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Pearls from artists* # 672
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Let me now, therefore, turn directly to the question of the European individual and, for a start, cite the observations of the Swiss psychologist, Carl G. Jung, throughout whose works the term “individuation” is used to indicate the psychological process of achieving individual wholeness. Jung makes the point that in the living of our lives every one is us is required by his society to play some specific social role. In order to function in the world we are all continually enacting parts Jung calls personnae, from the Latin persona, meaning “mask, false face,” the mask worn by an actor on the Roman stage, through which he “sounded” (per-sonare, “to sound through). One has to appear in some mask or other if one is to function socially at all; and even those who choose to reject such masks can only put on others, representing rejection, “Hell no!” or something of this sort. Many of the masks are playful, opportunistic, superficial; others, however, go deep, very deep, much deeper than we know. Just as every body consists of a head, two arms, a trunk, two legs, etc., so does every living person consist, among other features, of a personality, a deeply imprinted persona through which he is made known no less to himself than to others, and without which he would not be. It is silly, therefore, to say, for example, “Let’s take off our masks and be natural!” And yet – there are masks and masks. There are the masks of youth, the masks of age, the masks of the various social roles, and the masks also that we project upon others spontaneously, which obscure them, and to which we then react.
Joseph Campbell in Myths to Live By
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Pearls from artists* # 642
New York City
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Radical changes in our culture threaten to undermine the potency of art and artists alike. Disparate forces conspire to lower the bar for how we expect art to function. As decades go by, we are educating and evolving to value left-brain strengths over holistic right-brain thought, with disastrous consequences for humanity… Deep contemplation has been hijacked by addictive technology. Rising authoritarianism strives to squash dissenting and diverse voices, as well as historical truths and critical thinking skills. Social media approval affects the art that is produced, shared, and validated. Easily digested work is promoted, while the most compelling work (the kind that could transform the trajectory of art, or affect real social change) is left behind. Critics are coining terms like ‘Zombie Formalism’ … and ‘Zombie Figuration’ … in response to the sterility and stultifying sameness of much contemporary work. It’s as if artists were absorbing online algorithms into their bloodstreams. This empty, safe sensibility riffs and rehashes a vacuous culture, generating a perpetual cycle of well-branded insignificance.
Kate Kretz in Art From Your Core: A Holistic Guide to Visual Voice
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Pearls from artists* # 617
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Artists’ pigments, like printers’ inks, have many uses apart from the creation of art. The advertising artist, the illustrator, the portraitist, the stylist, and the decorator all employ the plastic and pictorial devices of the artist. Yet their chief preoccupation, the purpose and function of their effort, is other than the creation of art. It is the commercial artist’s job to enhance the desirability of marketable goods. The illustrator vies with the written word in the description of places or facts and the reporting of events. The portraitist must flatter his patron, while the stylist and decorator adorn his figure, streamline his gadgets, and embellish his property. There may be a resemblance to the outward appearance of art. But the intrinsic relationship is no closer here than that which exists between the composition of birthday greetings, recipes, or advertising copy and the creations of the poet, though the identical phrase and syntax may be used in both.
Mark Rothko in The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art
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Pearls from artists* # 562
“Shadow,” soft pastel on sandpaper, 26” x 20,” in progress
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Jung observed that complexes could affect groups of people en masse. He saw that certain moments seemed to be expressions of a collective shadow, a bursting forth of a mass psychosis; the repressed side of a whole group coming alive; a tribal Mr. Hyde. He saw this madness first-hand in Germany in the 1930s and wrote about it. But every era carries some measure of collective shadow.
One could argue that no moment in time has seen more of the reality of human darkness than ours. Having witnessed the Holocaust and faced the threat of nuclear war in the twentieth century, and now facing the environmental impact of fossil fuels and plastics in the twenty-first century, we are undoubtedly aware of more of humanity’s potential for destruction than any of our ancestors ever were. Such a view does not come from a moralizing stance. Our era has made forced witnesses of us all.
The shadow is about where we put the Devil – where do we allow darkness to be housed? Racism and bigotry offer the relief of foisting our group’s shadow onto another whom we view as lesser. Doing so enables us not to look at or feel our shadow, and not see our own worst selves. But this collective shadow of our modern culture is also bigger and wider than group-to-group projections. There are culture-wide or civilization expressions of the collective shadow.
Jung saw the widespread loss of connection to the inner life and to a lived spirituality as one of the primary illnesses of our time. He observed that people were no longer animated by the traditional religions… For Jung, this meant that we’ve lost the old way but not yet found the new, and are sitting in a spiritual vacuum.
Into that vacuum, without our awareness, has slipped our fascination with human technology. Observe people closely today and you’ll notice that we have an almost magical faith in our devices. People see their computers and phones as all-knowing and expect them to function perfectly all the time, and view pharmaceuticals as magic cure-alls. Where we used to put God, we now have put technology. Where spirit was, we have unconsciously placed human genius.
Gary Bobroff in Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell
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Pearls from artists* #561
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The most powerful symbols draw profound reactions from us. The symbolic images in great art attract and fascinate us; they stir our souls and move us beyond what can be easily expressed; ‘their pregnant language cries out to us that they mean more than they say.’
The unconscious produces symbols as part of a natural process within us. These images emerge out of the context of our lived experience… Jung saw the meaning-making process as one that not only requires attendance to the real context of our lives and history, but also involves profound inner listening. It asks us to use our rational capacities, but also our feeling and imaginal ones.
Symbolic images redirect our psychic energy, bringing together conscious and unconscious material and producing the lessening of conflict. In this way, they activate a transcendent function within the psyche. We experience this as the discovery of personal meaning and healing. This transformation is not the result of formulaic operations, but rather is a dynamic process that requires our authentic and vulnerable participation. The process challenges the whole of who we are and requires deep moral effort. That the unconscious would produce moving, powerful compensatory symbols inside us at all points to a fact that our culture may not have fully grasped – that there is a force working within us which is always driving us towards healing growth and greater consciousness… Despite our suffering, the psyche is always ultimately seeking both a healthy homeostatic balance and our ever-unfolding growth and unique development.
Gary Bobroff in Carl Jung: Knowledge in a Nutshell
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Pearls from artists* # 487
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
The sheer variety of aesthetic theories may be the best evidence we have that art cannot be boiled down to a single use, and even that it eludes usefulness altogether. In fact, one of the reasons art affects us so deeply is that it calls us out of the means-and-ends thinking that has us reducing everything to a function. Oscar Wilde’s infamous statement, “All art is quite useless,” was more than a pithy remark aimed at ruffling Victorian feathers; as far as he was concerned, it was a plain statement of fact. For the Aesthetic Movement of which Wilde was a leading exponent, art stood in absolute defiance of utility. Which is to say that the Aesthetes saw works of art as things whose only purpose is it be perceived – and this may be as close to a catch-all definition as we are likely to get.
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 465
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
In his 1970 Nobel Prize lecture, Aleksander Solzhenitsyn proposed that if art has never been revealed its intrinsic “function” to us, it is because such a thing is beyond our ken. For the Russian writer, we are mistaken when we call art a human innovation; we ought instead to see it as a gift, something that came to us from beyond the bounds of our world. Solzhenitsyn illustrates his point by comparing the work of art to the technological marvel that a man from the proverbial Stone Age comes across in the wilderness. Unable to penetrate its secrets, the man can only turn the object this way and that, looking for “some arbitrary use to which he can put it, without suspecting an extraordinary one.” Solzhenitsyn goes on:
“So also we, holding art in our hands, confidently consider ourselves to be its masters, boldly we direct it, reform and manifest it; we sell it for money, use it to please those in power; turn to it at one moment for amusement… and at another… for the passing needs of politics and for narrow-minded social ends. But art is not defiled by our efforts, neither does it thereby depart from its true nature, but on each occasion and in each application it gives us a part of its secret inner light.”
JF Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 442
*an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Alexander Pope identified a central function of poetry as taking thoughts we experience as half-formed and giving them clear expression: ‘what was often thought, but ne’er so well expressed.’ In other words, a fugitive part of our own experience, is taken up, edited, and returned to us better than it was before, so that we feel, at last, that we know ourselves more clearly.
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong in Art as Therapy
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Pearls from artists* # 396
Barbara’s Studio
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
To summarize, art is expression. Expression is nonutilitarian and has no purpose beyond itself. Early on this led me to define works of art as things whose only function is to be perceived. Since the appearance of such things in everyday life breaks the drift of habit for which we have been hard-wired by evolution, art always occurs as an interruption. In the course of time, humans have produced innumerable works of art, subordinating them to innumerable ends according to the needs of the hour, yet all art exhibits a primal quality that exceeds those appropriations. Because the inherent multivalence of art threatens the desire to reduce things to clear significations, human societies have a tendency to overlook it, with the result that a great many aesthetic objects are called art when they are perhaps something else. To clarify this distinction I called art designed to serve instrumental reason “artifice.” In its worst forms, artifice amounts to aesthetic manipulation of a kind that is indisputably hostile to the ideals of openness, plurality, freedom of thought, and rational disclosure that we were told were the cornerstones of modernity. Art, on the other hand, is innately emancipatory, being itself the affirmation or sign of freedom.
J.F. Martel in Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action
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Pearls from artists* # 384
Overlooking Copacabana, Bolivia and Lake Titicaca
* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.
Carnival in Oruro [Bolivia] is a glorious spectacle. It’s flash, pomp and brilliance can be enjoyed without understanding its long history and intricate mythologies. Still, the onlooker is left with a thousand questions that are not so easily answered. Behind the glitter of Carnival lie the history, the timeless myths and the distinct traditions of this mining community.
According to the Spanish writer Jean Laude, “The function of the mask is to reaffirm, at regular intervals, the truth and presence of myths in everyday life.” This suggests that masks should be studied in context, noting their association with the individual dancer and the history, myths and traditions of the community that produces them. The mask has to be animated within its ritual, comic or social role.
A first step in appreciating the masks is to understand something of the land and people that crafted them. Oruro is a mining city on the open Altiplano at 3,700 meters (12,144 ft.) above sea level. The sky appears a rarified blue, it is intensely cold and a constant wind lifts dust to the eyes. During the year no more than 125,000 people live in the city. Suddenly in the weeks of Carnival, the population doubles or triples.
Three languages, Quechua, Aymara, and Spanish are spoken in Oruro. Their use reflects an ancient pattern of conquest in the history of this land. It is said that the Urus, whose language is now almost lost, were the first inhabitants. In time they were dominated by the Aymara tribes. Later, Quechua was introduced as the Inca advanced their empire from Cuzco. Ultimately the Spanish arrived and founded the present city in 1601 to exploit rich mineral deposits found in the seven hills.
Today, descendants of the Urus live near Oruro around the shore of Lake Poopo. Elements of their distinctive culture remain but they have no wealth in comparison with the more dominant Aymara and Quechua who surround them. A further change came in the recent past because Oruro has acted as a magnet, attracting many people from the countryside to work in the mines.
On one side were the Urus, ancient owners of all the land which now only carries their name (Uro Uro = Oruro). On the other side were the miners, many of whom were Quechua and Aymara migrants. In the middle is “Carnival.”
El Carnaval de Oruro by Manuel Vargas in Mascaras de los Andes Bolivianos, Editorial Quipus and Banco Mercantil
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