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.
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Callan Park Gallery,
James Hillman,
Jose dos Santos,
Outsiders
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
The NY Times published an interesting article earlier this year on Pain as an Art form, and it has good two slide shows around the subject (Visualizing Pain and Migraine Art). Here’s an image from the second slide show which has stayed with me for a while now.
I can make the connection to the artist’s migraine suffering, and can really feel that horse and rider. And can make associations about the opposite of a “knight in shining armour”, and wonder also about the play between “knight” and “night”, a dark night experienced, but experienced by a still courageous knight…
And then there’s another level where I’m mute before the artist’s experience and the mystery of his or her creative response. (We’re not given the artist’s name in the slide show.)
And that mystery has kept the work alive for me – I’ve found it informing moments of my own recent lived experience.
I wrote recently of James Hillman’s Myth of Analysis (to which I’ve recently returned to reread), and here’s a lovely quote from him about not attempting to “understand” supposed psychopathology. I think we can extend this to other uprisings of creative expression – and apply it to this and many other haunting works of art:
To bring the peculiarities of psychopathology only upward, to the light of day and its bright ego, takes the color from these strange fish, and they expire in psychiatry’s labeled baskets and stalls.
The danger in too much understanding is in deracinating the work, whatever that work may be (to deracinate: “move forcefully to a hostile environment”, as one dictionary definition puts it).
Tagged as:
Art,
James Hillman,
Outsiders,
Psychotherapy
I’ve been reading about Heinrich Anton Muller in Colin Rhodes’ excellent book Outsider Art – Spontaneous Alternatives and am struck by Muller’s preoccupation with the construction of machines of no obvious purpose. (Muller was an inmate of the Munsingen asylum in Switzerland from 1906, for the last 24 years of his life.)
In this NY Times 1995 art review the influence of these machines on Tinguely and Picasso is made clear. Here’s Muller beside one of his fantastic machines, some kind of perpetual motion construction, and in some way useful to him in maintaining some kind of “sane balance” within his insanity (his initial breakdown having been triggered by the theft of his design for a grape harvesting machine, which he had failed to patent).
(Images ©Zentsch/BAWAG FOUNDATION)
The machines he eventually destroyed – in response supposedly to his incarceration. Luckily, his works on paper survived, and these have been a major influence on many artists, including Dubuffet.
Heinrich Anton Muller
Cannonne
colour pencil on cardboard, 31.3 x 49.6 cm
And here’s a note on Muller by Rhodes, one that for me has hints of the poetic, the existential, the humorous and the ubiquitous:
At the hospital Muller spent much of his time standing in a deep hole and in later years he spent hours staring through a large telescope-like object of his own construction at a small object he had made.
By ubiquitous I mean that Muller’s behaviour differs only possibly in degree from what the rest of us do most of the time….looking through mechanisms of our construction at objects we have made, a process well described by phenomenologists. Which leads me to wonder again about that term “insane”, and how convenient it’s been as a protection for those of us not so categorised.
As James Hillman said in The Myth of Analysis (in his essay on psychological language) the construction in the eighteenth century of the psychological language we largely still use was defensive :
Perhaps the immense energy that went into ordering mental pathology was meant to hold mental disorder at bay. Why, we may ask, were the new continents of the psyche not named with more felicity? Irrational and unconscious, like insane, are negative signs, begrudgingly affixed by reason to what it does not comprehend. One might have called Uranus or Neptune “non-Saturn”, Australia “un-Asia”. Even that Kantian-style definition of the unconscious as a negative Grenzbegriff (negative borderline concept) betrays the same perjorative bias toward the speech of the soul, whose expressions are simply imaginative, symbolic, fantastic, mythic – all words standing on their own, requiring no prior terms that are rational, conscious, and sane.
Tagged as:
Art,
Heinrich Anton Muller,
James Hillman,
Outsiders,
Pablo Picasso,
Psychotherapy
As James Hillman said in The Dream and the Underworld:
We work on dreams not to strengthen the ego but to make psychic reality, to make life matter through death, to make soul by coagulating and intensifying the imagination.
We make life matter too by keeping death near to us, something we are often uncomfortable with. Yet here, in Santa Maria Nuova near the Roman Forum, is the saint for whom the church is named, St. Francesca Romana, wrapped in her simple white habit.
Our denial of soul leads only to depression. Hillman again, in an NY Times article:
Depression is the secularization of melancholy. We’ve lost the gods. We’ve lost what once was behind it. That’s why it’s so depressing.
Tagged as:
James Hillman,
Psychotherapy
