Whenever I am asked by someone what it is that I do, I hesitate to call myself an artist or a writer. Each category feels like a shirt that is too tight or pants that can’t be buttoned. Neither word seems to say enough about what I do. As artists, we seem to limit ourselves with labels that define a product which we produce. I find it much more satisfying to state that I am a student of the humanities; that at no time in my life will I be able to say I am expert at any one thing because remaining a student forever leaves the door open to any creative thought that may materialize. Over my life of studying one thing or another, it always ends up being apparent that my chosen philosophy does fit well: everything in this world is connected. From basic biology to higher forms of consciousness. This becomes more obvious when language, literature, art and music are examined.
There are many kinds of artists. Most popular artists unfortunately believe that good art should match the sofa, they are enslaved to the commercialism of consumer driven business and their art screams this message. It is empty of emotion, devoid of depth and is as vapid as a valentine. It is that art which commands wall space in pricey galleries, wins honors by juries of non-creative critics. It does not tax the mind, it does not challenge the senses, it does not invite discourse or passion. But there is another kind of art, art which makes the viewer think or feel a connection to something deeper either of their own conscious experience or that of the subconscious ‘dream state’. Something akin to the Aboriginal People of Australia and their reference to “the Dream Time”.
Archaeologists love to place their own value on ancient artifacts and have probably been doing it as long as humans have been finding evidence of our rich ancestral artistic past. Examples of these misplaced values range from sites in Europe (Lascaux) to Anatolia (Catalhoyuk) and the Middle East (Jericho). In my course of studies, I have been led to each of these places as a way to understand the technical development of the visual arts. Through my methodology, I have also come to wonder of the purpose of some of the imagery which has made these places famous as examples of the early creativity of humans. But without an Orwellian vehicle for time travel, I will never truly know why humans descended to dark caves to paint fantastic images of beasts, or why the inhabitants of Catalhoyuk decorated their homes with sculptures of bulls and proto-female forms. It is doubtful that anyone will ever uncover the purpose of the ancient inhabitants of Jericho and their habit of embellishing human skulls with clay, shells and paint.
In the silence of the night, when we sit in the dark with lantern at hand, it seems the walls of Lascaux whisper their secrets, that the megaliths of Malta reveal the ritual of by gone ages.
The great comparative thinker Joseph Campbell spent his life tying together the threads of our human archetypal artistic endeavors. Campbell’s field of expertise was the that of comparative mythology, which is a vast canvas of cultural links through literary works and the visual arts. When viewed as a whole, all of known human creativity can be looked at as archetypal, and linked through consistent themes.
In the “Power of Myth” interviews, Joseph Campbell is asked by Bill Moyers who our modern Shamans are. Campbell answers that this is the function of the artist:
Moyers: “Who interprets the divinity inherent in nature for us today? Who are our shamans? Who interprets unseen things for us?”
Campbell: “it is the function of the artist to do this. This artist is the one who communicates myth for today. But he or she has to be an artist who understands mythology and humanity and isn’t simply a sociologist with a program for you.”
– from “The Power of Myth”
The most powerful art images I have created, the most successful work I have done, have come to me at the most inopportune times in the day. Often, those times are the state of conscious ‘flow’ that is often spoken of by highly effective motivated individuals. Simply said, the less attempt I make at creativity, the more ‘open’ I am to stimuli, the more ideas seem to flow and coalesce into a whole. Recently I find myself rattling around the house at midnight, my mind ablaze with ideas for visual art, my fingers sometimes itching to release words into my keyboard.
It is at these times when I am close to sleep, when the demands of everyday life slip away, that inspiration comes creeping with subtle hints at what lies under the facade of efficiency, of determined goals, of laborious thought. These are not the typical believed drug or alcohol induced ‘looseness’ that the general public perceives that artists work under. These moments seem to come from a place deep within, the ancient and archaic brain residue of the reptilian and archetypal human ‘Broca’s brain’.
It is in the deep place where imagery which is completed does not match the sofa. It is these images and words which speak to the subliminal of another time, another reality, of connected archetype. Is this the meaning of Campbell’s belief that today’s artist is the shaman of our times, the interpreter of reality?
New age motivational facilitators say that to accomplish a thing, first it must be visualized. This is also true for artists. Although I recall a quote by Picasso who believed that if a thing could be that easily conceived, it probably was not worth the effort to do. Yet it was Picasso who was vastly influenced by the same figures of beasts and creatures from the caves of Lascaux and the sculpture of Catalhoyuk.
Our perception of what art is extremely narrows our ability to accept the visual prompt as a life force. Australian Aboriginal people have a rich and complex way of archiving their history. Yet Western culture has rarely accredited this imagery as anything other than simply “visual art”. To the Aboriginal Peoples, the images of Dream Time are not just archetypal, they are instructional, much in the same way that religious iconography was instructional to a population which could not read the written word. The paintings and cave markings of the Aboriginal tell the story of their creation myths, they tell of the law of the elders, of the beginnings of civilization and of the history of the ancients. Yet Western semantics call these works “Art”, thus relegating them to the merely entertaining or decorative.
Dream Time imagery is much more than that. It is oral history passed through visual medium – or, better put, it is interpretation of culture within that group.
In the Himalaya the numerous tribes of people, who for the most part were nomadic, share much symbolism amongst themselves. Much of the meaning of those symbols, as they were begun, has been lost through the transient nature of nomadism and the melding of many religious traditions. But we can plainly see the connections to the mystical in many of these symbols, most notably the reverse swastika. Over time, it has served no culture’s interest to apply modern values to those symbols. In fact, the more conjecture about the symbolism that is done, the further away we move from possibly understanding the original intent.
Perhaps the well adjusted artist is an oxymoron. I myself do not believe this to be true, but if we seriously look at creativity and mental disorder, we see that the most creative people are often disordered people. Creative people appear to be more open to incoming stimuli from the surrounding environment. Less creative people might be seen as learning and adopting a method of ‘latent inhibition’ – or the capacity to ignore stimuli which might be irrelevant to their needs. This theory would mean that creative individuals remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming into their consciousness. It would seem that emotional range, or the very thing that gives great artists an edge, might also be the very same symptomatic responses that give Manic Depressive individuals a bipolar diagnosis.
Was the artist of 50 thousand years ago a lone individual with visions of the hunt and the dying animals butchered for food paying homage to the same when he/she/they entered the caves of Lascaux and found the textured walls a perfect canvas for telling the story of bison, deer, wolf?
Were the sculptors of Catalhoyuk protecting their homes with visual reminders of the most powerful beasts of their plains? And what of the skull decorators of Jericho? Were they creating a lasting tribal history when they embellished the skulls of their dead?
The answers to these questions will never be clear to us. But one thing will be clear, that the artist is a story teller; the person who interprets dreams, history, sense of place and time, and most importantly – of continuum.