The Vertical

I put up a post on horizontality a while ago and as I'm seeking some sort of balance in my reflections, think it's about time to explore the vertical. 

From: Felix Moscheles’s 1896 book, 'In Bohemia with Du Maurier'

When you begin a course in objective drawing, one of the first things you will be asked to do will be to practice measurement and one of the main elements of that will be to establish a vertical against which you can check both angles and relative sizes. Basically in order to establish measurement you need to compare a known element to an unknown one. One of the most common “known” elements is one that exists due to gravity. 

A drawer establishes a vertical by using a plumb line

A plumb line is one of the oldest measuring devices, one that has been used to establish verticality from time immemorial. It is also used to check relationships.

Checking the relationships between the corner of a sculpture's base and the carved head

As you can see from the image above, by using a plumb line we can easily check what lies directly above the vertical line established by the corner of the sculpture's base. We can also begin to assess by eye angles that relate to our vertical, such as the angle of the chin, of an eye or a cheek bone. By assessing a measure of length in relation to the plumb line, usually the artist's thumb slid up and down a pencil, you can also begin to establish size constancy. 

Using your thumb and end of a pencil to find a unit of length.

In the image above you can see how the plumb line establishes a vertical and how in relation to that you can find a unit of measurement; often in the case of life drawing using the head as a unit. This is of course 'sight size', so if you want your drawing to be bigger, you multiply the measured unit by the percentage larger you need it to be, leading to what is usually called proportional or scaled drawing. 

From: Charles Blanc’s 1867 book, Grammaire des arts du dessin.

Charles Blanc in his 'Grammaire des arts du dessin' uses an illustration that depicts a human being standing on top of a semicircle that represents the sphere of the world.  A vertical line runs through both the standing human and the world and this in turn represents a plumb line, which visualises how everything standing on the Earth relates to its centre of gravity. By using this line Blanc shows how the human figure and any other form, can be drawn as if firmly standing on the ground. Any deviation from this vertical creates some form of movement or emotional exchange beyond the establishment of uprightness. 

From: Grammaire des arts du dessin.

We have already looked at Humbert de Superville's work, a man who had his own three line scheme for expression; 'expansive, horizontal, and convergent', a scheme that he believed affected fundamental emotions. This 'off the vertical' scheme, was taken up by Charles Blanc and used to explain why it was so important to establish verticality as a measure against which all other angles could be compared. Therefore quite early on we have a relation between the vertical as a support for measurement, but also as a comparator in terms of emotional register. The vertical in the visual arts representing an upright character, one associated with resilience, growth, inner strength and quiet confidence. Vertical lines conveying a sense of nobility, spirituality and stability. They can also communicate a feeling of loftiness and spirituality, as vertical lines may suggest a relationship with the sky and other untouchable cosmic entities, such as the sun, moon and stars. Extended perpendicular lines suggesting an idea that goes beyond human measure.

If however you want to specify the establishment of a vertical line without any emotional or spiritual implications, you can do this by referring to it as a Unicode Character. U+FF5C represents the Fullwidth Vertical Line. 

Unicode Character “｜” (U+FF5C) The Fullwidth Vertical Line

Unicode stands for ‘Universal Character Encoding’ and is a global standard for representing text characters in binary form. It enables consistent storage, exchange and processing of text across different digital systems and platforms. Unicode was created with the aim of serving as a unified standard for representing all writing systems and characters developed by humans.

But if we look at heraldry the primary name for a single, wide, vertical stripe located in the centre of a shield is a pale. A palet or pallet, being a thinner version of the pale. The pale may occupy one third of the width of the shield. It has two diminutives, the palet, which is half as wide as a pale and the endorse which is by some said to be one eighth of its breadth, by others one fourth. However, being upright and red, it also signifies courage. 

A Pale

If considering the cross of the crucifixion, the 'stipe' is the vertical beam or upright post driven into the ground. A vertical view of the crucifixion refers to both the physical, upright orientation of the cross (crux immissa or crux commissa) on which Jesus was executed, as well as the theological, vertical relationship it represents between God and humanity. This theological, vertical relationship represents the direct, personal connection between God and humanity. Often symbolised by the vertical beam of the cross, it represents the reconciliation of sinners to God through Jesus Christ, facilitating a "God-ward" orientation of worship, prayer, and obedience. 

Michelangelo: Crucifixion

In Michelangelo's drawing the outstretched arms of Christ metaphorically fly him into that other world that sits above the humans that support him; humans, who Christ will in turn support as he makes his way to God's side. The vertical of the cross extends out of the ground at the base of the drawing and into infinity at the top. As it is cut off, the implication is that it continues out into the cosmos, invisibly extending far beyond the physical edge of the paper it is drawn upon. 

The vertical of the cross is perhaps one of the most spiritual metaphors associated with verticality, but it is not the only one. The vertical, invisible line that extends through the body as an energy channel in Eastern spiritual traditions is most commonly known as the Sushumna Nadi in Hinduism and Yogic philosophy. In Chinese Taoist alchemy and Qigong, this central axis is often referred to as the Central Meridian (Zhong Mai) or the Taiji Pole. 

The Sushumna Nadi

In Hinduism the 'Nadi' are astral channels, made up of astral matter that carry Pranic currents and the Sushumna Nadi is the most important one. It is a three in one symbol; the sustainer of the universe, the path of the universe and the path of salvation. It joins the back of the anus, via the spinal column, to the Brahmarandhra of the head and is invisible and subtle. In everyday life we feel this as we breath in and stand more upright, letting the top of our head becoming attached to an invisible thread that helps us maintain that upright vertical stance. This is again something I've become much more aware of as I continue with my research into visualising interoception. 

The Chinese arts of health, maintain that an upright posture for the cultivation and circulation of energy is vital. The Taiji Pole, is said to run directly through the centre of the body from the top of our head from the (Bai Hui) Spirits Door energy point (Qi Xue) down to the (Hui Yin) Meeting Yin energy point which is located between our anus and testicles. It is an energetic line on which are found the three elixir energy centres ( Dan Tians) of the upper Dan Tian, which is located in the head, the middle Dan Tian located in the chest and the lower Dan Tian located in the abdomen. The Taiji Pole also has three major energy channels that connect to it; 1: The Govenor channel (Du Mai) which travels up the back from the tail bone to the roof of the mouth and is considered a Yang channel. 2: The Conception channel, that travels from the tip of the tongue down the front of the body to the (Hui Yin) energy point between the legs is considered a Yin channel. 3: The most important energy channel that is also connected to the Taiji Pole is known as the Thrusting channel (Zhong Mai) which travels directly between both the Governor and Conception channels. In medical Qigong practice, a priority is regulating these two channels in order to balance Yin and Yang in the body.

Taiji Pole

Governing Vessel Meridian Acupuncture Points

Conception Vessel Meridian Acupuncture Points

Our backbones are also a protection for our nerves. Each vertebra has a hole in the centre, so when they stack on top of each other they form a hollow tube that holds and protects the entire spinal cord and its nerve roots. The spinal cord itself is a large collection of nerve tissue that carries messages from our brains to the rest of our body. Working in a spinal injuries centre, has highlighted for myself how important this is and the complexity of the body's wiring is such that doctors are still not quite sure as to what the effects will be of any spinal column breakages.  As we can see from the acupuncture charts above, each point along the spine is linked to a different effect. For instance CV10 is linked to issues with the lower stomach, such as stagnation, bloating, distention, weak digestion, diarrhea, undigested food in the stool, vomiting as well as rumbling or gurgling noises made by the movement of fluid and gas in the intestines.

We are it seems both physically wired and mentally wired. Energies flow between parts of the body in ways that at times are confusing, but perhaps only because we don't quite yet understand the full complexity of their interrelationship. 

Like trees we have evolved to stand tall. Trees maintain their verticality by constructing a scaffolding of trunks, limbs and branches that enable them to rise from the ground into the upper atmosphere. This makes them free of competition from ground covering plants and shrubs. In landscapes humans and trees are often the verticals against which the horizontality of the landscape is measured. In fact you can structure a landscape around a vertical and horizontal axis.

The differences between forests and woods, agricultural land, park landscapes, reed-beds and marshlands are recorded using height, openness and density of vegetation. All vegetation aspires to reach upwards and turns towards the sun. Whether a grass stalk or a fir tree, plants have evolved a vertical structure, designed to be able to bend with the wind and at the same time achieve maximum height by building rows of semi-rigid cells upon rows semi-rigid cells in the form of complex matrices.

It is gravity that rules this world. However, although it was the first force to be described mathematically (by Isaac Newton in 1687), we still do not know how it really works; the best modern description apparently being the general theory of relativity. We know what it does, but not what it is. The mystery of gravity is that it is an attractive force, but while the other forces such as electro-magnetism, can be both positive and negative and cancel each other out, gravity is only attractive, with no way to repel it, except it would seem to me metaphorically. Every time we stand up, we fight against gravity, we are in effect by living, a type of anti-gravity force. 

Georgia O'Keefe wrote the following to her husband Alfred Stieglitz in 1929: 

"There is much life in me...I realised I would die if I it could not move towards something...it makes me feel I am growing very tall and straight inside...and very still."

The flat landscape of New Mexico had given her a new life, one that she sensed verticality, as she measured herself against her surroundings. 

Reference:

O'Keefe, G. and Stieglitz, A. (2011) My far away one: Selected letters of Georgia O'Keefe and Alfred Stieglitz New York: Yale 

See also:

Angles, vision and sound

Hanging work for an exhibition

Drawings in the Pallent House gallery in Chichester 

Drawings as entanglements of life

Body auras

On Horizontality, the body and other things

Visualising energy flow

Maps made by our nervous systems

A straight line

Reflections on repulsiveness

Beauty is often thought of as being central to the idea of what art seeks to aspire to. As Keats put it; "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." However, if we look at Buddhist traditions you can find alternative approaches to aesthetic reflection, especially when it comes to the body. Our Western tradition is often focused on trying to maintain a beautiful body, we are constantly reminded of the need to iron out wrinkles, remove blemishes and maintain fitness. However other philosophies remind us that contemplating death is an integral part of the awareness of life. Buddha pointed out that death is “the greatest of all teachers”, for it teaches us to be humble, destroys vanity and pride, and crumbles all the barriers of caste, creed and race that divide humans, as all living beings are destined to die and that is the real truth that we all have to face. One aspect of this in Buddhist thought is Patikulamanasikara, generally translated as "reflections on the repulsiveness of the body". I had not thought of the body as repulsive, but perhaps that is because I'm used to thinking of it as an active, young, athletic entity and as I get older and look at myself in the mirror, I think I can see the Buddhist point of view a little easier. In Buddhist scriptures, meditation practice when thinking about the body involves mentally identifying 31 parts of the body, contemplated upon in various ways. This aspect of an imaginary journey into the body, has helped me to think in a different way about our interoceptual understanding of the body, something that I think is very unlike a medical understanding, such as we have by looking through Grey's Anatomy. One particular meditation involves meditating on 31 different body parts: head hairs (Pali: kesā), body hairs (lomā), nails (nakhā), teeth (dantā), skin (taco), flesh (maṃsaṃ), tendons (nahāru), bones (aṭṭhi), bone marrow (aṭṭhimiñjaṃ), kidneys (vakkaṃ), heart (hadayaṃ), liver (yakanaṃ), pleura or chest membrane (kilomakaṃ), spleen (pihakaṃ), lungs (papphāsaṃ), entrails (antaṃ), mesentery or the fold that suspends the intestines from the abdominal wall (antaguṇaṃ), undigested food (udariyaṃ), faeces (karīsaṃ), bile (pittaṃ), phlegm (semhaṃ), pus (pubbo), blood (lohitaṃ), sweat (sedo), fat (medo), tears (assu), skin-oil (vasā), salive (kheḷo), mucus (siṅghānikā), fluid in the joints (lasikā), urine (muttaṃ).

In a some traditions these 31 body parts are contextualised within the framework of the elements, so that the earth element is exemplified by the body parts from head hair to faeces and the water element is exemplified by bile through urine. The Japanese tradition of Kusôzu takes this tradition a little further. The nine contemplations on the impurity of the human body, ask us to focus on the stages of decay after death.

1st stage

5th stage of decay

All has dissolved back into the earth

Kinugasa Morishige 1670-1680: Ink and pigment on paper

From a kusôzu series

The Japanese art form of kusôzu appeared first in the 13th century and continued until the late 19th century. I think it makes a useful balance to our current obsession with the beautiful body and youth.

Archeological dig: Ancient burial site

Ancient burial sites are often laid out very formally reflecting the various rituals that would have taken place when the bodies were interred. Objects are often left with the bodies and they were no doubt meant to have various uses in whatever afterlife the people would have thought they might have.

Skeleton with assorted votive objects

Design for carpet 

I've been reflecting on these things lately and decided to make my own nondenominational prayer mats. Some like the one above, designed to carry the decaying bones of a ceramic figure and others to be more cosmic in design. The lower image was made in Maya from measurements taken from my own body. I really liked the fact that my face looked like a monkey's, something that just happened as the face was folded out flat. I also liked how the feet turned out, again as a result of folding a top foot mapping to one side and a foot net bottom to the other, the ankle being the joining moment. The body net was placed over a sprinkling of stars and cosmic bodies, as if the human body was a sort of measure or attempt to place a container over the universe. In Ursula K Le Guin's Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, she retells the story of human origin by redefining technology as a cultural carrier bag rather than a weapon. This made me think of those string bags my mother used to use for the shopping. The thing about those bags was that they both revealed what you had bought and gave them a new collective form; a form that was a bit like a body with organs, except the organs were made of apples, pears, hair spray canisters and bottles of bleach. We are a bit like that when converted into nets for 3D manipulation but we are also similar to water holding bags, one's that leak if you poke a hole in them. We are like these things and unlike them at the same time. This oscillation between possible metaphoric connections giving for myself enough traction for others to see a way in to their own understanding of what I'm doing. 

See also:

Drawing the dead and the dying

Quantum entanglement

Drawing maps

Flesh

Drawing with your wee

I was half asleep in bed and I had a sudden remembered image of making marks in the snow with my wee when a boy. I still remembered the yellow tinge the lines made in the snow and how excited I was. I felt again the cold on my bare legs and saw clearly the bits of twig that poked through the light coating of fresh snow. How it had been retrieved and where that memory had been hiding all those years I don't know, but something chemical or electrical must have had its buttons pressed. Perhaps my old man's need to go to the toilet had sent a message from my bladder and a route had been found to my brain. Boys in particular like to make marks with their wee in snow, its a very gendered way of drawing.

Not long ago Helen Chadwick's work was on show at the Hepworth in Wakefield. Her 'Piss Flowers' installation was I thought still a wonderful piece of work. It turns what could be just a gender issue into something transcendent. The exhibition at the Hepworth was entitled 'Life Pleasures' and weeing can be exactly that, a simple basic pleasure. Her Piss Flowers are also a feminist comment on how easy it is for boys to wee in the snow and perhaps because they take it for granted that it is something they can do, she can make her point much more succinctly and with a good dose of humour. It's as if she was saying, "Men never make the most out of what comes too easy." 

The installation consists of twelve white-enamelled bronze flower like forms. The shapes had been initially cast in plaster from the negative forms left by the artist and her partner, David Notarius, after urinating into deep snow in Canada. The casts invert the space so that they then resemble flowers. The gender twist was created as they took turns urinating, Chadwick’s wee was the more centralised and was vertical, while her partner's was more scattered, forming what eventually became the outer petals of the flower like forms. For the art theorists who would then write about the work, this inverts gender roles, creating a "phallic" pistil from the female's urine and "petals" from the male's. I am though simply reminded of the joy of weeing in company and see these sculptures as a beautiful evocation of love. 

Helen Chadwick: Piss Flowers: 1991-92

A close up of Piss Flowers

See also:

Drawing as material thinking

Drawing as a model for life experience

A history of drawing as thinking

Stains and blots: Blood sweat and tears

Reciprocity in art

Trikka Georgia :Feeling the roots under my feet grow

I finished my last post thinking about the importance of reciprocity and I referenced Lewis Hyde's book, 'The Gift'. Subtitled 'Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World', it is a very useful read if you are ever worried about the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism. I mentioned in my previous post that the press rarely write about visual art outside of the very exclusive 'art' sections and when they do it is nearly always about money and how high prices now are at auction. I also mentioned that as early as the 1920s Kandinsky was criticising the art market system as being unable to cater for what art was really about. In the art market the divorce of money from any spiritual or empathetic humanistic meaning is exemplified by the image of a 1955 De Kooning painting below. As an abstraction of the human figure it is interesting and it asks questions as to the embodied interrelationship between figure and ground, but at $300 million back in 2015, you could have given humanitarian aid to an entire community. In comparison a small, 50-bed modular hospital might cost £25-£40 million, at 2026 prices.

Interchange: De Kooning 1955. Sold for $300 million in 2015

During the late 1930s and early 1940s Hans Hofmann used to host a life drawing class that raised all sorts of questions as to how the human figure could be represented. During this time Lee Krasner attended and her drawings made as a student in his class were on offer recently at the Kasmin gallery’s booth at Art Basel, for prices ranging from $100,000 to $200,000.

Lee Krasner, Untitled (1939).

If you look at the Lee Krasner drawing you will see that she has been looking at almost exactly the same issues that De Kooning was exploring in 1955. So if the money spent on the De Kooning had anything to do with originality someone missed out on a bit of art history, as Hofmann was dealing with these issues in his classes almost twenty years before De Kooning got to grips with them in 'Interchange'. I don't think the price has anything to do with originality or 'greatness' as an idea or visual expression. it is simply to do with investment in a name and a time. In fact you could have bought a Lee Krasner drawing made when she was a student for a few dollars not that long ago, but her investment star is also rising and this is a good time for her in terms of her work's worth on the art market. Not that she would know that, as she died in 1984. But the gift of her work still keeps giving.

Amongst the indigenous peoples of North America the Kwakw_ak_a’wakw have a word meaning “a gift from the supernatural, a gift from the creator”. We all have these supernatural gifts, but in the western world we would call them our talents or special skills, we might be very aware of animal habits and become great hunters, have sensitive taste buds and love cooking but we might also be artists. These gifts are what individuals offer to others in the community and feasts are often held in order to celebrate achievements, a celebration that is associated with what is often called potlatching. This involved the giving away of or even destroying wealth to demonstrate status, reaffirm lineage, remember special achievements and mark life events like births, deaths, or marriages. "Potlatch" means "to give," and the practice, once banned by white governments, centres on generosity, community, storytelling and the redistribution of resources. It is a cornerstone of social, political and spiritual life. The reason that when white people showed up, they tried to stop tribes from potlatching, was that it was outside of any understanding of commodity exchange within capitalism; it was, like the idea of Communism, a threat to a particular way of thinking, in this case it seemed paradoxically that people were giving away everything that they had, in order to become wealthy.

When you have children you instinctively gift to them your time and energy, as you know that the family community will benefit from this. If you have any special gifts, such as an ability to play a musical instrument, you will gift this skill to your children by teaching it to them, thus passing on cultural capital and building the family's riches. You freely give away your time and energy, if you feel others will benefit. The Kwakw_ak_a’wakw tribe operates like a family and hosts celebrations to mark the various times that these gifts have been given. Lewis Hyde asks us to think about this type of exchange as being an alternative to the one we see operating when art is regarded as an investment, it is a gift that builds social capital.

I have occasionally received money for my work, but at the most just a few hundred pounds and there has always been a sense of exchange beyond the monetary value, people wanting to have an object in their house that represented a certain sort of idea, in a similar way to why you might buy a book. The money being more to do with a recognition that without some sort of exchange, it might be too hard for the maker to continue making. I have like so many artists kept the wolf away from the door by doing other things as well, such as teaching. I still make things and think about what it means to make things, this blog being one of the main channels through which I do my thinking. I do occasionally check to see if anyone picks up on what I do, as much as anything to see if what I do is of any use. It's good to hear from people too and open out conversations but sometimes a little research is useful. This is why I was looking recently at why other writers might have referenced my writing and came across a very interesting text on hair hanging as a circus discipline. It was illustrated by the writer's drawings, such as 'Feeling the roots under my feet grow', the image that opens this post. I found the text very interesting as it represents an attempt to fuse what a complex situation might look like together with how it might feel, an issue that I have had to work with during my own work on visualising interoceptual experiences. Trikka Georgia's text, 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release' had at one point referred to my blog post on horizontality, as this had helped her think through the issues she was dealing with. Hopefully what I had written had supported her thinking, just as in the same way what she had written helped me. This is what I mean by the gift; it is given freely and as it is received by others it allows them to do more and what they do then enriches us all and so by giving away our time and energy to create things, we eventually all profit. 

I first looked at the politics of a non-monetary economy, when a group of us were developing a model for the Leeds Creative Time Bank.  We developed a set of ethics, which were put into a poster form, which was itself at one point shown at the Tate Modern Gallery in relation to the ‘No Soul For Sale’ project. LCTB operated under a belief that we could use ‘social design’ to change social realities such as poverty or social isolation, which we saw at the time, as factors that were already impacting not only upon the creative sector in Leeds, but on all the city’s communities. Hyde's text was one of the gifts that we took from others to help us engineer the Timebank's structure. 

The poster developed for the timebank

However the politics surrounding non-monetary economies can be rather murky. The idea of the potlatch is a powerful one, but one that has come into being as much by desire as by reality. Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a system of banking and a means by which prestige is maintained, the potlatch is a central anthropological concept. Christopher Bracken in 'The Potlatch Papers' shows how the potlatch was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them, the government had invented something that people actually wanted. As Bracken put it, what had been invented was a mirror in which to observe not “the Indian,” but “the European.” 

The idea of the gift still has traction, because unlike money and traded goods, things like love, hope for the future, faith, beauty, the sentiment of a poem, the feeling tone of an image and the construction of an idea; you don’t have less when you give them away. Indeed, they are made to be given away and you feel better when you pass them on. As your gifts are passed on, somehow the world looks a little more like the one you would like it to be and you feel better about yourself. This reflection on the role of the artist in a world dominated by capitalism, doesn't perhaps help a starving artist put bread on the table, but it might explain why as artists we sometimes need to become involved with ventures outside of art making and how we might think about the role of the artist community and the objects that we make. I can remember a conversation from some years ago when I was part of a group exhibition and prices for our various works were being discussed. One artist put forward an idea that they thought their work was worth as much as a fridge. As they did others began to pitch in what sort of commodity their work might be seen as being as useful as and therefore as valuable as. Was a painting as useful as a carpet? Both have aesthetic qualities but one also keeps the room warm and softens the floor's impact on the feet. Therefore argued another, tapestries ought to cost more than paintings, as they could also be used to help keep a room warm. But argued someone else, an artwork is an idea and what people are buying is intellectual property and this is surely worth more than any single commodity. This was countered with, "Yes but counting backwards is also an idea, but its not worth anything." 

I don't have an answer to this, except to say that if at some point someone came along and said this blog is interesting enough to be published as a series of books and asked me if the content could be therefore sold in printed form, I would probably have a real dilemma to face. On the one hand the ideas contained in these posts might be disseminated even more widely and that would be a good thing. But by turning these online posts into hard copies that would have to be marketed and sold, they would join the rest of the commodifiable entities that the capitalist economy embeds within itself. As is often the case I'm lost and puzzled as to any answers to the conundrums I give myself, which is probably why I make art rather than write philosophy or engage directly in politics.

An anti-slug votive at work

I will be showing a few anti-slug votives in a small exhibition at the Trapezium Gallery in Bradford. At the end of the exhibition, I will gift the votives to anyone who feels they need a little other worldly support in their efforts to maintain a garden.

"That art that matters to us—which moves the heart, or revives the soul, or delights the senses, or offers courage for living, however we choose to describe the experience—that work is received by us as a gift is received. Even if we have paid a fee at the door of the museum or concert hall, when we are touched by a work of art something comes to us which has nothing to do with the price." Lewis Hyde: The Gift

References

Trikka Georgia: 'The Journey of a hair hanger's release

An interview with myself about the Leeds Creative Timebank

Barker, G. (2018) Leeds Creative Timebank: reciprocity for sustainable social design, Expanding Communities of Sustainable Practice Conference, Leeds Arts University, 16 November 2018 available at https://www.academia.edu/87392269/Expanding_communities_of_sustainable_practice_symposium_proceedings_2018 

Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.

See also:

In praise of verbs 

Drawing and the principles of permaculture

Horizontality

Katja Heitmann and embodied memory

Defining art

Artists' signatures 

Shamanism and art

Ceramic fish

I ended my last post thinking about the artist as shaman. This association has been made many times. For instance, Kandinsky believed that contemporary art and ethnic artefacts were both suffused with creativity and that the shaman as a craftsman, should be given the same level of aesthetic and anthropological appreciation as an artist. Kandinsky believed that it was not just an aesthetic affinity that cultural objects have, but that the spiritual and ethical congruity of hand made objects came into being because of an inner necessity and openness to the underlying resonances of a deeply spiritual world.
He was an early critic of the art market system and pointed out that the separation of art from popular culture, children’s art or the objects that were normally associated with ethnography or primitive art was wrong, indeed he stated that in his eyes they were often identical. As far back as1889, Kandinsky had made a visit to the Vologda governorship, coming across the Zyrjane, a Finno-Ugric population, where he met shamans and was astonished by the beauty and colours of the furnishings and artefacts that decorated their homes.

Joseph Beuys saw himself as an artist-shaman, a spiritual guide who used art to heal and transform society by connecting people to deeper, often forgotten, human and natural truths. He believed that art could be a force for social healing and when in the early 1980s I met him, he made a deep impression and helped me to find a needed belief in the power and importance of the discipline I was involved with.

However I've never been as forceful in my beliefs as Beuys, I tend to work by feeling my way towards something, rather than having a plan and executing it. For instance when I make one of my ceramic ideas, something comes into being that wasn't there before, arriving out of a muddle of thoughts and possibilities, partly as result of the material having a voice and partly out of my own desires to bring a thought into existence. Once made ceramics belong to the world of objects and many of the human made objects we engage with can also be used as commodities and even the ones initially not made as commodities, are often judged or regarded as objects that in one way or another have a relationship to commodities. Such is the power of money and exchange value. The idea that monetary value is the only way to measure worth is central to the art market and it is no surprise that the media rarely discuss art, except when it is sold at auction and fetches astronomical prices. Under Capitalism, worth has a very narrow definition and the strive towards economic success, seems to have eroded away many of our more spiritual or communal bonds and in particular in relation to the making of art or other culturally significant objects, we are loosing sight of the transformative power of objects as extended minds. However the shamanic idea that objects have fetishistic power lies not far beneath the surface of our everyday economic reality.

Marx wrote, "A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties". He saw that a belief in invisible lifelike powers existing within inanimate objects was essential to our complex meaning system that embeds the believer into the wider world of objects with meaning. Coining the term 'commodity fetishism', things were Marx believed 'magical', in that they promised 'magical' effects, that were, he would further argue 'fictional' or of no clear practical use value, but which nevertheless appeared to be the drivers for possible life changing psychological transformations. Marx never did quite get his head around the psychological power of capitalism. He took several of his ideas from contemporary writings about tribal uses of fetishes and other animist practices and it is this fact, that makes me think again about the role of the consumed object within late capitalism. I see the animist idea that underpinned Marx's original observations still in place. In recognising this, perhaps this gives us a way forward when looking for alternatives to a Capitalist model. Any alternative possibility to values based in capital, should emerge from a recognition that whatever new system comes into existence, that it would have to exercise a similar underlying psychological lever, but one that drove people into making more communally supportive decisions, rather than rewarded the economic achievements of the individual.

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object, I am not making one to sell, whereby I exchange it for cash. What I am doing is though trying to make another type of transaction, one whereby the person coming across the object is asked to think about why such a thing might exist. The art object becomes in effect a type of externalised mind, a form that allows thought to be grown around itself. The exchange value in this case depends on the receptiveness of the person encountering the object and how entangled they want to be into the possibilities the object opens for them.

For instance, in relation to a work I made a while ago now, my initial prompt to making over 300 ceramic fish was a description I came across of thousands of dead fish, washed up on a riverside beach due to an outflowing of pollution into the waters that they had previously inhabited. I wanted to ensure a moment of news was not forgotten and to make it concrete and unavoidable. I also wanted to highlight the bigger issue, which was the fact that we are constantly degrading and destroying the world in which we and all other creatures live. But as I made the fish, each one emerged out of the making as having a different 'life force', some felt as if they had more élan vital than others. Where this came from I wasn't sure, but it had something to do with my relationship with the clay out of which their various forms emerged. Somehow something of my own life force had been transferred into what had been made. Something of my personal spirit had travelled out of my body and had been transported into an inanimate material which now had some sort of animate form. I had in effect performed an ancient shamanic rite and in doing so had also made 'fetishes'. Fetishes that in this case were meant to be found by people who were exploring this small stream in Barnsley.

Fish installation and three individual fish

There are different types of shaman, I don't for instance operate as a spirit walker, the type of shaman that can leave their body behind and travel in spirit form, but as a maker I do feel I have access to a shamanic tool kit. These tools are though not just physical objects but are things possessing spiritual significance that can be used to help make objects come into being, that are designed to connect people with concepts that have the potential to bring about change in their inner thoughts, energies or beliefs. 

This interest in art as a shamanic practice goes back to when I was a student at Newport College of Art. It was there that I first read the work of Mircea Eliade and Carlos Casteneda. After this experience, I had an intuitive feeling that a shamanic aspect of art practice was still viable, but didn't know how to harness this feeling. Casteneda's 'The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge' was widely read by artists in the early 1970s and although now more regarded as fiction, the ideas were very powerful and they developed an intuition that shamanic practices were still possible. 

It was only after working more as a community based artist and eventually as a votive maker, who then found himself more recently working in a hospital setting, that I have perhaps finally begun to see what my previous experiences were hinting at.

Another influential writer who also wrote about the continuing importance of shamanism and who has helped me in the past to make sense of what I do is Lewis Hyde. In particular the idea of art making as a gift. According to Hyde (1983): 'The spirit of an artist’s gifts can wake our own. The work appeals, as Joseph Conrad says, to a part of our being which is itself a gift and not an acquisition…. A gift revives the soul.' This is an incredibly romantic idea and to offer up what you do as a gift is a rare thing, mainly because we are brought up to believe that we need a monetary reward for our labour, if not we cant put any food on the table and we die. However I now have a pension, having worked for over 50 years at what is now Leeds Arts University, so I am in a position to offer some of my time as a gift. 

The importance of reciprocity needs a little fleshing out, something however for another post. 

References

Casteneda, C. (1990) The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge London: Penguin

Poggianella, S. “The Object as an Act of Freedom. Kandinsky and Shaman Art, in Evgenia Petrova, (ed), Wassily Kandinsky. Tudo comença num Ponto. Everything starts from a dot , State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, 11/11/2014 - 28/09/2015, pp. 29-39 Available at: https://www.academia.edu/41629506/The_Object_as_an_Act_of_Freedom_Kandinsky_and_Shaman_Art?email_work_card=abstract-read-more

Eliade, M. (2020) Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy New York: Princeton University Press

Hyde, L., (1983) The gift: Creativity and the artist in the modern world. London: Vintage.

Marx, K. (1990). Capital. London: Penguin Classics. p. 165.

See also:

Audience as Shamanic community

Drawings of nervous systems

Why I'm making animist images

In praise of verbs

Exhibition: Piscean Promises

Penone draws a tree

I'm still thinking about the implications of last week's post on the fold. I remember seeing a video of Giuseppe Penone holding his hand around the trunk of a young tree. His fingers could almost completely encircle it. He then had a cast made of his hand in that clutching shape, going on to replace his flesh and blood hand with the cast, which I think was in metal. He then left the tree to its own devices, filming it every now and again over the following years. The tree gradually shaped itself, folding its form around the hand. I thought it one of the most sensitive drawings I had ever seen. The tree was making its own shape, as it grew it responded to the intrusion of the artificial hand, flowing gracefully around it, acknowledging its presence, but not letting it get in the way of its growth, it revealed a relationship, that many of us have seen before, but not as clearly.

Tree and remains of old fence combine energy fields: Digital print

I have in the past made images myself of situations such as a tree and fence becoming entwined as the tree flows around the metal that has been erected next to it. (As above, where I thought it looked as if the tree was eating the fence.) In these images I tried to show how energy flows were intermingled; but Penone took his time and made sure his idea had properly conjoined with the life flow of the tree; making the work in 'tree-time', rather than human time. 

Giuseppe Penone: I have Been a Tree in the Hand, 1984-1991

Penone's was an art work made over many years and it reminded me that we rarely take into account the different time frames within which the world works.

Tree and gesture 1985-1991 wood with iron

During the late 1980s Penone would return to the idea several times, in the case of the image above, it is perhaps much easier to see that he was thinking of this growth event as a drawing; it being finished once the branch of the tree is removed and transported into a gallery. 

The animated short film 'Rocks' (2001), by Chris Stenner, Arvid Uibel and Heidi Wittlinger, reminds us that rocks, trees, the wind, the sea, plants, bacteria, birds, insects and other creatures, all have their own particular time signatures within which they operate.

 

Das Rad

However, these rocks as observers make a fundamental mistake in their view of what is happening, they are in fact part of a much larger pattern, woven into being by a series of interrelationships, part of an, as Bohm put it, "undivided wholeness", (1995, p.134) in which the observers are not separate from what is observed. 

Penone's tree creates an analogy, whereby the tree accepts the iron grip of the hand as part of its reality and rather than rejecting it, it flows around it. This for myself clarifies the relationship between consciousness and the material world. We often think of our consciousness as being something separate from the world, it is the seat out of which we can observe the world. But as Bohm goes on to explain in the final part of 'Wholeness and the Implicate Order', "consciousness and matter in general are basically the same order" (1995, p.208), they can affect each other, "mind enfolds matter in general and therefore the body in particular. Similarly, the body enfolds not only the mind but also in some sense the entire material universe." (p.209) The atoms of our bodies being enfolded throughout all space and time, the mind and body being one. Bohm then goes to to state that, it is therefore misleading to "think of ourselves as independent entities, that interact with other human beings and with nature." (210), all are projections of a single totality. At a deeper level of order, the tree and the hand are one, the thought that brought the hand into contact with the tree, being of the same order of reality as the tree itself. 

When I make a drawing or a ceramic object there is no separation between my hand, my thoughts and the materials with which I am engaged with. Whether I'm making a drawing of the landscape in front of me or constructing a drawing out of my imagination, both are again projections of a single totality. 

Notebook drawing 

In my notebook drawing made to remind myself of an experience of how a tree had grown in response to an old wire metal fence, an old moment of consciousness is frozen and becomes as physical as the initial experience. Then at a later date, this drawing becomes a starting point for a digital image, one that I have just now used as an opening image for this post, one thing triggers another into existence. 

For Penone, a tree is a perfect sculpture/drawing/work of art. A living entity that like ourselves, records every instant of its life and experience in its structure. He comes back to this several times, sometimes bringing the tree together with stone forms, as in his project for the Garden of Stone below. In this case a drawing of a possibility, comes into existence as a solidified idea, one that in its turn, becomes another reality. 

Project for the Garden of Stone: 1968

Penone at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park

At other times he takes rubbings or casts from trees, in the installation “Pensieri e Linda”, below, he makes a frottage of elderberry leaves on a linen canvas, of the trunk of a thirty metre high acacia tree. 

“Pensieri e Linda”

At one point during the late 1960s Penone decided to build a ring of wax around a tree. As he did this he realised that the wax registered two impressions; the bark of the tree and the press of his fingers; a double identity, tree and human conjoined. His drawing 'I felt the breath of the wood', reminding myself of how closely humans can find themselves identified with a tree and that shamanic practices can still be integral to how contemporary art is constructed. 

Giuseppe Penone: I felt the breath of the wood

"When you have your eyes open, the space outside goes inside your mind".
Giuseppe Penone

Reference

Bohm, D (1995) Wholeness and the Implicate Order London: Routledge

The perfection of the tree An interview with Giuseppe Penone

See also:

Ilana Halperin: Minerals of New York

Letting things happen

Charcoal

Drawings as entanglements of life

Drawings as aesthetic transducers