“The Teal Vase”, alt: “The ORIGINS Still Life,” Oil paint on canvas, 40 x 30 inches. S. Abelow, 2018 - 2020.
The artist’s sacrifice is towards an exploration of the depths, in hope of a redemptive contribution. Striving, in an aesthetic and philosophical quest, each artist looks for remedies for the alienation of man from nature. Art is, therefore, the ultimate expression of humanity overcoming its flaws and failures and realizing its natural potential.
Part one of this series, “Mapping ORIGINS,” introduced the map of the basic dualisms: heaven and earth, masculine and feminine. Now we will begin to explore the way in which art arises out of this dynamic and the dynamism art enacts through culture.
Artists, whether by transcendent longing, or by carnal confusions, concern themselves with these basic dualisms, expressing their conflict and temporary resolution in each work (“I need another pretty, or else shocking thing!”).
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From a dysfunction of the basic dualisms, inner personal neuroses and collective neuroses always arise. As ideas oppose earthly existence, the relation between male and female groups, as well as the orientation of individual identity (shaman, warrior, leader, wife, healer) in terms of sociable function and functional speciation is drawn into question. Looking out from the intersection of a conflict-ridden set of relations, thus, the individual finds himself or herself at a constant pull from many angles.
Artists represent their manifold dualisms (of both inner and outer reality) through poem, myth, narrative, sound, rhythm and song, but also color, and figurative representation. Predisposed by the artists personality and place in life, this can include mood, emotion, but also ideas, philosophies, dogmas.
Regardless of disposition, the creative individual expresses their relationship to life, through their artistic production — the many nuances of which are, at bottom, expressions of a basic dualism. Art production is always engaged in dialectic, to whatever degree of charge, intensity, or meaning/meaninglessness. This dynamism between archetypes is relative, in the sense that, integration and development imply cross-communication, and folding the lower into upper, the reptilian brain into the frontal cortex, etc. Example: intense meaning can exist side-by-side with profound absurdity.
Reaching back to the first part of this essay series: As much as the SHEMAH mandala can be read to reveal the ultimate integration of the personality, each quadrant and subsequent band of color, can also be read as dissociated or fragmented elements, and in that sense a “shadow” reading is possible.
For example, we look towards the “green” quadrant. By isolating the green, we can speak of caring of the body -- interest in yoga, self-care ritual, dressing well, eating healthfully; on the shadow side, the isolated “earth value” is merely the extraction of resources (green=money), on the one hand, and on the other, obsession with earthiness, as a regression into the subsuming paradise.
In the last art review — “Why Paint?” — I criticize the art world’s exploitation of the Goddess of Beauty. The interest in her realms of alluring beauty and polymorphous play represent the “Shadow Feminine” which the Western-Ego finds “dark.” By isolating bands of color, and analyzing motif-theme, composition and social interaction, we can comprehend the ambiguous, underdeveloped and harmful aspects of personality.
Culture needn’t have been born out of the natural state of humanity if it wasn’t for this fault of the human condition: Men and women fail to resolve their inner and outer tension on their own, burdening their failure onto their children for generations to come, externalizing the resolution into society. In reaction to widespread dysfunction, Artist’s sacrifice themselves to an exploration of the depths, in hope of a redemptive contribution. Thus a hypothetically integrated culture is the ultimate remedy for alienation of man from Nature.
In the next installment we will be having a look at the struggles of artists, positioned on the various fault-lines of society.