Art: A waste of time or meaningful expression?

By admin · Saturday, July 18th, 2009

THE INNER TECHNOLOGY OF ART:

Making Public the Private

Once in a while it helps to sit back and think about things like Art – and what it actually means to be called or to call someone an Artist. We could think about the earliest evidence of human artistic activity, found before the outbreak of the First World War in southern France: the famous paleolithic cave paintings of Lascaux, more than 30,000 years old, which largely depict the primal mystique of the hunt. The scholar Joseph Campbell, in ‘Primitive Mythology,’ describes these prehistoric artists as shamans: medicine men and women who worked as intermediaries between the mystical and practical worlds, whose private visions – projected into public ceremony and ritual – could effect profound change in our lives by impinging upon our perceptions.

Then, as now, the shaman-artist served as a visionary of the sacred, a medium connecting the various dimensions, a transducer of spirit into matter and vice versa, a vital link between metaphysical and physical. His ability to merge the inner world of dreams and symbols with the outer world of the hunt made him a healer and a seer, gifted with initiatic and prophetic authority.

Australian aboriginal creation myths speak of archetypal ancestors, closely linked to specific animal lineages, singing the landscape into being as Songlines. The spiritual world is a vibratory essence which can materialize itself by lowering its frequencies. Physical reality is but a shadow of the metaphysical. Interestingly, this idea of earthly existence as a shadow-play is the central metaphor in Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave,” wherein he describes the unawakened consciousness as a prisoner chained in darkness, kept enthralled by an illusory pageant of animated shadows enacted by an invisible priesthood. Precisely the technique employed in the Wayang Kulit tradition, still practised in former colonies of the Majapahit Empire.

The imaginative interplay of light and dark creates all drama – a word associated with dreams and nightmares. From Plato’s Cave to Wayang Kulit to the Magic Lantern and George Lucas’s Industrial Light Magic is a mere progression of technological sophistication. A father amusing his child by creating animated shadows with his hands is drawing on a very ancient artform. These days the same father (especially if his name happens to be George Lucas or Steven Spielberg) would have access to computer-generated digital images which enormously