Votives
I have been thinking more about the relationship that exists between art and religion. For instance the objects I have made that operate as votives, are linked to a need to work with a belief in their effectiveness. Even though these are what I describe as non-religious votives, or secular votives, people still seem to find them effective, as they allow the envisaging of change. A model of a frozen shoulder, allows someone to imagine their frozen shoulder pain, travelling out of their actual shoulder, to now inhabit a new shape, one designed to work as a pain receiver or taker away. In being able to now more actively imagine the pain moving out of their body, somehow this loosens the hold that pain has on the person with the problem. However, in order for the transfer to take place, it has also been found to be far more effective if some sort of verbal ritual is designed to accompany it. Even something as simple as:
Pain, pain, go away
Move on out of me today
Pain pain, in my shoulder
You are banished to a holder
This simple rhyme, seems to operate not dissimilarly to a spell, it can be chanted in the mind or spoken out loud with others and in some way it seems to help by giving some sort of agency to the pain and with that agency a choice. But if I'm working with votive type objects, what does this have to say about the role of related disciplines such as magic and religion in all this?
The longer I continue to make art that in some way I see as being able to operate as a way of transforming a situation, by allowing people to work with an idea that has emerged out of the body/mind and is now an externalised thought, the more I wonder if the making of images would have been inseparable from the way communication with the 'spirit world' was maintained and established by early humans. In particular animist societies would not have had a divide between the two worlds, as they had a belief in the ability of the spirit to move between alive and inanimate things. There would have been no problem for an image to operate as a vessel or substitute for a body. It might become a portal or carrier, working to operate as a doorway into an alternative state of consciousness or as a messaging service, whereby information was passed between the physical and spiritual worlds. In fact visual images can simultaneously operate in all of these various ways and that is one of their unique properties.
Bison: The Cave of Altamira in northern Spain
For instance an image of a bison could represent the spirit of an animal, become an entry point into the 'animal' as a spirit, be a message about how the tribe wanted to think about a relationship with that animal, perhaps to establish a communication channel with the many dead animals that had been part of successful hunts, or to make sure the bison was going to continue to be seen alive again during the following hunting year, so that future hunts would be successful. But perhaps the image could be a portal through which a human could pass to become a bison. To be a bison is to know a bison and to know a bison is to be able to hunt it much more effectively. The bison is also a powerful beast and may have been envied as to its strength and resilience, perhaps in some ways it also becomes a figure of worship, an entity whereby a human may want to establish an invisible communication channel, down which the bison entity could pass on aspects of its strength and virility. For a hunting community a bison was their lifeblood, its life was interwoven with theirs as was its death. The mystery of a bison's reappearance each year, probably at similar times and places would have to be explained somehow, also any bison glut or scarcity would have to be responded to, and humans had imagination. Therefore they would imagine why a bison might not reappear. It might be simply fed up in that it had not been appreciated properly last year or it might have encountered a much fiercer predator, in imagination perhaps a creature much more lion like. Gradually a link between ideas, perhaps thoughts communicated around the first warming night fires, would help give form to the materials surrounding early peoples; initially a shape like a bison might have been seen in a rock form lit by a fire, then at another point in the shape of some clay fingered whilst people talked around that fire, or outlined in burnt wood, as a stick was taken out of a hearth.
The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel
The Lion Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel is a very early example of an animal / human hybrid and it would take hundreds of hours to carve images of that sort, therefore the idea must have been long established by then, that material objects could be used as important intersessions in the relationship between humans and what I shall call the spirit world. Whether the lion man carving operated as a doorway, a substitute, a communication channel or in other ways we will never know, but as a physical object it carries an idea of transformation and hybridity that clearly connects humans and lions. Perhaps it was used to channel down a lion's strength and ferocity before setting off for a hunt, or to give to a member of the tribe as an award of some sort, anointing them with the title of 'lion' because of their prowess in battle, the lion-man being part of a symbolic transfer of power. Rulers like to be seen to be anointed and appointed by a God of some sort and this might have been an object taken from a very early example of a ritual process whereby power was both acknowledged and passed on. In all of these cases the image/object lies at the centre of the process and allows for thoughts to be shaped and held in certain forms. I'm also sure that a narrative would have surrounded this object, its function would have been 'talked out', amongst those present. Whether a shaman held court, or it was more a collective experience, who knows, but some sort of ritual collective experience would have been woven around the object, its significance understood by all present. This could be what we would eventually think of as religion.
My questions in relation to this, are in what way is the visual materialising of thought related to the structures within our brains that help visualise information and are these structures and the processes they support in some way responsible for our religious feelings? If so there would be a necessary connection between the visions made and the spiritual feelings invoked.
In his book, Paleopoetics, Christopher Collins tries to trace our collective history back much further than when the lion man was being used. He begins by observing that before verbal language, early humans must have had ways of dealing with complex understandings of the world. He refers to Jacob Von Uexküll's idea that each creature's own 'unwelten' or phenomenal world is different. This implies that living beings perceive their worlds in terms of species-specific, spatio-temporal, "self-in-world" subjective reference frames. So if we go back to the special nature of our perceptual systems, visual information is passed from each eye into the brain via the optic nerve. Once information reaches the visual cortex, (Ungerleider and Mishkin, 1982) argued that it is then split into two neural streams, one going to the parietal lobe, (the dorsal stream) the other the temporal lobe (the ventral stream). The dorsal stream being associated with spatial perception, the ventral stream being associated with object recognition. The ventral stream essentially transforms visual information into representations that hold form or shape, in such a way that things emerge out of the undifferentiated colours and shapes of our complex environments, the brain's processing giving importance to things that hold significance to us. For instance although in our early history there would be no word for ripe fruit yet, the brain would still need to be able to associate the changing colour of fruit with its readiness for eating. That old natural symbol is still in operation and I believe it may have something to do with why we still need to make art, part of our old brain is still stimulated by visual alerts, even manufactured ones like paintings and drawings, triggering our ancient neural pathways, a process that we now call tacit knowledge, instinct, intuition or gut feeling.
Higher order visual pathways
However the dorsal and ventral streams don't operate separately, they work together. They are like two highways that have multiple connecting roads between the two. As the brain develops, more connecting roads form as information gets exchanged. As more information gets exchanged, the system becomes increasingly efficient at identifying and interacting with objects in the visual world. The dorsal stream never acts alone, nor does the ventral stream. Instinct and rationality become entwined.
The interconnections between dorsal and ventral pathways
In fact, where, what and how are intermingled and cross reference each other, (Sheth and Young, 2016), one element of the picture is always being checked out by another, until a 'something' emerges out of the complicated moving background jumble of scanned perceptions. The visual materialising of a thought, as in a drawing, could be regarded therefore as following a similar process. Could, I begin to think, certain types of drawings be regarded as models of how visual perception itself operates?
What if you see a shaking of the leaves of a tree. Sometimes it's obvious what is causing the shake, but at other times it's not. Is it a creature moving along a branch? Is it the wind? But what if you can see no animals and you feel no breeze? Your imagination will quickly come into play. It's complex but simple at the same time. Interconnected in parallel with the “what” of the ventral pathway, is the dorsal stream, the vision for action stream of "where” and “how”. The guidance of actions is decided upon alongside having to locate associated objects in a space. Do you want to grab or avoid these objects in space, i.e. stay and see what's going on or run away? In fact all of the brain’s lobes participate in vision, and multiple visual centres are located throughout the brain, but all of them are as they become attuned to each other, subject to bayesian inference, that statistical method that updates the probability of a hypothesis as more evidence or information becomes available.
Instinct is the stuff of chimpanzees as well as humans, so how does it relate to the forming of religions? I think its got to do with trust and belief. In order for all that dorsal and ventral pathways stuff to work at the speed it does, we cant actually think about it, we need to trust in our instincts. Gut feeling for one reason or another seems to work for us. But what happens when we develop higher order thinking mechanisms such as inductive logic? They are slower, but in their step by step logic, they can stand up to scrutiny and you can decide whether or not the logic is 'true' or not. Hence we have scientific reasoning. Of course this works well for us, but as we have seen in the past it can also lead not to war, but to an ability to wage war with an efficiency that becomes inhuman. As a necessary balance, I believe that art still in many ways allows us to use instinct or an internal sense of rightness, when either trying to solve non scientific problems or to simply re-engage with the world. As an artist you develop a belief in your feelings for materials, in the particular way your body moves, for certain sounds or ways of making images, but you don't have to know what these things mean; you operate using tacit knowledge.
Ramsey Dukes: Diagram of the relationships between disciplines
Looking at the magic researcher Ramsey Dukes's diagram, you can see the relationship between art and religion, both emerging from a belief in intuition, but religion has to work with more thinking than feeling, i. e. it needs structures within which to work, such as codes of behaviour as set out by the various religions or the stories told by a shaman to make sense of the spirit world that shamanic practices might help you enter. Hence religion needs a certain amount of inductive logic, so that followers can be shown reasons for the truth of their beliefs. Art still operates as a more 'open' portal into intuitive logic, which is why it is both useful to religion and at the same time a problem; because all visual images are open to interpretation. According to Dukes, magic is simply 'what works', using any combination of logic, symbols, rhetoric, atmosphere, influence etc. to effect an impact on others. Art in many ways 'bleeds' into both religion and magic, its edges of 'effect' being formed by whatever surrounding narratives are being told.
For instance the image below is a meditation on paper, made by people who were Indian tantric mystics. The image operates as a portal for the mind and is for individual contemplation.
Indian tantric art
The black square by Malevich, below, was hung high up in the corner of a room, the traditional spot for a sacred Russian Orthodox religious icon, signalling a shift from religious worship to pure, secular artistic devotion.
Malevich
The 'Ultimate Painting' 1963 by Ad Reinhardt, is an example of 'Art-as-Art' or 'Art for Art’s Sake'. Reinhardt insisted on separating art from everyday life, trying to erase any content other than the art itself. He described the work as "a pure, abstract, non-objective, timeless, spaceless, changeless, relationless, disinterested painting"
Ultimate Painting' 1963 by Ad Reinhardt
However Reinhardt's paintings have been interpreted as meditations on death, the ultimate end of things and have also been seen as portals into other worlds. Show any group of people a black square and ask them what it means and you will get a wide range of answers, its meaning to each individual being dependent on its use value.
I have recently completed a commission for a church, the work I installed created a situation that I was able to evaluate in real time, as I was taking tours of the graveyard within which the work was set. St Michael's Church installation (Details)
I had made large ceramic ears, installed as portals, many of which were embedded into trees, so that people encountering them could both listen to nature and talk to the trees. But some were free standing, such as the one above, a two sided form that now replaced a former stone cross that had been broken off many years ago. One, (left) was designed to echo the form of the virgin Mary, the other side a more 'normal' ear. It was interesting to hear what people said as they encountered the work, those with an already Christian disposition 'saw' the virgin in the ear, those who had to be shown the idea, mostly then 'got it'. I made the ear as a portal, or ear trumpet, that could enable people to speak to the dead. When we attempted to speak to Alice via the ear below, we were all aware that the graveyard had been covered by brambles for many years. Alice's memorial was broken; no one had put flowers on her grave for many years. Alice had died young and she had had no words of comfort given to her since her grave had been abandoned. To then 'speak' of her, to address her directly was an emotional moment. Some people were brought to tears as a few words were said. A few words of comfort to let Alice know that she was being acknowledged by people who had never known her, but who on this day, in the Autumn of 2026, were minded to try and comfort her.
The fact that an object could be a portal between the mundane world of today's busy city and the spirit of a long dead child did seem to work, an idea as ancient as the one whereby an image of a bison, allowed early humans to communicate with its spirit.
