Here’s an article, A Tailor In The Cyclops’ Cave?, by Steve Silverton, that I’ve just enjoyed reading. It’s a good reminder of what really works in psychotherapy, and a reality-check on notions that mechanical approaches can in some way address the poetic, relational worlds that we create, as they contemporaneously creates us.
… we humans tend to make ourselves up as we go along, not only our present but our past and our future as well. We are always re-writing ourselves and whatever the current story or pre-occupation is tends to change our sense of our past, present and future selves. The figure creates the ground and the ground creates the figure.
Steve Silverton’s writing comes with the clear mark of personal experience. His reflection on the question “How do you work?” (posed to the therapist by a potential client) moves not only into the nature of the relational venture of client and therapist, but raises the subject of how we potentially are limited by the words at our disposal (the words in that question), by collective sub-texts behind our endeavours and inquiries; how these endeavours can be limited by that sub-text.
Gallery 4A (the Asia-Australia Arts Centre) is currently showing a rich and meditative installation called Nostalgia, by the Chinese artist Qiu Anxiong (pronounced choo anshong, I’m reliably informed).
I attended the screening of three of his animated video works (including the three-screen The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Seas based on the ancient Chinese manuscript Classic of the Seas and Mountains) in Parker Street, right next to the Gallery, last Friday night. The screening was part of the Sydney Chinese New Year Festival.
Qiu’s works in Nostalgia are meditations on times that have passed, on country and traditional Chinese ways, on industrialisation, and on pollution. He uses “brush and ink” painted scenes (over 6000 of them in this work), beautifully stitched into animations in which land and town scapes morph, animals change into other animals, and catastrophic events occur.
I saw military tanks that were also elephants, birds that were ominous helicopters, birds and landforms that become aircraft and their nautical carriers. As in any true Gestalt, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and the next day it was the whole, the felt experience that stayed with me. I was left with a profound sense of how we muddle through, individually and collectively, retaining traces of our remembered “natural” pasts.
Here’s a still from The New Sutra of the Mountains and the Seas, in Parker Street, on a warm Sydney evening, with Chinatown buzzing. The film’s haunting sound track was embellished by the periodic tings-tings of the nearby light rail cars sliding past down Hay Street.
In the Gallery, you can still get to see another video work, Flying South (2006), and the installation Nostalgia upstairs.
Here’s a sequence of stills from the 9 minute work Flying South, which I watched several times. It’s a poignant work from this accomplished artist.
Sometimes you’ve just got to post things even when they’re not new! For some back-story on these lino-cuts, see my Gestalt Journal paper.
I was interested to depict some ideas on self and identity, and how these are understood in the Gestalt model. The “self” in this model is considered to be more “at the boundary”, at the interface to the other, than at an individually-constructed centre.
The lino-cuts are about an experience of multiple, morphing “selflets” (multiple selves) that, although retaining some sense of a permanent centre, have also an amoebic, mutating quality, their boundaries permeable membranes through which dialogue occurs.
Ron Dowd Atoll, 2006
lino-cut, 30 x 30 cm
Ron Dowd Black Snake, 2006
lino-cut, 30 x 30 cm
Ron Dowd Lucky, 2006
lino-cut, 30 x 30 cm
Emily Pothast We Are You When You Are Dead
Collage and coloured pencil on paper, 2008
16-1/2 x 6 inches
Here’s a lovely and enigmatically titled work by Emily Pothast that has more than a hint of the alchemical, and for me also a strong sense of Gestalt.
Note the association with the tree of life of classical alchemy – this work having the same number of eyes as the tree of life has heads (one for each of the chakras). The image below is the alchemical androgyne, from the Rosarium Philosophorum of 1550.
The tree of eyes (“I”s?) grows from a noumenal field, one that is structured just the way things are, in accordance with the Flower of Life design, a so-called “seed image” for many ancient sacred geometries.
In this work, the ground is an energised seed for the outpouring of the tree, as the many I’s of the self outpour from the noumenal.
It would be hard to miss the debate that’s recently resurfaced in Australia concerning Bill Henson’s photographic works of children. The works themselves have been around for years and I’ve seen them from time to time – just a few blocks away from home at Roslyn Oxley9 gallery.
I see the critical encampments that have recently formed (for and against Henson), and the subsequent feuding between these camps, as a natural continuation of an unease within the art practice. These conflicts were there in seed-form (child-form?) from the beginning, because the territory Henson mines is so psychically charged, unclear and troubled for his audience – and probably for him as well. What we are seeing in these recent critical conflicts is the gestalt (the art as the ensemble of artist, art works, audience, critics and the histories of all these parties) growing to a level of maturity that he has no alternative but to address. The child always grows up, and may have something to say if it has not been too damaged…
And on the subject of the alternative (the child who can’t respond), here’s for me one of the more powerful statements that have been made on this subject, by the (anonymous) “MMCM” over at the art life:
A core feature of child sexual abuse mythology is the notion that actual physical sexual violation constitutes the final boundary, and that anything prior to that is harmless. What a child sleeps through, cannot possibly hurt them. What a child is stunned into not feeling, cannot possibly affect them. What a parent approves of, what a national gallery gives imprimatur to must, of course, be okay.
On our recent hike in Umbria we arrived (after 17 km of walking from the Forca delle Porelle, near Spoleto, on a hot day) at the beautiful Abbazia San Pietro in Valle, where we stayed the night. With a history extending from the eight century (when a Duke of Spoleto founded the abbey as a Benedictine community) the abbey has been lovingly maintained and recently converted into a hotel (it has been privately owned since 1860).
Here’s an image taken on approach to the abbey.
Put it down to the heat maybe, or my exhilaration at arriving at such a beautiful place after a steep downhill hike from the hills above the abbey (that required tacking to and fro across a rough strada bianca) but the campanile, the cloister and the church itself seemed imbued with a rich warmth – a feeling encapsulated by a small sacred heart painting on one of the walls in the family’s area.
Separating the motif from its overtly Christian aspects (which may be quite difficult to do), such a devotional image can hold power for the psyche.
Of course in Gestalt we are interested in emotional levels, truths of the heart that underlie and inform (and yet can so easily be blocked from) our often more constrained responses to the world. How we keep the heart’s truths alive is a challenge.
Here also is one of the frescos in the church, restored in 1995 and pre-dating Giotto’s school by about 100 years. The bleeding wounds to the nubile Saint Sebastian also interest me.
This is an initial attempt to animate Staemmler’s second scheme of interaction between the partners in a couple.
I’ve shown the shapes shifting because that is what happens in the interactions between the partners – behaviours, and the meanings attributed to them by the other party, are in constant flux; and in constant reaction to a wide range of factors in the field* (cultural and gender to name just two), both in and out of awareness.
Frank Staemmler’s schemes of interaction are in his paper Joint Constructions: On the Subject Matter of Gestalt Couple Therapy, Exemplified by Gender-Specific Misunderstandings with Regards to Intimacy, in Robert Lee’s recent book The Secret Language of Intimacy.
field: “complex interaction of all effects for a given person”. For more on the Gestalt field, see here and my own paper here (PDF).
Robert Lee was recently in Sydney and it was a pleasure to meet up with him again at the GANZ Professional Development Evening. And it was an opportunity to buy from this gentle man his new book The Secret Language of Intimacy (The GestaltPress, 2008), which continues his investigation into the dynamics of couple relationships.
As well as Robert’s work and his description of how he runs his intimacy workshops, I was very taken by Frank M Staemmler’s paper, in this book, on joint constructions and gender-specific misunderstandings. I’d like sometime to try to animate some of his constructions on this blog.
In this article I related some art works I’d made to the Gestalt contact cycle and the modifications or disturbances of contact spoken about in Gestalt.
I described how these art works led me to wonder about various ideas of self in the Gestalt literature. I inquired about Gestalt field theory, and if and how it relates to the idea of a noumenal field, as I intuitively experienced this in relation to my art making practice.
I suggested how Gestalt phenomenological fields and the noumenal field may relate to each other, and that the idea of a noumenal field is a natural extension of Gestalt’s phenomenological field.
The article appeared in the Gestalt Journal of Australia and New Zealand Vol 2 No 2 May 2006.
Download:
The article is available in Acrobat format. Download the article (RonDowdGJArticle2006.pdf, 25 pages, 360Kb).
Ron Dowd is a psychotherapist practising in Sydney's East. He works from a Gestalt, intersubjective and nondual perspective. He's a member of GANZ (Gestalt Australia and New Zealand) and is PACFA registered. Ron also makes art, some of which appears here. You can contact him by email, phone or web-form.
