The more we attune to the imaginal field, the closer we come to the semantic idea of “inspiration”, as a lived and breathed reality, renewed in each instant. That ‘present’ can remake our past and forge our future. Why should inspiration or creativity be “unusual” when, in fact, it goes on all the time? It quickens, exercises, elevates and stimulates the intellect and emotions with passion, purpose, meaning, drive.
We “make soul” by living life, by irrepressibly imagining possibilities. Soul is rooted firmly in the mundane world. We cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behavior and physical behavior exist in a symbiotic relationship.
Make friends of The Muses. Inspiration is simply the loving expression of a heightened and churning impulse toward creativity. What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels.
We “make soul” by living life, by irrepressibly imagining possibilities. Soul is rooted firmly in the mundane world. We cannot be in the physical world without demonstrating the archetypal or the imaginal. We might conclude that imaginative behavior and physical behavior exist in a symbiotic relationship.
Make friends of The Muses. Inspiration is simply the loving expression of a heightened and churning impulse toward creativity. What we believe conditions what we perceive, feel, and express. The prime expression of beliefs is through spontaneous imagery. We never experience directly, but interpret our experience of our perceptions through imagery. All our input comes through multi-sensory channels.
Art Manifesto 2014
The Sacred & Banal
Where is the Sublime in the Age of Bread & Circuits?
by Iona Miller, (c)2014
The Sacred & Banal
Where is the Sublime in the Age of Bread & Circuits?
by Iona Miller, (c)2014
The Freedom of the Moon
I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water star almost shining.
I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.
--Robert Frost
I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water star almost shining.
I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.
--Robert Frost
The rapid and worldwide growth of a psychological interest over the last two decades shows unmistakably that modern man is turning his attention from outward material things to his own inner processes.
Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.
The psychological interest of the present time is an indication that modern man expects something from the psyche which the outer world has not given him: doubtless something which our religion ought to contain, but no longer does contain, at least for modern man.
--Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, Modern Man in Search of Soul, 1933, CW, Volume 10
Expressionism in art prophetically anticipated this subjective development, for all art intuitively apprehends coming changes in the collective unconsciousness.
The psychological interest of the present time is an indication that modern man expects something from the psyche which the outer world has not given him: doubtless something which our religion ought to contain, but no longer does contain, at least for modern man.
--Jung, The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man, Modern Man in Search of Soul, 1933, CW, Volume 10
Art, for the most part, is not really “art”, anymore. It is barely decoration. Little beyond "sofa art", most of it can be characterized as “personal display,” with attached monetary value, rather than "sublime". Much of even the lauded art of today has no "secondary market", being usurped by the headlong rush for the next new thing -- the next emotional contagion. How long can the voice of the depths be silenced by tidal waves of mediocrity and fried nerve endings?
Works created in the pioneering days of new media with primitive patches and plug ins look childish in retrospect and are relegated to end chapters in history books, discarded like leftover syntho-pop. Best-practice of those days is now literally child's play. Despite the availability of free information, [and disinformation], Millennials may not even know the points of reference, exemplars and historical figures from the common cultural history earlier generations took for granted as the overtones of humanity's vast journey.
What Feeds & Funds the Soul?
The magic springs from below, from the upwelling creative spirit -- the One spirit deep within. If we want a living, vital art, we must go deep on a quest for something lost and suppressed – something forfeited long ago. We won’t find it in a sterile gallery, or pop ups, or the museum, the art fair, or even within the exploded deconstructed frame, or the curatorial or the archival. Where is the art that helps us discover ourselves? Has not every perverse curiosity for everything barbaric and subterranean already been aroused and sated? We need it not to best the past, but to find our own way forward.
We won't find it in the formulaic retrieval of the electronic, traditional or obsolete -- not even in complex visual harmonics, or the saccharin sentimentality of typical new age and psychedelic works, nor in the true-grit of underground scenes. They might reflect what's happening, but they cannot reveal what's coming or how we might deal with it. We won't find it in the painfully precise mechanical renderings of 3D printing or films, nor in other soup-of-the-day "peacock" technological displays, nor in the empty reflective observations of pop art, which pepper our lives in a non-stop assault of virtually meaningless mixing and remixing.
We certainly won't find it in the vapid imagery barrage of social media, where even the best image has a half-life of nanoseconds, even if it goes viral. According to the inverse law of networking, the more trivial it is the more shallow attention it will garner.
What separates the memes from the memorable, the nuanced from the derivative? What can inspire us to gain ground? Where are the clues that can help us awaken from dissociation and remember where we came from? Certainly not through art that requires a sustaining narrative root but is the hybrid equivalent of sterile GMO seeds.
How else can we hope to become more fully human? Do we have to blunder into redemption? Dare we even use such a term, when such work may not be beautiful or pleasant. Perhaps it can only appear in a certain state of the soul. Could the alchemical and transformative come as Jung describes? "[W]hen the God appears to us we are at first powerless, captivated, divided, sick, poisoned with the strongest poison, but drunk with the highest health. Yet we cannot remain in this state, since all the powers of our body are consumed like fat in the flames." Gold never has to prove itself.
We have played out all the familiar tropes and buzzwords; they resound like tinplate notes from an old pianola. All archetypes are stripped bare. Every theme has been hacked, sampled and re-hashed -- mined out from the nascent to the apocalyptic. Long-revered symbols have morphed into icons of globalist supremacy and lost or reversed their "charge". Meaning has inverted into its opposite in a global pole-flip. The Abyss stares back coldly through deadened eyes radiating recycled electrons.
Sacred Nature
Nature is inside us, permeating our cells; but we've lost sight of its rhythms and patterns, or reduced them to sterile algorithms. We ignore Nature at our peril. A long time ago, art was a primordial, sacred expression of a world saturated with supernatural mana and deep meaning.
Mankind looked toward the stars and dared to dream culture into being. Art was direct revelation, and in that sense sublime. Art illuminated our sense of unity with the Cosmos, capturing a bit of microcosmic magic. It helped us find our way forward through the dark mists of approaching events and upheavals.
Later on, art became part of Empire’s self-congratulatory pageantry and pomp. Then it was woven into Renaissance science; the discovery of space and representation. With the rise of bourgeois culture, art became a philosophical instrument, undermining the pieties, the smug certainties of Middle Class life.
Modern art was supposed to shock and disrupt. That was its function. Soon, we discovered that these shocks and disruptions did not interfere with or impede the incessant flow of commodities, the seemingly relentless progression of Empire, beating at the zombiefied heart of global life.
Art’s destabilizing spectacles and broken reflections fed the Capitalist machinery of incessant production and militarization. Art provided an ideological cover for the continual decimation of nature, and the annihilation of traditional cultures. Every effort to break the realm of the aesthetic and finally find something unpresentable, rejected, or repulsive, paradoxically enhanced the filthy, corrupt power of the mega machine.
During the Cold War, writers and artists faced a huge challenge. The Soviet world expected works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was touted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such apparent freedom carried a hidden cost with a covert agenda.
Weaponized Art
Falsely so-called Intelligence applied extraordinary energy to a secret campaign. Some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were unwitting instruments -- whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not. Art was co-opted by the global secret services and bent to their agendas. Spies became the de facto arbiters of taste, style, and social behavior.
Rebellion was routinized; dissent was channeled. Art was deliberately used for political indoctrination, if not social engineering. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
http://gizmodo.com/5686753/how-the-cia-spent-secret-millions-turning-modern-art-into-a-cold-war-arsenal
CIA waged a cultural and propaganda war against socialist ideas from the 1940s to the 1960s. They created, funded and ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, though both bodies always claimed that the CCF was quite independent. They moved through the art world as they had the publishing world.
From the start of the Marshall Plan, CIA got $200 million a year to support various activities, including assassinations, coups, strike-breaking, election-rigging. It set up supposedly independent magazines, festivals, and organizations. In the name of Empire, art was efficiently absorbed into the disintegrating spectacle. The banal spectacle became the norm, as it had in Rome. Only now it is "Bread & Circuits", with electronic gadgetry as the cultural carrot.
The artists who played the game effectively – titillating the bourgeois just enough – mastered the game of private capital accumulation for themselves. They retired to Bavarian castles, Brooklyn lofts, and East Hampton mansions, surrounded by their fawning devotees. A less-affluent contingent fled to Europe, even Berlin, to escape the soul-crushing effects of consumer-driven art. Everybody agreed to the rules of this cynical pantomime, and all was fine for a while.
Then the Know-Brow revolution overturned both High-Brow and Low-Brow art and experimentation with a technological revolution that has resulted in a final blow to art as it has been known throughout the ages. Art has been reduced to an egalitarian pursuit where anyone with a laptop or phone app can create multimedia marvels. But what do they have to say that hasn’t been said? The real story of the truly creative artist with a Vision and a Voice still calls from the wilderness – the hinterlands of the psyche.
We are subjected to philosophical, religious and political propaganda continuously. Culturalization colonizes us at the belief system layer of psyche and infects our self talk and self-image from birth forward. The same process happens at the national and multinational level. People are controlled and manipulated through their belief systems, often based on the most outrageous primary assumptions about how things work. But what if they/we are completely wrong? Our beliefs condition how we think, feel and act.
But our beliefs are recursively conditioned by centuries of cultural programming and mythic patterns that control and manipulates entire populations, socio-politically and spiritually. What if your most cherished beliefs about your spiritual life were undermined with less glamorous revelations about the manipulation of human nature? Why do we seek Truth, and more importantly, why do we seek it outside ourselves in some mysterious authority or mystical signs?
We have to learn how to stop gobbling down propaganda, consumerism, and phony beliefs and make ourselves immune to such manipulation because the onslaught is virtually relentless. Why is the Information Age riddled with gurus? Different classes of belief diseases poison not only what we think, but also HOW we think. Our beliefs about belief are the deeper problem.
We need to build our psychological immunity to such psychotropic infections with DIY mind control. Organized arrays of opinions on economics, philosophy and theology battle for our human minds, seducing and then abandoning us when their false promises fail to manifest. But perhaps if we believe we can, we can solve the problems we claim are unsolvable because of our stupefication, without resort to “higher powers”. We have to focus on what these arcane and banal beliefs deflect us from thinking about, learning to cope without mental crutches. Propaganda misdirects our attention down a dead end path.
Nobody controls anything. It's so complex, everything affects everything else, and we can't anticipate, plan for, or escape it all, despite our intentions or the quantum-mind magic buzzword, "intentionality". Perhaps we seek a domain of control of our lives and health and futures precisely because we feel so OUT of control. We see the flux of chaos and sense the fear and pain in its wake.
Who Calls the Tune?
Who calls the tune for today's "artists"? Anyone with a smartphone can make Selfies, tweeked with apps that do all the creative thinking and create the result at the click of a button from a list of preset options. The same goes for cobbled video production, which arguably has made great strides from the days of Nam June Paik. The best that can be said about such even "happy accidents" is that it helps get outside what is inside in some form of expression. But is it art? Hardly.
Again, canned art is predictable and serves only the panoply of spectacle in the landscape dominated by a Bread & Circuits mentality of disposable entertainment and electronic carrots. High-end multi-media now requires formidable teams of expensive production specialists whose skill-sets are constantly obsolesced by new crops of up to date nameless young Turks. Thus, it falls into the realm of Big Business.
But for the multimedia revolution at our fingertips, we might have gone on forever, patting ourselves on the backs for our little academic exercises in avant-garde-ism, but unfortunately – or, perhaps, fortunately – we now are forced to realize that our entire system – not just the art system – is a con game, a Ponzi Scheme.
Empire mortgaged the future of the Earth for short-term gratifications, for narcissistic celebrations. The gilded shark tanks and massive arena shows no longer help to justify Capitalism’s incessant omnivorous expansion, as the climate shatters and the Sixth Great Extinction proceeds.
Postmodern art gave form and expression to the contemporary religion of nihilism. In this way, it meshed perfectly with the Totalitarian project of the New World Order, the perfected surveillance state. In a nihilistic universe, the Ego reigns, for one transitory moment, floating above the void.
Art became a world of cut-ups, samples, and infinitely re-cycled tropes. Now it is being expunged from the core-curriculum, replaced by a host of toys that trivializa and routinize creation and the zealotry it takes to carve beauty by hand from solid stone. Children are not even taught cursive writing beyond Grade 2. Are we to applaud mediocrity as if it carries meaning? Reflecting a vapid culture hardly raises the bar. Time is spent learning new tricks, rather than producing quiet or resounding splendor, or even soul-searing depictions of despair.
Albert Camus realized, in The Rebel, only two worlds are, in the final analysis, possible for the human mind: The world of rebellion or the world of the Sacred. We can no longer bear to perpetuate the antiquated, repetitive, exhausted modes of rebellion. This must mean, by process of elimination, we are beginning to toggle back toward the world of the Sacred, if Camus was right.
Could the realm of the Sacred reemerge in the midst of our desacralized postmodern wasteland? It would be the final outrage, the last shock.
Intention is a powerful idea, not just airy-fairy wishful thinking. What is the intention of our current civilization? What is the intention of the little particles of individuality swarming around in it? What is the intention of the artist who still understands that their discipline offers an intuitive apprehension, a window on the future, on new environments?
Shamans were the first artists. Eastern mystics, esoterics, and shamans agree there is only one consciousness that expresses itself through the creative medium of space and time. This consciousness fragments itself into myriad tiny shards in order to learn about its own expressive capacities.
If this view is correct, then the intention of civilization should be to mesh all of these fragments back together into a harmonic, ever-changing whole. We could explore universality in diversity, and overcome the false dualism between the individual and collective by reimagining our world as a collaborative work of art.
Can we trade comfortable lies for unpleasant truths? Can art lose its separate identity as an ornament of bourgeois culture and becomes intrinsic to a social world based on creative expression and improvisation, just as technology and nature weave together in a new synthesis?
Nam June Paik thought so early in the information age: "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."
Inspiration should be a verb, not a noun; it is a complex dynamic, a force of Nature and our nature. When someone asks me what “inspires” me and my artwork, I can’t imagine naming any one thing, or list of “things”. It’s like asking my favorite color. I can’t help but answer, ALL, “all of the Above…and Below”.
What doesn’t inspire the artistic eye that doesn’t merely “look at”, but “sees through” to the imaginal depth of any given perception or experience? Rather than the impressionistic senses informing the soul, the soul informs the multisensory experience of being. Inspiration means life, the opposite of death. It implies purpose, direction, meaning, ecstasy, creativity.
Any moment can be as inspirational as the next. Inspiration can come from an internal movement or sensation, a love affair with color and form, the awe of an incandescent moment, even the pain of a soul on fire struggling to express itself or the zeitgeist of the times. All ways of looking at reality are imaginative. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
The Sublime
Art, today, can prepare the ground for that leap in consciousness and civilization that is so urgently necessary. It can help to heal the culturally imposed divide between humanity, nature, and the cosmos. We simply cannot predict how it will do so -- perhaps through prophetic dreams, where we can tap our common roots.
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness beyond imitation: physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.
The sublime is ineffable. Sublimity is historically a romantic notion. Sublime experiences, whether in nature or in art, inspire awe and reverence. An emotional understanding transcends rational thought and words or language.
In “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” Kant discusses aesthetic experience and judgment of the beautiful and the sublime, and also artistic creation. He pondered whether sublimity is restricted to objects of nature, or whether there can also be sublime art.
Before the Romantics, the sublime was normally related to traditional religions. For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world): we allow our emotions to overwhelm our rationality as we experience the wonder of creation and nature. The sublime is deeply experiential and can shake one to the core.
In the 1st century, Longinus described the sublime as great, elevated, or lofty thought, art, or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric. An inspired aesthetic, the sublime evokess awe and veneration, with great persuasive powers. He speaks for the art of the sublime, and names several characteristics.
The sublime requires:
"It must needs be, therefore, that we shall find one source of the sublime in the systematic selection of the most important elements, and the power of forming, by their mutual combination, what may be called one body," Longinus claims.
Though we may not understand how the pieces fit together for quite some time to come, we need to remain open to the inspiration of genius that has fed great art through millennia. We are facing unprecedented challenge as a species. We turn to film and art to help us contextualize experience, personal and collective. As Francis Bacon said, “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” In this way we deepen our relationship with Nature and Cosmos.
State of the Heart
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, reflecting or steering culture. 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 in the quantum paintbox include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnosis or natural trance. They assault as many of the senses and emotions 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. Artists are already designing new bodies, new senses, and synthetic environments.
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.
Now there is no intergenerational priesthood to have our visions for us; we have them for ourselves. Rather than anti-scientifically 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. Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself with self-awareness and self-responsibility. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
Art As Meta-Syn
The function of the contributing artist is ‘pathfinding,' not just creating another pretty or more shocking picture, nor contributing to the glut of recycled commercial imagery that plagues our senses. Creating tangibles from the depths, which truly move us, which speak to us collectively, is another gift altogether. It is work that ‘says something'.
Art has a certain healing or negentropic capacity, the capacity to counter the entropic energies of social breakdown, decay, and meaninglessness. In this sense, great art – authentic art -- feeds us, as it has fed mankind from the earliest times.
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 reveals the indomitable human Spirit.
Any therapist knows that the stories they hear from most of their clients fall into very few, quite typical tales. What we need are bigger stories to guide us in our complex world. We can enlarge our perspective from the individual to the global through “bigger stories”, such as those from our wisdom traditions.
Mythopoesis means literally, "myth-making," the natural expression of the visionary wisdom inborn to the human species (Lash, et al).It is a creative act of story-telling or narration, by which human beings "track" their experience and orient themselves to the cosmos at large. Metahistory is a guiding narrative for human potential, rather than an interpretation of events. The cross-cultural metastory of the human species is an overarching view of past, present, and future. It opens a path toward participation in a story that leads beyond history, a mythos to guide the species.
Works created in the pioneering days of new media with primitive patches and plug ins look childish in retrospect and are relegated to end chapters in history books, discarded like leftover syntho-pop. Best-practice of those days is now literally child's play. Despite the availability of free information, [and disinformation], Millennials may not even know the points of reference, exemplars and historical figures from the common cultural history earlier generations took for granted as the overtones of humanity's vast journey.
What Feeds & Funds the Soul?
The magic springs from below, from the upwelling creative spirit -- the One spirit deep within. If we want a living, vital art, we must go deep on a quest for something lost and suppressed – something forfeited long ago. We won’t find it in a sterile gallery, or pop ups, or the museum, the art fair, or even within the exploded deconstructed frame, or the curatorial or the archival. Where is the art that helps us discover ourselves? Has not every perverse curiosity for everything barbaric and subterranean already been aroused and sated? We need it not to best the past, but to find our own way forward.
We won't find it in the formulaic retrieval of the electronic, traditional or obsolete -- not even in complex visual harmonics, or the saccharin sentimentality of typical new age and psychedelic works, nor in the true-grit of underground scenes. They might reflect what's happening, but they cannot reveal what's coming or how we might deal with it. We won't find it in the painfully precise mechanical renderings of 3D printing or films, nor in other soup-of-the-day "peacock" technological displays, nor in the empty reflective observations of pop art, which pepper our lives in a non-stop assault of virtually meaningless mixing and remixing.
We certainly won't find it in the vapid imagery barrage of social media, where even the best image has a half-life of nanoseconds, even if it goes viral. According to the inverse law of networking, the more trivial it is the more shallow attention it will garner.
What separates the memes from the memorable, the nuanced from the derivative? What can inspire us to gain ground? Where are the clues that can help us awaken from dissociation and remember where we came from? Certainly not through art that requires a sustaining narrative root but is the hybrid equivalent of sterile GMO seeds.
How else can we hope to become more fully human? Do we have to blunder into redemption? Dare we even use such a term, when such work may not be beautiful or pleasant. Perhaps it can only appear in a certain state of the soul. Could the alchemical and transformative come as Jung describes? "[W]hen the God appears to us we are at first powerless, captivated, divided, sick, poisoned with the strongest poison, but drunk with the highest health. Yet we cannot remain in this state, since all the powers of our body are consumed like fat in the flames." Gold never has to prove itself.
We have played out all the familiar tropes and buzzwords; they resound like tinplate notes from an old pianola. All archetypes are stripped bare. Every theme has been hacked, sampled and re-hashed -- mined out from the nascent to the apocalyptic. Long-revered symbols have morphed into icons of globalist supremacy and lost or reversed their "charge". Meaning has inverted into its opposite in a global pole-flip. The Abyss stares back coldly through deadened eyes radiating recycled electrons.
Sacred Nature
Nature is inside us, permeating our cells; but we've lost sight of its rhythms and patterns, or reduced them to sterile algorithms. We ignore Nature at our peril. A long time ago, art was a primordial, sacred expression of a world saturated with supernatural mana and deep meaning.
Mankind looked toward the stars and dared to dream culture into being. Art was direct revelation, and in that sense sublime. Art illuminated our sense of unity with the Cosmos, capturing a bit of microcosmic magic. It helped us find our way forward through the dark mists of approaching events and upheavals.
Later on, art became part of Empire’s self-congratulatory pageantry and pomp. Then it was woven into Renaissance science; the discovery of space and representation. With the rise of bourgeois culture, art became a philosophical instrument, undermining the pieties, the smug certainties of Middle Class life.
Modern art was supposed to shock and disrupt. That was its function. Soon, we discovered that these shocks and disruptions did not interfere with or impede the incessant flow of commodities, the seemingly relentless progression of Empire, beating at the zombiefied heart of global life.
Art’s destabilizing spectacles and broken reflections fed the Capitalist machinery of incessant production and militarization. Art provided an ideological cover for the continual decimation of nature, and the annihilation of traditional cultures. Every effort to break the realm of the aesthetic and finally find something unpresentable, rejected, or repulsive, paradoxically enhanced the filthy, corrupt power of the mega machine.
During the Cold War, writers and artists faced a huge challenge. The Soviet world expected works that glorified militancy, struggle and relentless optimism. In the West, freedom of expression was touted as liberal democracy's most cherished possession. But such apparent freedom carried a hidden cost with a covert agenda.
Weaponized Art
Falsely so-called Intelligence applied extraordinary energy to a secret campaign. Some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were unwitting instruments -- whether they knew it or not, whether they liked it or not. Art was co-opted by the global secret services and bent to their agendas. Spies became the de facto arbiters of taste, style, and social behavior.
Rebellion was routinized; dissent was channeled. Art was deliberately used for political indoctrination, if not social engineering. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-weapon-1578808.html
http://gizmodo.com/5686753/how-the-cia-spent-secret-millions-turning-modern-art-into-a-cold-war-arsenal
CIA waged a cultural and propaganda war against socialist ideas from the 1940s to the 1960s. They created, funded and ran the Congress for Cultural Freedom, though both bodies always claimed that the CCF was quite independent. They moved through the art world as they had the publishing world.
From the start of the Marshall Plan, CIA got $200 million a year to support various activities, including assassinations, coups, strike-breaking, election-rigging. It set up supposedly independent magazines, festivals, and organizations. In the name of Empire, art was efficiently absorbed into the disintegrating spectacle. The banal spectacle became the norm, as it had in Rome. Only now it is "Bread & Circuits", with electronic gadgetry as the cultural carrot.
The artists who played the game effectively – titillating the bourgeois just enough – mastered the game of private capital accumulation for themselves. They retired to Bavarian castles, Brooklyn lofts, and East Hampton mansions, surrounded by their fawning devotees. A less-affluent contingent fled to Europe, even Berlin, to escape the soul-crushing effects of consumer-driven art. Everybody agreed to the rules of this cynical pantomime, and all was fine for a while.
Then the Know-Brow revolution overturned both High-Brow and Low-Brow art and experimentation with a technological revolution that has resulted in a final blow to art as it has been known throughout the ages. Art has been reduced to an egalitarian pursuit where anyone with a laptop or phone app can create multimedia marvels. But what do they have to say that hasn’t been said? The real story of the truly creative artist with a Vision and a Voice still calls from the wilderness – the hinterlands of the psyche.
We are subjected to philosophical, religious and political propaganda continuously. Culturalization colonizes us at the belief system layer of psyche and infects our self talk and self-image from birth forward. The same process happens at the national and multinational level. People are controlled and manipulated through their belief systems, often based on the most outrageous primary assumptions about how things work. But what if they/we are completely wrong? Our beliefs condition how we think, feel and act.
But our beliefs are recursively conditioned by centuries of cultural programming and mythic patterns that control and manipulates entire populations, socio-politically and spiritually. What if your most cherished beliefs about your spiritual life were undermined with less glamorous revelations about the manipulation of human nature? Why do we seek Truth, and more importantly, why do we seek it outside ourselves in some mysterious authority or mystical signs?
We have to learn how to stop gobbling down propaganda, consumerism, and phony beliefs and make ourselves immune to such manipulation because the onslaught is virtually relentless. Why is the Information Age riddled with gurus? Different classes of belief diseases poison not only what we think, but also HOW we think. Our beliefs about belief are the deeper problem.
We need to build our psychological immunity to such psychotropic infections with DIY mind control. Organized arrays of opinions on economics, philosophy and theology battle for our human minds, seducing and then abandoning us when their false promises fail to manifest. But perhaps if we believe we can, we can solve the problems we claim are unsolvable because of our stupefication, without resort to “higher powers”. We have to focus on what these arcane and banal beliefs deflect us from thinking about, learning to cope without mental crutches. Propaganda misdirects our attention down a dead end path.
Nobody controls anything. It's so complex, everything affects everything else, and we can't anticipate, plan for, or escape it all, despite our intentions or the quantum-mind magic buzzword, "intentionality". Perhaps we seek a domain of control of our lives and health and futures precisely because we feel so OUT of control. We see the flux of chaos and sense the fear and pain in its wake.
Who Calls the Tune?
Who calls the tune for today's "artists"? Anyone with a smartphone can make Selfies, tweeked with apps that do all the creative thinking and create the result at the click of a button from a list of preset options. The same goes for cobbled video production, which arguably has made great strides from the days of Nam June Paik. The best that can be said about such even "happy accidents" is that it helps get outside what is inside in some form of expression. But is it art? Hardly.
Again, canned art is predictable and serves only the panoply of spectacle in the landscape dominated by a Bread & Circuits mentality of disposable entertainment and electronic carrots. High-end multi-media now requires formidable teams of expensive production specialists whose skill-sets are constantly obsolesced by new crops of up to date nameless young Turks. Thus, it falls into the realm of Big Business.
But for the multimedia revolution at our fingertips, we might have gone on forever, patting ourselves on the backs for our little academic exercises in avant-garde-ism, but unfortunately – or, perhaps, fortunately – we now are forced to realize that our entire system – not just the art system – is a con game, a Ponzi Scheme.
Empire mortgaged the future of the Earth for short-term gratifications, for narcissistic celebrations. The gilded shark tanks and massive arena shows no longer help to justify Capitalism’s incessant omnivorous expansion, as the climate shatters and the Sixth Great Extinction proceeds.
Postmodern art gave form and expression to the contemporary religion of nihilism. In this way, it meshed perfectly with the Totalitarian project of the New World Order, the perfected surveillance state. In a nihilistic universe, the Ego reigns, for one transitory moment, floating above the void.
Art became a world of cut-ups, samples, and infinitely re-cycled tropes. Now it is being expunged from the core-curriculum, replaced by a host of toys that trivializa and routinize creation and the zealotry it takes to carve beauty by hand from solid stone. Children are not even taught cursive writing beyond Grade 2. Are we to applaud mediocrity as if it carries meaning? Reflecting a vapid culture hardly raises the bar. Time is spent learning new tricks, rather than producing quiet or resounding splendor, or even soul-searing depictions of despair.
Albert Camus realized, in The Rebel, only two worlds are, in the final analysis, possible for the human mind: The world of rebellion or the world of the Sacred. We can no longer bear to perpetuate the antiquated, repetitive, exhausted modes of rebellion. This must mean, by process of elimination, we are beginning to toggle back toward the world of the Sacred, if Camus was right.
Could the realm of the Sacred reemerge in the midst of our desacralized postmodern wasteland? It would be the final outrage, the last shock.
Intention is a powerful idea, not just airy-fairy wishful thinking. What is the intention of our current civilization? What is the intention of the little particles of individuality swarming around in it? What is the intention of the artist who still understands that their discipline offers an intuitive apprehension, a window on the future, on new environments?
Shamans were the first artists. Eastern mystics, esoterics, and shamans agree there is only one consciousness that expresses itself through the creative medium of space and time. This consciousness fragments itself into myriad tiny shards in order to learn about its own expressive capacities.
If this view is correct, then the intention of civilization should be to mesh all of these fragments back together into a harmonic, ever-changing whole. We could explore universality in diversity, and overcome the false dualism between the individual and collective by reimagining our world as a collaborative work of art.
Can we trade comfortable lies for unpleasant truths? Can art lose its separate identity as an ornament of bourgeois culture and becomes intrinsic to a social world based on creative expression and improvisation, just as technology and nature weave together in a new synthesis?
Nam June Paik thought so early in the information age: "Our life is half natural and half technological. Half-and-half is good. You cannot deny that high-tech is progress. We need it for jobs. Yet if you make only high-tech, you make war. So we must have a strong human element to keep modesty and natural life."
Inspiration should be a verb, not a noun; it is a complex dynamic, a force of Nature and our nature. When someone asks me what “inspires” me and my artwork, I can’t imagine naming any one thing, or list of “things”. It’s like asking my favorite color. I can’t help but answer, ALL, “all of the Above…and Below”.
What doesn’t inspire the artistic eye that doesn’t merely “look at”, but “sees through” to the imaginal depth of any given perception or experience? Rather than the impressionistic senses informing the soul, the soul informs the multisensory experience of being. Inspiration means life, the opposite of death. It implies purpose, direction, meaning, ecstasy, creativity.
Any moment can be as inspirational as the next. Inspiration can come from an internal movement or sensation, a love affair with color and form, the awe of an incandescent moment, even the pain of a soul on fire struggling to express itself or the zeitgeist of the times. All ways of looking at reality are imaginative. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle.
The Sublime
Art, today, can prepare the ground for that leap in consciousness and civilization that is so urgently necessary. It can help to heal the culturally imposed divide between humanity, nature, and the cosmos. We simply cannot predict how it will do so -- perhaps through prophetic dreams, where we can tap our common roots.
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness beyond imitation: physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic. Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757) connected the sublime with experiences of awe, terror and danger. Burke saw nature as the most sublime object, capable of generating the strongest sensations in its beholders. This Romantic conception of the sublime proved influential for several generations of artists.
The sublime is ineffable. Sublimity is historically a romantic notion. Sublime experiences, whether in nature or in art, inspire awe and reverence. An emotional understanding transcends rational thought and words or language.
In “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment,” Kant discusses aesthetic experience and judgment of the beautiful and the sublime, and also artistic creation. He pondered whether sublimity is restricted to objects of nature, or whether there can also be sublime art.
Before the Romantics, the sublime was normally related to traditional religions. For Romantics, the sublime is a meeting of the subjective-internal (emotional) and the objective-external (natural world): we allow our emotions to overwhelm our rationality as we experience the wonder of creation and nature. The sublime is deeply experiential and can shake one to the core.
In the 1st century, Longinus described the sublime as great, elevated, or lofty thought, art, or language, particularly in the context of rhetoric. An inspired aesthetic, the sublime evokess awe and veneration, with great persuasive powers. He speaks for the art of the sublime, and names several characteristics.
The sublime requires:
- High thoughts;
- Fervent passion
- Greatness of soul
- Sublime and worthy images
- Harmonizing elements,
- Amplification
- Elevation
- Emulation as inspiration
- Powerful Images
- Poetic Images
- Persuasive Images
- Smooth connections
"It must needs be, therefore, that we shall find one source of the sublime in the systematic selection of the most important elements, and the power of forming, by their mutual combination, what may be called one body," Longinus claims.
Though we may not understand how the pieces fit together for quite some time to come, we need to remain open to the inspiration of genius that has fed great art through millennia. We are facing unprecedented challenge as a species. We turn to film and art to help us contextualize experience, personal and collective. As Francis Bacon said, “The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery.” In this way we deepen our relationship with Nature and Cosmos.
State of the Heart
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, reflecting or steering culture. 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 in the quantum paintbox include truly tactile virtual reality, and various levels of induced altered awareness, such as hypnosis or natural trance. They assault as many of the senses and emotions 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. Artists are already designing new bodies, new senses, and synthetic environments.
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.
Now there is no intergenerational priesthood to have our visions for us; we have them for ourselves. Rather than anti-scientifically 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. Knowledge is power...over yourself. Mind your mind; control yourself with self-awareness and self-responsibility. There is no artificial distinction between the pursuit of knowledge and self-knowledge and aesthetics. Beauty is an affair of the heart but speaks to our whole being.
Art As Meta-Syn
The function of the contributing artist is ‘pathfinding,' not just creating another pretty or more shocking picture, nor contributing to the glut of recycled commercial imagery that plagues our senses. Creating tangibles from the depths, which truly move us, which speak to us collectively, is another gift altogether. It is work that ‘says something'.
Art has a certain healing or negentropic capacity, the capacity to counter the entropic energies of social breakdown, decay, and meaninglessness. In this sense, great art – authentic art -- feeds us, as it has fed mankind from the earliest times.
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 reveals the indomitable human Spirit.
Any therapist knows that the stories they hear from most of their clients fall into very few, quite typical tales. What we need are bigger stories to guide us in our complex world. We can enlarge our perspective from the individual to the global through “bigger stories”, such as those from our wisdom traditions.
Mythopoesis means literally, "myth-making," the natural expression of the visionary wisdom inborn to the human species (Lash, et al).It is a creative act of story-telling or narration, by which human beings "track" their experience and orient themselves to the cosmos at large. Metahistory is a guiding narrative for human potential, rather than an interpretation of events. The cross-cultural metastory of the human species is an overarching view of past, present, and future. It opens a path toward participation in a story that leads beyond history, a mythos to guide the species.
REFERENCES
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik
http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/2013/01/i-want-to-emboss-you-like-coin.html
http://www.planetaryculture.com/intentional-arts/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nam_June_Paik
http://carljungdepthpsychology.blogspot.com/2013/01/i-want-to-emboss-you-like-coin.html
http://www.planetaryculture.com/intentional-arts/
