Metamorphosis 2
Metamorphosis 1
What is causing artists around the world to rise up and join the swelling tide of imaginative magi otherwise known as the makers of sacred art?
Looking at some of the art that is called spiritual today, one might think something weird is happening, something edgy… A mounting rebel flood of divine creativity is crashing through dams once thought impenetrable… Was it the psychedelic revolution that bored the first hole? Was it the Outsider movement? With artistic license extended beyond the pale, even to feral, high and certified “mad” artists, the same rabble of renegade prophets and palette-wielding wing nuts that batters down walls of tradition is also building us a new holy wonderland….
The 20th Century has embalmed, debunked, stretched, snapped, spliced and nuked the spiritual question. Today, just past the threshold of the 21st, many intuitive and creative people have either invented their own religions, or extracted the seeds of truth from orthodox faiths’ dead, interdictory hulls – then poured on a dose of electric fertilizer. The result has been a mutinous beanstalk of wild, inspired, living sacred art.
Perhaps this marks a new age of spiritual expression, and we can now begin sanctifying curious stripes of numinous experience such as encounters with aliens, plant spirits, and even the many sincere but recherché resurrections of Jesus Christ. 20th Century art movements such as Surrealism, Symbolism, Visionary, Fantastic, Outsider and Entheo Art have done much to expand the scope of the sacred. By opening the doors to imaginative inner worlds and dreams, they have also admitted our inner gods. Considering the psychic and sacred liberation these movements offer, it is not difficult to see why they have endured for decades, and now blossom once again as they enter the 21st Century…. New hybrids of psychedelic digital imagery and painting send fiber-optic tendrils spiraling into the future…. while simultaneously twining around the sturdy primordial roots of indigenous shamanic Art….
At first glance it may appear that Huichol string painting, Australian Aboriginal dot painting, and other sacred artistic traditions have finally emerged into the sunshine of European-based art culture due to their relevance to contemporary shamanism…. But the longer one looks, the more it appears that contemporary shamanism is one in many renaissances of an extremely ancient universal complex of values, and is largely informed by the templates of its older brothers. The tradition of sacred plant art appears in every culture, and reaches back to Neolithic times, when our ancestors made rock art depicting the magic mushroom and its myco-active connoisseurs. Shamanic experience may even be the seed from which today’s major religions have sprung. Whatever the case, today we are witnessing a peak in shamanic awareness and innovation, and with it the perennial rebirth of the ancient nature wisdom that has enabled so many cultures to sustain ecological harmony. Our civilization, long at odds with its earthly matrix, is now awakening to the consequences of a poisoned planet, and the dire need of ideological reform.
Throughout time, the greater balance of ideology and art has celebrated the spiritual mysteries and cycles of nature. The last millennium however, culminating in the 20th century, has reversed the trend. We have torn spirit from matter and exiled it to a distant heaven. We have illegitimated and ridiculed the mathematical, astronomical and medical knowledge of sustainable cultures and driven its trustees to extinction. We have all but prohibited the creation of new holy art, granting Michelangelo (deserving but deceased) the final word on the sublime, while looking exclusively to the secular world for frontiers suitable to “fine art”. This is not to say that the chthonic divine has not seeped through mainstream 20th century canvasses, but cubistic African spirits take on the look of undercover agents while moving in stop-motion through the brothels and nightclubs of Europe….
Why then have the spirits cast off their masks and paraded undisguised through the gates of the 21st century? Could it be the domino effect? Everything in our culture seems to be undergoing a spiritualized unmasking – even war, and science… We have been kneeling before the altars of these two juggernauts so covertly that until recently we hardly recognized them as our society’s patron gods. Materialist notions suggest that god died with the advent of rationalism and scientific method, but some may sense in this a stealthy transmigration…. It is not far from a common sentiment that the fierce hot winds of Hiroshima and Nagasaki blew the secular masks of science and warfare aside, revealing a display of blinding light and horrific cruelty which are the hallmarks of Yahweh….
Now that Yahweh and his nuclear explosions have arrived on the scene, we are in for a wild atomic ride…. So let’s make a hairpin turn into the realm of popular culture...
Zooming in on the last several decades, it becomes clear that the psychedelic revolution of the 1960’s has finally begun to recover from whiplash, and is tooling along happily once more. Smirk at the platform shoed, elephant bellbottomed love decade if you will, but know that behind the beaded curtains and cannabis haze something humorously serious happened. A whole society executed a flaming cross-your-heart triple lutz into an oceanic acid bath: LSD… Experiential virgins of the collective mind may protest, but they can’t deny: contemporary pop culture is orchestrated by those who have inhaled – (and maybe even taken the acid test…)
The deeper psychedelic point of view from which the groovy brick-a-brac of pop culture derives has by this time become something of a tradition, complete with bardic tales of adventure and folk heroes. In the likes of Albert Hoffmann, Timothy Leary, The Merry Pranksters, Don Juan and the legends of rock and roll, today’s budding psychonauts have a bevy of older brothers and sisters at their backs, a rubberized cordon, if you will, protecting them against psychedelic dismounts into the hard-edged suburban square world that stunned the post-50’s head…
But for those whose tastes in psychedelic heroes runs more to the contemplative visual artist adventuring behind reality’s veil, an equally powerful assembly can be summoned out of roughly the same time period. Among the European Fantastic artists thriving during the 60’s and 70’s, Ernst Fuchs was possibly the most influential in popularizing the sacred. Together with Hundertwasser, Dali, Mati Klarwein and a host of famous and obscure psychedelic mystics, he initiated the 20th Century’s first wave of overtly sacred art. By emphasizing printmaking as a means of capitalizing on a rendering style so intricate and time intensive that no more than a few hundred paintings could be produced from a lifetime of work, and then by teaching a distinctive method of refined painting, the now popular Misch technique, Fuchs turned out a passionate and foot-sure group of adherents, some of who in turn carry on his tradition of mentorship today. Those currently teaching offshoots of the Misch technique include Brigid Marlin, Philip Rubinov Jacobson, Roberto Venosa and Martina Hoffmann. But even lone seers who have never had a painting lesson in their lives may claim Fuchs as a mentor. Artworks showing his influence pop up everywhere. Across oceans, decades and cultural divides, Fuchs’ impact on the visionary world is one with the seismic rumbling of a fateful shift in the crust of the Creatrix.
Another distinct but related wave of sacred art is now rising under the influence of Alex Grey. His writings and performances, as well as his paintings, submit the vagaries of spiritual experience to cerebral ordering. Likewise do the writings of Laurence Caruana. Caruana verbalizes unusual visual perceptions, gleaned during his painting and meditation sessions, and integrates them with a wealth of philosophical and cultural knowledge. Both artists manage to bridge the left and right brain hemispheres and translate visionary experience into terms more readily appreciated by the intellect. For a far more detailed and studious account of the figures and forces touched on here, I highly recommend Caruana’s Manifesto of Visionary Art….
Now let us launch through a dimensional barrier and into the quantum convolutions of cyberspace…. The Internet has no national borders, and it is not juried…. Nor is it patrolled by the art police, or censored by the reincarnations of Bishop Irenaeus…. We are now cruising through the electric ethers of a free and bountiful realm…. This may be a truism, but to those of us whose art can find no home above the world’s cafeteria lines and sofas, it is a mantra of hope…. New spiritual visions, no matter how natural and healing, may well stir up primordial terrors in a society conditioned to fear any transgression of orthodoxy as a ticket to eternal damnation. For thousands of years, religious authorities have hammered home the evils of nature and our own bodies, so it is really no surprise that the art of direct spiritual experience, which necessarily often involves both, will become for some unfortunate people an object of loathing. It is sad, but it is not their fault. It is also not the fault of gallery owners that most of them shy away from providing a spiritual emergency room for the fundamentally challenged, and hence judge this work too edgy for commerce….
On the other hand, the Internet is proving them wrong… Unlike abstract expressionism, minimalism, conceptualism or any other movement initially struggling for acceptance, Visionary art doesn’t need a theory to sell it. It appeals directly, esthetically. It immediately fills the chest with either dread or rapture. A growing number of people today have experienced their own visionary states and are so delighted to see them reflected in masterfully rendered art that they buy paintings and prints straight from artists’ websites.
One of the most interesting and exciting circumstances of contemporary art is that there is a whole galaxy of stars newly visible in cyberspace, but yet uncharted by the art industry. In effect, the power to recognize and support them is in the eyes and hands of us all. This is an unprecedented cultural opportunity, for artists and everyone else involved in the information renaissance… It used to be that unless an artist lived in Paris or New York she had no access to a happening art scene. Now she can log onto Beinart’s Surreal and Visionary Art Collective, or Tribe, any of the numerous art and culture blogs, and share conversation and pictures with other esoteric thinkers around the world… As long as the Internet remains free from the kind of corporate dominance that destroyed radio and television, it will be a vehicle for grass roots cultural frontiers such as this one, created by and for the people.
This freedom of expression and communication comes at a fine time, too. Whether by apocalypse, Mayan calendar expiration, or ecological disaster, prophecy has it that we are living in the end times. With such a terrorist siren song on the air, the intervention of diverse creative voices is a crucial means of changing the tune and replacing the threat of doom with a rallying cry of rebirth…
Thanks again to religious authorities, the global mind has for some time been locked in the thralls of fear -- of the end, Armageddon, wholesale death. Fear is the life’s blood of corrupt governments, corporations and religious institutions, of course. So even though the end times are a myth, it may appear to the advantage of the powerful and myopic to promote them as literal predictions.
But what is death? And does anything really end? The human mind is, among other things, a symbol-making organ. Many subjects of thought are too complex to fully express themselves in tangible terms. They rely on a symbol, on its face deceptively simple and tangible, but concealing a mysterious underside. When one draws the Death card in Tarot, it is this dimension that should hover into consideration. Simply expressed, it is change. But just as we fail to understand what lies on the other side of physical death, we fail to fully decipher the hidden implications of symbolic death, or transformation, unless we directly experience them.
Shamans regularly surrender themselves to symbolic death – a vivid, dramatic and emotional experience. These warriors emerge from death more unified with life than ever before. They are reborn with a direct knowledge of their connectedness to other life forms, the earth, and the archetypes contained within human consciousness. One of these archetypes is the creator. Visionary artists who have had shamanic experiences are now poised to perform a healing role in culture. Simply by manifesting their diverse spiritual visions, they can demonstrate to humanity that the creator lives within us all. No authority need intercede between a human being and her experience of the divine. Indeed, we are all creators, and our sacred communal creation is this ever-changing world.
Maura Holden, 2006
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