artist as visionary

Mikey Georgeson

The Artist as Visionary

• As an artist I identify with Jung’s position of artist as non human that is to say objective and impersonal. I am an instrument of the art. I see the role of my rational mind to negotiate as an emissary with the part of me which is the conduit.

• ‘If today’s art contributes to the struggle against nihilism, then this is mainly because from time immemorial it has also acted as life’s temptress and stimulator.’

• Jos de Mul, April 2004

Yes, the self-fulfilling joke of creativity and the horrible Hochmut (arrogance) of humans to believe they are the masters of everything, is a terrible mistake and an illusion. Art forms us, art manipulates everything in the most

radical and fantastic way (see Zardoz).Jonathan Meese

• In-der-Welt-sein : being-in-the-world

• Heidegger • Alethia "the

state of not being hidden; the state of being evident"

Dewey - whenever there is a coalesence into an immediately enjoyed qualitative unity of meanings and values drawn from previous experience and present circumstances, life then takes on an

aesthetic quality - what Dewey called having “an experience.”

Methodologies

• In the Channel 4 television documentary "New Order: Play At Home”, Factory Records owner Tony Wilson describes praxis as "doing something, and then only afterwards, finding out why you did it".

• Following passions as beacons leads to instances of backwards causality (after J.G. Ballard).

Text Box (Multi-dimensional Absorption) is a painting incorporating found and personal artefacts together with a short looped audio commentary by the artist. This grew out of the desire to integrate my accompanying text with the painting itself. The headphones hover invitingly in front of the painting and once donned complete a circuit with the viewer. Using an audio of a personal authorial voice causes the annotation to coalesce with the subjective nature of painting. An intended meaning of a universal connection being reached via the idiosyncratically personal is thus discovered through engaged process rather than received through exchange language.

methodologies

• Praxis translating through doing - trusting experience, before institution or dogma.

• A Mystic… not merely on an accepted belief or practice, but on that which the person regards as first hand personal knowledge

• Painting doing singing

Action-Painting Action Man started as a play on words in my mind but once embarked upon I realised that play and trust are powerful tools for a painter. Pollock stood up to paint in order to escape the shadow of history

and I crouched on the floor of my studio reanimating the childhood hours spent improvising narrative with an action figure. Never has my work felt so relevant as a father of two sons in a society of the spectacle.This is not to say one should eschew all analysis merely that meaning can be arrived at through acting within the world. As

Merleau Ponty says “I’m from the start outside myself and open to the world”.

Processes

• technical and materials means of production• A poem is never finished only abandoned Paul

Valery • All criticism is dominated by the outworn

theory that the man is the cause of the work as in the eyes of the law the criminal is the cause of the crime. Far rather are they both the effects.

Contemporary art and theory

• Inke Nijburg• “testifies to a desire to connect everything together and to make it

meaningful… a counterbalance to the absurdity of our existence…”• “spans the personal and the social, the everyday and the unfathomable”• • Mirjam Westen page 107 Piercing the Spirits

Wilhelm SasnalThroughout his work Wilhelm Sasnal combines references to political events, to art and cultural history with snippets of personal experience and everyday life.

Sphie von Hellerman

A canvas is a battle field. Fighting each other are the ideas and process.

• The sole difference, which is the difference between a child’s reality and adult’s, was that they were no longer laden with meaning.

• Karl Ove – A Death in the Family

research• The Cosmic Serpent – Jeremy Narby• Understanding Media – Marshall McLuhan• Jung a Very Short Introduction – Anthony Stevens• The Doors of Perception – Aldous Huxley• In Defence of Wonder – Raymond Tallis• The Master and his Emissary – Iain McGilchrist• The Poetics of Reverie – Gaston Bachelard• Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance – Pirsig• The Meeting of East and West – F. S. C. Northrop• The Lost Estate – Alain Fournier• Angels – Cecil Collins• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman –• Angela Carter• Prometheus Rising – R. A. Wilson• Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – T. S. Eliot• The Spirit in Man, Art and Literature – C. G. Jung• My Struggle - Karl Ove Knausgaard

“Art does not know a beyond, science does not know a beyond, religeon does not know a beyond. Our world is

enclosed around itself” Knausgaard

A powerpoint presentation is never finished only abandoned