Ron Dowd
Hyperthyroidic Field #2
Coloured pencil and ink on paper, 26 x 19 cm (approx)

Here’s a nice introduction to the cross-over between science and nonduality (“the no-state state”) and the scientific method as a “way in” to the subject, for Westerners. It’s from the Science and Duality Conference site, for their conference that’s happening in October this year.

Yesterday I brought Nonduality as a subject in its own right into the Art + Psyche fold. It’s a new category in the blog. Now, here together are the three major areas I’m interested in, both personally and in my psychotherapy practice.

What’s Nonduality? There’s a lot on the subject around the web, for example, at Jerry Katz’s original Nonduality site. And it goes by many other terms in the many traditions of which it is spoken, such as presence, awareness, advaita, sunyata, and one term that I’ve constructed myself (an amalgam from Kant and Gestalt), the noumenal field.

Here’s Gangaji on the subject of the play of our lives of thought and suffering, and the underlying nondual dimension:

All the while, there is this simple, present stillness that is aware of the whole play. It experiences the play, experiences the suffering of the play, yet is ultimately untouched by the play. [Diamond in your Pocket, p113]

Gangaji’s spiritual lineage is the East (Papaji and Ramana Maharshi), and she has managed to fuse the understandings of contemporary Western psychology to this ancient spiritual tradition (advaita vedanta). Her teaching has been a strong influence on me, enabling me to bring the nondual dimension into my psychotherapy practice. I look forward to blogging more on this subject in the future.

Ron Dowd
Hyperthyroidic Field #1
Coloured pencil and ink on paper, 26 x 19 cm (approx)

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.

Yet more on emptiness: he’s a nice quote from an interview with Adyashanti, a contemporary spiritual teacher. The interview is in a collection of essays and interviews The Sacred Mirror: Nondual Wisdom & Psychotherapy, which I consider to be a pretty good survey of what the book title states it to be!

Q: Is the avoidance of emptiness the root of human suffering?
Adyashanti: I like to call it the dirty little secret of humanity. It’s the emptiness, the abyss, that’s right in the middle of every human being. It’s right there, the silence that is always there, just waiting for some recognition.

More on the subject of the void and emptiness, I re-read Bernadette Roberts’ impressive book What is Self? over Christmas and there was one paragraph that struck me as deep wisdom, being as it is so simple.

Instead of going down into their own emptiness, people try to fill it with the pleasures of this world. They run from darkness, nothing and emptiness and often become embroiled in various delusions regarding its true nature. Too few people come to the unitive state [union with the Divine] because they are outside the proper religious tradition or context for having a true understanding of their experiences. (p 62)

Roberts’ path happens to be Mystical Christianity, but the wisdom she speaks of, arising as it does from a living tradition, transcends that tradition.

And raises questions within that traditional as well: I’m particularly taken by Roberts’ revisioning of the metaphorical (archetypal) meaning of the crucifixion, as, rather than a transformation into the unitive state (or a shedding of the ego, as some commentators have it), a transformation out of such a state, to one of a wholly higher order – one in which all experience of Self (which in the unitive state she understands as an experience of oneness with the Divine) drops away, leaving a void at the centre of the Self, that void being the Divine.

And as she says later:

Psychological and spiritual freedom is the ability to live with not-knowing. (p 101)

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.

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.)

it’s like this at the fish market -
standing around
when all I want is
pink glistening salmon flesh -

there’s a problem with knives
and by the time I get one
you’ve offered me
your breast to cut -

I go for the cheek
incising thin red
around the jaw line

and throw away the knife
shocked by the pain I’ve inflicted

hiding the act
from the rest of my life

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.

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.

Ron Dowd
Un – (Heart’s Desire)
Lino cut, collage

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.

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.

It feels time to publish this little book of poems, The Rains That Fall Around Here on Issuu. All 24 poems, written over the period 2003 to 2009, have a devotional theme.

My poetry output is fairly low, and these poems are for me a distillation of an ongoing understanding and occasional encountering of the devotional, the noumenal.

One of the poems, something in a drawer, appeared in Australia’s Blue Dog; the rest are unpublished elsewhere.

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”.

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).

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.

As I mentioned previously, I’ve now a great storehouse of photos of puppets and masks from our recent visit to the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets near Ubud, Bali. I had a great time, in completely empty galleries, the D700 clicking away at ISO 6400 (available light only) and getting good results.

Here’s what welcomes you at the entrance to the fourth Joglo house, which contains a wealth of puppets, these being the first examples. On the left, Prayitno (director and collector of the works), on the right, You Know Who. (More details on the “House” are here.)

On our recent trip to Bali we spent 2 wonderful hours at the Setai Darma House of Masks and Puppets. It’s near Mas, maybe 15 minutes from Ubud, but even our hotel driver didn’t know where it was. I recommend it highly – over a thousand masks from Indonesia, China, Malaysia, and other Asian countries, and thousands of puppets as well, all housed in four antique Joglo houses, which the director, Prayitno, had shipped from Java.

I took many photos, and from time to time will post exquisite examples of both mask and puppets. Here’s the first: a topeng tua (old mans’ mask – topeng is mask in Indonesian, and topeng also refers to the masked dance). The maker of the mask is Wayan Tangguh. More notes on the topeng tua are at Mask of the World.

For the opposite of that breath of soul I’ve just re-encountered in Bali and in the Sedgwick piece, and always look for in art, here’s a scathing review in The Australian by Christopher Allen of the 2009 Blake Prize. The Prize is run by the Australian Blake Society (“named after the visionary artist and poet, William Blake”). The review’s quite long but well worth reading.

It’s all pretty depressing stuff, but I sparked up at Allen’s intelligent attempt at tackling the “notion” issue. Here he is:

The [winning] artist told this newspaper she was interested in “notions of worship and ecstasy”, which is a bad start: a notion, a perennial favourite in artspeak, is a vague entity that is no longer the thing itself but has not achieved the clear and distinct nature of a concept. When an artist claims to be interested in notions, you know they haven’t thought anything through properly.

Well said. Anyone who’s survived five years of art school, yet wants depth (me) is pretty sensitive to the “notions” position. All I’d add to Allen’s exposition is that it’s about position as well – i.e. maintaining a safe one, so your fellow art institutionalists won’t hound you out of the pack.

Ok, this one’s not obviously about Bali, yet in another way it is. This is a work by Paul Sedgwick (2006) that I saw at the recent exhibition of works from the Peter Fay collection at the Callan Park Gallery. I photographed it then, but wasn’t initially moved. Yet this strange canvas has been working on me over the ensuing weeks (and even while in Bali) and I now love its language and its delicacy.

That got me wondering about how good Outsider art works – how it operates, as though on a different plane from much mainstream art, breathing from deeper levels of the psyche. And the painting fits well for me with my recent Bali experience – Bali and this work hold something related; another, fresh way of inhabiting the world.

Before I went to Bali I spoke to Peter Fay about this work, and he gave me some of the background. Paul works out of an arts workshop in Hamilton New Zealand. He compiles lists of street names, of mountains, of local landmarks. (This one has entries from the Auckland phone book.)

I like Peter’s take on the work: to him it’s “the dying of a breath of wind” (the way the letters fade). There’s much delicacy here, in the text and in the underlying abstraction of colour (which the photo doesn’t quite do justice to). An art piece that’s prepared to die away, to breathe in quite a different way. I like that.

Just back from Bali, where Karima and I have been for a little over a week, and we’re now both adjusting to the busyness of our Sydney life after the very different pace there. And though collectively we, as tourists, have changed the place (since I was first there in 1990 anyway – made it more urbanised, more oriented towards shopping), the spiritual “embeddedness” of the Balinese people is still very evident.

People who make bamboo and flower offerings every day, and place them in doorways, on roadsides, in their temples. People for whom a reverence for their gods is primary, and alive. Certainly there’s a superstitious downside, but to me, overall, there’s strong evidence of a healthy, happy way of living.

Though the locals we met where mostly engaged with us commercially (hotel staff, drivers, waiters) what repeatedly remained with us was the feeling that commerce was only the practical aspect of this engagement. Beyond it was their pleasure in connecting with us, in ensuring we had a good time, in showing us their way of life, and in sharing the beautiful aspects of their island – from exquisite rice fields to local coffee beans, from a beautifully presented mango lassi to a careful elucidation of the complexities and realities of local corruption.

What does this have to do with Art and Psyche? It’s a great reminder to me of a graceful way of living, where art is in every detail that happens in one’s life, where there’s psychic health – which means there’s ongoing inquiry into our soul and that of the world. It’s what reveals itself when we give its space, which is what artists (particularly those not driven by the institutionalised art systems, often known as “Outsiders”) continually rediscover. I’d like to blog more on aspects of our Bali trip, and the beautiful reminders it’s given me.

I love Ed Rusha’s work (having first encountered it in a major show of drawings and prints at the Auckland Art Gallery way back in 1978) and have been impressed with his energy and creativity over a really long period of art making – 50 years. The U.K. Telegraph has a great article and interview on his current retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London.

But I laughed at this little gem from the interview. (Ruscha is speaking of LA in the 1950s.):

What it didn’t have was much in the way of indigenous art. ‘The LA art scene was very small in those days. New York was capital of the art world without a doubt in the 1950s and 1960s. Los Angeles at that time was a cultural dry spot, the Australia of the art world – way out there, very small and undeveloped. There were two or three people who actually collected art and we young artists had no idea about how to reach them.’

Ok, we’re not LA, we’re not the USA, but what immediately springs to mind (seeing as we’re talking “indigenous”) is the wonderful recent Tommy Watson show, and the current Early Papunya Paintings at the Grey Gallery . Outside that realm, (in fact, “Outsider”) I think of the huge Cunningham Dax collection in Melbourne (12,000 works), as well as the myriad outsider and mainstream artists making their work from just where they happen to be in Australia.

This proves nothing of course, it’s all about where you’re looking from. Here though, we’re not “way out there”. There’s a danger, when you’re at an assumed epicentre, of missing other points of view.