when another writer labeled the group as “light years ahead of the contemporary culture,” these comments merged and evolved into the title Light Years. It included the concept that the work being produced here was avant-garde rather than populist, hence was not to achieve wide recognition and acknowledgment until decades later: by 1985, a list of participants in the Coffeehouse Years, 1960-1966, showed that over half of the 180 had received illustrious grants and honors, including NEA, Guggenheim, NYSCA, Obie, Oscar, Emmy and Fulbright. This was of great interest because at that time the artists of the group were regarded as mavericks.
THE BEGINNINGS.
In the winter of 1960, there were no coffeeshops in Manhattan in the area which was becoming known as the East Village. On the edge of 1961 (some writers remember snow on the ground), two entrepreneurs, Mickey Ruskin, a lawyer from New Jersey, and Ed Kaplan, a New Yorker, opened the Tenth Street Coffeeshop on the block between The Bowery and Fourth Avenue, in a building owned by Ed Schwartz. Tenth Street was already attracting Abstract Expressionist artists who were in room-sized galleries or studios (Brata Brothers, Hilda Carmel, Bill deKooning). The area was ripe for gentrification: a run-down district right next to The Bowery, a street with cheap hotels and rooming-houses. When artists move in, it’s the beginning of renovation and rehab. Mickey Ruskin knew something—he was later to achieve renown as the sequential owner of several notable watering-spots: the Ninth Circle and the famous Max’s Kansas City, a bar devoted to visual and literary artists, and the proprietor of an early multimedia locus, Longview Acres. The neighborhood also becomes a newly fashionable destination for people to taste the life of the artist at a safe remove. In 1960-1961, “Mystery Bus Tours” from the Five Towns region of Long Island made regular stops on Tenth Street so that suburban folk could add a vicarious ingredient of risk to their programs. These visitors could easily be the original birth-family of the artists of the East Village.
Coffeehouses have for centuries been a place where one could meet kindred souls for discussion and conversation in a neutral space not as intimate as home. One could take solitary time to jot notes for creative projects. In Paris, famed cafés drew local and expat writers and painters early in the last century; post-war Japan had many coffeehouses in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s had European-influenced coffeeshops, some of which had occasional poetry readings. The Tenth Street Coffeeshop, at street level in a semi-tenement neighborhood of 50-year-old buildings, was a tiny space divided by waist-high wooden verticals on either side of which were tables that could seat two or three. At the far end were coffee-making machines and a cash register. From the onset, this coffeeshop attracted poets, at first an intense group of 10 or 15 and burgeoning until 30 or more writers (and a few painters) were regularly filling the space to overflowing every Thursday evening. At this point, Mickey Ruskin and his new partner, Bill Mackey, opted for a space that was three times larger, on Seventh Street between First and Second Avenues.Mickey named the new larger place after a famous coffeeshop in Paris, but gave it a slightly different spelling: he called it “Les Deux Megots”. This venue was to become the nucleus of a major forum for the encouragement and development of artists; the group was to continue cohesively as a unit until 1966.
FEEDBACK A CRUCIAL INGREDIENT.
Word got around and people came. On an average once-a-week reading night, some 35 writers would show up, many of whom would be planning to read from new work. One could see the same core group of writers week after week. From the onset, the meetings had pure magnetic energy. Artists are about communication. During the initial months when the group was still at Tenth Street, a format was established of informal commentary by the poets on the work being read and this continued at the new coffeeshop until it was outmoded by the sheer number of poets who attended. By then, readers received comments and input individually after a piece was read aloud. It was an accepting milieu. The one unstated and unifying rule of membership was to attend consistently, be writing, and be willing to read the writing aloud to others and to listen to others as they present their work, and to respond to them in turn. Responsiveness and feedback were treasured. Voluntary membership in this club of outsiders depended on producing an art and sharing that art...
Robert Newman : Gain Ground Opens New Territory
Light Years:
an Anthology on Sociocultural Happenings (Multimedia in the East Village, 1960-1966)
Introduction Vivid personal stories of the poets and writers who leaped out of the literary traditions of the 1950s, blending with other artists to create the excitement of a new art mix called multimedia.
Light Years tells the story of a unique group of poets, novelists, playwrights and book people who associated with visual and performing artists at the core of New York’s emerging East Village Scene in a creative renaissance during the 1960s. The memoirs illustrate how these writers took poetry off the page, how they developed the heady amalgam multimedia. Voices and words were thrust into perspectives where the body and the space around it became extensions of poetry; this is what made the Light Years poets different from others of its era: taking skills into the realms of audio and visual experimentation, and exercising freedom to reconstitute academic learning so as to create new arts. In the intervening decades, the people of Light Years, while achieving as professors, translators, editors, novelists, playwrights, actors, and filmmakers, have also received recognition for work in multimedia.
Their chapters intimate how the avant-garde becomes classical and is incorporated into culture, with innovative performances and adventurous objets d’art forming a basis for a mainstream of the future. No other anthology better illuminates how these poets’ words, music and bodies in motion helped transpose American and European consciousness about the possibilities of modern communication.
The Light Years assemblage was at the leading edge of the evolution into process art, conceptual art, and performance art, moving onto stages, art spaces and sites; therefore, it is entitled to be viewed as part of a First Generation of multimedia artists. Each artist’s chapter shows the development of their art in the years before making it into major museums, Documenta and high-visibility art expositions and publication by art presses, international media and literary presses. The mini-memoirs are like the people who wrote them: frank, brilliant, gossipy, bawdy, sweet, nasty, humorous, revealing, sensual, scholarly—filled with the discerning, variegated discoveries of people driven to be immersed in the art world.
THE GROUPS.
From 1960 to 1966, the poets and other artists who gathered at Tenth Street Coffeeshop, Les Deux Megots and Le Metro in Manhattan formed a Salon des Independants, a unit discrete from other non-academic arts groups in New York and from other groups of writers. It had its own individual texture and characteristics. It was the only cluster moving toward the evolution of a new art form which would jump literature rapidly in the direction of the new century at the edge of new technology, including development of the computer. Four of the larger groups outside of academia have already been given attention in studies and books: The Beats, of San Francisco’s North Beach; the Black Mountain College poets, who mostly read at university and bookshop venues; the original members of and descendants of the New York School as centered on the West Side in upper Manhattan and later at St. Mark’s Poetry Project in the East Village, who advocated a particular style of poetry related to glorifying personal events and details of one’s life in a cool, semi-humorous style similar to the elite linguistics of The New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly; and Fluxus, “the radically democratic, proto-conceptualist, collective [international] art movement” (definition from Connoisseur Magazine).
At first glance, the Light Years group appears to be a random gathering, but an underlying configuration becomes evident. With a close look, one can establish “order, pattern, arcs of behavior… patterns other people can’t see…” (Shareen Joshi, The Joshi Effect, Santa Fe Institute). This would be the one New York group who propelled poetry onto stages, arenas, halls, lofts and garages as an ingredient of multimedia. Variety would seem this group’s most immediately perceptible characteristic, both as to personae and artistic product. Without a concise name by which it could be quickly identified, people referred to it by the name of the coffeeshop where the weekly readings took place. The other groups, each practicing a particular kind of writing, have been easier to label than one which covered the entire range of writing, from the classically sourced to the crisp corner of the avant-garde and even extending into the new merging of the arts.
There was a highly specialized energy held in common by over 180 apparently disparate artists. Armand Schwerner, a Light Years poet, used “a horde of elective affinities” to describe this group of writers and other artists who came together at three coffeeshops, sequentially from 1960 to 1966, to read their work aloud, exchange gossip and news of the tribe, and develop social relationships of every stripe imaginable (yes, the one you just thought of included). The artists in the Light Years arena were open to many visions and perspectives; they were in a period of intensive personal growth and outreaching in the development of their art. Concurrent groups influenced and had input toward the formation of the individual art being produced at Tenth Street and Deux Megots.
These were academia, Fluxus, experimental theater, multimedia, intermedia, happenings, Abstract Expressionist Art and Pop Art, dance, and contemporary film
QUESTIONS.
What drew these people together? What binding elements, common beliefs, and energy sources caused this group to unite and then keep up a bond for six years? These artists could be found living and working in an area of the city which was on the edge of gentrification—what effect did that locus have? What was the relationship of the Light Years group to the other arts groups of that era? What were the demographics of these people, i.e., what was the personal makeup of the participating artists: point of origin, background, education, spheres of interest, motivations for being involved intensely in producing art? And, very importantly, what were the ingredients that made these group readings internationally famous quite rapidly after the group coalesced?
NAMING NAMES.
At a poetry reading at the Deux Megots Coffeeshop in 1962, the poet Paul Blackburn observed to the editor that there was clearly a core cluster of some 35 writers who consistently showed up, and he used the word leitmotif, the musical form of a repeated theme associated with the appearance and reappearance of a person or idea. He then mentioned Jackson Mac Low’s early book Light Poems; later, when another writer labeled the group as “light years ahead of the contemporary culture,” these comments merged and evolved into the title Light Years. It included the concept that the work being produced here was avant-garde rather than populist, hence was not to achieve wide recognition and acknowledgment until decades later: by 1985, a list of participants in the Coffeehouse Years, 1960-1966, showed that over half of the 180 had received illustrious grants and honors, including NEA, Guggenheim, NYSCA, Obie, Oscar, Emmy and Fulbright. This was of great interest because at that time the artists of the group were regarded as mavericks.
THE BEGINNINGS.
In the winter of 1960, there were no coffeeshops in Manhattan in the area which was becoming known as the East Village. On the edge of 1961 (some writers remember snow on the ground), two entrepreneurs, Mickey Ruskin, a lawyer from New Jersey, and Ed Kaplan, a New Yorker, opened the Tenth Street Coffeeshop on the block between The Bowery and Fourth Avenue, in a building owned by Ed Schwartz. Tenth Street was already attracting Abstract Expressionist artists who were in room-sized galleries or studios (Brata Brothers, Hilda Carmel, Bill deKooning). The area was ripe for gentrification: a run-down district right next to The Bowery, a street with cheap hotels and rooming-houses. When artists move in, it’s the beginning of renovation and rehab. Mickey Ruskin knew something—he was later to achieve renown as the sequential owner of several notable watering-spots: the Ninth Circle and the famous Max’s Kansas City, a bar devoted to visual and literary artists, and the proprietor of an early multimedia locus, Longview Acres. The neighborhood also becomes a newly fashionable destination for people to taste the life of the artist at a safe remove. In 1960-1961, “Mystery Bus Tours” from the Five Towns region of Long Island made regular stops on Tenth Street so that suburban folk could add a vicarious ingredient of risk to their programs. These visitors could easily be the original birth-family of the artists of the East Village.
Coffeehouses have for centuries been a place where one could meet kindred souls for discussion and conversation in a neutral space not as intimate as home. One could take solitary time to jot notes for creative projects. In Paris, famed cafés drew local and expat writers and painters early in the last century; post-war Japan had many coffeehouses in Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto. New York’s Greenwich Village in the 1950s had European-influenced coffeeshops, some of which had occasional poetry readings. The Tenth Street Coffeeshop, at street level in a semi-tenement neighborhood of 50-year-old buildings, was a tiny space divided by waist-high wooden verticals on either side of which were tables that could seat two or three. At the far end were coffee-making machines and a cash register. From the onset, this coffeeshop attracted poets, at first an intense group of 10 or 15 and burgeoning until 30 or more writers (and a few painters) were regularly filling the space to overflowing every Thursday evening. At this point, Mickey Ruskin and his new partner, Bill Mackey, opted for a space that was three times larger, on Seventh Street between First and Second Avenues.Mickey named the new larger place after a famous coffeeshop in Paris, but gave it a slightly different spelling: he called it “Les Deux Megots”. This venue was to become the nucleus of a major forum for the encouragement and development of artists; the group was to continue cohesively as a unit until 1966.
FEEDBACK A CRUCIAL INGREDIENT.
Word got around and people came. On an average once-a-week reading night, some 35 writers would show up, many of whom would be planning to read from new work. One could see the same core group of writers week after week. From the onset, the meetings had pure magnetic energy. Artists are about communication. During the initial months when the group was still at Tenth Street, a format was established of informal commentary by the poets on the work being read and this continued at the new coffeeshop until it was outmoded by the sheer number of poets who attended. By then, readers received comments and input individually after a piece was read aloud. It was an accepting milieu. The one unstated and unifying rule of membership was to attend consistently, be writing, and be willing to read the writing aloud to others and to listen to others as they present their work, and to respond to them in turn. Responsiveness and feedback were treasured. Voluntary membership in this club of outsiders depended on producing an art and sharing that art...
META-SYN LIGHT
FIRST FRIDAY, August 4, 2006
ART AS META-SYN
Mixed MediA, Montage, Book Signing
IONA MILLER & ROBERT NEWMAN
ART AS META-SYN: Art can be therapeutic, both in the process of creation and for the viewer who reacts from personal associations. Art bares the soul, and provides a container for unbridled self-expression. High synergy is a differentiating characteristic of the nonagressive and secure. Beyond synergy is negentropy, the flow of creative connection with Source. Symbolic art has both an emotional and cognitive content. Metaphysical art draws on the multicultural iconography, not only of the globe, but of the Beyond. At its best it embodies and reveal the indomitable human Spirit.
Robert Bruce Newman is a developer of programs in the medical uses of meditation and a new childbirth method, Calm Birth. He has published three books: DISCIPLES OF THE BUDDHA / Living Images of Meditation (4/01); CALM BIRTH / New Method for Conscious Childbirth (10/05); and CALM HEALING / Medicine for the New Era (10/06). He has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Naropa University, and the City University of New York. His art has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY; the Dwan Gallery, NY, NY; and other museums. http://medigrace.org and http://calmbirth.org He will be speaking with Ruth Miller co-author of CALM HEALING in our forthcoming GPML Fall lecture series. Sponsored by The Wisdom Center/GPML 115 NE EVELYN, GRANTS PASS, Oregon 97526
Iona Miller, CHT Consultant and transdisciplinarian Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer, hypnotherapist and multimedia artist doing groundbreaking work on the fusion of science-art, chaos theory, plenum physics, and emergent paradigm shift in experiential psychotherapy, new physics, biophysics, philosophy, cosmology, healing, creativity, qabalah, magick, metaphysics, and society. Rather than having an interest in specific doctrines, I am interested in the EFFECTS of doctrines from religion, science, psychology, and the arts. Our beliefs are the moldable raw material of the psyche, manipulated by governments, media and culture. How do we become what we are and how is that process changing in the near future? Art foretells that process. Author of The Modern Alchemist and The Magical & Ritual Use of Perfumes has shown in South Beach and Phoenix galleries.. http://ionamiller.org and http://ionatopia.50megs.com
Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity. To be art, it just has to be significant.
As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice. We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor, without resurrecting or imitating the past, but taking it that strategic step further with contextualized elements.
We have attained a degree of technological sophistication to open most, if not all, of the new realms to the creative process. Unexplored media include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnotism, which assault as many of the senses as possible in order to break open the door of the five senses and drive our audience into the infinitude beyond, newer vistas of participatory experience and expression.
STATE OF THE HEART: Higher art must be intensely personal while being universal and universally accessible. It must show refined knowledge, understanding and respect for the art that has come before to enrich those around us. Much the same can be said for an artfully and heartfully lived life. We can apply a similar strategy to our spirituality, drawing on the best of what the past offers while keeping our practice and service contemporary and relevant. Our lives become multidimensional artful expressions without frames, embodied in living Light.
Process-oriented spirituality is eclectic and intensely personal. The connection we have with the inspirational Source that nourishes creative life is the same source that sustains our spirits and funds our compassion. It is a deep well from which we can drink at will, the abundant lifesprings of our essential being. The Romantics, arguably beginning with Blake, turned art into a kind of substitute for religion. The East emphasizes a mystical-magical orientation, the West a humanist-rationalist POV. Romanticism is an essentially Gnostic spirituality, a Mystery religion. But now there is no intergenerational priesthood to have our visions for us; we have them for ourselves.
Rather than antiscientifically considering cognition and technofacility an anti-artistic dirty little secret, digital art and multimedia embrace the fusion. There is no Romantic terror of human cognition nor need for antitechnical transcendence. Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics.
ART AS META-SYN
Mixed MediA, Montage, Book Signing
IONA MILLER & ROBERT NEWMAN
ART AS META-SYN: Art can be therapeutic, both in the process of creation and for the viewer who reacts from personal associations. Art bares the soul, and provides a container for unbridled self-expression. High synergy is a differentiating characteristic of the nonagressive and secure. Beyond synergy is negentropy, the flow of creative connection with Source. Symbolic art has both an emotional and cognitive content. Metaphysical art draws on the multicultural iconography, not only of the globe, but of the Beyond. At its best it embodies and reveal the indomitable human Spirit.
Robert Bruce Newman is a developer of programs in the medical uses of meditation and a new childbirth method, Calm Birth. He has published three books: DISCIPLES OF THE BUDDHA / Living Images of Meditation (4/01); CALM BIRTH / New Method for Conscious Childbirth (10/05); and CALM HEALING / Medicine for the New Era (10/06). He has taught at the University of Colorado, Boulder, Naropa University, and the City University of New York. His art has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY, NY; the Dwan Gallery, NY, NY; and other museums. http://medigrace.org and http://calmbirth.org He will be speaking with Ruth Miller co-author of CALM HEALING in our forthcoming GPML Fall lecture series. Sponsored by The Wisdom Center/GPML 115 NE EVELYN, GRANTS PASS, Oregon 97526
Iona Miller, CHT Consultant and transdisciplinarian Iona Miller is a nonfiction writer, hypnotherapist and multimedia artist doing groundbreaking work on the fusion of science-art, chaos theory, plenum physics, and emergent paradigm shift in experiential psychotherapy, new physics, biophysics, philosophy, cosmology, healing, creativity, qabalah, magick, metaphysics, and society. Rather than having an interest in specific doctrines, I am interested in the EFFECTS of doctrines from religion, science, psychology, and the arts. Our beliefs are the moldable raw material of the psyche, manipulated by governments, media and culture. How do we become what we are and how is that process changing in the near future? Art foretells that process. Author of The Modern Alchemist and The Magical & Ritual Use of Perfumes has shown in South Beach and Phoenix galleries.. http://ionamiller.org and http://ionatopia.50megs.com
Art connected to Source and the zeitgeist of its times has a living taproot in the matrix of evolution. Our works "work" when they work themselves through our culture, based on that culture's underlying psychological need. They become meaningful if perceived as carrying revelatory weight that somehow illuminates our collective lives. They may not be "true", but good things come of this generative vision, reaffirming and celebrating our humanity. To be art, it just has to be significant.
As artists, we use our own experiential vision to create perceptual embodiments in our medium of choice. We can still take a fresh look at the world, inspired by the entire spectrum of human artistic endeavor, without resurrecting or imitating the past, but taking it that strategic step further with contextualized elements.
We have attained a degree of technological sophistication to open most, if not all, of the new realms to the creative process. Unexplored media include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnotism, which assault as many of the senses as possible in order to break open the door of the five senses and drive our audience into the infinitude beyond, newer vistas of participatory experience and expression.
STATE OF THE HEART: Higher art must be intensely personal while being universal and universally accessible. It must show refined knowledge, understanding and respect for the art that has come before to enrich those around us. Much the same can be said for an artfully and heartfully lived life. We can apply a similar strategy to our spirituality, drawing on the best of what the past offers while keeping our practice and service contemporary and relevant. Our lives become multidimensional artful expressions without frames, embodied in living Light.
Process-oriented spirituality is eclectic and intensely personal. The connection we have with the inspirational Source that nourishes creative life is the same source that sustains our spirits and funds our compassion. It is a deep well from which we can drink at will, the abundant lifesprings of our essential being. The Romantics, arguably beginning with Blake, turned art into a kind of substitute for religion. The East emphasizes a mystical-magical orientation, the West a humanist-rationalist POV. Romanticism is an essentially Gnostic spirituality, a Mystery religion. But now there is no intergenerational priesthood to have our visions for us; we have them for ourselves.
Rather than antiscientifically considering cognition and technofacility an anti-artistic dirty little secret, digital art and multimedia embrace the fusion. There is no Romantic terror of human cognition nor need for antitechnical transcendence. Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics.
Alex Grey
"I am a mystic artist and co-founder, with my wife Allyson, of CoSM. The Mission of the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, is to build a sanctuary of visionary art to inspire every pilgrim's creative path and affirm the values of love and wisdom."
Alex Grey was born in Columbus, Ohio on November 29, 1953 (Sagittarius), the middle child of a gentle middle-class couple. His father was a graphic designer and encouraged his son's drawing ability. Young Alex would collect insects and dead animals from the suburban neighborhood and bury them in the back yard. The themes of death and transcendence weave throughout his artworks, from the earliest drawings to later performances, paintings and sculpture. He went to the Columbus College of Art and Design for two years (1971-73), then dropped out and painted billboards in Ohio for a year (73-74). Grey then attended the Boston Museum School for one year, to study with the conceptual artist, Jay Jaroslav. At the Boston Museum School he met his wife, the artist, Allyson Rymland Grey. During this period he had a series of entheogenically induced mystical experiences that transformed his agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism. The Grey couple would trip together on LSD. Alex then spent five years at Harvard Medical School working in the Anatomy department studying the body and preparing cadavers for dissection. He also worked at Harvard's department of Mind/Body Medicine with Dr. Herbert Benson and Dr. Joan Borysenko conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. Alex's anatomical training prepared him for painting the Sacred Mirrors (explained below) and for doing medical illustration. When doctors saw his Sacred Mirrors, they asked him to do illustration work.
Grey was an instructor in Artistic Anatomy and Figure Sculpture for ten years at New York University, and now teaches courses in Visionary Art with Allyson at The Open Center in New York City, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the California Institute of Integral Studies and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.
In 1972 Grey began a series of art actions that bear resemblance to rites of passage, in that they present stages of a developing psyche. The approximately fifty performance rites, conducted over the last thirty years move through transformations from an egocentric to more sociocentric and increasingly worldcentric and theocentric identity. The most recent performance was WorldSpirit, a spoken word and musical collaboration with Kenji Williams which was released in 2004 as a DVD.
Grey's unique series of 21 life-sized paintings, the Sacred Mirrors, take the viewer on a journey toward their own divine nature by examining, in detail, the body, mind, and spirit. The Sacred Mirrors, present the physical and subtle anatomy of an individual in the context of cosmic, biological and technological evolution. Begun in 1979, the series took a period of ten years to complete. It was during this period that he developed his depictions of the human body that "x-ray" the multiple layers of reality, and reveal the interplay of anatomical and spiritual forces. After painting the Sacred Mirrors, he applied this multidimensional perspective to such archetypal human experiences as praying, meditation, kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth, nursing and dying. Grey’s recent work has explored the subject of consciousness from the perspective of “universal beings” whose bodies are grids of fire, eyes and infinite galactic swirls.
Renowned healers Olga Worral and Rosalyn Bruyere have expressed appreciation for the skillful portrayal of clairvoyant vision his paintings of translucent glowing bodies. Grey's paintings have been featured in venues as diverse as the album art of TOOL, SCI, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, Newsweek magazine, the Discovery Channel, Rave flyers and sheets of blotter acid. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including Feature Inc., Tibet House, Stux Gallery, P.S. 1, The Outsider Art Fair and the New Museum in NYC, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Alex has been a keynote speaker at conferences all over the world including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Basel, Barcelona and Manaus. The international psychedelic community has embraced Grey as an important mapmaker and spokesman for the visionary realm.
A large installation called Heart Net by Alex and his wife, Allyson, was displayed at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum in 1998-99. A mid-career retrospective of Grey's works was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999. The large format art book, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey has been translated into five languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies, unusual for an art book. His inspirational book, The Mission of Art, traces the evolution of human consciousness through art history, exploring the role of an artist's intention and conscience, and reflecting on the creative process as a spiritual path.
Transfigurations is Alex's second large format monograph containing over 300 color and black & white images of Grey's work. Sounds True has released The Visionary Artist, a CD of Grey's reflections on art as a spiritual practice. ARTmind is the artist's recent video exploring the healing potential of Sacred Art. Grey co-edited the book, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books, 2002). In 2004 Grey’s VISIONS boxed set containing a portfolio of new works and a Sacred Mirrors and Transfigurations, his collected works. The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, a long-term exhibition of fifty works of transformative art by Grey has opened (Fall 2004) in New York City. He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter, Allyson Grey and their daughter, the actress, Zena Grey.
Alex Grey was born in Columbus, Ohio on November 29, 1953 (Sagittarius), the middle child of a gentle middle-class couple. His father was a graphic designer and encouraged his son's drawing ability. Young Alex would collect insects and dead animals from the suburban neighborhood and bury them in the back yard. The themes of death and transcendence weave throughout his artworks, from the earliest drawings to later performances, paintings and sculpture. He went to the Columbus College of Art and Design for two years (1971-73), then dropped out and painted billboards in Ohio for a year (73-74). Grey then attended the Boston Museum School for one year, to study with the conceptual artist, Jay Jaroslav. At the Boston Museum School he met his wife, the artist, Allyson Rymland Grey. During this period he had a series of entheogenically induced mystical experiences that transformed his agnostic existentialism to a radical transcendentalism. The Grey couple would trip together on LSD. Alex then spent five years at Harvard Medical School working in the Anatomy department studying the body and preparing cadavers for dissection. He also worked at Harvard's department of Mind/Body Medicine with Dr. Herbert Benson and Dr. Joan Borysenko conducting scientific experiments to investigate subtle healing energies. Alex's anatomical training prepared him for painting the Sacred Mirrors (explained below) and for doing medical illustration. When doctors saw his Sacred Mirrors, they asked him to do illustration work.
Grey was an instructor in Artistic Anatomy and Figure Sculpture for ten years at New York University, and now teaches courses in Visionary Art with Allyson at The Open Center in New York City, Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, the California Institute of Integral Studies and Omega Institute in Rhinebeck, New York.
In 1972 Grey began a series of art actions that bear resemblance to rites of passage, in that they present stages of a developing psyche. The approximately fifty performance rites, conducted over the last thirty years move through transformations from an egocentric to more sociocentric and increasingly worldcentric and theocentric identity. The most recent performance was WorldSpirit, a spoken word and musical collaboration with Kenji Williams which was released in 2004 as a DVD.
Grey's unique series of 21 life-sized paintings, the Sacred Mirrors, take the viewer on a journey toward their own divine nature by examining, in detail, the body, mind, and spirit. The Sacred Mirrors, present the physical and subtle anatomy of an individual in the context of cosmic, biological and technological evolution. Begun in 1979, the series took a period of ten years to complete. It was during this period that he developed his depictions of the human body that "x-ray" the multiple layers of reality, and reveal the interplay of anatomical and spiritual forces. After painting the Sacred Mirrors, he applied this multidimensional perspective to such archetypal human experiences as praying, meditation, kissing, copulating, pregnancy, birth, nursing and dying. Grey’s recent work has explored the subject of consciousness from the perspective of “universal beings” whose bodies are grids of fire, eyes and infinite galactic swirls.
Renowned healers Olga Worral and Rosalyn Bruyere have expressed appreciation for the skillful portrayal of clairvoyant vision his paintings of translucent glowing bodies. Grey's paintings have been featured in venues as diverse as the album art of TOOL, SCI, the Beastie Boys and Nirvana, Newsweek magazine, the Discovery Channel, Rave flyers and sheets of blotter acid. His work has been exhibited worldwide, including Feature Inc., Tibet House, Stux Gallery, P.S. 1, The Outsider Art Fair and the New Museum in NYC, the Grand Palais in Paris, the Sao Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Alex has been a keynote speaker at conferences all over the world including Tokyo, Amsterdam, Basel, Barcelona and Manaus. The international psychedelic community has embraced Grey as an important mapmaker and spokesman for the visionary realm.
A large installation called Heart Net by Alex and his wife, Allyson, was displayed at Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum in 1998-99. A mid-career retrospective of Grey's works was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego in 1999. The large format art book, Sacred Mirrors: The Visionary Art of Alex Grey has been translated into five languages and has sold over one hundred thousand copies, unusual for an art book. His inspirational book, The Mission of Art, traces the evolution of human consciousness through art history, exploring the role of an artist's intention and conscience, and reflecting on the creative process as a spiritual path.
Transfigurations is Alex's second large format monograph containing over 300 color and black & white images of Grey's work. Sounds True has released The Visionary Artist, a CD of Grey's reflections on art as a spiritual practice. ARTmind is the artist's recent video exploring the healing potential of Sacred Art. Grey co-edited the book, Zig Zag Zen: Buddhism and Psychedelics (Chronicle Books, 2002). In 2004 Grey’s VISIONS boxed set containing a portfolio of new works and a Sacred Mirrors and Transfigurations, his collected works. The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, CoSM, a long-term exhibition of fifty works of transformative art by Grey has opened (Fall 2004) in New York City. He lives in New York City with his wife, the painter, Allyson Grey and their daughter, the actress, Zena Grey.
Expressive Arts - Iona Miller
The Many Expressions of Art ...Art has two aspects, one for the artist and the other for the beholder...For the artist, the meaning of art lies in the apprehension of a perceptive context that is clarified and fulfilled in the work, and at the base of the whole process lies the biological purpose of attaining a higher level of consciousness, thus annulling a participation mystique...the new discovery comes to the beholder by wa of the unconscious; he takes it in like the air he breathes. --M.C. Cammerloher/"Art in the Psychology of Our Time"
According to Jung's theory of psychological types (see Book 4, Hod), man possesses four different possibilities of reacting to his environment. These are represented as the functions sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling. The realm of Art consists of a). the representative or imitative arts (such as dance, drama, and ceremonial magick), which portray or reproduce a psycho-physical relationship and convey "meaning"; and b). plastic arts where visual perception is the central experience. In the Greek language, the conjunction of concrete sensation, psychic image, and spiritual meaning is termed aisthesis. It conveys both the notion of breathing in (or smelling) and perceiving.
The imitative arts, and ceremonial magick, in particular, create an atmosphere which is breathed in by the participant or observer alike. The meaning is inherent in the engagement with psychic reality. Cammerloher attributes representative arts to the function intuition; plastic arts are the product of sensation. In the past, mystical man, guided by his favorite function, intuition, could attain redemption or illumination. Application of the mysteries has broadened, and mankind has reached the stage where all the functions may be developed and serve as a key to the mysteries. In a holistic viewpoint, the total person possesses balanced activation and can use a function at will.
The great artist Eugene Delacroix expressed his opinion in his journal: When I have painted a fine picture, I haven't expressed a thought. Or so they say. What fools they are! They deprive painting of all its advantages. The writer says nearly everything to be understood. In painting a mysterious bond is established between the souls of the sitters and those of the spectator. He sees the faces, external nature; but he thinks inwardly the thought that is common to all people, in which some give body in writing, yet altering its fragile essence.
Art embodies or lends a visible and demonstrable form to perception and image. As the image becomes "fleshed out," there is an experience of fulfillment for artist or beholder alike which transcends the merely aesthetic. The art-experience enables man to consciously experience his particular perceptions and images by formative effort. Thus nature becomes both subject and object. Man as nature, becomes reflective, self-aware and perceptive. The dichotomy of the subject-object, or I-It relationship is harmonized. This enables the artist to annul his unconscious identification with the environment, which is known in psychology as participation mystique.
The Art of Painting:
Everyone possesses the ability to produce some visual representation of his perceptions, with or without formal training. Cammerloher states: "The varying simplicity or development of the form then provides an absolutely unmistakable picture of the level his perceptions have attained." The three basic stages of artistic knowledge of the world are categorized as delimitation, direction and variability of boundaries and direction. Art is the language for the communication of perceptions. Therefore, artistic statements are relative to the degree of knowledge attained. One who knows the language of art transmits more information. This does not refer to technical training, but to the ability to state perceptions clearly and consciously, on a precise level.
In this manner, the artist produces "the only possible demonstration of the stage of development attained by his images." In other words, he has an ability to reproduce that which he sees with his inner eye. As a means of removing the artist from participation mystique, the artistic act is a way of illumination. Anyone is capable of this experience at any level of technical ability. Technical art may be corresponded to the left lobe of the brain and is the product of logic (or thinking). An objective experience is reproduced, for example a photographic-type portrait or external landscape. Imaginal art, however, seems to emerge from the right brain, and is a grace or gift from the soul. We could hardly expect the artist to work without a model, and in this instance the model is internal reality. he still paints that which is "seen." But, the subjective experience is concretized in a communicative form, and he is able to share the quality of his vision with others. Delimitation implies a sharp boundary; there is now an inside and outside (the magic circle is formed). With the drawing of the boundary, the force of creative action is acquired.
The artist uses the canvas to focus his vision, which is executed using the magic wand of the brush (or knife). When one becomes able to differentiate detail within the boundary, dimensionality is established. Complex contours and their mutual relationships are established with precision. The variable boundary stage may be characterized by the three-quarter profile, and utilizes the principle known as fore-shortening. Foreshortening gives the illusion of proper relative size. At this stage of perception-knowledge, space acquires a meaning of its own; static vision becomes dynamic; relativity becomes the prevailing view. Foreshortening, or perspective drawing, combined with the technique of mixing paints known as chiaroscuro, creates the illusion of depth in a painting.
The great masters of the Italian Renaissance developed this treatment of light and shade in painting, and this advance in technique made their work remarkably life-like. For the painter, the world is revealed by illumination. Any painting (other than simple graphic arts) either contains a light source within itself, or one is depicted as illuminating the scene from an assumed point outside the picture. It is the painter's aim to capture as accurately as possible the effects of light on visual perception. Light and color are intimately related. Most people realize that color variation is the result of absorption patterns when an object is hit by white light. The variations of the spectrum which aren't absorbed are reflected back to the eye. Color is not only important in paining, but in psychology.
Much ado has been made in recent years of various color therapies. However, these techniques ar inconsistent in their attributions of the various properties of color in respect to emotional response. On this point the Qabalah furnishes an extensive, cohesive theory worthy of individual testing. Colors are defined in terms of hue, value and chroma. Hue distinguishes one color from another, such as red from green. Value indicates lightness or brightness, and is represented by ten shades of gray ranging from black to white. Chroma means intensity or saturation of color; is it relatively pure or grayish?
Colors are combined in painting according to the elements of harmony. Colors emerge from a spectrum, and so they group in sequences. These sequences may be used as a tool for determining what is attractive to the eye, to convey just the right signals to produce the desired effect. Contrary signals to the eye disturb the effect, whether they are noticed consciously, or not. There are different types of harmonies. Analogous harmony comes from adjacent hues which lie next to each other in the spectrum, such as blue with its adjacents turquoise and violet. Complementary harmonies mix colors which are inherently opposites, like yellow and violet, or orange and turquoise, and red and green. In a balanced harmony the entire color spectrum is exploited. A primary triad includes magenta, yellow and turquoise.
A four color harmony, or tetrad, could include red, yellow, blue-green and violet, for example. In a dominant harmony one color is glorified and its influence extends over the entire design. Harmony is assured by bringing all colors into a consistent relationship. Another important aspect of painting is the law of field size, or control of the field. An expert in this is able to create unique and startling color illusions. Control of the field is achieved through producing a quality which pervades the entire canvas. It is an illumination quality -- bright, dark, grayish. The artist then adds touches of hue to make the canvas come alive, create a world of its own. Details in the canvas may appear lustrous, iridescent, luminous.
Other qualities are transparency, texture, and solidity. To make a lustrous effect, requires mixing the background in shades by adding black. Then, pure intense color in small amounts appears lustrous. Luster depends upon black contrast. The iridescent effect, like opal or mother-of-pearl, requires a background of a gray field. The predominance of soft gray creates an illusion of mistiness. The luminous effect is complex and subtle. Purity contrast, not value or hue, yields the desired effect. The luminous effect was brought to perfection by Rembrandt. The effect is seen in paintings where the light source is internal, such as a candle or fire-glow. Also, light shining into the eyes blurs vision, so this diffuseness must be accounted for in the painting. Highlights and shadows add the finishing touches. A delicate transition from normal color into shadow, with a diffuse edge simulates "reality."
The Art of Magic
There is magic in art, and art in Magick. The magic of art is its expression of symbol or prototype. Art is the symbolic forming of archetypes working in time. In the creative process, the artist becomes seized or fascinated; the archetype rises up in him and he creates the images in his personal form. He shapes them into a "work" because he has been sufficiently aroused to call forth his creative powers.
This process is analogous to that produced through ceremonial magick. At the culmination of the rite comes the assumption of the godform, where the aspirant is seized by the archetypal power he has called up. The creative power of this form subsumes him. His "work" is in fact the Opus of the Great Work, the process of Self-transformation. Drama and dance are closely related in origin to ceremonial magic. So is the art of perfumery, through the development of incenses and fumigations. These scents were designed as psycho-sensory evocations. They call forth certain psychological states. Rhythmic swaying and dancing, and circumambulations are fundamental in ritual. Modern forms of dance have their origins in rites of the past.
According to Julian Jaynes, in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, ballet is intimately linked with the goddess Artemis, which corresponds with path 25, ART. The golden oracle at Ephesus, famous for its enormous wealth, had trained eunuchs as mouthpieces for the goddess Artemis...and the abnormal dancing on the tips of the toes of modern ballerinas is though to derive from the dances before the altar of the goddess.
In Magick, the will and the senses conspire to stir the emotions. Through consecrations, oaths, invocations, the aspirant changes his experience of reality. He is transported to another world in a quantum leap of consciousness. A modern, example, which is not magick, per se, is the ability of movie makers to create a simulated 'astral journey." Caught up in identification with the movie, we are led along through another time, another place, another life, another world. Magick seeks to tap mystical experiences of this type which are internal, and spiritually meaningful. In Magickal ceremony, the aspirant knows whether the work appeals to him; he may consciously understand, or wish to understand the latent meaning of the rite. In either event he intuitively perceives and apprehends the archetypes and their meaning. They enter into him unconsciously.
In a discussion of Art, it is pertinent to recall that Crowley re-named Path 25, changing its name from Temperance to Art. We may infer from the position of this path on the Tree of Life (between Yesod and Tiphareth), that it concerns harmonization of the archetypal dynamics of "spirit" (Hod/Mercury) and "nature" (Netzach/Venus). Art, then, forms the magickal link between the archetypal and instinctual realms. We may also refer to creative aspects of psychology, technology, alchemy, and magick as artistic expressions. There are also correspondences with Tantra, sex magick, and enflamment. Entrance to the solar sphere Tiphareth via the 25th Path, Trump XIV, in Magick implies Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
In psychology, this process is termed Individuation or coming into consciousness of the Self. This implies a breaking up of one's involvement in the collective psyche, or participation mystique, and a transformation of personality. To enter this state "balance is required--the ability to let the ego move downstream, to lose its centrality and control, to give in, submit, enjoy and pleasure itself in the floodtide of becoming and then return to its central point, enriched by the experience; strengthened by its weakness, in its recognition of the limitations imposed by living entirely within the world of the natural standpoint."
In his work Ego at the Threshold, Edward Sampson substitutes the word 'transcendent' for the power of archetypal spirit, and states that "Balance is achieved when the natural standpoint and the transcendent meet in an atmosphere that permits the transcendent more than lip-service guidance in our everyday lives; with such balance we can extend ourselves beyond the everyday and experience a world always available; balance is achieved when the ego moves off to the side, enjoying living life, not merely thinking about it." Magick, as art, carries us into the sacred realm outside of time and space, and may even predict the future.
Art may be defined as recognition, selection and projection. Craft, on the other hand, (including Wicca, often termed 'the Craft") connotes the manual dexterity, charm or ability to create what you want. Art is a process, not a product, not the selection of a product. Art and magick build pathways in the mind for energy to flow; it develops a characteristic archetypal pattern. In the "arte de magick," man gives form to his own vision of Reality. The psychological effect of ceremony is profound and transformative; nature looses her omnipotence, and the aspirant gains independence, a sense of purpose.
Magick mediates between the bizarre inner world and ego-consciousness. The Art of Alchemy Another variation on the theme of magic is the alchemical Opus. It also involves an aspirant practicing the process of self-transformation. Carl Jung and his followers have detailed the correspondences between the alchemical work and modern psychotherapy. It seems, in fact, that alchemy is an antique form of psychotherapy, or service to the psyche, (or the gods). In projecting the contents of his unconscious onto the elements of the work (sun = gold, moon = silver, mercury = quicksilver, etc.) the alchemist is able to unite the opposites within himself and effect the transformation into the Philosopher's Stone. This stone, in fact, represents the point of maximum equilibration.
Alchemy is a sacred work, requiring the aspirant to be Self-oriented, rather than ego-oriented. The individual is considered a microcosm of the whole of existence: The individual psyche is and must be a whole world within itself in order to stand over and against the outer world and fulfill its task to be a carrier of consciousness. For the scales to be balanced, the individual must be of equal weight to the whole world. In Psychotherapy and Alchemy, Edward Edinger lists the following among the alchemical operations: calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortificatio, seperatio, and the final coniunctio which results in the birth of the homunculus or Philosopher's Stone.
Poetic Metaphor: For the poet is a light and winged and holy Thing and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses. And the mind is no longer in him. When he has not attained this state, he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. --Plato/Ion There is an ecstatic inspiration common to vision and word, song and prophecy.
The origins of poetry lie deep in the history of mankind. In the remote past the subconscious spontaneously produced magical incantations and songs. This transpersonal expression was fundamental in the creation of society or culture. The rhythmic sensuous images of prophecy and poetry enriched the consciousness of the individual and group, alike. In Plato's viewpoint the poet does not awaken the images; rather, the images awaken him. The gift of the poet is to capture and record the interrelationship of an archetype with his intellectual and emotional complexes, in an instant of time. Assuming that his technique is proficient, his task is to prevent the ego from tampering with the poem, refining or tempering the contents of the psyche, convinced of personally writing (rather than receiving) the poem.
Among the metaphors of poetic speech are perceptions made through paranormal experiences of the senses. An example is "seeing music", "hearing the stars sing" or experiencing "bitter cold." In each descriptive phrase a quality or experience of one sense is combined with an object not ordinarily associated with it. Nevertheless, an understandable meaning is conveyed intuitively. We all sense the inherent meaning of "warm or cool colors" or "bright sounds". This perceptual phenomenon is known as synesthesia, or sensory blending. This sensory blending is common in mystical experiences of an "extrasensory" nature. Actually they never are perceived through an extra sense, at all. But through a re-visioned experience of the normal five senses.
Poets are able to 'touch the stars", or see "dawn smile", or be "lulled by glowing light as if it were music". Pervading a high degree of poetic metaphors are images of light and sound, in which brightness equates with loudness and brightness and pitch have an affinity. However, this doesn't mean loudness and brightness are perceptually or metaphorically equivalent in all cases. There are many examples of poets who were involved in a spiritual quest. William Blake, of course, combined both his talents in poetry and illustration. The 19th century revival of the Western occult tradition influenced the works of W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley.
In America, the New England contingent of Transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickenson and others who sought reality through spiritual intuition. Some of the most soul-moving poetry comes from the writings of the Saints or Masters of the East, the mystic poets. There is a great deal of beautiful Sufi poetry. Sikh scripture is also replete with references to the Light and the Sound of divinity. Kabir and Guru Nanak were saints who expressed their love for the Lord din poetry. Other oriental poetic forms include the Zen Koan, and Haiku. Both convey a profound spiritual message in a minimal number of words. Modern examples of the psychological quest are poetess Anne Sexton, Rainier Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman and Robert Bly.
The "Artistic Temperament"
The public has a way of creative mythologizing which makes the artist more than an ordinary person. The phenomena which creates movie stars and superstars occurs in other fields and projects the "mad scientist", or "eccentric artist." Part of the artist's gift is his relative lack of adaptation to the values of "average" society. The artist is aloof from daily life, in a world of his or her own. Or, if they are close to the streets, they have a radically different perspective on things which produces his unique vision. Rodin, Picasso, and Dali are all examples of psychological "rugged individualism." An artisan has a trade; an artist lives an alternative lifestyle. It is impossible to analyze why this impulse occurs to one individual and not another.
According to Jung, an artist leads a dual existence; he mediates between world like a shaman: In his capacity of artist (the person)....is objective and impersonal -- even inhuman -- for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being. Jung observed that every creative person could be considered a "duality or a synthesis of contradictory attitudes," a unique human with a personal life, but also the carrier of an impersonal creative process. The artist's creative achievement cannot be accounted for by an examination of his personal psychology.
A Masterwork stands on its own. Jung even went further by stating that: The personal life of the poet cannot be hold essential to his art -- but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool, or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet. Society frequently projects artists are folk heroes or antiheroes. In Sam Keen's Voices and Visions, Joseph Campbell states: The creative mythology of the modern artists arises when the individual has an experience of his own -- of order, or horror, or beauty -- that he tries to communicate by creating a private mythology. So it is the creative individual who must give us a totally new type of nontheological revelation, who must be the new spiritual guide.
Campbell sees creative artistic work as a "response to the need to escape from danger and chaos and find some new security." This inner quiet repeats the main theme of the hero monomyth (see Book VII, Tiphareth for Hero archetype). Further development of consciousness leads the artist to acute perception. He no longer simply reflects the collective values, he is now free to criticize them. Campbell states, "...the world of the artist or the intellectual must be fierce, accurate in its judgment of the fault in a person or society. But along side this judgment there must be affirmation and compassion. What is important is to keep the dissonance between judgment and compassion." It is curious that Campbell should employ precisely these words.
This judgment and compassion refer explicitly to the qualities know respectively (in qabalistic terms), as Geburah/Mars and Chesed/Jupiter. They are the sphere which are encountered immediately after Tiphareth-consciousness is achieved. They represent aspects of the Individuality, just as the lower spheres denoted aspects of the personality. Specifically, Geburah represents the force aspect of individuality. Chesed represents and transmits the ideal form of the individuality from the Supernal Triad to consciousness. The Supernal Triad (or top three spheres) represents existence so ideal the mind cannot conceptualize it. It is the true home of the soul. For consciousness to enter this level of mystical attainment means balancing the forces of Geburah and Chesed on the Middle Pillar. This harmonization corresponds with path 13, Trump II, The High Priestess. We may consider The High Priestess a higher octave of "Art," since both a lunar in nature.
The Priestess knows the art of piercing the veil, or soul-making. Not all would-be artists, however, attain this integrated ideal. Like shamans, some artists have inherently imbalanced personalities. Many experience a gut-wrenching pathos, a sad yearning which may be encoded in their work. Susanne Langer describes her reaction to such art in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The fact that I know as much as I do of the essence of pothos comes from meeting with great music (and art). If those passages make me sad is an extraneous and irrelevant detail. My grasp of the essence of sadness...comes not from moments when I have seen sadness, but from moments when I have seen sadness before me released from entanglements with contingency. We have seen this in great beauty, in the works of our greatest artists.Puer Aeternus, Marie Louise vonFranz discusses the artist and puer complex. In the really great artist there is always a puer at first, but it can go further. It is a question of feeling-judgment. If one ceases to be an artist when ceasing to be puer, then one was never really an artist. Objectifying the puer, is only the first step. Puer has to learn to carry on with the work he does not like, not only with work where he is carried away by great enthusiasm, which is something everybody can do...being carried away by a festival of work. Puer has to kick himself again and again to take up the boring job through sheer will power.
Puer is also the impulse to feel special, precocious, or gifted. The complex is a desire. What, then, are the psychological criteria for an "artist"? VonFranz lists some in her work, Creation Myths. ...these four factors -- originality, consistency, intensity, and subtlety -- (show) the differences between someone who has creative fantasies and someone who is only spinning neurotic nonsense...the continuity of devotion an individual is capable of giving his fantasy is very important and shows the difference between someone who is gifted with creative fantasy and somebody sucked into sterile unconscious material. There are also certain psychological types more adapted or inclined toward artistic expression.
Different types -- both introverts and extroverts -- pursue different areas of art, such as fine art or performance art. Many artists are Dionysian temperaments strong on Sensation-Perceiving (SP). This penchant for acting on impulse contains a seeming paradox, for SPs, living only for immediate action, become the world's great performing artists: the virtuosos of art, entertainment, and adventure. The great painters, instrumentalists, vocalists, dancers, sculptors, photographers, athletes, hunters, racers, gamblers -- all need the skills which come only from excited concentration on an activity for long periods. No other type can mobilize what virtuosity takes: untold hours of continuous action. ...In a sense the SP does not work, for work implies production, completion, and accomplishment. The SP has no such desire for closure, completion, finishing. He is process-oriented. What ensues from his action is mere product, mere outcome, mere result, and is incidental. Thus, the SP's "work" is essentially play.(Kiersey, Bates, 1978) In Myers-Briggs terms, ISFP is known as "the Artist"; ESFP as "Entertainer"; INFJ as "Author"; INTO as "Architect"; ENTP as "Inventor"; ISTP as "Artisan"; while ESTP is a born "Promoter".
In therapy, unexpressed pathos (which is an indicator of the Puer archetype; see Chapter 7, Tiphareth), is sometimes given vent through creative activity. The therapeutic value of art has long been recognized. Jung encouraged his patients to give free reign to their preconscious contents by painting in a spontaneous manner. However, Langer points out that, It may well be that an artist never creates a work of art unless he is emotionally stirred; if so, it does not follow that this, his own emotional excitement is what he portrays. ...may portray something quite independent of his own psychic processes. He may go beyond the thing felt. In art therapy, the resulting paintings often lack technical precision, but show striking examples of the symbols and imagery of the individuation process.
The most prominent motif in these artistic expressions is the mandala. It is a variation on the magical circle, a symbol of the unfolding Self. A modern cultural example of unfolding variations on the mandala comes from a branch of technological art which corresponds with Path 25: Aerospace. The quest is sublimated now into the creation and indwelling of a new extension of mankind's world -- the space station. The majority of these are wheel-shaped for efficiencies sake. Here the puer tendency to verticality and ascensionism is disciplined to very pragmatic ends. There is always the puer complex at work motivating the artist, as well as an element of Narcissism.
The artist has a love relationship with the image of himself which is projected onto the canvas. Both imaginal art and archetypal thought enliven the world of fantasy and imagination, by turning vision inward. They are a release from the literalization of object-orientation. They take the psychic energy which normally flows outward, and turn it in. Art therapy is a way of integrating the values of archetypes. But in order for the values of, let's say the anima or animus, to be incorporated into the personality of the artist, he or she must assimilate the psychological significance of their own work. Otherwise, the creative urge may be just another way of projecting one's inner reality into the outer world.
This integration does not always happen spontaneously to the artist. If this were so, every great artist or poet would be a Self-Realized or God-Realized individual. History has shown different. Discipline is not the only distinction between the true artist and the dabbler or dilettante. To subject oneself to hard work and the evaluation of one's fellow man is no small accomplishment. The development of artistic insight rather than an externalization of one's specific neurosis is another. One must combine the innate curiosity and vitality of youth with the maturity and dedication of experience. In her classic on the archetype of Eternal Youth,
According to Jung's theory of psychological types (see Book 4, Hod), man possesses four different possibilities of reacting to his environment. These are represented as the functions sensation, intuition, thinking and feeling. The realm of Art consists of a). the representative or imitative arts (such as dance, drama, and ceremonial magick), which portray or reproduce a psycho-physical relationship and convey "meaning"; and b). plastic arts where visual perception is the central experience. In the Greek language, the conjunction of concrete sensation, psychic image, and spiritual meaning is termed aisthesis. It conveys both the notion of breathing in (or smelling) and perceiving.
The imitative arts, and ceremonial magick, in particular, create an atmosphere which is breathed in by the participant or observer alike. The meaning is inherent in the engagement with psychic reality. Cammerloher attributes representative arts to the function intuition; plastic arts are the product of sensation. In the past, mystical man, guided by his favorite function, intuition, could attain redemption or illumination. Application of the mysteries has broadened, and mankind has reached the stage where all the functions may be developed and serve as a key to the mysteries. In a holistic viewpoint, the total person possesses balanced activation and can use a function at will.
The great artist Eugene Delacroix expressed his opinion in his journal: When I have painted a fine picture, I haven't expressed a thought. Or so they say. What fools they are! They deprive painting of all its advantages. The writer says nearly everything to be understood. In painting a mysterious bond is established between the souls of the sitters and those of the spectator. He sees the faces, external nature; but he thinks inwardly the thought that is common to all people, in which some give body in writing, yet altering its fragile essence.
Art embodies or lends a visible and demonstrable form to perception and image. As the image becomes "fleshed out," there is an experience of fulfillment for artist or beholder alike which transcends the merely aesthetic. The art-experience enables man to consciously experience his particular perceptions and images by formative effort. Thus nature becomes both subject and object. Man as nature, becomes reflective, self-aware and perceptive. The dichotomy of the subject-object, or I-It relationship is harmonized. This enables the artist to annul his unconscious identification with the environment, which is known in psychology as participation mystique.
The Art of Painting:
Everyone possesses the ability to produce some visual representation of his perceptions, with or without formal training. Cammerloher states: "The varying simplicity or development of the form then provides an absolutely unmistakable picture of the level his perceptions have attained." The three basic stages of artistic knowledge of the world are categorized as delimitation, direction and variability of boundaries and direction. Art is the language for the communication of perceptions. Therefore, artistic statements are relative to the degree of knowledge attained. One who knows the language of art transmits more information. This does not refer to technical training, but to the ability to state perceptions clearly and consciously, on a precise level.
In this manner, the artist produces "the only possible demonstration of the stage of development attained by his images." In other words, he has an ability to reproduce that which he sees with his inner eye. As a means of removing the artist from participation mystique, the artistic act is a way of illumination. Anyone is capable of this experience at any level of technical ability. Technical art may be corresponded to the left lobe of the brain and is the product of logic (or thinking). An objective experience is reproduced, for example a photographic-type portrait or external landscape. Imaginal art, however, seems to emerge from the right brain, and is a grace or gift from the soul. We could hardly expect the artist to work without a model, and in this instance the model is internal reality. he still paints that which is "seen." But, the subjective experience is concretized in a communicative form, and he is able to share the quality of his vision with others. Delimitation implies a sharp boundary; there is now an inside and outside (the magic circle is formed). With the drawing of the boundary, the force of creative action is acquired.
The artist uses the canvas to focus his vision, which is executed using the magic wand of the brush (or knife). When one becomes able to differentiate detail within the boundary, dimensionality is established. Complex contours and their mutual relationships are established with precision. The variable boundary stage may be characterized by the three-quarter profile, and utilizes the principle known as fore-shortening. Foreshortening gives the illusion of proper relative size. At this stage of perception-knowledge, space acquires a meaning of its own; static vision becomes dynamic; relativity becomes the prevailing view. Foreshortening, or perspective drawing, combined with the technique of mixing paints known as chiaroscuro, creates the illusion of depth in a painting.
The great masters of the Italian Renaissance developed this treatment of light and shade in painting, and this advance in technique made their work remarkably life-like. For the painter, the world is revealed by illumination. Any painting (other than simple graphic arts) either contains a light source within itself, or one is depicted as illuminating the scene from an assumed point outside the picture. It is the painter's aim to capture as accurately as possible the effects of light on visual perception. Light and color are intimately related. Most people realize that color variation is the result of absorption patterns when an object is hit by white light. The variations of the spectrum which aren't absorbed are reflected back to the eye. Color is not only important in paining, but in psychology.
Much ado has been made in recent years of various color therapies. However, these techniques ar inconsistent in their attributions of the various properties of color in respect to emotional response. On this point the Qabalah furnishes an extensive, cohesive theory worthy of individual testing. Colors are defined in terms of hue, value and chroma. Hue distinguishes one color from another, such as red from green. Value indicates lightness or brightness, and is represented by ten shades of gray ranging from black to white. Chroma means intensity or saturation of color; is it relatively pure or grayish?
Colors are combined in painting according to the elements of harmony. Colors emerge from a spectrum, and so they group in sequences. These sequences may be used as a tool for determining what is attractive to the eye, to convey just the right signals to produce the desired effect. Contrary signals to the eye disturb the effect, whether they are noticed consciously, or not. There are different types of harmonies. Analogous harmony comes from adjacent hues which lie next to each other in the spectrum, such as blue with its adjacents turquoise and violet. Complementary harmonies mix colors which are inherently opposites, like yellow and violet, or orange and turquoise, and red and green. In a balanced harmony the entire color spectrum is exploited. A primary triad includes magenta, yellow and turquoise.
A four color harmony, or tetrad, could include red, yellow, blue-green and violet, for example. In a dominant harmony one color is glorified and its influence extends over the entire design. Harmony is assured by bringing all colors into a consistent relationship. Another important aspect of painting is the law of field size, or control of the field. An expert in this is able to create unique and startling color illusions. Control of the field is achieved through producing a quality which pervades the entire canvas. It is an illumination quality -- bright, dark, grayish. The artist then adds touches of hue to make the canvas come alive, create a world of its own. Details in the canvas may appear lustrous, iridescent, luminous.
Other qualities are transparency, texture, and solidity. To make a lustrous effect, requires mixing the background in shades by adding black. Then, pure intense color in small amounts appears lustrous. Luster depends upon black contrast. The iridescent effect, like opal or mother-of-pearl, requires a background of a gray field. The predominance of soft gray creates an illusion of mistiness. The luminous effect is complex and subtle. Purity contrast, not value or hue, yields the desired effect. The luminous effect was brought to perfection by Rembrandt. The effect is seen in paintings where the light source is internal, such as a candle or fire-glow. Also, light shining into the eyes blurs vision, so this diffuseness must be accounted for in the painting. Highlights and shadows add the finishing touches. A delicate transition from normal color into shadow, with a diffuse edge simulates "reality."
The Art of Magic
There is magic in art, and art in Magick. The magic of art is its expression of symbol or prototype. Art is the symbolic forming of archetypes working in time. In the creative process, the artist becomes seized or fascinated; the archetype rises up in him and he creates the images in his personal form. He shapes them into a "work" because he has been sufficiently aroused to call forth his creative powers.
This process is analogous to that produced through ceremonial magick. At the culmination of the rite comes the assumption of the godform, where the aspirant is seized by the archetypal power he has called up. The creative power of this form subsumes him. His "work" is in fact the Opus of the Great Work, the process of Self-transformation. Drama and dance are closely related in origin to ceremonial magic. So is the art of perfumery, through the development of incenses and fumigations. These scents were designed as psycho-sensory evocations. They call forth certain psychological states. Rhythmic swaying and dancing, and circumambulations are fundamental in ritual. Modern forms of dance have their origins in rites of the past.
According to Julian Jaynes, in The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, ballet is intimately linked with the goddess Artemis, which corresponds with path 25, ART. The golden oracle at Ephesus, famous for its enormous wealth, had trained eunuchs as mouthpieces for the goddess Artemis...and the abnormal dancing on the tips of the toes of modern ballerinas is though to derive from the dances before the altar of the goddess.
In Magick, the will and the senses conspire to stir the emotions. Through consecrations, oaths, invocations, the aspirant changes his experience of reality. He is transported to another world in a quantum leap of consciousness. A modern, example, which is not magick, per se, is the ability of movie makers to create a simulated 'astral journey." Caught up in identification with the movie, we are led along through another time, another place, another life, another world. Magick seeks to tap mystical experiences of this type which are internal, and spiritually meaningful. In Magickal ceremony, the aspirant knows whether the work appeals to him; he may consciously understand, or wish to understand the latent meaning of the rite. In either event he intuitively perceives and apprehends the archetypes and their meaning. They enter into him unconsciously.
In a discussion of Art, it is pertinent to recall that Crowley re-named Path 25, changing its name from Temperance to Art. We may infer from the position of this path on the Tree of Life (between Yesod and Tiphareth), that it concerns harmonization of the archetypal dynamics of "spirit" (Hod/Mercury) and "nature" (Netzach/Venus). Art, then, forms the magickal link between the archetypal and instinctual realms. We may also refer to creative aspects of psychology, technology, alchemy, and magick as artistic expressions. There are also correspondences with Tantra, sex magick, and enflamment. Entrance to the solar sphere Tiphareth via the 25th Path, Trump XIV, in Magick implies Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.
In psychology, this process is termed Individuation or coming into consciousness of the Self. This implies a breaking up of one's involvement in the collective psyche, or participation mystique, and a transformation of personality. To enter this state "balance is required--the ability to let the ego move downstream, to lose its centrality and control, to give in, submit, enjoy and pleasure itself in the floodtide of becoming and then return to its central point, enriched by the experience; strengthened by its weakness, in its recognition of the limitations imposed by living entirely within the world of the natural standpoint."
In his work Ego at the Threshold, Edward Sampson substitutes the word 'transcendent' for the power of archetypal spirit, and states that "Balance is achieved when the natural standpoint and the transcendent meet in an atmosphere that permits the transcendent more than lip-service guidance in our everyday lives; with such balance we can extend ourselves beyond the everyday and experience a world always available; balance is achieved when the ego moves off to the side, enjoying living life, not merely thinking about it." Magick, as art, carries us into the sacred realm outside of time and space, and may even predict the future.
Art may be defined as recognition, selection and projection. Craft, on the other hand, (including Wicca, often termed 'the Craft") connotes the manual dexterity, charm or ability to create what you want. Art is a process, not a product, not the selection of a product. Art and magick build pathways in the mind for energy to flow; it develops a characteristic archetypal pattern. In the "arte de magick," man gives form to his own vision of Reality. The psychological effect of ceremony is profound and transformative; nature looses her omnipotence, and the aspirant gains independence, a sense of purpose.
Magick mediates between the bizarre inner world and ego-consciousness. The Art of Alchemy Another variation on the theme of magic is the alchemical Opus. It also involves an aspirant practicing the process of self-transformation. Carl Jung and his followers have detailed the correspondences between the alchemical work and modern psychotherapy. It seems, in fact, that alchemy is an antique form of psychotherapy, or service to the psyche, (or the gods). In projecting the contents of his unconscious onto the elements of the work (sun = gold, moon = silver, mercury = quicksilver, etc.) the alchemist is able to unite the opposites within himself and effect the transformation into the Philosopher's Stone. This stone, in fact, represents the point of maximum equilibration.
Alchemy is a sacred work, requiring the aspirant to be Self-oriented, rather than ego-oriented. The individual is considered a microcosm of the whole of existence: The individual psyche is and must be a whole world within itself in order to stand over and against the outer world and fulfill its task to be a carrier of consciousness. For the scales to be balanced, the individual must be of equal weight to the whole world. In Psychotherapy and Alchemy, Edward Edinger lists the following among the alchemical operations: calcinatio, solutio, coagulatio, sublimatio, mortificatio, seperatio, and the final coniunctio which results in the birth of the homunculus or Philosopher's Stone.
Poetic Metaphor: For the poet is a light and winged and holy Thing and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses. And the mind is no longer in him. When he has not attained this state, he is powerless and unable to utter his oracles. --Plato/Ion There is an ecstatic inspiration common to vision and word, song and prophecy.
The origins of poetry lie deep in the history of mankind. In the remote past the subconscious spontaneously produced magical incantations and songs. This transpersonal expression was fundamental in the creation of society or culture. The rhythmic sensuous images of prophecy and poetry enriched the consciousness of the individual and group, alike. In Plato's viewpoint the poet does not awaken the images; rather, the images awaken him. The gift of the poet is to capture and record the interrelationship of an archetype with his intellectual and emotional complexes, in an instant of time. Assuming that his technique is proficient, his task is to prevent the ego from tampering with the poem, refining or tempering the contents of the psyche, convinced of personally writing (rather than receiving) the poem.
Among the metaphors of poetic speech are perceptions made through paranormal experiences of the senses. An example is "seeing music", "hearing the stars sing" or experiencing "bitter cold." In each descriptive phrase a quality or experience of one sense is combined with an object not ordinarily associated with it. Nevertheless, an understandable meaning is conveyed intuitively. We all sense the inherent meaning of "warm or cool colors" or "bright sounds". This perceptual phenomenon is known as synesthesia, or sensory blending. This sensory blending is common in mystical experiences of an "extrasensory" nature. Actually they never are perceived through an extra sense, at all. But through a re-visioned experience of the normal five senses.
Poets are able to 'touch the stars", or see "dawn smile", or be "lulled by glowing light as if it were music". Pervading a high degree of poetic metaphors are images of light and sound, in which brightness equates with loudness and brightness and pitch have an affinity. However, this doesn't mean loudness and brightness are perceptually or metaphorically equivalent in all cases. There are many examples of poets who were involved in a spiritual quest. William Blake, of course, combined both his talents in poetry and illustration. The 19th century revival of the Western occult tradition influenced the works of W. B. Yeats and Aleister Crowley.
In America, the New England contingent of Transcendentalists included Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickenson and others who sought reality through spiritual intuition. Some of the most soul-moving poetry comes from the writings of the Saints or Masters of the East, the mystic poets. There is a great deal of beautiful Sufi poetry. Sikh scripture is also replete with references to the Light and the Sound of divinity. Kabir and Guru Nanak were saints who expressed their love for the Lord din poetry. Other oriental poetic forms include the Zen Koan, and Haiku. Both convey a profound spiritual message in a minimal number of words. Modern examples of the psychological quest are poetess Anne Sexton, Rainier Maria Rilke, Walt Whitman and Robert Bly.
The "Artistic Temperament"
The public has a way of creative mythologizing which makes the artist more than an ordinary person. The phenomena which creates movie stars and superstars occurs in other fields and projects the "mad scientist", or "eccentric artist." Part of the artist's gift is his relative lack of adaptation to the values of "average" society. The artist is aloof from daily life, in a world of his or her own. Or, if they are close to the streets, they have a radically different perspective on things which produces his unique vision. Rodin, Picasso, and Dali are all examples of psychological "rugged individualism." An artisan has a trade; an artist lives an alternative lifestyle. It is impossible to analyze why this impulse occurs to one individual and not another.
According to Jung, an artist leads a dual existence; he mediates between world like a shaman: In his capacity of artist (the person)....is objective and impersonal -- even inhuman -- for as an artist he is his work, and not a human being. Jung observed that every creative person could be considered a "duality or a synthesis of contradictory attitudes," a unique human with a personal life, but also the carrier of an impersonal creative process. The artist's creative achievement cannot be accounted for by an examination of his personal psychology.
A Masterwork stands on its own. Jung even went further by stating that: The personal life of the poet cannot be hold essential to his art -- but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool, or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet. Society frequently projects artists are folk heroes or antiheroes. In Sam Keen's Voices and Visions, Joseph Campbell states: The creative mythology of the modern artists arises when the individual has an experience of his own -- of order, or horror, or beauty -- that he tries to communicate by creating a private mythology. So it is the creative individual who must give us a totally new type of nontheological revelation, who must be the new spiritual guide.
Campbell sees creative artistic work as a "response to the need to escape from danger and chaos and find some new security." This inner quiet repeats the main theme of the hero monomyth (see Book VII, Tiphareth for Hero archetype). Further development of consciousness leads the artist to acute perception. He no longer simply reflects the collective values, he is now free to criticize them. Campbell states, "...the world of the artist or the intellectual must be fierce, accurate in its judgment of the fault in a person or society. But along side this judgment there must be affirmation and compassion. What is important is to keep the dissonance between judgment and compassion." It is curious that Campbell should employ precisely these words.
This judgment and compassion refer explicitly to the qualities know respectively (in qabalistic terms), as Geburah/Mars and Chesed/Jupiter. They are the sphere which are encountered immediately after Tiphareth-consciousness is achieved. They represent aspects of the Individuality, just as the lower spheres denoted aspects of the personality. Specifically, Geburah represents the force aspect of individuality. Chesed represents and transmits the ideal form of the individuality from the Supernal Triad to consciousness. The Supernal Triad (or top three spheres) represents existence so ideal the mind cannot conceptualize it. It is the true home of the soul. For consciousness to enter this level of mystical attainment means balancing the forces of Geburah and Chesed on the Middle Pillar. This harmonization corresponds with path 13, Trump II, The High Priestess. We may consider The High Priestess a higher octave of "Art," since both a lunar in nature.
The Priestess knows the art of piercing the veil, or soul-making. Not all would-be artists, however, attain this integrated ideal. Like shamans, some artists have inherently imbalanced personalities. Many experience a gut-wrenching pathos, a sad yearning which may be encoded in their work. Susanne Langer describes her reaction to such art in Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling. The fact that I know as much as I do of the essence of pothos comes from meeting with great music (and art). If those passages make me sad is an extraneous and irrelevant detail. My grasp of the essence of sadness...comes not from moments when I have seen sadness, but from moments when I have seen sadness before me released from entanglements with contingency. We have seen this in great beauty, in the works of our greatest artists.Puer Aeternus, Marie Louise vonFranz discusses the artist and puer complex. In the really great artist there is always a puer at first, but it can go further. It is a question of feeling-judgment. If one ceases to be an artist when ceasing to be puer, then one was never really an artist. Objectifying the puer, is only the first step. Puer has to learn to carry on with the work he does not like, not only with work where he is carried away by great enthusiasm, which is something everybody can do...being carried away by a festival of work. Puer has to kick himself again and again to take up the boring job through sheer will power.
Puer is also the impulse to feel special, precocious, or gifted. The complex is a desire. What, then, are the psychological criteria for an "artist"? VonFranz lists some in her work, Creation Myths. ...these four factors -- originality, consistency, intensity, and subtlety -- (show) the differences between someone who has creative fantasies and someone who is only spinning neurotic nonsense...the continuity of devotion an individual is capable of giving his fantasy is very important and shows the difference between someone who is gifted with creative fantasy and somebody sucked into sterile unconscious material. There are also certain psychological types more adapted or inclined toward artistic expression.
Different types -- both introverts and extroverts -- pursue different areas of art, such as fine art or performance art. Many artists are Dionysian temperaments strong on Sensation-Perceiving (SP). This penchant for acting on impulse contains a seeming paradox, for SPs, living only for immediate action, become the world's great performing artists: the virtuosos of art, entertainment, and adventure. The great painters, instrumentalists, vocalists, dancers, sculptors, photographers, athletes, hunters, racers, gamblers -- all need the skills which come only from excited concentration on an activity for long periods. No other type can mobilize what virtuosity takes: untold hours of continuous action. ...In a sense the SP does not work, for work implies production, completion, and accomplishment. The SP has no such desire for closure, completion, finishing. He is process-oriented. What ensues from his action is mere product, mere outcome, mere result, and is incidental. Thus, the SP's "work" is essentially play.(Kiersey, Bates, 1978) In Myers-Briggs terms, ISFP is known as "the Artist"; ESFP as "Entertainer"; INFJ as "Author"; INTO as "Architect"; ENTP as "Inventor"; ISTP as "Artisan"; while ESTP is a born "Promoter".
In therapy, unexpressed pathos (which is an indicator of the Puer archetype; see Chapter 7, Tiphareth), is sometimes given vent through creative activity. The therapeutic value of art has long been recognized. Jung encouraged his patients to give free reign to their preconscious contents by painting in a spontaneous manner. However, Langer points out that, It may well be that an artist never creates a work of art unless he is emotionally stirred; if so, it does not follow that this, his own emotional excitement is what he portrays. ...may portray something quite independent of his own psychic processes. He may go beyond the thing felt. In art therapy, the resulting paintings often lack technical precision, but show striking examples of the symbols and imagery of the individuation process.
The most prominent motif in these artistic expressions is the mandala. It is a variation on the magical circle, a symbol of the unfolding Self. A modern cultural example of unfolding variations on the mandala comes from a branch of technological art which corresponds with Path 25: Aerospace. The quest is sublimated now into the creation and indwelling of a new extension of mankind's world -- the space station. The majority of these are wheel-shaped for efficiencies sake. Here the puer tendency to verticality and ascensionism is disciplined to very pragmatic ends. There is always the puer complex at work motivating the artist, as well as an element of Narcissism.
The artist has a love relationship with the image of himself which is projected onto the canvas. Both imaginal art and archetypal thought enliven the world of fantasy and imagination, by turning vision inward. They are a release from the literalization of object-orientation. They take the psychic energy which normally flows outward, and turn it in. Art therapy is a way of integrating the values of archetypes. But in order for the values of, let's say the anima or animus, to be incorporated into the personality of the artist, he or she must assimilate the psychological significance of their own work. Otherwise, the creative urge may be just another way of projecting one's inner reality into the outer world.
This integration does not always happen spontaneously to the artist. If this were so, every great artist or poet would be a Self-Realized or God-Realized individual. History has shown different. Discipline is not the only distinction between the true artist and the dabbler or dilettante. To subject oneself to hard work and the evaluation of one's fellow man is no small accomplishment. The development of artistic insight rather than an externalization of one's specific neurosis is another. One must combine the innate curiosity and vitality of youth with the maturity and dedication of experience. In her classic on the archetype of Eternal Youth,
The Artistic Field - Iona Miller
Art has jumped the canvas even further into real life modalities beyond our former concepts of performance art. Life itself becomes the artful act on an ongoing basis. The body and oeuvre are only spheres of influence that extend further and further from the realm of actual exhibition.
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,’ including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination: the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.
The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.
‘Homo Negentrop’
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop. Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species’ of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown’ (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.
Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors’ that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.
One doesn’t have a Muse; one serves one’s Muse. She comes and goes. In a sense, the artist is ‘ridden’ by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. That daemon, according to Socrates is one’s genius, a compelling force urging us to create.
Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if this daemon isn’t served, the artist can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.
The artistic life is a chaotic arc of inspiration upon inspiration, following the Muse. Artists walk what for others is ‘the road not taken’ (chaos theory’s bifurcation or forking), sometimes going ‘where angels fear to tread.’ Their charismatic influence pulls others into their orbits, and the small effect of one personality potentially spreads its influence over the world (butterfly effect), sometimes over history. The history of art is one of the richest threads of our cultural heritage.
Artists wriggle among many possibilities before settling into a project. We might take poetic license calling artists ‘beautiful attractors’ (Wildman, 2004). The notion of a beautiful attractor draws on the dynamics of synergy. The power distribution of the artistic community is aimed at mutual aid and learning, much like the healing community. Sometimes artists even engage in deliberate public psychotherapy, impacting their immediate communities.
Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.
Mana is personal power, also known as chi, prana, animal magnetism, or kundalini. Mana initiates the transformative process in individuals and society. Many artists have magnetic personalities. Exhibiting sensitivity to a certain kind of universal guidance, their influence emanates from their sphere of potentiality through synchronicity and serendipity, stimulating catharsis or breakthrough in others.
The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists’ communities?
Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.
The Artistic Field of Influence
‘We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
Artists, along with the other innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs, constitute only 1% of the population. We can imagine them at the top of a pyramid of influence, which trickles down to the most solidified or familial and industrial levels of society (see Appendix; Wildman, Table 1). This is clearly less true for the representational artist whose work is without symbolic value, and rather than progressive or transgressive is merely decorative or aesthetic.
Today, science and art aren’t as polarized in their aims as we might think. They are perennial venues for the emergence of discovery, invention, and creation. The argument is that although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. Like art, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from the inside.
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
The objective and subjective mode are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites.
Thus, the metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines.
Gregory Bateson calls metaphor Nature’s language. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.
We can draw from the organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.
Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.
Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.
Negentropy is implicated in the successful development of science, economics, technology, infoscience, and art. Negentropy is the degree of order, or function of a state. It relates to the organization of societies, including subcultures such as the artworld, determining the quantity and quality of creative work
That which was formerly unmanifest comes into being. Negentropy governs the spontaneous transmission and direction of flow of information among systems. The qualities of that information are timeless. It is synergistic in that what was formerly unconnected becomes so, creating something wholly optimal and new or futuristic. In the 1920s, Hungarian scientist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi coined the term syntropy for ‘negative entropy.’
In cybernetics, a meaningful interpretation of negentropy is a measurement of the complexity of a physical structure in which quantities of energy are invested, e.g., buildings, works, technical devices, and organisms which become more complex by feeding not on energy but on negentropy. Art facilitates negentropy by expanding our general field of experience. Negentropy facilitates artistic realization by creating something from nothing.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic, way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.
The two worlds of science and art have married in the digital revolution. Art has from the beginning required a certain amount of technical expertise, the ability to create and use technology in its execution. Only the means and their complexity have changed, evolving over the years, culminating now in a revolution based on ‘ars electronica’: the electronic arts.
Artists are the chaotic attractors of the social field. While conventional artists may enjoy great favor, the ‘strange attractors,’ including leading edge and extreme artists have a special role as catalysts in contemporary life. Artists have always drawn others beyond the limits of their ordinary awareness, confronting them with another reality, initiating them into a world of profound meaning without conventional boundaries.
The beginning of the history of modern man traces back to primordial art, such as that found in the Paleolithic caves of Lascaux. From the beginning, art spoke of magic, of the supernatural, of imagination: the fantastic and disturbing. Always strong in content and aesthetic sophistication, it grew, hand in glove, with the emergence of technological skills.
The emergence of art was and continues to be an unparalleled innovation, confronting our psyches with a giant leap in human evolution whose transformative influence continues opening and exploring brave new worlds to this day. Art has been a driving force and living thread woven into the fabric of society since modern man emerged.
‘Homo Negentrop’
Originally, artists were shamans, healers, and magicians. Their art revealed the compelling dreamscape of primal man, his beliefs about himself, this world, life and death, and hope for an afterlife. We might poetically call them the first negentropic humans, Homo Negentrop. Some might argue ironically that artists are a ‘species’ of their own. Unarguably, they created order and meaning from the chaos of existential life.
Throughout history the insightful vision of artists expressing in symbolic form the ‘as-yet-unknown’ (Jung) has been at the cutting edge of social change. It preceded rational and intellectual social ordering. Artists intuitively extract the gold of their unique vision from creative chaos and manifest it for others to see. Their mediums vary from graphic and print modes, to performance art, ritual, body art, film, and even more arcane forms.
Chaos theory has its ‘strange attractors’ that never settle down into any normal rhythm. The strange attractor dances to the innovative beat of a different drummer. Artists, particularly edge artists, function much like these chaotic attractors whose boundaries are deterministic yet unpredictable. They draw from beyond the personality, from transpersonal resources, and the wellspring of the collective human unconscious.
One doesn’t have a Muse; one serves one’s Muse. She comes and goes. In a sense, the artist is ‘ridden’ by the creative daemon that possesses him or her. That daemon, according to Socrates is one’s genius, a compelling force urging us to create.
Passion (drive) and pathos are reflected in the fact that if this daemon isn’t served, the artist can even become physically ill. Images, ideas and inspirations cry out to become manifested. Order or form yearns to be born from chaos; and those very acts of creation breed destruction of old systems.
The artistic life is a chaotic arc of inspiration upon inspiration, following the Muse. Artists walk what for others is ‘the road not taken’ (chaos theory’s bifurcation or forking), sometimes going ‘where angels fear to tread.’ Their charismatic influence pulls others into their orbits, and the small effect of one personality potentially spreads its influence over the world (butterfly effect), sometimes over history. The history of art is one of the richest threads of our cultural heritage.
Artists wriggle among many possibilities before settling into a project. We might take poetic license calling artists ‘beautiful attractors’ (Wildman, 2004). The notion of a beautiful attractor draws on the dynamics of synergy. The power distribution of the artistic community is aimed at mutual aid and learning, much like the healing community. Sometimes artists even engage in deliberate public psychotherapy, impacting their immediate communities.
Artists magnetically draw the attention of others to their creations, to their vision, into the imagination, into the collective future. We might think of them as the ‘indicator species’ of the social ecology, the evolving cultural landscape. Orbiting far from the norm, they provide a negentropic counter-balance, an evolutionary burst, social innovation -- to conservative forms and institutions, which tend to ossify leading to stasis and decay.
Mana is personal power, also known as chi, prana, animal magnetism, or kundalini. Mana initiates the transformative process in individuals and society. Many artists have magnetic personalities. Exhibiting sensitivity to a certain kind of universal guidance, their influence emanates from their sphere of potentiality through synchronicity and serendipity, stimulating catharsis or breakthrough in others.
The effect is moreso when a movement or school of artistic expression is involved (complex feedback loops) as the reality morphing effect increases exponentially. Artists reflect and influence one another. Arguably, artists demonstrate where society may be heading. They haunt the psychic and perceptual frontiers, drawing the future into the now. How many cultural revolutions have begun in artists’ communities?
Art changes the way people perceive reality, how they see life and their place in it. These negentropic innovations become embedded in social structure. Realizations, insight, empathy are implicit. They show us windows of prescient emotions and impulses, their unframed works rending the veil of the human unconscious.
The Artistic Field of Influence
‘We expect artists as well as scientists to be forward-looking, to fly in the face of what is established, and to create not what is acceptable but what will become acceptable . . . a theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others do not see . . . “creative observation.” (Bronowski, 1958).
Artists, along with the other innovators, scientists and entrepreneurs, constitute only 1% of the population. We can imagine them at the top of a pyramid of influence, which trickles down to the most solidified or familial and industrial levels of society (see Appendix; Wildman, Table 1). This is clearly less true for the representational artist whose work is without symbolic value, and rather than progressive or transgressive is merely decorative or aesthetic.
Today, science and art aren’t as polarized in their aims as we might think. They are perennial venues for the emergence of discovery, invention, and creation. The argument is that although science and art are social phenomena, an innovation in either field occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. Like art, science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from the inside.
“Scientists search for a ‘real’ and hidden, internal visibility (invisible to the naked eye) which will confirm the limits of identity. . .This is an act of limitation which inverts its own criteria by relying on a ‘depth’ model of identity, which is invisible, but gives visibility through microscopic magnification. Yet this search for an invisible core of identity remains open to a visible transgression via artists who are constantly exposing these new certainties as constructs.” (Sargeant, 1999).
The objective and subjective mode are not divorced from one another, anymore than the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Science adapted the artist’s sense that the detail of nature is significant. Like yin and yang, they rely on one another in a dynamic meld that lies beyond the dialectic in the tension of opposites.
Thus, the metaphors of science have gained increasing relevance in the artworld. Art and science begin as imaginative speculation that guesses at a unity or gestalt. Metaphors reflect universal or holistic references and processes, connecting concepts across disciplines.
Gregory Bateson calls metaphor Nature’s language. There is aesthetic pleasure in finding likenesses between things once thought unalike. It gives a sense of richness and understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, through engagement of the whole person.
We can draw from the organic metaphors of quantum physics, field theory, and chaos theory to illuminate the state of the arts. Physics describes the interrelationship of chaos and order as field relationships, while chaos theory describes nature’s own methods of creation and self-assembly. Entropy is the tendency for any closed part of the universe to expand at the expense of order. It is a measure of randomness and disorder -- chaos.
Negentropy is the generative force of the universe. Negentropy (emergent order from chaos) is a nonlinear higher order system, a dynamically creative ordering information. Thinking, science, and art are therefore negentropic.
Negentropy, like art, is ‘in-form-ative.’ It is related to mutual information exchange. Information is embodied in the fractal nature of imagery and symbols, which compress the informational content of the whole. Creativity is an emergent phenomenon patterned by strange attractors, which govern the complexity of information in dynamic flow.
Negentropy is implicated in the successful development of science, economics, technology, infoscience, and art. Negentropy is the degree of order, or function of a state. It relates to the organization of societies, including subcultures such as the artworld, determining the quantity and quality of creative work
That which was formerly unmanifest comes into being. Negentropy governs the spontaneous transmission and direction of flow of information among systems. The qualities of that information are timeless. It is synergistic in that what was formerly unconnected becomes so, creating something wholly optimal and new or futuristic. In the 1920s, Hungarian scientist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi coined the term syntropy for ‘negative entropy.’
In cybernetics, a meaningful interpretation of negentropy is a measurement of the complexity of a physical structure in which quantities of energy are invested, e.g., buildings, works, technical devices, and organisms which become more complex by feeding not on energy but on negentropy. Art facilitates negentropy by expanding our general field of experience. Negentropy facilitates artistic realization by creating something from nothing.
The creative act is one of uniting the unmanifest with the manifest world in a meaningful, often symbolic, way. Such conception is relevant to consciousness, organization, structure, faith, subconsciousness, emotion, even spirituality. Above all, creativity means trusting the process. Investigation of the negentropic criterion helps us move toward a truly transdisciplinary doctrine for the artistic field of influence.
The two worlds of science and art have married in the digital revolution. Art has from the beginning required a certain amount of technical expertise, the ability to create and use technology in its execution. Only the means and their complexity have changed, evolving over the years, culminating now in a revolution based on ‘ars electronica’: the electronic arts.
