A while ago I had a badge made, it was a very simple idea but for myself at the time it represented something fundamental. Time appears to flow from the known past, to the present and onwards to an unknown future. But not all cultures have seen time in this way. For instance, the indigenous Māori concept of time known as wā, is non-linear. Their experience of time is of a continuous unfolding whereby the living exist alongside their ancestors, making history and the present contiguous. This has been described as spiralling time, which is in constant, expansive motion. Whilst in the Amazon rainforest, the Pirahã tribe live with an unbroken sense of the immediate present. Their language lacks a past tense entirely and they do not have a sense of history or future-past constructs. For them, time is not a sequence of past, present, future, but an immediate condition of things as they are.
In quantum physics the past, present, and future also exist at the same time. The block universe theory, as supported by Einstein's theory of relativity, describes a four-dimensional block, whereby space and time combine into the single four-dimensional structure of spacetime. The feeling of time moving is just how humans experience it; yesterday, today and tomorrow are all equally real, much like different locations exist even if you cannot see them.
The Block Universe
There is also a cyclical view of time. Cyclical patterns of change are often embedded into mythologies, especially because we live on a planet that revolves, thus setting up an idea of constant return. Day follows night, autumn follows summer, spring follows winter. However, some cultures have much longer or more cosmic ideas of time than others, such as the Taoist idea of "the blue sea becomes mulberry fields".
In the ancient Taoist text 'Shenxian Zhuan', compiled by the Eastern Jin dynasty scholar Ge Hong in the 4th century, a story is told by the immortals that illustrates how immense the passage of time can be. When the immortal Wang Fangping asks another immortal, Magu to visit, she notes that since they last met, the celestial eastern sea has already turned into mulberry fields. In the story Magu explains that she looked down and saw that the sea had dried up and transformed into farmland and she suspects it will soon turn back into an ocean again. This idea of vast cyclical change is used to describe massive, sweeping and irreversible transformations that happen over far longer spans of time than human lives.
I also had to think about colour. The combination of blue, green and purple is an analogous colour scheme, i. e. the colours are adjacent to each other within a colour wheel. The tonality of each colour is adjusted so that each value is similar, a series of choices which I hoped would create a calm, harmonious feeling.
I was at the same time aware of colour symbology, but I did not try to fix anything, except to be cognisant of blue in my mind standing for calm, peace and spirituality, green for nature, growth, and renewal and purple for wisdom, and creativity, but I did not want to label these, as each culture has its own colour symbology.
The spiral form is one often used to represent spiritual transformation; it represents a cycling closer to higher consciousness over time, as well as mimicking natural patterns found in galaxies, shells, whirlwinds, and whirlpools.
My badge is small, my attempt in as compact a form as possible, to form a doorway into thinking about these things. I still have some left and give them away as a reminder that art does not have to be massive or grand in order to be effective. If you would like one e mail me on garry.barker@leeds-art.ac.uk
The phrase, "I am large, I contain multitudes" is taken from Walt Whitman's famous poem 'Song of Myself'. It is a beautiful celebration of human complexity, meaning we all possess multifaceted, often contradictory personalities and emotions that evolve over time.
I contain multitudes: Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan would more recently follow in Whitman's footsteps, constructing a song that is also a meditation on personal identity seen as a complex mix of contradictions, history and shifting roles, rather than a single, fixed persona. I've become very aware of this as I make interoceptual portraits. People are not fixed identities, their feelings swirl around and one day the feeling tone I'm trying to realise is one particular shape or colour and on another day it changes. Whether this is a change in myself or in the person I'm thinking about I'm not sure, but change is happening and the interpersonal communication is shifting as I attempt to follow or grasp that change using drawing or colour. On the outside we may look the same but inside we are constantly morphing, or at least it seems like this to me. This situation is compounded by the fact that our surrounding social structures are also changing; Zygmunt Bauman in 'Liquid Modernity' describes our contemporary society, as one where all social structures, relationships and institutions are constantly morphing into new formats and concepts.
For the DC comic Doom Patrol, Grant Morrison and the artist Richard Case invented the character Crazy Jane, the dominant alternate personality of the character Kay Challis. The idea that Morrison and Case were trying to work with was to construct a character who had dissociative identity disorder, in this instance, a person with a total of 64 unique identities. When I was reading Doom Patrol, Crazy Jane was the dominant alter ego or host. They were playing I thought at the time a dangerous game, as in order for this character to be so disturbed, she had had to have had a previous life of deep trauma. This emerged as a story of childhood abuse, and although I could see where Morrison was going with this, it still felt awkward. He was interested in the brain's psychic power. He was also interested and I presume still is, in magic. The magician's ability to seek power over things by using sympathetic magic, involves the transforming of spiritual energy into different forms, so that it can 'inhabit' a fetish or other magical object. This overlaps it seems to me with the power of an art object to hold within it an externalised thought. This boundary or edgeland, being a territory not unlike the wall of the shaman's cave. I have been looking at paleopoetry as an idea recently; pre-linguistic thinking and the split between our old and new brains. The old brain being able to intuitively grasp thoughts without the need for logic. This old brain is still with us and magical thinking is perhaps something that can harness it, leaving the more recent one to worry about what happened. The unconscious is a minefield and one artists have often gone into without any safeguards, because it seems to offer answers that sit totally outside current ideas of how the world ought to behave. It is at times like these that logic seems to fail us. Powerful forces seem at work that are nothing to do with rational thought. I can see why during the first world war Dada came into being; logic seemed to have failed the world, so artists had to turn to illogic or ways of working that owed nothing to the processes of thinking that had led to carnage and the death of millions.
Although I was worried by Morrison and Case's idea, at the same time it fascinated me and still does. I suspect Morrison and Case had seen 'The Three Faces of Eve'. Christine Costner Sizemore was an American woman who, in the 1950s, was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder, now known as dissociative identity disorder. Her diagnosis became the kernel around which the character 'Eve' was developed for the book and 1957 film. In the film, Eve White a timid, self-effacing
woman goes to see a psychiatrist and while there, a "new personality", the wild, fun-loving Eve Black,
emerges. Eve Black knows everything about Eve White, but Eve White is unaware
of Eve Black. The film depicts Dr.
Luther's attempts to understand and deal with these two faces of Eve. Under
hypnosis at one session, a third personality emerges, a relatively stable woman
but with no name and little memory of her past. She chooses to take the name
Jane. who remembers a traumatic event in Eve's
childhood. This event had led to the creation of her different
personalities. Following this recollection, Jane remembers
her entire past and believes the other personalities are gone. During my 1950s comic reading there was also another fictional character who on a daily basis operated as if he had a split personality and that was Superman/Clark Kent. The mild mannered reporter who in a moment could change into the hero, Superman; a split that has been represented as the tension between our private vulnerabilities and our public responsibilities and before that we had Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a tale about the struggle between the good and evil living inside every single person.
Two Face: Matt Wagner design for DC Comics
In the DC franchise Batman comics, 'Two-Face' employs a similar good/evil duality, but this time the duality is plain to see, as his exterior appearance reflects how his interior personality has changed.
The popularity of these characters, I believe reflects our own awareness of having to contain multitudes. I am a 76 year old man with failing knees, but that doesn't stop me in my head, scoring a great goal for West Bromwich Albion, as they go on to win the FA Cup. For a brief moment I am a recreated Jeff Astle, the last man to score a cup final goal for the Albion. One day I can be a positive, outward going creative and the next day an inward looking, tired has-been. I'm interested, I'm bored, I'm lethargic, I'm excited, I'm drunk, I'm sober, I'm frightened of the future, I'm positive about where everything is going, I'm lonely, I'm nervous of crowds, I'm in love, I'm cold hearted, I'm all of these things and many more, so what does an honest portrait of myself look like?
Interoceptual portraits
Not a pretty sight, but perhaps they do touch a certain nerve. Our unconscious selves are hard to control, we may think our conscious minds lead the way, but if this is the case why are so many people across the world fighting each other, accusing each other of wrongs, responding to slights that are often imaginary, beginning wars because of rumour and attacking people because of some sort of perceived difference and undertaking weaponised behaviour to justify harm. We sure are messed up.
Maybe we are all more like Crazy Jane than we would like to think.
Crazy Jane as envisioned by Richard Case
As Whitman put it, amongst many other lines;
I am of old and young, of the foolish as much as the wise,
Regardless of others, ever regardful of others,
Maternal as well as paternal, a child as well as a man,
Stuff’d with the stuff that is coarse and stuff’d with the stuff that is fine,
Whitman's words are a reminder to beware of that best selfie shot, because that is not you. Neither is the winning painting in that portrait competition, so many avidly watch on Sky television. Beware of a good likeness of whatever personality is sent out to have their portrait painted; it is unlikely to have captured anything of their inner reality. A frozen moment of an external appearance may be captured, but we all know we have a 'good side' and a 'bad side' and if our thought dreams could be seen, as Bob put it, they would probably put our heads in a guillotine and how do we capture all of that in one image?
Bauman, Z. (2000) Liquid Modernity London: Polity
Whitman, W. (2016) Song of myself: with a complete commentary. University of Iowa Press.
