INTRODUCTION
In Part 1 of this short essay I work backwards from contemporary cultural phenomena most of which today seem founded on an aphorism that enigmatically appeared in our language, now functioning as a meme, i.e. Life is Art! I show that there is an underlying soul phenomenon at work, a mystery incarnating as our produced cultural forms. We can assist this incarnation through a deeper soul understanding of the aphorism Life is Art—particularly the “is” of artistic identification, as I will explain.
In Part 2 of this essay I work forwards from a dream I was given in the early nineties. A voice simply said, “your life is a high gothic novel!” I show how this dream began to shape my life as an art work—a high gothic novel.. The same mystery of incarnation is involved as in Part 1. I show how the final form of modern cultural productions, including human beings as an art form, crucially depends on each individual’s or artist’s moral being and thus their approach to the mystery.
LIFE IS ART I
I recently came across a BBC news item discussing a new installation artwork by a Thai artist. It is called Sleepcinemahotel, where people can watch a movie and fall asleep for the night. The artist calls it “a celebration of sleeping, of closing eyes and crossing a border to another territory together.”
I watched the short video and was arrested by his opening statement: “Everything is an art form, including sleep.” He said it so casually, with just a touch of humour, perhaps pre-empting a possible reaction of disbelief. Everything is an art form? Every thing is an art form? His claim finds strong support in the Contemporary Art world. The befuddled public finds itself accosted by all manner of ordinary every-day objects of the world now exhibited as art works. Art galleries no longer are the sole “houses of art”. I once visited an artist’s home in which were displayed a variety of art works, at times indistinguishable from the usual things you would expect to find in a home. I asked to use the toilet, unless, I added with a poor joke, that little room was an Installation. She was not amused.
Such statements as the Thai artist’s reveal that new thinking has entered our culture and has been taken up or accepted as a meme with relatively little interrogation. How could such a transformation happen in the first place, such that thinking “everything is an art form” becomes possible, let alone so easily accepted? It was not always so. Obviously the history of art forms has been exhaustively studied, as well as how one art form emerges from another. I am asking specifically how art transformed from representing the things of our world to non-representational art and then to a definition of identity with the things of the world i.e. every thing is (or can be) an art form! This is a long story involving art history and the philosophy of representation, but such changes in the appearances of the world reflect and express foundation-shaking transformations in the psyche, the hidden background to all manifest form.
In an amazingly short period of history, say, 18th-19th centuries to the 21st century, the psyche has withdrawn from the world of appearances to a self-presentational mode that could only be expressed by abstract, non-representational art. The psyche “wants” to become conscious of itself as psyche, i.e. no longer as reflected in worldly appearances. This withdrawal from the phenomenal world led to art works that were no longer seeking to represent worldly appearances, but rather to express the source of all appearances. Self–movement, colour, geometry, texture, and the medium itself were now privileged, whereas, in contrast, we were previously supposed to ignore these qualities-in-themselves in order to accurately perceive the represented worldly reality. The psyche is the invisible medium through which we perceive the world’s appearances, or reality. In representational art, our attention was not to be drawn to the medium, i.e. until non-representational art emerged.
With the psyche’s withdrawal, things correspondingly became mere things, or commonplace things, no longer transparent to spiritual reality—exploitable resources! Then, an astonishing meme entered the discourse in contemporary art—every thing is an art form! This is tantamount to saying that every thing now is or can be a psychic phenomenon, i.e. every commonplace thing can be discovered to have an inner depth of meaning. But does this identity of art and ordinary reality produce the same perceptual experience as it once did, i.e. when ordinary phenomena autonomously “lit up” with meaning and depth and were represented as such by art?
Representational art imitates an already ensouled world. So, for example, figures with gold colour around their heads were understood as representing holy people. We could once even perceive this holiness directly as a real appearance in the world (mana), as given to us.
Now, in contemporary life, the real appearances are commonplace things, with no soul life reflected in them, as can be demonstrated by the great cry of meaninglessness that rose up in the 20th century.. The identity between artwork and ordinary reality, as expressed by the Thai artist, is not given but made by the logic of artistic identification, in the way that a child “makes” a stick into a gun by an act of creative imagination, i.e. by saying in effect, “this stick is now a gun”. This is an imaginative act with a little bit of will in it. Normally the child exercises this will when she resists irrelevant interpretations of the stick while she is playing the game. In other words a rich context of finite relevant meaning arises in response to the stick’s now being a gun rather than a conductor’s baton or a witch’s broom.
In the same way, our Thai artist “makes” the assembly of beds in a room, along with the movie, into an artwork by an act of creative imagination: “This assembly now is Sleepcinemahotel”—an Installation. And so a relevant context of meaning arises in response to this “is” of artistic identification. The artwork would probably resist an interpretation by those participants who climb into bed, not to watch the movie and fall asleep, but in order to make love, noisily or not. Such actions do not fit the rich context of meaning saturating and defining the Installation.
Contemporary art forms and their “coming to be” via an act of artistic identification is revealing to us how the cultural gap between spirit and matter can now be overcome by individual acts of imagination, i. e., acts of willed surrender. If the audience playfully accepts the artist’s creative act of imagination on the assembly of ordinary objects, those objects become an artwork or, as I would say, a soul phenomenon. By participating in the “imagistic thinking” of a soul phenomenon, the gap is always-already behind us. The audience now knows what to do, appropriate to the art form so created. This is similar, once again, to children “agreeing” to accept the artistic identity of stick and gun, and proceeding to join in a game of cops and robbers, etc. Reality transfigured, consciousness transformed!
Contemporary art is hinting at a real possibility for us. By playful, conscious acts of artistic identification, we can transfigure commonplace objects into soul phenomena which, by definition are bearers of meaning, depth, and interiority. We can thus extend the discoveries of contemporary art to all walks of life, as we will see in Part 2
LIFE IS ART II
In the early nineties I was given a strange new dream-thought: Your life is a high gothic novel! Such dream presentations carry the force of truth, although at the time I did not understand it at all. As truth, the force of the thought began to work its way into my being and my perceptions were subtly altered over subsequent years. I was drawn to certain books and other media. I began to perceive modern cultural productions in a fresh way: haute couture, lifestyles, advertising, labels, brand names, contemporary art and art philosophy, consumerism, etc. I also began to notice how much variations of this thought have worked their way into our language, so that now, the identity of life and art (the “is” of my dream thought) is simply taken for granted.
But there is a profound mystery underlying or “within” these cultural productions and our daily discourses that I believe has not been methodologically addressed as such. All our modern cultural productions express or use this mystery for ordinary human purposes that are largely based on our unconscious desires (money, fame, power, glamour) but the mystery itself has been largely ignored. Nonetheless it is appearing as the “within-ness” of our cultural productions. That is to say the mystery is a negative reality! Cultural forms are produced by a sometimes violent collision between the movement of this negative reality and our unconscious desires, finally forming the given appearances of our contemporary culture. The resultant forms emerging in our culture stand as testimony to Owen Barfield’s prescient warning c. 1957:
Imagination is not, as some poets have thought, simply synonymous with good. It may be either good or evil. As long as art remained primarily mimetic, the evil which imagination could do was limited by nature . . . [b]ut . . . when the fact of the directionally creator relation is beginning to break through into consciousness, both the good and evil latent in the working of imagination begin to appear unlimited.… we could very well move forward into a chaotically empty or fantastically hideous world. . . . We should remember this, when appraising the aberrations of the formally representational arts. . . . in so far as they are genuine, they are genuine because the artist has in some way experienced the world he represents. And in so far as they are appreciated, they are appreciated by those who themselves are willing to make a move towards seeing the world in that way and, ultimately therefore, seeing that kind of world. We should remember this, when we see pictures of a dog with six legs emerging from a vegetable marrow or a woman with a motor-bicycle substituted for her left breast.
Barfield is warning us that there is an incarnation process happening (a breakthrough into consciousness as he puts it) through the lives and works of artists or the human “co-creators”. The imagination (or objective psyche) is beginning to break into our manifest world but mostly in chaotically or fantastically hideous ways, the outcome of its movement intersecting with our unconscious desires (money, fame, glamour, power are the usual suspects). Thus the mystery underlying our modern cultural productions is a mystery of incarnation into matter!
As we unconsciously participate in this incursion of the alien other, i.e. the mystery as I have said, the singular importance of our desires in this process of incarnation can find historical precedent in alchemy where at least some alchemists realized that the state of their moral being was crucial to the transformation of the prima materia into the philosophers’ stone. Following the alchemists’ lead C. G. Jung insisted on the importance of the shadow (our unconscious desires) in the individuation process. He well understood that an unknown other is emerging into material existence through us and that the form it takes is crucially related to the state of our moral being. This is why, I believe, he clearly declared that we must welcome what will therefore appear as the coming guest if we turn towards that appearing other with all our love and passion. Barfield in turn warns us what menacing forms the appearing will take if we turn towards that other with our more shadowy desires leading the way. It is not hard to conclude whose vision is becoming more real today…
Returning now to my early dream, after these more general considerations re: art is life, I want to share my early dream-thought’s more personal elements—my life is a high gothic novel! Following this dream I was drawn towards a series of anomalous experiences that led to my essay, From Dream to World. My memories were activated as well. I remembered for example that Edgar Allen Poe had been my favorite author as a child. I began to explore high gothic literature and art. I discovered that those Romantic authors and artists were sensitive souls resonating with a felt loss of the “enchanted world”. The imagination had mysteriously withdrawn from quotidian life but these artists could still experience an imagination-filled world very much alive at the dark edges of the now prosaic world (sans imagination). Old ruins, swamps, bogs, moors, marshes, derelict castles, lonely forest paths leading nowhere, gloomy wastelands, ghosts, demons, criminal priests, spells—these images were now the last dwellings for soul-life and such tales were very popular with Western readers. The horrors of demon-infested spaces were a secret delight for the soul. It’s no wonder Jung the Romantic also reminds us where we can journey if we favour getting to know psyche:
Anyone who wants to know the human psyche… [should]… wander with human heart through the world. There in the horrors of prisons, lunatic asylums and hospitals, in drab suburban pubs, in brothels, and gambling halls… through love and hate, through the experience of every passion in every form in his own body, he would reap richer stores of knowledge…
How clearly this passage shows Romanticism as a root of Jungian thought! And note that Jung shows how we are to so wander—with heart. He is talking about the cultivation of our moral being, to prepare us for receiving the awe-inspiring guest.
The impact of my early dream still continues shape my life being a high gothic novel, as my most recent dream (Feb 2021) says:
I am homeless, wandering; some connection with others who then are gone. I am in a city. I have a plastic bag with some things in it. Other than that I have nothing. I am wandering the streets. Some contact with others who then go their own way. I have nowhere to go, nothing to do. I briefly think of going to a News Agency to get a paper so I can look up the Classifieds for work but that idea dies. I think that in a few days, I will be less acceptable to society: bearded, smelly, dirty clothes, and thus less able to get out of this homeless condition,. Yet there is nothing I can do about it. No one to rescue me. Night is falling; nowhere to go. This reality is sinking in remorselessly. No escape. In one scene I am crossing a field against a stiff bitter wind; it blows something out of my hand and I turn to retrieve it but then I think, “O, I chose the direction that is against this wind!” I then turn to face the bitter wind once more and press on. I have made my choice.
So much of my life has unfolded according to that dreamscape! For years I was merely a “victim” of its force of will. I would set off on my motorbike without goal or privileged direction only to enter a maze waiting for me. I would accidentally find dead-end alleys, the wrong side of town, dangerous places in the desert, lost caves, and I would fearfully retreat back to the familiar. I did not know for years that I was in fact choosing the way of the maze, or as my dream above says, “the bitter wind”. As I began to write more, I continued this manner of wandering but now it produced a method of writing. I still travel to the margins of known society—the books no one wants to read, the abandoned voices, the “crazies”, the weird belief systems, the wild ideologies, the sexual deviants, the psychopaths—none are prohibitive for me! But I journey more willingly now, with heart, refining my darker desires in the fires of truth along the way, and return with memories of my participation with the soul-stuff lying “within” these dark places.
And I begin to write…
This essay with graphics and citations can also be found here.
