Random Order Revisited:
Collage Jumps the Canvas to Multimedia Art
By Iona Miller, 5/2004
The Multimedia Art of Iona Miller
Random Order Revisited:
Collage Jumps the Canvas to Multimedia Art
The Multimedia Art of Iona Miller
By Iona Miller, 5/2004
Let us imagine the Anima Mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street. ~ James Hillman
Robert Rauschenberg originally legitimized collage as a valid artform with his curatorial manifestos, The Art of Assemblage (1961) and Random Order (1963). He revisioned many presuppositions about art and older notions of the avant-garde in his own non-nihilistic oppositional strain. In fact, his notion of “random order” prophetically prefigures the scientific discovery of Chaos Theory by decades.
At his most ambitious, Rauschenberg hoped technology would allow him to create a machine to integrate spectators into its functioning, reactions setting it in motion transforming the participants. This is multimedia interactivity, with feedback and feedforward loops. He wanted to educate the predictable public to risk, including in the realm of sexuality. He wanted to reflect and modify the desires of the viewer.
Many of the goals of today’s multimedia “Know-Brow” artists are similar, aiming at embodied experience and pushing those insights further as CG images become more compelling. The larger question remains, “What does it mean to be human?” American film and video critic Gene Youngblood once wrote that “all art is experimental, or it isn’t art.” Innovation brings radically new frames of reference or discards frames entirely.
“Indeed the new materials artists use today have radically transformed art, and our globally-linked planet has brought the plurality of artistic forms, the diversity of styles, the ways in which statements about art can be formed and framed to the surface. Within this we find that the wide array of technical practices, this virtual reality theatre being one example, now make it easy to see that technology has had a tremendous impact on how we engage with art, how we engage with the question of what art is, and how we view the many ways artists exploit technology in our time.“
New tools, of course, have always resulted in new forms and, in the largest sense, we can say that technological innovations add imaginative possibilities to the artistic toolbox. When we place the results into a mix that includes social, cultural, political, and scientific contributions we find the enlarged vantage points new technologies offer are even more intriguing.
“Perhaps as striking as the number of ways in which artists use technology is that forms of experimentation, like artistic goals, vary widely today. Given this it is not surprising that, sometimes, technologically informed work simply excites our senses and, at other times, even an educated viewer may wonder how best to address a work he or she simply does not understand. There is also the challenge of engaging with work that invites us to be participants rather than passive spectators. And, of course, work presented in more traditional ways, so to speak, continues to raise traditional questions about what art is.
“One might ask: Is it the visceral quality of a work that excites us or will we more fully experience an artist’s intention if we read the work as a text and interpret the levels of meaning embedded in the project? Then, again, perhaps an interpretation based on ferreting out meaning compromises key elements that might be optically-centered or intended to emotionally-charge our experience?” ~Amy Ione, 2000, http://users.lmi.net/ione/sf3.html
Philosophically defined concepts such as ideology, aesthetics, meaning, emotion, embodied or situated cognition, complexity, anticipation, inspiration, signification, psychophysical coordination, emergentism, depiction, focal-point conflict, and other elusive models fit into the well-honed categories, bracketing themes such as picture organization and gestalt, metaphor, interpretation, subjectivity, enculturation, neural processing, language and history.
They depend crucially on our psychophysical constraints (compensation, accentuation, contrast, occlusion, dissonance, blur, grain, codes, projection, distortion, denotation, etc.) and enabling of our sensorimotor apparatus. They also depend on the ecological and sociocultural environment in which our apprehending and productive capacities come into being. Rhythm perception and production involve a complex, whole-body experience.
The avant-garde attempted to break down the false division between “art” and “life.” This medium has morphed again, and the message of the art and science of depiction morphs with it. The generative approach is multidisciplinary. Insightful connections and correlaries are described, not truths or explanations. Collage, montage, and assemblage have gone digital -- jumped the juxtaposed canvas into graffiti, into digital fine art, into art music as sampling and into animation, which draws from the entirety of art history stringing together its pastiche.
Early digital films of the1990’s such as “The Mind’s Eye,” “Beyond the Mind’s Eye,” and “The Gate,” are good examples of the later. Some of these vignettes draw explicitely from art history, using works of Picasso, allusions to Dali, Magritte, etc. They also draw on the genre of science-art. Their immediate predecesors were computer-generated dynamics, such as “Fractal Fantasy”, and a host of other mathematically driven animations like “Voyage To the Planets”.
Multimedia with its efficiency of rendering takes us beyond the aesthetic block of static art that hangs on the wall and becomes p(art) of our lives. Home studios and user-friendly programs and interfaces now allow individual digital fine artists, such as Laurence Gartel and filmmaker Bob Judd, to produce their own audio-visual visions on DVD. Trial and error process focus the artist’s eye on the current state of he image and his/her reactions to it. Trained image makers know what they need and choose the relevant tool.
Art history language is translative and descriptive, not generative. Validity has standards, but they become outmoded periodically, and must be revisioned to prefigure inevitable transformations. The aesthetics of juxtaposition is fundamental; it is a primary modality of simultaneous display that can either 1) temporarily shock, negate, or scandalize, (cultural value); or 2) lead toward lasting aesthetic and symbolic tensions (aesthetic and psychological value).
Juxtaposition can shock, surprise or inform. However, once the shock circuit [artifact of the DaDa era] is closed, the effect will not repeat again in the same individual. There is a world of difference between threat and shock or lasting aesthetic effect. Primary tropes tend to characterize the creations of those who work in this assemblage modality, revealing their mental shorthand, their private symbolic and iconographic lexicons.
The second form ignites the potential of disparate elements in a new ‘force field.’ It becomes a ‘strange attractor’ around which our eye and consciousness can circulate and recirculate. This is one form of the iconography of high art, Rauschenberg effectively argued. His was a challenging balance between aesthetic signification and spectatorial reception.
Collage can seem random or purposeful, assembling symbols or elements that “want to live with one another.” Some artists just ‘know’ what wants to live together, what is aesthetically pleasing and psychologically congruent or challenging, what juxtaposition still has something to say beyond simple pattern saturation. Minimalism, or classical juxtapositions of opposites, is too sparse for such rich, complex vision.
Rauschenberg continually rejected an aesthetic of nihilism, shock and negation through his whole career preferring complete esthetic freedom, eschewing art and historical battles already waged by predecesors. His works changed focus, evoked multiplicity, and multiple perspectives. He preferred the unresolved.
Neo-dada attitudes of the pre- and post WWII era have carried over into post Postmodern underground art with multimedia performance artists, who are socially disengaged or culturally and politically frustrated. Even this seemingly negative response to pain seeks to engage with “process” and “life” which is not separate from “art.” But, by definition, much of this “art”, often identified with the Fluxus movement, is not lasting, frequently consisting of artifacts or ephemera.
These edge and extreme artists are idiosyncratic and narcissistic, but generally not socially toxic, anarchistic or apolitical, but quite political and often spiritual in their statements, rhetoric, and performances. They have broken free of the museum and the artworld and found their own validation. But provocation can’t last indefinitely.
The history of the avant garde is discontinuous, turbulent, nonlinear, chaotic, just like its art. All of its metaphors strongly suggest the randomly punctuated rhythms of Chaos Theory. Its reference points reinforce this description, reiterating complex feedback loops, strange attractors, and producing big effects [such as radical cultural and political effects] from minor perturbations.
Iona Miller’s Psychogenesis: Updates:
In the 1990’s, Iona Miller created 400 posters, 24 x 36, from the most prevalent form of trash available: discarded magazines, the base of the garbage pyramid. While they are commonly used, she found a unique means of doing so. Of course, the strongest constraint of this medium is availability, listening to one’s inner voice on where to go when to find the raw materials. If you listen closely enough, knowing what to save and discard, they call to you.
Miller recycled this ‘found’ imagery into a series of self-therapeutic works, which she later discovered contained a virtual encyclopedia of psychological archetypes, the “strange attractors” of the psyche. She compiled the more symbolic, rather than merely aesthetic, of these process art works in Psychogenesis: A Journey through Inner Realms of Wonder and Imagination via Modern Iconography and Recycled Imagery, at the turn of the Millennium.
The avant garde alleged the praxis of life is to be renewed and renewal was the unrelated therapeutic purpose of this project. But this ‘art’ was uncontrived, claiming no commercial purpose or drive. It has nothing to do with the institutionalization of art nor discursive rules, nor social criticism, nor overarching historical frameworks.
Nor is it expressing the avant garde strategy of using shocking assault on the division of art and life. It had to do with getting what was inside out. It is life in motion and its strategy is to take the commonest most discarded thing, appropriate it and activate its healing talismanic potential, turn lead into gold, giving it a new potency beyond the transgressive power, a force that comes from the emergent power of the one true thing.
These works reappropriate the ordinary, the mundane and recontextualize it within a meaningful whole of which the viewer is an integral part. It is motivated by the urge to connect with the life stream, the flow of psychophysical energy or libido that animates us. It is driven by jealousy of time to fulfill its expressive goal before death finds another unreleasable hostage, for even as I am writing this I hear about the sudden death of a friend of 25 years. Now, I have gone digital and begun merging myself in this series, particularizing the images even further.
The Psychogenesis preface begins:
“Welcome to my world--a world ensouled and enlivened by imagery. A world of the seemingly familiar, yet peculiarly mysterious: the vast landscape of consciousness, fluid temporal movement, the undivided flux of creation. Many people have allowed me to tap into their dreams, their inner streams of realities, their nether realms. I conclude that our local existence is nested in a vast collective domain, abode of symbols, guiding archetypes, and myths. We contain and are contained by Universe, and we are not different from that. This eternal world outside spacetime is the contact point for sacred time and space, the container for that which never was but is always happening. Since its source is complex, its coding is intense. Archetypal images enfold multiple meanings, modes, potentials, dimensions.
The human psyche is inherently polytheistic, polymorphous, continually in motion.We are experiencing not just the revival of ancient images, but also the harvest of all the world's cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being. Gradually we discover that these stories are our own stories, that they drive the amplified rhythms of our own lives, depending on and enhancing us, filling us with a sense of the fractal resonance of the mythic life within our own.In our modern culture every image, mundane or divine, has been used and abused.
In the Postmodern Era there is no new iconography. In imagery and art, there is nothing new under the Sun. Everything, which can be used from religion, myth and symbolism, has been used and can only be recycled -- recycled like these collaged images from the trash-heap of society. The material for these images was literally someone's garbage. My task was therefore, as usual whether doing art or therapy, trying to turn alchemical lead into gold."
Here, in this animated world, images are lovingly juxtaposed with their complements and contrasts in naturally corresponding clusters of symbolism. They share the same metaphysical essence. Some images just want to "live together." Symbols held in the subtle net of a visual field become particularized imagery; they become personal, unique. The familiar is combined with the mysterious, reflecting a singular surrealistic vision. It embodies a truth rather than providing meaning.
The familiar becomes unfamiliar or “unknown” once again in the juxtaposed context. It helps us confront mystery, to stand in the Mystery. Reflectaphors, or reflective metaphors, repeat themselves in each image or poster, as well as jump from image to image--i.e., they echo themes among the various pieces as the series unfolds itself in self-similar fashion, like the iterations and reiterations of fractals.
Anima Mundi
So, Anima Mundi bids you welcome and acts as our tour-guide or hostess. She coaxes us deeper into the labyrinth of desire and fulfillment, where each of us finds our own resonance, the imagery, which speaks the loudest or clearest, or beguiles with the mere whisper.
To experience psychic reality means to be in soul, in the realm of the imagination, as if interacting with its inhabitants and locales. Inner visionary experience, be it wrathful or beatific, is an expression of soul. Through images the unconscious affects our worldview, health and relationships. Imagination not only conditions our reality; it is our reality. Soul is the middle world between gross materiality and the spiritual world.
Matter, spirit, and ego fight over the soul. Yet soul is a primary experience, virtually our only way of being. Each wants its unique fantasy to reign uppermost. So, the first task is to distinguish soul from spirit, so the body may unite with and be enlivened by both.
This is a psychological approach to art and life--giving voice to soul, living life as art. It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies and the world of nature with imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle and develop a relationship with Her.
All images arise either from body processes (instinct) or psychic forms (spirit). Whether instinct-controlled or spirit-controlled, images are related to physiological processes. They appear psychologically as images, but work physiologically. They produce emotional or visceral manifestations, but not in any causal way. The images don't produce reactions. The image is the entire psychophysical gestalt.
The soul generates images unceasingly. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. This is art that is not separate from life.
Imagine Nothing:
Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact One World.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.
I began this series of collages shortly after the death of both of my parents three days apart from one another. Though I painted years earlier, I am not a trained artist, but a clinical hypnotherapist with a strong Jungian background in symbolism. Realizing I could use this for processing my own pain and grief, I began them as Art Therapy. I had originally made a few as examples of process work for my students in a college class I taught, called "An Introduction to Depth Psychology."
I found in my therapy practice a tendency for clients to present certain recurrent motifs, such as black holes, "blacker than black," tunnels, images of chaotic breakdown, etc. Prior, I had been writing a book called Dreamhealing, about Asklepian dream healing, a technique developed around the metaphors of the then-new science of Chaos Theory which is now known as Complexity. In this deepening process, the client becomes each element the imagination presents in turn. Immersed in this process imagery, I sought to create some visual images, which might intimate this experiential material.
So, my posters are gestalts: waking dreams, where all elements are co-temporaneous, existing in time holographically--presented together even though they image a dynamic process. Each of them constitutes a shamanic dream journey--a full immersion in the inner world. They are postcards from the inner journey, snapshots of milestones along the Way.
None of them are contrived beforehand -- all were emergent experiences of just letting the images work themselves. No theme was determined in advance. The posters themselves dictate some of what must happen on them. In order for them to appear seamless, I had to hide or disguise the seams in various fashions. Yes, sometimes "less is more," but most often more was needed to insure a seamless quality. This was not a project where minimalism could ever prevail.
Part of the burden and joy of working in this medium is using what one has, or can find, what is spontaneously available. Jungian psychology uses the notion of the bricoleur, the craftsman who works with that which is at hand, including self-imposed rules. This includes the psychological situation as well as the materials. My grief work accentuated the death-rebirth motif, which is ubiquitous in therapy in any case.
In their formative stages, the elements were not fixed on the canvas, and sometimes due to electrostatics, heat, and gravity "things moved of their own accord." Almost invariably, this was an improvement over any intuitive or deliberate placement I might have made. So, it was a process of flowing with the animating process, rather than dictating the process.
Later, they organized themselves into larger groups. There were obvious thematic connections for some of them, but others were not so obvious until there were hundreds of them. Their order has no relationship to the time of assembly. I have never re-sorted them, but for some reason the over-all story of the text for each leads seamlessly into the next, providing a narrative stream. The text for each piece suggested itself long after completion through a recognition process, or sometimes immediately by synchronicity. They assembled themselves and with one another by a process I can only describe as "synarchy."
The awesome pandaemonium of imagery flowed forth spontaneously and my ego could not fight its way free. Rather, I had to surrender to the forces that often crossed my subjective will. I was a slave to the process for some time, producing several pieces a week for long periods of time, and sometimes even doing more than one per day.
The mystery images are a compelling source of transformation and healing, and it worked! The physician healed herself, or rather opened to the inner healer and let time take care of the rest.
"
Collage Jumps the Canvas to Multimedia Art
The Multimedia Art of Iona Miller
By Iona Miller, 5/2004
Let us imagine the Anima Mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street. ~ James Hillman
Robert Rauschenberg originally legitimized collage as a valid artform with his curatorial manifestos, The Art of Assemblage (1961) and Random Order (1963). He revisioned many presuppositions about art and older notions of the avant-garde in his own non-nihilistic oppositional strain. In fact, his notion of “random order” prophetically prefigures the scientific discovery of Chaos Theory by decades.
At his most ambitious, Rauschenberg hoped technology would allow him to create a machine to integrate spectators into its functioning, reactions setting it in motion transforming the participants. This is multimedia interactivity, with feedback and feedforward loops. He wanted to educate the predictable public to risk, including in the realm of sexuality. He wanted to reflect and modify the desires of the viewer.
Many of the goals of today’s multimedia “Know-Brow” artists are similar, aiming at embodied experience and pushing those insights further as CG images become more compelling. The larger question remains, “What does it mean to be human?” American film and video critic Gene Youngblood once wrote that “all art is experimental, or it isn’t art.” Innovation brings radically new frames of reference or discards frames entirely.
“Indeed the new materials artists use today have radically transformed art, and our globally-linked planet has brought the plurality of artistic forms, the diversity of styles, the ways in which statements about art can be formed and framed to the surface. Within this we find that the wide array of technical practices, this virtual reality theatre being one example, now make it easy to see that technology has had a tremendous impact on how we engage with art, how we engage with the question of what art is, and how we view the many ways artists exploit technology in our time.“
New tools, of course, have always resulted in new forms and, in the largest sense, we can say that technological innovations add imaginative possibilities to the artistic toolbox. When we place the results into a mix that includes social, cultural, political, and scientific contributions we find the enlarged vantage points new technologies offer are even more intriguing.
“Perhaps as striking as the number of ways in which artists use technology is that forms of experimentation, like artistic goals, vary widely today. Given this it is not surprising that, sometimes, technologically informed work simply excites our senses and, at other times, even an educated viewer may wonder how best to address a work he or she simply does not understand. There is also the challenge of engaging with work that invites us to be participants rather than passive spectators. And, of course, work presented in more traditional ways, so to speak, continues to raise traditional questions about what art is.
“One might ask: Is it the visceral quality of a work that excites us or will we more fully experience an artist’s intention if we read the work as a text and interpret the levels of meaning embedded in the project? Then, again, perhaps an interpretation based on ferreting out meaning compromises key elements that might be optically-centered or intended to emotionally-charge our experience?” ~Amy Ione, 2000, http://users.lmi.net/ione/sf3.html
Philosophically defined concepts such as ideology, aesthetics, meaning, emotion, embodied or situated cognition, complexity, anticipation, inspiration, signification, psychophysical coordination, emergentism, depiction, focal-point conflict, and other elusive models fit into the well-honed categories, bracketing themes such as picture organization and gestalt, metaphor, interpretation, subjectivity, enculturation, neural processing, language and history.
They depend crucially on our psychophysical constraints (compensation, accentuation, contrast, occlusion, dissonance, blur, grain, codes, projection, distortion, denotation, etc.) and enabling of our sensorimotor apparatus. They also depend on the ecological and sociocultural environment in which our apprehending and productive capacities come into being. Rhythm perception and production involve a complex, whole-body experience.
The avant-garde attempted to break down the false division between “art” and “life.” This medium has morphed again, and the message of the art and science of depiction morphs with it. The generative approach is multidisciplinary. Insightful connections and correlaries are described, not truths or explanations. Collage, montage, and assemblage have gone digital -- jumped the juxtaposed canvas into graffiti, into digital fine art, into art music as sampling and into animation, which draws from the entirety of art history stringing together its pastiche.
Early digital films of the1990’s such as “The Mind’s Eye,” “Beyond the Mind’s Eye,” and “The Gate,” are good examples of the later. Some of these vignettes draw explicitely from art history, using works of Picasso, allusions to Dali, Magritte, etc. They also draw on the genre of science-art. Their immediate predecesors were computer-generated dynamics, such as “Fractal Fantasy”, and a host of other mathematically driven animations like “Voyage To the Planets”.
Multimedia with its efficiency of rendering takes us beyond the aesthetic block of static art that hangs on the wall and becomes p(art) of our lives. Home studios and user-friendly programs and interfaces now allow individual digital fine artists, such as Laurence Gartel and filmmaker Bob Judd, to produce their own audio-visual visions on DVD. Trial and error process focus the artist’s eye on the current state of he image and his/her reactions to it. Trained image makers know what they need and choose the relevant tool.
Art history language is translative and descriptive, not generative. Validity has standards, but they become outmoded periodically, and must be revisioned to prefigure inevitable transformations. The aesthetics of juxtaposition is fundamental; it is a primary modality of simultaneous display that can either 1) temporarily shock, negate, or scandalize, (cultural value); or 2) lead toward lasting aesthetic and symbolic tensions (aesthetic and psychological value).
Juxtaposition can shock, surprise or inform. However, once the shock circuit [artifact of the DaDa era] is closed, the effect will not repeat again in the same individual. There is a world of difference between threat and shock or lasting aesthetic effect. Primary tropes tend to characterize the creations of those who work in this assemblage modality, revealing their mental shorthand, their private symbolic and iconographic lexicons.
The second form ignites the potential of disparate elements in a new ‘force field.’ It becomes a ‘strange attractor’ around which our eye and consciousness can circulate and recirculate. This is one form of the iconography of high art, Rauschenberg effectively argued. His was a challenging balance between aesthetic signification and spectatorial reception.
Collage can seem random or purposeful, assembling symbols or elements that “want to live with one another.” Some artists just ‘know’ what wants to live together, what is aesthetically pleasing and psychologically congruent or challenging, what juxtaposition still has something to say beyond simple pattern saturation. Minimalism, or classical juxtapositions of opposites, is too sparse for such rich, complex vision.
Rauschenberg continually rejected an aesthetic of nihilism, shock and negation through his whole career preferring complete esthetic freedom, eschewing art and historical battles already waged by predecesors. His works changed focus, evoked multiplicity, and multiple perspectives. He preferred the unresolved.
Neo-dada attitudes of the pre- and post WWII era have carried over into post Postmodern underground art with multimedia performance artists, who are socially disengaged or culturally and politically frustrated. Even this seemingly negative response to pain seeks to engage with “process” and “life” which is not separate from “art.” But, by definition, much of this “art”, often identified with the Fluxus movement, is not lasting, frequently consisting of artifacts or ephemera.
These edge and extreme artists are idiosyncratic and narcissistic, but generally not socially toxic, anarchistic or apolitical, but quite political and often spiritual in their statements, rhetoric, and performances. They have broken free of the museum and the artworld and found their own validation. But provocation can’t last indefinitely.
The history of the avant garde is discontinuous, turbulent, nonlinear, chaotic, just like its art. All of its metaphors strongly suggest the randomly punctuated rhythms of Chaos Theory. Its reference points reinforce this description, reiterating complex feedback loops, strange attractors, and producing big effects [such as radical cultural and political effects] from minor perturbations.
Iona Miller’s Psychogenesis: Updates:
In the 1990’s, Iona Miller created 400 posters, 24 x 36, from the most prevalent form of trash available: discarded magazines, the base of the garbage pyramid. While they are commonly used, she found a unique means of doing so. Of course, the strongest constraint of this medium is availability, listening to one’s inner voice on where to go when to find the raw materials. If you listen closely enough, knowing what to save and discard, they call to you.
Miller recycled this ‘found’ imagery into a series of self-therapeutic works, which she later discovered contained a virtual encyclopedia of psychological archetypes, the “strange attractors” of the psyche. She compiled the more symbolic, rather than merely aesthetic, of these process art works in Psychogenesis: A Journey through Inner Realms of Wonder and Imagination via Modern Iconography and Recycled Imagery, at the turn of the Millennium.
The avant garde alleged the praxis of life is to be renewed and renewal was the unrelated therapeutic purpose of this project. But this ‘art’ was uncontrived, claiming no commercial purpose or drive. It has nothing to do with the institutionalization of art nor discursive rules, nor social criticism, nor overarching historical frameworks.
Nor is it expressing the avant garde strategy of using shocking assault on the division of art and life. It had to do with getting what was inside out. It is life in motion and its strategy is to take the commonest most discarded thing, appropriate it and activate its healing talismanic potential, turn lead into gold, giving it a new potency beyond the transgressive power, a force that comes from the emergent power of the one true thing.
These works reappropriate the ordinary, the mundane and recontextualize it within a meaningful whole of which the viewer is an integral part. It is motivated by the urge to connect with the life stream, the flow of psychophysical energy or libido that animates us. It is driven by jealousy of time to fulfill its expressive goal before death finds another unreleasable hostage, for even as I am writing this I hear about the sudden death of a friend of 25 years. Now, I have gone digital and begun merging myself in this series, particularizing the images even further.
The Psychogenesis preface begins:
“Welcome to my world--a world ensouled and enlivened by imagery. A world of the seemingly familiar, yet peculiarly mysterious: the vast landscape of consciousness, fluid temporal movement, the undivided flux of creation. Many people have allowed me to tap into their dreams, their inner streams of realities, their nether realms. I conclude that our local existence is nested in a vast collective domain, abode of symbols, guiding archetypes, and myths. We contain and are contained by Universe, and we are not different from that. This eternal world outside spacetime is the contact point for sacred time and space, the container for that which never was but is always happening. Since its source is complex, its coding is intense. Archetypal images enfold multiple meanings, modes, potentials, dimensions.
The human psyche is inherently polytheistic, polymorphous, continually in motion.We are experiencing not just the revival of ancient images, but also the harvest of all the world's cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being. Gradually we discover that these stories are our own stories, that they drive the amplified rhythms of our own lives, depending on and enhancing us, filling us with a sense of the fractal resonance of the mythic life within our own.In our modern culture every image, mundane or divine, has been used and abused.
In the Postmodern Era there is no new iconography. In imagery and art, there is nothing new under the Sun. Everything, which can be used from religion, myth and symbolism, has been used and can only be recycled -- recycled like these collaged images from the trash-heap of society. The material for these images was literally someone's garbage. My task was therefore, as usual whether doing art or therapy, trying to turn alchemical lead into gold."
Here, in this animated world, images are lovingly juxtaposed with their complements and contrasts in naturally corresponding clusters of symbolism. They share the same metaphysical essence. Some images just want to "live together." Symbols held in the subtle net of a visual field become particularized imagery; they become personal, unique. The familiar is combined with the mysterious, reflecting a singular surrealistic vision. It embodies a truth rather than providing meaning.
The familiar becomes unfamiliar or “unknown” once again in the juxtaposed context. It helps us confront mystery, to stand in the Mystery. Reflectaphors, or reflective metaphors, repeat themselves in each image or poster, as well as jump from image to image--i.e., they echo themes among the various pieces as the series unfolds itself in self-similar fashion, like the iterations and reiterations of fractals.
Anima Mundi
So, Anima Mundi bids you welcome and acts as our tour-guide or hostess. She coaxes us deeper into the labyrinth of desire and fulfillment, where each of us finds our own resonance, the imagery, which speaks the loudest or clearest, or beguiles with the mere whisper.
To experience psychic reality means to be in soul, in the realm of the imagination, as if interacting with its inhabitants and locales. Inner visionary experience, be it wrathful or beatific, is an expression of soul. Through images the unconscious affects our worldview, health and relationships. Imagination not only conditions our reality; it is our reality. Soul is the middle world between gross materiality and the spiritual world.
Matter, spirit, and ego fight over the soul. Yet soul is a primary experience, virtually our only way of being. Each wants its unique fantasy to reign uppermost. So, the first task is to distinguish soul from spirit, so the body may unite with and be enlivened by both.
This is a psychological approach to art and life--giving voice to soul, living life as art. It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies and the world of nature with imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle and develop a relationship with Her.
All images arise either from body processes (instinct) or psychic forms (spirit). Whether instinct-controlled or spirit-controlled, images are related to physiological processes. They appear psychologically as images, but work physiologically. They produce emotional or visceral manifestations, but not in any causal way. The images don't produce reactions. The image is the entire psychophysical gestalt.
The soul generates images unceasingly. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."
Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. This is art that is not separate from life.
Imagine Nothing:
Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact One World.
Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.
I began this series of collages shortly after the death of both of my parents three days apart from one another. Though I painted years earlier, I am not a trained artist, but a clinical hypnotherapist with a strong Jungian background in symbolism. Realizing I could use this for processing my own pain and grief, I began them as Art Therapy. I had originally made a few as examples of process work for my students in a college class I taught, called "An Introduction to Depth Psychology."
I found in my therapy practice a tendency for clients to present certain recurrent motifs, such as black holes, "blacker than black," tunnels, images of chaotic breakdown, etc. Prior, I had been writing a book called Dreamhealing, about Asklepian dream healing, a technique developed around the metaphors of the then-new science of Chaos Theory which is now known as Complexity. In this deepening process, the client becomes each element the imagination presents in turn. Immersed in this process imagery, I sought to create some visual images, which might intimate this experiential material.
So, my posters are gestalts: waking dreams, where all elements are co-temporaneous, existing in time holographically--presented together even though they image a dynamic process. Each of them constitutes a shamanic dream journey--a full immersion in the inner world. They are postcards from the inner journey, snapshots of milestones along the Way.
None of them are contrived beforehand -- all were emergent experiences of just letting the images work themselves. No theme was determined in advance. The posters themselves dictate some of what must happen on them. In order for them to appear seamless, I had to hide or disguise the seams in various fashions. Yes, sometimes "less is more," but most often more was needed to insure a seamless quality. This was not a project where minimalism could ever prevail.
Part of the burden and joy of working in this medium is using what one has, or can find, what is spontaneously available. Jungian psychology uses the notion of the bricoleur, the craftsman who works with that which is at hand, including self-imposed rules. This includes the psychological situation as well as the materials. My grief work accentuated the death-rebirth motif, which is ubiquitous in therapy in any case.
In their formative stages, the elements were not fixed on the canvas, and sometimes due to electrostatics, heat, and gravity "things moved of their own accord." Almost invariably, this was an improvement over any intuitive or deliberate placement I might have made. So, it was a process of flowing with the animating process, rather than dictating the process.
Later, they organized themselves into larger groups. There were obvious thematic connections for some of them, but others were not so obvious until there were hundreds of them. Their order has no relationship to the time of assembly. I have never re-sorted them, but for some reason the over-all story of the text for each leads seamlessly into the next, providing a narrative stream. The text for each piece suggested itself long after completion through a recognition process, or sometimes immediately by synchronicity. They assembled themselves and with one another by a process I can only describe as "synarchy."
The awesome pandaemonium of imagery flowed forth spontaneously and my ego could not fight its way free. Rather, I had to surrender to the forces that often crossed my subjective will. I was a slave to the process for some time, producing several pieces a week for long periods of time, and sometimes even doing more than one per day.
The mystery images are a compelling source of transformation and healing, and it worked! The physician healed herself, or rather opened to the inner healer and let time take care of the rest.
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Mystic Arts
INTRODUCTION
I have been a “Qabalististic artist” for over 35 years. That is to say, Qabalah is the primary thread that weaves through all my graphic and written work one way or another. The history of Hermetic philosophy in Visionary Art is very rich, an often unconscious esoteric current that pervades Western art from the Renaissance forward. Similar symbolic imagery always permeated Eastern art under different philosophies.
Even Botticelli, Michaelangelo, Titian, Ficino, Blake, Tchelechew, Grey, and others owe a debt to the Hermetic revolution and philosophical syncretism. The Renaissance was about developing a stereoscopic perspective, and the task of today’s visionary Digerati is to take that vision hyperdimensional. As ever, it is all about recontextualization and multisensory evocation of psychobiological states.
Great art has impact; it stops us in our tracks with aesthetic arrest, then leaves an aesthetic afterglow. It concentrates transformative insights in skillful, original forms. For the visionary, art becomes a literal description of extreme mindbody states. Mission is committed vision. With a perceptual acuity tuned to discovery, the artist beckons the viewer further, to share her vision, albeit, in silence.
On Summer Solstice 2005, I got a spontaneous influx of creative energy. I presumed it would end there, but it has kept right on going. Of course, that is not to say that I am ever blocked, as I simply don’t know what that feeling is. I’m not bragging though, because the flip side of my characteristically fluid or fluent process is that I must serve it when the prolific Angel is upon me. I could only ignore it at my peril. Ah, but then what the heck? Dylan said we all gotta serve somebody.
The summer influx came in the form of a wide variety of what I could characterize as Ionic Vortices, psychic quadratic equations, holographic interference patterns, electromagnetic quadratic monopoles of highly saturated brilliance, even visions of the morphing quaternions (hypercomplex numbers) of the Zero-Point virtual field. It really doesn’t matter what domain they are viewed from, as the patterns repeat at all levels in nature and our nature in an infinite fractal reiteration.
Surely, the onlooker will have his or her own point of view and interpretation of the rather abstract medium. It might be as simple as a sort of universal stirring of the pot, so to speak. In any event, if I had actually tried to depict field forces, I don’t think I could have come up with a better idea: but this one was a spontaneous eruption, an emergence at the creative edge of chaos, where if you just get out of the way, things flow forth, effortlessly.
Jung has linked mandalas to the imaginal net of the Self archetype, and implied that they often emerge when a person is in need of healing, of holistically feeling that deepest connection to the source of being and imagination, of imposing order on disorder. Do I need healing? Who among us doesn't? Who can't benefit by taking a moment to connect with sensuous Beauty, technological, archetypal and spiritual? What higher goal could we have for our artistic intentionality? Its unique beauty is its radiance, its spirit, beyond reason and words.
The symmetry of mandalas somehow creates a neurological calm within us. We see through it to another world outside our mundane existence. As we contemplate The Center we identify with that Cosmic Axis at an existential level, and it recalibrates the psyche. We don’t know “how”. THAT is the penetrating Mystery, the marriage of the soul with the divine. All we can do is rest within it.
Mandalas are as old as the first circles scrapped on sand and stone by our ancient ancestors. Perhaps the oldest mandala was the rotating, circular bowl of the heavens. But what can be expressed through morphs of this form, both visually and symbolically is virtually infinite. Mandalas can be so symbolically dense, that from a distance all we perceive is an undifferentiated vortex. But this vortex holds the seeds of our potential spirituality.
The Tree of Life is a glyph entirely composed of circles, lines and color but it conveys and orders an encyclopedia of symbolic associations. Tibetan Buddhist sand mandalas likewise symbolically represent the creation and reabsorption of the entire universe. Mandalas, like the horoscope or wheel of I Ching hexagrams or Tarot deck, have been used as divinatory devices. They are aids to inner recollection, aids for connecting with the divine. Solar systems and galaxies are mandalas, and so is the atom.
Now, the mandala enters the era of SCIENCE-ART (the fusion of art and physics), where it continues expressing that which is unseen in the inner realms except by the dark-adapted or Third Eye. First we had the molecules, then atoms, then the undetermined waveforms of subatomic particles, and now virtual fields of the pulsating vacuum fluctuation and their pure potential, sometimes called the scalar field.
Computers have been generating mechanical mandalas practically since their inception. But these soulless forms don’t have the depth of a “considered” piece. Mandalas themselves are mnemotechnical systems or devices. In this case, the computer doesn’t make my mandala, nor does it make source, content or morphing choices. It doesn’t make the creative choices where to start or when to end. The artist creates the qualitative field within which synchronistic events manifest and from which uncontrived art emerges.
I use the computer to create it, the same as I used to employ the brush. If it helps me shortcut the process, good, as fluency comes from keeping up with mental processes in execution. The secret, as ever, is the source material, the palette, the Light. These mandalas are Rorschachs for the third eye. If you are lucky, perhaps one will “capture” you.
FOUR IN ONE
Jung described wholeness as a quaternio. Some electromagnetic field interaction is described as quaternions. These mandala fields aren’t accurately called quaternions, but I call my mandalas QuaternIONAs. The four contains a powerful retrograde connection to the One. It is a mythopoetic unified field theory. As quaternions are related to matrices, so these mandalas are related to the old alchemical formula of Maria Prophetessa: the Four in One.
“Out of the One comes Two, out of the Two comes Three, and from the Third comes the One as the Fourth.”
Marie-Louise von Franz wrote of this formula extensively in her classic, Number and Time. She was one of the original Jungians with a definite eye for the interface of psyche and matter – that elusive instant where the center of Nothing, (which is everywhere, always, forever), becomes Something. It is the vacuum fluctuation of the Imagination, where the amorphous unconscious becomes an eidetic image, alive in the mind’s eye.
The mandala, a quaternary thought-model, is a creative means of holding the tension of psychological opposites, discrete but conjoined – even those of potential and actual. One is openness; two is plurality; three is engagement, and four is integrability. Jung corresponded this four-fold process with integration of the psychological functions of Intuition, Thinking, Feeling, and Sensation.
THE SELF & THE MANDALA
A geometrical God-image, the mandala is the psychic counterpart of the alchemical unus mundus, one world where soul and spirit are not divorced from the body. The body is the unconscious, the memory and repository and expression of our essential nature – our Self.
According to Jung, his archetype of the Self, or the metaphysical Higher Self, is an archetype of wholeness, the entire contents of the psychophysical field. Synchronistic phenomena are its parapsychological equivalent. It manifests symbolically in the inherently hypnotic form of the mandala, which draws us inward like a black hole.
I contend, according to both Qabalah and the holographic concept of reality, this implies it is the personification or embodiment of the entire Universe, for we are a microcosm of that. Mandalas depict the magic circles that coordinate or explore the meaning of cosmic order. The man-dala is the symbol of man as the intercessor between micro- and macrocosm. Finding its secret center means finding illumination. It is a cosmic portal, and a psychotronic device.
This is why we see through these primal forms when we look inside ourselves, as visionary artists, mystics, or depth psychologists. The Self is the ultimate muse, the source of all inspiration. Its abstract representation is the highly coherent Cosmic Mandala form, order which is infinitely rich in meaning.
We resort to art when we cannot articulate our vision with concepts alone, when our reach exceeds our grasp. The oneness of existence transcends our conscious comprehension, insisting on a comprehensive symbol. In a moment of synchronicity, it is the vehicle of transcendence.
When we have gone out and been overwhelmed by ten thousand outer things, we can make them one through the image of the One Mind. Making a mandala is a discipline for pulling the scattered aspects of ourselves and the spiritual forces of life together and coordinating that with the universal circle. But we can’t identify with undifferentiated nothingness, so we have to give it qualities. And the most primal of these are color, line, and volume with motion – symbolized force.
This centering meditation can realize itself through art, uniting heaven and earth – vision and substance. Granted, in the digital era, that substance is more ephemeral – the pulsating EM stuff of the temple of living light. But then, doesn’t that reflect Nature’s Way even better? The animated mandala as pure frequencies carries this further than the static print or wall art, since nature is never still. It is a unified field of dynamically unfolding rhythmical sequences, a fractally reiterating manifold of the imagination, transpersonal energies beyond temporal flux.
THE SELF & CREATIVITY
Creativity expresses itself through a specific act. Originally, in primal shamanic cultures, there was no separation between art and the sacred – all art was sacred, and it still is, if we hold that attitude of reverence toward its source in Spirit. Similarly, before our addiction to so-called scientific objectivity, physics was not separate from philosophy, but known as Natural Philosophy.
In the quantum era, physics has returned to a philosophy, since there is no consensus but only theories about the nature of ultimate reality and matter (strings, holographic, multiverse, transactional, etc.). SCIENCE-ART is a form of mythopoeisis, a sacred psychology that delves deep enough to creatively see their unification.
To be creative means to invent, to originate, to perceive old patterns in new relationships, or rearrange old patterns in new ways. This is the hallmark function of the real self. Ironically, it is the recycling of consciousness, eternally morphing force and form. Our individual capacity for expressing this varies. There are forms of personal creativity that have nothing to do with artistic expression.
Through the function of our emerging self we can make original, unique, creative rearrangements of our own inner psychological patterns. Every artist knows what these are, because they form the basis of our recurrent, even autobiographical themes…our neuroses, proclivities and obsessions. We tend to revisit them often, morphing our relationship with eternal forms, over and over again. They are expressed outwardly as originality and style.
It is style – a consolidated perspective - that separates the great artist from the mediocre. Art we make for our Self rings far more authentic than art contrived for consumption in the popular marketplace. The artist who is true to his or her Self best exemplifies the zeitgeist of the times.
Art also requires a devotion to the vision, a willingness to stick to the image as presented in the unconscious, to follow where it leads. The practice of therapy has the same kind of creative requirement. Often it involves effort and struggle and the willingness to endure anxiety. Some people are just unwilling to make the necessary effort or to endure the unavoidable anxiety. They forego creative fulfillment as a result. They consume, rather than have a love affair with images.
The self is our unfixed aspects that transcend and encompass ego. Qualities of the self are qualities of creative spirit: 1). Spontaneity and aliveness of affect (passion); 2). Self-entitlement (pleasure at environmental support); 3). Self-motivation, Self-activation, assertion and support ; 4). Acknowledgement of self-activation and maintenance of self-esteem (adaptive coping); 5). Self soothing of painful affects or emotions; 6). Continuity of self; 7). Commitment and perseverance toward goals; 8). Creativity to transmute old patterns; 9). Capacity to express Intimacy.
Tales of artists’ struggles with their own creativity are legendary. In this process, however, psychological scars can be transformed into genius. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, transformed by genius. The inner muse, genius, or Self is what Plato called our Daemon. Under inspiration we are ridden by this Daemon, and bent to do its will, rather than creating solely from the ego, employing craft and technique.
Thus, genius is not something we are, but something we occasionally are lucky to have or enjoy, manifesting transpersonal energy through us. To the extent that our theme expresses common developmental conflicts it will touch more people, who identify with or yearn for that existential position. Like therapy, art can be a proxy vehicle for discharging feelings and discovering a-ha solutions. Great art can alter our worldview, at least for a time of magical aesthetic transport. Space and time become suspended, superceded.
The fully developed real self – our genius – has access to its creativity for it is indissolubly connected to Source, the wellspring of creativity. But we can be artistically creative even without full development of the self – though it is a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Self-esteem is established and reinforced by self-activation in our art. Creativity is the vehicle of a quest to establish a real Self.
We are ARTificers – doers and makers. Art is a verb, not a noun – process, not merely product. It is an end in itself – the imaginal or visionary telos. The real self provides an internal visual grammar and repertoire. It is finite and fixed, but varied and flexible enough to blend the need for real self-expression with the external roles required by adaptation. Part of the joy of the creative process is the pleasure of increasing mastery, a biophysical gestalt.
Visionary art is a process of Self-Actualization. Artists individuate in expressing their original statement that also speaks to the collective consciousness.
