ARAS Connections: Image and Archetype - 2009 Issue 2

'…it is only as an aesthetic phenomenon that existence and the world are eternally justified…' (Nietzsche. F. 1872)

 
I will begin by stating that, for me, what takes place in the studio, and subsequent reflections on the activity and its outcomes, appears to be deeply connected to a vital personal need to engage in some form of highly altered state of mind. Such a need is curiously demanding and inevitably complex in terms of potential meaning - being intensely bound up with formal visual issues and imaginative responses to the developing image.
 
What is becoming clear, as my experience and conscious understanding develops, is that both process and product appear to be driven by inner (perhaps unconscious) needs - needs that are essentially manifested through highly concentrated perceptual fantasies. Such fantasies on face value seem to be, in effect, what I will call 'hermetic constructs' - having no clear symbolic connection to the external world as such or, apparently, any shared cultural connection beyond the obvious one of earlier experiments in modernist abstraction.
 
In this sense the work appears to be, in practice, intensely introverted – perhaps even bordering on the autistic. That said the imagery does seem to carry a level of aesthetic meaning and value, a value rooted somewhere other than any associations that might be made with shared, externally validated, sources of recognition. What then perhaps needs to be addressed from the outset, concerns what such implied inner needs might be, as it seems that these needs drive the initial intention to physically create an image and to act this out imaginatively through a highly specific process of change and development.
 
Read the entire paper.

"There is a secret stone, hidden in a deep well
Worthless and rejected, concealed in dung or filth
And this stone is a bird, and neither stone nor bird…"
     (Mylius, quoted in Jung, 1963, note 441, p. 194)

 
In certain works of art, the numinous quality comes not through content, likeness to reality, perfection of technique or composition, but rather through the vagaries of the process itself, unfinished and imperfect. The tension of this imperfection is then held invisibly and secretly in the image until the viewer comes along to privately open and engage it in the viewing, and that uncompleted, never ending process comes to life, drawing the viewer into its participatory space. This mysterious quality does not track any direct line through art history, but follows a fine, supple thread, leaping across continents, centuries and even millennia.
 
Works that capture this quality share an affinity or correspondence that doesn't respect mundane time, space, logic, or personal tastes and aesthetic preferences, but rather, connects to the timeless god-like quality in each of us, that essential being at our very core. We occasionally catch a glimpse of this Being, reflected sometimes in nature, sometimes in art, like the startled and startling gaze of an animal caught unawares, suddenly looking back at us in recognition. The art critic and novelist, John Berger, suggests that to find this "invisible heaven, one must only lift up something as small and as at hand as a pebble…" Quoting Simone Weil, he says "When we know how to turn whatever happens, no matter what it is, into an object of desire…", this desire "pierces through time to find eternity behind it." (Berger, p. 11)
 
Read the entire paper.