Mythic Worlds

Jordan Belson, Brain Drawing, 1952. Ink on paper

The Drawing Centre in New York has just held an exhibition entitled 'Mythic Worlds: Works from the distant past through to the present'. I wish I had been there to see it, however they have put together an on-line catalogue, so we can get a good idea of the exhibition's content and this review is therefore based on what I could find available on line, rather than what was actually on exhibition, but we must all cut our cloth accordingly. 

Jordan Belson, Brain Drawing, 1952. Ink on paper

After reading through the catalogue and looking at the images of work on display, there were certain artists that for me, stood out as having practices that in one way or another, were helpful in understanding what I have been doing recently myself. Selfish perhaps, but when you visit exhibitions it is always useful to have a focus, or you can find yourself wondering what you are doing there and become overloaded with too much information to process. This doesn't mean you avoid new things, it's simply that you need a way into the new. I'm always keen to find artists that I have never encountered before, especially if they have been making work that seems to overlap with my own interests and Jordan Belson in particular interested me because of his attempts to fuse both scientific and mystical understandings of the universe. He developed what some people have labeled “cosmic cinema”, his animated films exploring the dynamic relationships between form, movement, colour and sound. Using basic animation techniques, mirrors, kaleidoscopes, and a variety of low-tech equipment he creates films that operate very like early types of microbial life. I'm making a new animation at the moment and by looking at Belson's work, I was reassured that the low technology approach I have been making is still viable. 

Making an old school animation

Exhibitions with a theme are often useful as they help you to think about the wider context for work and good curators find unexpected relationships between artists that you might not have thought about before. 

Jordan Belson: Samadhi (1967)

The animated film Samadhi explores the relationship between spiritual perception and scientific theory, drawing from Oriental philosophy and religion as well as Johannes Kepler’s astronomical theories and is accompanied by Belson’s ambient score. 

Jordan Belson, Brain Drawing, 1952. Ink on paper

His images reminded me that human beings are over 50 percent bacterial life and they helped me to visualise an idea that if God was of any species, it would be that of a higher form of bacterial entity. These images could therefore be seen as aspects of the religious art of microbial life forms, and now that I think about it, I would be quite happy to have people consider my own recent work in a similar way. 

Mel Chin: Tantric Dream diagram: 1991

Mel Chin: Degrees of paradise: Drawing for gallery layout

Mel Chin's 'Degrees of Paradise' was a study for a proposed State of Heaven, where an immense, floating, hand-knotted carpet, would serve as a symbolic and sacrificial sky. In 1991 we were faced with the actual destruction of the ozone layer and eventually the world's governments did act to ban ozone depleting chemicals. Chin's work was part of a global movement to raise consciousness of the need for action in relation to the use of ozone layer destroying chemicals. Looking at it from a 30 year distance, it reminded myself of the fact that art can help raise awareness of the need for action to be taken. Chin in tapping into Tantric ideas, also reminds us of the centrality of our physical bodies to a wider spiritual understanding of the interconnections between ourselves and all the other events and things that happen in this world. 
Displayed in the adjacent gallery, (see gallery layout drawing above) through a “sky” of video monitors was 'the State of Heaven', a multidimensional fractal program developed by McGill University physicists S. Lovejoy and F. Begin. Their interpretation of meteorological dynamics had advanced understanding in the fields of climatology and plate tectonics, Chin acknowledging that connectivity and collaboration with other disciplines are vital if deep communication is to be achieved. The resulting final images generated were to be given to weavers to be reinterpreted in wool, but I'm not sure whether or not this final aspect of the piece was ever completed. 

Ilka Gedő is another artist that I somehow had not looked at before. Her self-portraits are very powerful, and her image in the exhibition of a table immediately communicated the fact that she was able to draw objects and turn them into events, a rare skill, but one I'm beginning to think is essential in a time when Capitalism is beginning to loosen its grip, and if we are to collectively get it to remove its dead hands from our tiller, we will need more and more examples of how to experience the world as interconnected events and not as a collection of atomised or itemised things. I was particularly interested in her drawings and pastels of the Ganz Factory. She was able to take a momentary experience and bring to it an intense spiritual concentration and expressive power. These are drawings of industrial work, drawings that reminded myself of my time working at Round Oak Steel Works in the West Midlands. Her drawings are both realistic and at the same time, more importantly, expressive and moving. The objects that appear in these industrial spaces, just as they did for myself in the 1960s, seem to devour the human beings that are brought in to service them. 

Ilka Gedő

I have been thinking about drawings as types of batteries recently and Gedő's in particular seem to be full of that energetic potential that marks can create, especially as their collective energies flow across the surface of the paper. Her work taps into that 'uncertain certainty' that so many artists exhibit when they come to terms with both the fragility of life and its underlying dynamism. 

Ilka Gedő

Ilka Gedő: Table 1949

Hu Zhengyan was the first artist to develop colour woodblock printing and he worked in 17th century China, however it was his images devoted to the depiction of strange distorted wooden forms that had been selected for this exhibition and they intrigued me. They reminded me of traditional Japanese suiseki stones, small naturally occurring rocks which are appreciated for their aesthetic value because they look like full sized landscape forms. 

Hu Zhengyan: Woodblock prints

A suiseki stone

The idea of seeing vastness in small things is a wonderful one and is something all of us can understand, as we have had to pass through childhood to get where we are. It has always seemed to me that if you can keep that childlike wonder that you had when as a child you made models, you would have far more chance of being a good artist. I now believe that this is a type of animism, a way of sending your thoughts out to inhabit other things, but also a way for objects to hold thoughts within themselves, so that they in turn can go on to inhabit the people that then encounter them. 

This is how the drawing centre introduces the exhibition: 

Tracing commonalities, both formal and conceptual, Of Mythic Worlds draws surprising connections between artists that might otherwise go unnoticed. Rarely exhibited drawings by Morris Graves, Jack Whitten, Georgia O'Keeffe, and theorist and writer Roland Barthes are presented alongside nineteenth-century Shaker Gift Drawings, as well as major works from artists such as Mel Chin and Jordan Belson. Historical block prints from the Qing dynasty are juxtaposed with works made by contemporary artists including Cici Wu, Bernadette Van-Huy, Julia Phillips, Steffani Jemison, and Robert Bittenbender. Of Mythic Worlds also includes new work made on the occasion of the exhibition by Duane Linklater, an Omaskêko Ininiwak artist based in North Bay, Ontario.

Together, the works of these artists investigate personal belief systems, spirituality, and consciousness; explore the metaphysical and the sublime; recall myths passed down from ancient cultures; and expand our understanding of mysticism and immateriality.

The exhibition it is argued in the introduction covers a lot of ground and I suppose it is the job of the marketing people to find a comprehensive net within to present it. I wonder how if given the money and access to various collections myself or someone else might have put an exhibition together. As students you can organise exhibitions of old postcards (heck you can tell my age in thinking people may still collect these) or cut out images printed off from your computer and organise them on a wall, it's always an interesting thing to do, as you begin to see connections that you had never noticed before. I also realise that with the 3D software we have access to you could design and put up a whole exhibition on line, see. 

You can find an on-line catalogue of the exhibition here

 See also:

Drawing together science and myth

The Uncertain Certainty 

Visualising the invisible

The diagram as art and spirit guide

Animism and drawing lines: a reflection on another exhibition

Drawing the corona virus

It looks as if the Leeds Arts University will close its doors to students in the near future and if so, on-line resources will become more and more important. If you are a student and are in self-isolation, then you can use this blog as a way of keeping in touch with ideas about art practice.  I am still available to message, either via the comments boxes or via e mail and hopefully this emergency situation will be over in the near future. 

Those of you that follow this blog who are not students, again feel free to message me if there are any questions. 

As someone interested in drawing things, it is interesting to look at how the virus has been visualised. I have already made some drawings of it for a card game I’m designing in relation to an idea I have about contemporary votives, (see image above) and have therefore had to think about the relationship between images taken from electron microscopes and the processes of simplification for illustration purposes. 

Transmission electron microscope (TEM) from the centres of disease control and prevention (CDC) C S Goldsmith and T G Ksiazek (left) and NIAID (right) Arrowhead = corona/ halo around a viron 

This first image makes the virus look very amorphous, it looks alive but very indistinct, every virus also seems to be an individual, and its hard to sort out one from another, are they all examples of the same virus or is this the virus amongst other microscopic elements, such as blood cells? 

Image of corona virus in scientific paper that has been drawn on a CAD program

The CAD version above is very like a flower or arrangement of flowers erupting from an arid planet. Gone is all the indeterminacy of the photograph, the artist has given the virus a clear form and what was in the photograph a halo around a viron, is now a series of tufts surrounding a sphere. 

A more 'organic' image of the virus

The 'tufts' are in this image now more like organic tubes and the image appears much more transparent, suggestive of life more than the previous image, especially as the sphere is not uniform and it deviates from a circle. 

A more schematic CAD drawing

The CAD drawing above reinforces the 'flower' shape emerging from out of the sphere. 

Corona virus electron microscope photography

Looking again at an electron microscope image, we can 'see' what we are looking at a little clearer now, but just like the early drawings of the moon, there is room for a lot of invention. 

Needle tip, printed full-stop and razor’s edge: Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665).

These images of the corona virus reminded me of the first drawings done through a hand held, lens focused microscope by Robert Hooke. In particular his drawing of a full stop, which looks like a planet with hairy extensions erupting out of it. This type of situation is key to an understanding of how images develop. The thing that sits in your mind is very different to the reality that is invading your body, but you can't think clearly about something that you can't see, so you need someone to produce an image to allow you to get your head around it. However these images are a product of imagination and our imaginations are often led into making intuitive leaps, usually based on one thing being like something else. 

I thought I'd seen these images before and realised it was in Salford when I went to see Karina Smigla-Bobinski's 'Ada' installation. Smigla-Bobinski was making an image based on a Platonic ideal of geometric form, but once let loose in a room, it made its mark by leaving traces of its contact on walls ceiling and floor using its charcoal tips. I can now see it as a metaphor for a virus, a new one that has come out of recent experience.

Karina Smigla-Bobinski: 'Ada' 

There is another series of associations that can be made with the corona virus and its depictions. Looking at the early electron microscope photograph of the virus above, it is described as ‘a corona / halo around a viron’.  (The infective, extracellular (outside the cell) form of a virus is called the viron) Coronas and halos are metrological terms for certain atmospheric phenomena and these terms are themselves derived from religious iconography. 

Virgin Mary with halo

The earliest form of what we now call a halo, was something that surrounded the whole body and was called the aureola. This was the concept of a surrounding aura, glow or irradiation used in Christian and other religions to single out figures that had first of all God like status, and then later other elevated beings such as saints or the virgin Mary. 

The aureola, is often in the form of an ellipse that surrounds the whole body, while the halo or nimbus usually takes the form of a luminous disk surrounding the back of the head.

Two examples of mandorlas in Eastern Orthodox Church imagery

I think the most interesting form of the aureola is the mandorla, as used in Eastern Orthodox Church icons. It is used to depict sacred moments which transcend time and space, such as the resurrection, transfiguration or the ascension.  These oval or sometimes circular figure surrounds are painted in several concentric patterns of colour that grow darker as they come close to the centre, or figure of Christ. This is in keeping with the church's use at the time of apophatic or negative theology, which was an attempt to approach any descriptions of God by negation. The theory was that to speak only in terms of what may not be said about the perfect goodness that is God, was the only way to get an idea across that God was beyond perfection. Therefore, paradoxically, in these images, as holiness increases, there is no way to depict its brightness, except by darkness. This idea of negative depiction is an interesting concept that can perhaps be used to illuminate ideas about what a corona virus looks like. 

Buddha with halo

The halo is seen in Christian, Greek and Buddhist art, as a circular form surrounding the head that appears to have light radiating from it. It is used to enable audiences to pick out the more spiritual players in complex religious images.  In more secular imagery, Roman emperors are sometimes depicted with rays of the sun emanating from their head, although this was probably related to their interest in Sol Invictus, a later Roman religion whereby sun worship was being returned to. 

Sol Invictus

In all cases the halo signifies importance and it is the sun that is the most important thing to us on Earth; we are both derived from it and sustained by it. Depictions of the sun god Ra in Egyptian carvings reflecting the fact that this image has a long tradition. 

Images of Ra

The nimbus, a term often used instead of halo, constitutes the idea of a crown modified by the emanation of light from the head of a superior being. The crown of course has long been used to identify superior beings. 

Corona is of course defined as, resembling or likened to a crown. The sun's corona is normally visible only during a total solar eclipse, when it is seen as an irregularly shaped glowing nimbus surrounding the darkened disc of the moon. 

Sun's corona seen during an eclipse by the moon

Once again we begin to see a negative being used to allow us to see something positive. It is the moon’s removing from our sight the centre of the image of the sun that allows us to appreciate the sun’s corona. 

So by a convoluted path we can return to images of the virus and perhaps see them as part of a long tradition of trying to visualise those things that cant be seen and in particular those things that by their very nature are beyond our comprehension. 

Disneyfication of a corona virus

Disneyfication is defined as: the transformation of something real or unsettling into something perfectly safe or into a carefully controlled and safe entertainment. By trying to represent something that is so feared, (like god or in this case the devil) in a way that resembles the way we draw cartoon characters, perhaps its harsh nature is also softened in the mind. 

The corona halo

When you push all the metaphors together, what you get is a corona sitting within a halo. The virus becomes a sun god.

Shrine to St. Corona

Saint Corona was often called upon by gamblers and treasure hunters as well as those seeking good fortune when dealing with money. 

Money as good fortune sun god

Thinking about art and what it helps us to think about may at least form some sort of distraction. 

Take care everyone and I shall try to keep posting from isolation. 

See also:

Hands, hygiene and hope

Drawing and thinking: how to understand the virus

The virus is looking at you

Connecting the singularity 

Drawing and isolation

More on Disney

Drawing the corona virus

A more painterly response

Michael Kenny drawings for Easter

As it's Easter I thought I'd put up a post about the continuing resonance of the key moment of Christianity. Christ's death and resurrection can also be read as the struggle to reconcile the idea of the sprit and the body. For artists working with images this event strikes right at the core of what it is to try and capture life through the act of drawing. Whether you are a Christian or not, for artists working in the Western European tradition images of the crucifixion are central to how the connection between matter and space are thought about.  

I have posted on this issue before and don't want to repeat what I wrote then, but the issue that keeps me interested in this is central to why I continue to make drawn images. When you are faced with a blank piece of paper it is as if you are facing the void. Any empty space that is pregnant with possibility has an aspect of the spiritual to it. As soon as you make a mark life is initiated and the forms that arrive, although simply marks, will be read as complex ideas and given weight beyond their simple physical traces. This battle to retain something of the life of experience and yet at the same time keep an awareness of the simple fact that the moment of drawing is simply just that, a being at one with a piece of paper and a mark making implement. It is in many ways an experience not too far away from some meditative states as described by various religious devotees. 

So for Easter I am leaving you with Michael Kenny's 'Stations of the cross' drawings.

See these earlier posts for further reflections on this topic. 

Drawing and the spirt
Drawing and life