a little bit of magic ...
Kandinsky viewed art as a spiritual expression and believed that its spiritual content depended on its originality. Skill at imitation had no place in his scheme. Setting about this arts investigative experience, one is almost overwhelmed by a subtle sense of the impenetrable, a silence, a hollow anxiety in which the words of Siddharta seem to echo:- "I am going nowhere, I am just walking, I am wandering about".
This results in a sort of drifting of thought that sets off along the horizons of doubt, into the unstable territories of uncertainty and waiting, these are the insecurities that a person may go through on the way to discovery. Inevitably so, and the pain, oh the pain of it. An element of the unknown, the scary, the risky is envitably part of the experience.
You don't know, but you press ahead anyway and accept the magic of primitive thought as an access to understanding, as an awareness of the existential drama of "being here", and of "the living in the world process".
In "the world of magic" De Martino has written "the soul can be lost, in the sense, that it has not yet been fixed in reality and in experience, but is a fragile presence that runs the risk of being swallowed up and annihilated by the world".
In the magical world of art, individuation is not a fact, but a historical duty, and "being here" as a discreet process of awareness, is a reality in the process of establishment. And this is why that sense of doubt and dismay, of being adrift, is a reference to our "Home Base", the place we need to aspire to and the place, the solitary place we hopefully will recognise and arrive at in some time to come.
Doubtless we can never be sure of where we are, nor necessarily of how we got there, or indeed where we are ultimately going. It is the passage, the trip, the journey, a journey that will take us who knows where. We are once again on a threshold. The arts were very important and at the cutting edge of existence and awareness during times past. Egyptian, Greek, Roman times, the renaissance. But at no time since the industrial revolution have the arts been potentially more important than just now. Creativity and the arts refer to mind processes similar to the workings of natural processes such as the realisation that the observer is and has always been an integral part of the observed.
The discovery of Quantum physics has meant a reassessment of reality, what we thought to be the basic building blocks of matter, appears as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of the whole. These relations always include the observer in an essential way. Because of the interrelatedness of all things, every thing has some function that relates to everything else.
Clarity, meaning, logic, are all qualities of hindsight. Our lives only have form because we can look back and see how the convergence of paths have formed identifiable patterns and how those patterns lead relentlessly and logically to "now". It is in looking back that we identify direction and grasp ongoing themes.
Paradoxically however, it is the process of venturing forward, be it in life or in creation, in an apparent chaos of chance, opportunity and mishap that the formlessness of events and our consequent decisions confront us. In this way nature is allowed to form its own perfection, the paradox being, that ultimately perfection will always rise from apparent chaos. So much of art is patience in a waiting game. Intensity, focus, discipline, integrity, responsibility.
Some might say - the goal of the art experience, like in meditation - is to reach the mantra, which aims at the fundamental vibrations of the Universe. When one achieves this, mantra is inarticulate abstracted consciousness.
Kandinsky believed that artists were in the spiritual vanguard, that they could "show the way to the spiritual food of the newly awakened spiritual life". He saw artists as a medium for the transference of psychic vibrations.
In "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" he described his view that the importance of visual images and form was to "create corresponding spiritual vibrations" in the viewer to create vibrations of the soul. Art attends to this polarizing of emotional states - on the one hand self expression as an externalisation process based in emotional responses to experiences and interactive social exchange.
At the other extreme, art attends to the mantra or inarticulate abstracted consciousness, and the various and far ranging intellectual conundrums in between. Amply manifested in the history of art.
So, we are on that journey, travelling from place to place - place being discoveries and from time to time we rest awhile and look about, or as Siddharta says "I am just walking. I am wandering about" and we journey on. We are all on that journey, those that journey, those that is who can deal with our appetites on the journey that leads us who knows where.
Adrian Mauriks Sculpture Studio, 1996
