The quality of these two images is not great. I’m not sure what was happening, but I visited the exhibition at about the time I was starting to feel unwell last year, so maybe this went with the territory – as possibly does the subject.
Callan Park Gallery held a show titled Snakes last November, and I enjoyed several lovely examples of this mysterious animal by Jose dos Santos. The snake woman on the left was rich and more overtly sexual than the image makes out – complete with painted red vagina (which seems to have become muted in this photograph).
I’m thinking that the approach to dos Santos’ snakes should be as Hillman’s approach to snakes in dreams, i.e. phenomenological rather than analytical. In this nice quote from Hillman’s Inter-Views (1983):
“…a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour with this black snake talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, talking about the repressed sexuality, talking about the natural mind, all those interpretive moves that people make, and what is left, what is vitally important, is what this snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s walking into your life…and the moment you’ve defined the snake, you’ve interpreted it, you’ve lost the snake, you’ve stopped it…The task of analysis is to keep the snake there…”
Such an approach keeps the snakes of dos Santos (as it does the dream) alive, able to affect the consumer afresh on each encounter; chaotic, disturbing, as is his nest of vipers below.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
James Hillman,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
A new exhibition at Cunningham Dax is due to open next week in Melbourne, and I regret not being able to get there for it. According to the flyer:
Avoiding the Void features works from the Cunningham Dax Collection which reflect and engage with existential ideas and concerns. The exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the insightful ways in which the creators of these works have grappled with difficult questions that are ordinarily avoided.
Joan Rodriquez
Isolation
Charcoal and Conte on paper
There are also public talks on the topic of Existentialism, a topic around which psychotherapy has gravitated for some time, and through the writings of Rollo May, Irvin Yalom, Ernesto Spinnelli and Victor Frankl (to name some of my personal favourites) has been greatly enriched.
(As an aside, I see that Spinelli will be visiting Sydney in November this year, an event not to be missed for those existentially inclined.)
It’s maybe a little presumptive to comment on the title of the exhibition, not having seen the exhibition itself, but I wonder about “avoiding”: is this what the artists are considered to be doing or not doing? In my experience, it’s the latter (the not avoiding), the via negativa of many spiritual traditions, that is the only way through, or in.
Tagged as:
Joan Rodriquez,
Outsiders,
Psychotherapy
I have been enjoying this William Hawkins image during January, during a time of upheaval and a move to a temporary location, due to our upcoming renovation.
(We’re now on the eleventh floor of an apartment block in Woollahra, from which we survey the Russian Consulate, and the AFP (Australian Federal Police) car that’s often idling in front – its sole occupant, I imagine, grateful for his air conditioning chewing on the muggy Sydney heat.)
The image is from a calendar of Outsider art given to me by my good friend Ardslie. I’ll post an image each month from this beautiful production; the images too good to last just a month each!
Willima Hawkins
Untitled (Rearing Stud Horse)
Enamel on Masonite, 122 x 144 cm (approx)
Hawkins was born in rural Kentucky in 1985 but it wasn’t until the 1970s that he started painting in the style of this work, a style for which he became well known. His rural background and long years of manual labour informed much of his work. This man knew about animals (Two Dark Horses is also great; more at the Foundation for Self-Taught American Artists.)
Tagged as:
Outsiders,
William Hawkins
Here’s Jauk Kera Putih (the white monkey) from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Ubud. It’s good to come back to these images from last year’s Bali trip – the figures seem to inhabit a pantheon equally as rich, psychically, as the more familiar (to me, anyway) Western (i.e. the Greek). He’s another very expressive dude.
Tagged as:
Masks
Iam finally interested in blogging again, after being unwell and at the same time preparing for a renovation that Karima and I are having done to our apartment. It’s been a strange period, everything taking its normal but exhausting course at the level of day to day activities, yet below the surface taking a very different, solitary course, one of hyperthyroidism (caused, it appears, by a mercury detox that was insufficiently monitored by the doctor).
The phenomenology of hyperthyroidism was for me centred on the heart, the thoughts being whether that heart could be trusted, what it wanted of me when, thumping hard, it woke me at 1:30 am each morning. Although I felt heat, at a deeper level I experienced icy chill, an existential heart, a cold stranger that seemed completely unconcerned for my sleep and for my well-being in general. I learned something of this stranger: as James Hillman says, sickness can be a vital way for the soul to learn.
Some quotations from Hillman (A Blue Fire, p262 – 263) come alive, seem appropriate not only to my recent experiences, but to psychotherapeutic endeavours in general:
The descent to the underworld can be distinguished from the night sea journey of the hero in many ways. We have already noticed the main distinction: the hero returns from the night sea journey in better shape for the tasks of life, whereas the nekyia takes the soul into a depth for its own sake so that there is no “return”. The night sea journey is further marked by building interior heat (tapas), whereas the nekyia goes below that pressured containment, that tempering in the fires of passion, to a zone of utter coldness.
Therapeutic analysis remains incomplete if it is satisfied with bringing balm to burning problems. It still has to venture into the frozen depths that have so fascinated poets and explorers and that in depth psychology are the areas of our archetypal crystallizations, the immovable depressions and the mutisms of catatonia…
Here we are numb, chilled. All our reactions are in cold storage. This is a psychic place of dread and a terror so deep that it comes in uncanny experiences, such as voodoo death and the tostell [animal trancing] reflex. A killer lives in the ice…
We may recall here that the Styx is a river of icy hatred that protects the underworld and is holy and eternal as are the god’s oaths that they swear by that frigid river…
The icy chasm of Christianism’s shadow is a realm of radical importance that cannot be reached with Christianism’s bleeding heart. An archetypal approach to this zone follows the homeopathic maxim: like cures like. The nekyia into hell’s ice requires coldness. If any connection is to be made, we must be able to work with the cruel extremities of ice itself…
The heart has a coldness, a place of reserve like the refrigerator that preserves, holds, protects, isolates, suspends animation and circulation, an alchemical congelation of substance. The cruelty and mean despising are the surroundings of a private sense of ultimate deepening. Maybe in my ice is my fairy-tale princess, whom ego psychology wants to kiss into life; but maybe she is otherwise engaged in her frigid stillness, deepening toward the Ninth Circle, below everything moving; a detachment and stability reminding of the cold body of death…
What occurs to me is that there’s an “art” of psyche-making, an art that’s an ongoing way to live with what is given us (rather than limiting art to what is depicted or presented in form); which gives a deepening to life, a recognition of certain shades that haunt our homes.
Tagged as:
James Hillman,
Psychotherapy
Ihave been somewhat unwell recently, so the blog has not been getting much attention. I have more time for reading though, and there’s currently a rich seam of books I’m visiting and revisiting – including some by Maurice Nicoll, friend of Jung and wonderful interpreter of Ouspensky.
Recently I’ve been struck with Nicoll’s statement that “man is a certain ratio between the visible and the invisible”. Nicoll goes on (in his book Living Time):
Man has inner necessities. His emotional life is not satisfied by outer things. His organisation is not only to be explained in terms of adaptation to outer life. He needs ideas to give meaning to his existence. There is that in him that can grow and develop – some further state in himself – not lying in “tomorrow” but above him. There is a kind of knowledge that can change him, a knowledge of quite a different quality from that which concerns itself with facts relating to the phenomenal world, a knowledge that changes his attitudes and understanding, that can work on him internally and bring the discordant elements of his nature into harmony.
There’s advantage in being unwell – that “ratio” seems more stark, more delineated. And our purpose, distinct from the material, of bringing our natures into harmony, seems more clear.
Tagged as:
C. G. Jung,
Maurice Nicoll,
P. D. Ouspensky
Here’s Denawa from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets, Ubud. He’s the bad guy in the Maya Denawa story. The maker is Wayan Tangguh. The mask has jewellery, real hair and mother of pearl. And as usual, they know how to do teeth!
Denawa is associated with the Tirta Empul Temple – you can read the story of his evil involvement here.
Tagged as:
Masks
I am now the proud owner of number 892/2000 in the first edition of Susan King’s comic book, which I bought at her recent exhibition at the Callan Park Gallery. Here’s a snippet from the book, brimming with energy and much strangeness.
According to the comic:
Susan stopped talking around the age of 4. But she drew and drew and drew and drew and drew – expressive, rich, imaginative and complex drawings. In the mid 1980s, Susan stopped drawing. Then towards the end of 2008 as new people were starting to discover Susan’s work, she started to draw again. It’s late 2009. Susan has an exhibition happening imminently, a documentary is being made about her, wonderful people from the art world are studying her drawings… and Susan continues to draw.
There’s lots more of her work at Susan’s web site, and here are a couple of favourites of mine from the show (the one “happening imminently”):
Below is an image from her web site that I couldn’t help thinking fits closely with another of Susan as a child, drawing in the sand at Waihi, New Zealand. Maybe it’s my New Zealand connection, but I feel an emotional pull from these images; she’s managed to keep alive a fresh, child’s view and a child’s creative use of the natural resources around her. And I guess for me that’s the kick I get from Outsiders – their ability to remind me of things I’ve pushed out of my awareness, in my construction of a “normal” adult psyche.
Susan’s also on Facebook – I searched for “Susan Te Kahurangi King”.
Tagged as:
Callan Park Gallery,
Outsiders,
Susan King
Another image from Robert Adams: Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance, a current exhibition at the Getty museum.
Robert Adams
West Edge of Denver, Colorado 1968 -1970
© 2009 The J. Paul Getty Trust. All rights reserved.
Adams, in the audio accompanying the image on the Getty site, says:
Two things, I think, brought me to make the picture: one, the loneliness of the figure, and two, the remarkable high altitude light which bathes the entire scene.
The traditional view of art, and I subscribe to it, is that art should delight and instruct. It’s in that sense inevitably political I think. The woman as she is isolated in that window suggests to me indirectly that there is something inhumane about the way our housing is conceived. The delight, if there is such, comes in the panoply of light that bathes rather mysteriously this frightening, dark isolation that is at the centre of the picture.
This is a powerful image from 40 years ago, one that strikes me all the more so after my recent Bali experience, where housing is conceived in quite another way. Partly this is due to climate, but also due to a collective view of housing (so there’s no homelessness), to arrangements of communal living that weave the need for housing into the overall ensouled process of everyday living.
Coming back to Sydney, our clean city streets seem in one sense empty (expunged of soul) and in another cluttered with traffic and (in the inner Eastern Suburbs at least) peopled by, to a greater or lesser extent, the homeless (in both an outer and inner sense).
Tagged as:
Photography,
Robert Adams
Another beauty from the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets. This one is Ratu, from the secular Topeng Panca dance. (There are evidently very few such secular dances in Bali; most have a religious significance.)
Panca means five – the dance was originally performed by five people, for purposes of entertainment. Ratu is is a queen or other consort. The maker is Wayan Tangguh. I loved the painting on this mask, and the delicious attention given to the mouth.
Tagged as:
Masks
