ART BASEL MIAMI
©2012, Laurence Gartel, All Rights Reserved
[email protected]
[email protected]
Log of GARTEL's ART BASEL MIAMI Exhibitions & Events
December 4-7, 2003
December 1, 2004 December 1, 2005 December 7-10, 2006 December 6-9, 2007 |
December 4-7, 2008
December 3-6, 2009 December 2-5, 2010 December 2, 2011 December, 2012 |
Art Basel Miami Beach, Labyrinth
Art Basel Miami 2011
"GARTEL - Cymatics," Bang & Olufsen, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2011
Opening Vernissage on December 2nd, 2011, 7PM-11PM.
Show continues from December 2nd, 2011 - through - March 3, 2011
GARTEL: ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH event at Bang & Olufsen
GARTEL's ART BASEL MIAMI 2011 partnership with Bang & Olufsen, a Danish-founded audio-visual company, led to fantastic original works inspired by the creative interaction of sight and sound. In the 1920s, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen were technological pioneers in sound recording and signal transmission, much like GARTEL followed as a 1970s pioneer of the digital era of art.
B&O products are known for distinctive design, compared to mainstream rivals, because they hire independent designers rather than employ them in the company. GARTEL is still "making waves," partnering for a unique Art Basel multimedia exhibition " CYMATICS" that continues for the rest of this season, making good use of B&O's supersized 3-D screens.
Laurence will also unveil the GARTEL Rolls Royce "Themed 1989" Spirit. at the V.I.P. opening vernissage at
Bang & Olufsen, 1691 Michigan Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, Friday, December 2nd, 2011. 7PM-11PM.
Artist Website: gartelmuseum.weebly.com
GARTEL's ART BASEL MIAMI 2011 partnership with Bang & Olufsen, a Danish-founded audio-visual company, led to fantastic original works inspired by the creative interaction of sight and sound. In the 1920s, Peter Bang and Svend Olufsen were technological pioneers in sound recording and signal transmission, much like GARTEL followed as a 1970s pioneer of the digital era of art.
B&O products are known for distinctive design, compared to mainstream rivals, because they hire independent designers rather than employ them in the company. GARTEL is still "making waves," partnering for a unique Art Basel multimedia exhibition " CYMATICS" that continues for the rest of this season, making good use of B&O's supersized 3-D screens.
Laurence will also unveil the GARTEL Rolls Royce "Themed 1989" Spirit. at the V.I.P. opening vernissage at
Bang & Olufsen, 1691 Michigan Avenue, Miami Beach, Florida, Friday, December 2nd, 2011. 7PM-11PM.
Artist Website: gartelmuseum.weebly.com
ABM 2010
"Gartel Couture", "Gartel Tesla Wrap", Nikki Beach
Hosted by Dolce Entertainment at Nikki Beach, The GARTEL Couture Premiere during Art Basel 2010 was a huge hit. Great vibe, wonderful people, great energy. I thank Bonnie McCabe for working day and night relentlessly on the GARTEL Collection of magnificent clothing. At the same time I unveiled the GARTEL Tesla Art Roadster. It caused such excitement on the streets of Miami that it immediately went viral on the internet, on over 40,000 websites.
Labeled the father of digital art, Laurence Gartel is known for his visually opulent and adventurous works of art on innovative materials. For the past 35 years, Gartel has devoted his life to digital art. He’s basked in commercial success and has had his work exhibited in prestigious art houses such as the MoMa, Smithsonian, PS 1, and the Whitney. But this year, he didn't come to Art Basel to show off his latest art piece, he was in town to promote his latest ventures in fashion and art cars.
Gartel's premier fashion show at Nikki Beach revealed a colorful collection of resort wear. Prints on silk and satin bring his trademark graphic designs from the museum wall to the street. The models strutted down the runway in © Sandra Silverstein / MFbGartel bikinis, dresses, skirts, and cover-ups in a mélange of psychedelic prints (such as a collage of Vegas images mixed with images of gummy bears and peppermint candies). For female fans of Gartel, these flowing art pieces are welcome wearable additions to their resort-wear collections.
Labeled the father of digital art, Laurence Gartel is known for his visually opulent and adventurous works of art on innovative materials. For the past 35 years, Gartel has devoted his life to digital art. He’s basked in commercial success and has had his work exhibited in prestigious art houses such as the MoMa, Smithsonian, PS 1, and the Whitney. But this year, he didn't come to Art Basel to show off his latest art piece, he was in town to promote his latest ventures in fashion and art cars.
Gartel's premier fashion show at Nikki Beach revealed a colorful collection of resort wear. Prints on silk and satin bring his trademark graphic designs from the museum wall to the street. The models strutted down the runway in © Sandra Silverstein / MFbGartel bikinis, dresses, skirts, and cover-ups in a mélange of psychedelic prints (such as a collage of Vegas images mixed with images of gummy bears and peppermint candies). For female fans of Gartel, these flowing art pieces are welcome wearable additions to their resort-wear collections.
ABM 2009
“GARTEL: Redefining/Reinventing, The National Hotel, Art Basel Miami Beach, 2009
“ARTery Fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, Wynwood, 2009
3D is the magic word of power for the 2010s
"AUTO MOTION" DIGITAL SCULPTURE"
DESIGNING FOR CHANGE: Gartel's First World-Class 3D Sculpture
By Iona Miller, January 6, 2010
“Oh I'm newly calibrated. All shiny and clean.
I'm your recent adaptation. Time to redefine me.”
– Collective Soul, “Better Now”
"AUTO MOTION" DIGITAL SCULPTURE"
DESIGNING FOR CHANGE: Gartel's First World-Class 3D Sculpture
By Iona Miller, January 6, 2010
“Oh I'm newly calibrated. All shiny and clean.
I'm your recent adaptation. Time to redefine me.”
– Collective Soul, “Better Now”
Material Science-Art
Like any great pop artist, Laurence Gartel is continually redefining himself in an electronic arena evolving at light speed. Creating a "first" in the world of fine art is not easy. But Gartel is not limited in the scope of his vision to what has gone before. Who knows what subtle cues prompt an artist to move into new territory? It may be a meeting, a brilliant idea, or a whisper from the muse, but once the process is ignited, the project takes on a life of its own.
Gartel is a pathfinder, as he has demonstrated time and again in his cutting edge transmedia creations. He doesn't tell us, but lets the work stand on its own and speak for itself. Its an effortless act which flows forth from unbound genius, designed to celebrate itself.
Though it still sounds like science fiction, 3D digital printing is becoming a reality for designers, engineers and artists, alike. State of the art computer tools still require the master’s touch to create luminous works of art. Strange alloys are new allies in that process.
Gartel unveiled the first pure 3D Computer Generated Sculpture at The National Hotel during ART BASEL WEEK 2009 in Miami Beach. The piece was not carved and 3D scanned, but created from thin air. It poses the question, “What is a sculpture and what is a print?
Gartel’s answer lies in hitting "Command P" on the keyboard: The sculpture is really a print in plastic media. However, it took nine months to produce, and 3 ½ weeks to render. It is part of his ongoing “AUTO MOTION” series, recently exhibited and acclaimed at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College in Ft. Myers, Florida.
“Auto Motion” is arguably the world’s first fully-digital 3D fine art sculpture by a renown digital master, created from digital files using a 3D digital printer. In the past, Gartel has printed his artwork on designer tiles, etched it in bas relief for waterfalls and interior design, and been etched into 3D crystal. But none of it tops his latest. The pure Digital Sculpture erupts from its base with a whole new spatial quality that is thoroughly of this moment.
The process itself remains proprietary, preserving the mystery and magic of creation. The power is in the secret and the secret is in the power of that moment of aesthetic arrest that stops us dead in our tracks with delight and wonder at the emergence of something totally novel. We haven't seen anything like it before. It heralds a vast new potential in design, miraculously without any “laying on of hands.” Yet it is infused with the spirit of its creator.
“The invited guests, and art aficionados of the GARTEL sculpture unveiling were absolutely stunned,” said Norsham Blasko, President of The Connector Group who organized the presentation. “Mr. Gartel has been a pioneer of this art form for over thirty years,” declared Ms. Blasko. “Gartel defined it then, and he is redefining now.”
“What is equally amazing is how the young artists have so much respect for GARTEL,” acknowledged Blasko. “He is a true legend and deeply respected,” stated Carly Ivan Garcia, an emerging digital artist from California who was part of the evening’s festivities at the National Hotel. “He really did change the world,” said Robert Harris, another emerging talent. “He is doing it all over again.” “Absolutely amazing, 35 years later.”
Rapid Prototype Printing
“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” --Marshall McLuhan
No single tool has exceeded the capacity of the microchip for shaping our electrified world through what Frank Lloyd Wright called the spiritual marriage of form and function. Changing our world utterly, it has given birth to the whole spectrum of digital media – a vast potential that is still being unpacked by artists and audience, alike. Digital 3D is breakthrough technology that moves beyond modeling, simulation, replication and fabrication into the visionary realm of fine art. Applications include direct metal printing, as well as other high tech composites.
Every media requires that we bend our will to its capacities and limitations. We must express ourselves within its constraints. The magic word of power for the 2010s is “3-D.” We’ve seen this in the unprecedented success of the blockbuster film “Avatar” and the imitators sure to follow. 3D TV is the hot-ticket item of the emerging decade. But the “first” of any new genre must always stand alone in its class as a window to the future. It cannot be usurped.
This is so for Gartel’s breakthrough work, “Auto Motion” sculpture. Known for his digital pioneering print and film/animation work, Gartel began “thinking” in 3-D at the end of the “Naughties” decade and found the technology had finally caught up with his vision once again, as it did in the mid-70s in the birth of digital media.
Nevertheless, simply having the technical means at one’s disposal doesn’t mean you can create great art. It requires solving not only the technical problems, but designing, structuring and creating a balance that encodes our current needs for a unique cultural experience.
When finished, the solution must be beautiful or it is meaningless. Further, technical disaster can strike at any point of the expensive rendering process, just as the wrong stroke can ruin a fine marble sculpture, or like a bronze casting can go awry ruining the wax model. Delicate digital sculpture can also be destroyed during removal from the mother matrix.
3D printing is the process that makes physical objects from virtual CAD models or math files. There are many different ways to do it, but they all work by building up models one layer at a time. It's not a carving process. Computer-controlled mills can be used to cut a design out of a solid block of material, but that method doesn't work well for designs which have a lot of undercutting where casting is out of the question.
This is an additive process using a printer that uses “plastic” rather than “ink.” Millimeter by millimeter the printer passes a coating, building up one layer at a time to make the object. The photographic quality, resolution, and detail is like nothing anyone has ever witnessed in a three dimensional form.
Different 3D printing processes use different materials for “the build” in proprietary ways. The burgeoning market is highly competitive. Each layer of the toolpath prints a fine addition to the form, creatinging it from the void. It builds high resolution layers to produce ‘burnable’ models in plastic, metal or wax. It has a vocabulary of its own: stereolithography, metal-printing, laser-activated binders, and airspace, for example.
Mobius Strip Racetrack
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Gartel’s digitally-informed solution for modeling the dreamscape weaves together psychology and technology. His answer to the problem is direct. It addresses the audience as well as his current creative passion for supercars, making a new visual language accessible because it is already understood. And he does so with the magic that requires no overt physical expression, but one that fuses the ephemera of computing power and vision into a lasting moment of art history. He’s done it before and he did it again, creating a masterwork while breaking new design ground.
It isn’t easy to wrap your mind around the abstraction of an algorithm in virtual or visual terms. 3D modeling is a tedious, technical process with a steep learning curve. You have to decode it. Yet, the work retains his undaunted signature and mystique without being obscure, trendy or stylish. It is as if his works lifted from the 2D of print or film to inhabit the multidimensional world in which we live and breathe. It inhabits the same accessible space we do. We know it is right, because it is, indeed, beautiful.
Like any great pop artist, Laurence Gartel is continually redefining himself in an electronic arena evolving at light speed. Creating a "first" in the world of fine art is not easy. But Gartel is not limited in the scope of his vision to what has gone before. Who knows what subtle cues prompt an artist to move into new territory? It may be a meeting, a brilliant idea, or a whisper from the muse, but once the process is ignited, the project takes on a life of its own.
Gartel is a pathfinder, as he has demonstrated time and again in his cutting edge transmedia creations. He doesn't tell us, but lets the work stand on its own and speak for itself. Its an effortless act which flows forth from unbound genius, designed to celebrate itself.
Though it still sounds like science fiction, 3D digital printing is becoming a reality for designers, engineers and artists, alike. State of the art computer tools still require the master’s touch to create luminous works of art. Strange alloys are new allies in that process.
Gartel unveiled the first pure 3D Computer Generated Sculpture at The National Hotel during ART BASEL WEEK 2009 in Miami Beach. The piece was not carved and 3D scanned, but created from thin air. It poses the question, “What is a sculpture and what is a print?
Gartel’s answer lies in hitting "Command P" on the keyboard: The sculpture is really a print in plastic media. However, it took nine months to produce, and 3 ½ weeks to render. It is part of his ongoing “AUTO MOTION” series, recently exhibited and acclaimed at the Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College in Ft. Myers, Florida.
“Auto Motion” is arguably the world’s first fully-digital 3D fine art sculpture by a renown digital master, created from digital files using a 3D digital printer. In the past, Gartel has printed his artwork on designer tiles, etched it in bas relief for waterfalls and interior design, and been etched into 3D crystal. But none of it tops his latest. The pure Digital Sculpture erupts from its base with a whole new spatial quality that is thoroughly of this moment.
The process itself remains proprietary, preserving the mystery and magic of creation. The power is in the secret and the secret is in the power of that moment of aesthetic arrest that stops us dead in our tracks with delight and wonder at the emergence of something totally novel. We haven't seen anything like it before. It heralds a vast new potential in design, miraculously without any “laying on of hands.” Yet it is infused with the spirit of its creator.
“The invited guests, and art aficionados of the GARTEL sculpture unveiling were absolutely stunned,” said Norsham Blasko, President of The Connector Group who organized the presentation. “Mr. Gartel has been a pioneer of this art form for over thirty years,” declared Ms. Blasko. “Gartel defined it then, and he is redefining now.”
“What is equally amazing is how the young artists have so much respect for GARTEL,” acknowledged Blasko. “He is a true legend and deeply respected,” stated Carly Ivan Garcia, an emerging digital artist from California who was part of the evening’s festivities at the National Hotel. “He really did change the world,” said Robert Harris, another emerging talent. “He is doing it all over again.” “Absolutely amazing, 35 years later.”
Rapid Prototype Printing
“We shape our tools and afterwards our tools shape us.” --Marshall McLuhan
No single tool has exceeded the capacity of the microchip for shaping our electrified world through what Frank Lloyd Wright called the spiritual marriage of form and function. Changing our world utterly, it has given birth to the whole spectrum of digital media – a vast potential that is still being unpacked by artists and audience, alike. Digital 3D is breakthrough technology that moves beyond modeling, simulation, replication and fabrication into the visionary realm of fine art. Applications include direct metal printing, as well as other high tech composites.
Every media requires that we bend our will to its capacities and limitations. We must express ourselves within its constraints. The magic word of power for the 2010s is “3-D.” We’ve seen this in the unprecedented success of the blockbuster film “Avatar” and the imitators sure to follow. 3D TV is the hot-ticket item of the emerging decade. But the “first” of any new genre must always stand alone in its class as a window to the future. It cannot be usurped.
This is so for Gartel’s breakthrough work, “Auto Motion” sculpture. Known for his digital pioneering print and film/animation work, Gartel began “thinking” in 3-D at the end of the “Naughties” decade and found the technology had finally caught up with his vision once again, as it did in the mid-70s in the birth of digital media.
Nevertheless, simply having the technical means at one’s disposal doesn’t mean you can create great art. It requires solving not only the technical problems, but designing, structuring and creating a balance that encodes our current needs for a unique cultural experience.
When finished, the solution must be beautiful or it is meaningless. Further, technical disaster can strike at any point of the expensive rendering process, just as the wrong stroke can ruin a fine marble sculpture, or like a bronze casting can go awry ruining the wax model. Delicate digital sculpture can also be destroyed during removal from the mother matrix.
3D printing is the process that makes physical objects from virtual CAD models or math files. There are many different ways to do it, but they all work by building up models one layer at a time. It's not a carving process. Computer-controlled mills can be used to cut a design out of a solid block of material, but that method doesn't work well for designs which have a lot of undercutting where casting is out of the question.
This is an additive process using a printer that uses “plastic” rather than “ink.” Millimeter by millimeter the printer passes a coating, building up one layer at a time to make the object. The photographic quality, resolution, and detail is like nothing anyone has ever witnessed in a three dimensional form.
Different 3D printing processes use different materials for “the build” in proprietary ways. The burgeoning market is highly competitive. Each layer of the toolpath prints a fine addition to the form, creatinging it from the void. It builds high resolution layers to produce ‘burnable’ models in plastic, metal or wax. It has a vocabulary of its own: stereolithography, metal-printing, laser-activated binders, and airspace, for example.
Mobius Strip Racetrack
“When I’m working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.” -- R. Buckminster Fuller
Gartel’s digitally-informed solution for modeling the dreamscape weaves together psychology and technology. His answer to the problem is direct. It addresses the audience as well as his current creative passion for supercars, making a new visual language accessible because it is already understood. And he does so with the magic that requires no overt physical expression, but one that fuses the ephemera of computing power and vision into a lasting moment of art history. He’s done it before and he did it again, creating a masterwork while breaking new design ground.
It isn’t easy to wrap your mind around the abstraction of an algorithm in virtual or visual terms. 3D modeling is a tedious, technical process with a steep learning curve. You have to decode it. Yet, the work retains his undaunted signature and mystique without being obscure, trendy or stylish. It is as if his works lifted from the 2D of print or film to inhabit the multidimensional world in which we live and breathe. It inhabits the same accessible space we do. We know it is right, because it is, indeed, beautiful.
ABM 2008
GARTEL: Ferrari Projections," Daniel Azoulay, during Art Basel, Fl. 2008
GARTEL During ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH At DANIEL AZOULAY GALLERY, Midtown Miami 4, December 2008
LAURENCE GARTEL steps up to the plate again. You never know what he is going to do next! GARTEL considered the "FATHER" of Digital Art Movement for over thirty years, has gone back to his original computer systems at the Experimental Television Centre, in New York to produce a brand new multimedia video animation DVD titled, "FERRARI." The early analog systems of 35+ years, pre-date the personal computer and art still operational and completely integrate into today's bleeding edge technology. – Amazing!
The work is part of a larger installation that will be shown at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2009. GARTEL stated in a recent interview, "Now that everyone in the world has a computer, what are they doing to move the electronic aesthetic to new levels?" "Most are just repeating steps that were taken ages ago." "They were completely unaware of the origins of the medium and thus both artist and curator are naive, implied Gartel. You rarely see a personal aesthetic from people working computers, but rather the "signature of the software." "There is no artistry," says GARTEL. "ART has to be in the work or otherwise it is just another rolling billboard at the mall."
"FERRARI" by GARTEL is another harmonic of creation. For one thing, the software, which has been employed, has been custom written exclusively for Gretel's needs. He works his magic and adds his autobiographical imagery. "Since I was a boy, I had a fascination with fast cars," says GARTEL. I liked them for their speed. "Today, I like them for their sleek beauty: A motorcar that is sensual," says GARTEL. Azoulay a Miami art dealer has always had a sense of high standard and originality. Quality has always been his trademark. "When I heard what GARTEL was doing, it was something that caught my attention, He is always ahead of the curve. You never know what GARTEL is going to come up with. It is both unknown and exciting at the same time. That is what ART is supposed to do," said Azoulay.
GARTEL will be projecting one channel of his installation, which will be shown at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2009, outside Daniel Azoulay Gallery from December 2 – December 7. 2008, 11 am –to 8 pm. - VIP Opening Reception, December 4, 5 to 10 pm. Daniel Azoulay Gallery is located at Midtown Miami 4, 3301 1st Avenue, Suite 105, Miami, Florida 33137
LAURENCE GARTEL steps up to the plate again. You never know what he is going to do next! GARTEL considered the "FATHER" of Digital Art Movement for over thirty years, has gone back to his original computer systems at the Experimental Television Centre, in New York to produce a brand new multimedia video animation DVD titled, "FERRARI." The early analog systems of 35+ years, pre-date the personal computer and art still operational and completely integrate into today's bleeding edge technology. – Amazing!
The work is part of a larger installation that will be shown at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2009. GARTEL stated in a recent interview, "Now that everyone in the world has a computer, what are they doing to move the electronic aesthetic to new levels?" "Most are just repeating steps that were taken ages ago." "They were completely unaware of the origins of the medium and thus both artist and curator are naive, implied Gartel. You rarely see a personal aesthetic from people working computers, but rather the "signature of the software." "There is no artistry," says GARTEL. "ART has to be in the work or otherwise it is just another rolling billboard at the mall."
"FERRARI" by GARTEL is another harmonic of creation. For one thing, the software, which has been employed, has been custom written exclusively for Gretel's needs. He works his magic and adds his autobiographical imagery. "Since I was a boy, I had a fascination with fast cars," says GARTEL. I liked them for their speed. "Today, I like them for their sleek beauty: A motorcar that is sensual," says GARTEL. Azoulay a Miami art dealer has always had a sense of high standard and originality. Quality has always been his trademark. "When I heard what GARTEL was doing, it was something that caught my attention, He is always ahead of the curve. You never know what GARTEL is going to come up with. It is both unknown and exciting at the same time. That is what ART is supposed to do," said Azoulay.
GARTEL will be projecting one channel of his installation, which will be shown at the Georges Pompidou Centre, Paris in 2009, outside Daniel Azoulay Gallery from December 2 – December 7. 2008, 11 am –to 8 pm. - VIP Opening Reception, December 4, 5 to 10 pm. Daniel Azoulay Gallery is located at Midtown Miami 4, 3301 1st Avenue, Suite 105, Miami, Florida 33137
ABM 2007
"Gartel: EXOTIC/EROTIC/ELECTRONIC"
GARTEL: "Art Basel Miami", A.N.E.W. Museum / Galleries, Miami, Florida 2007-2009
GARTEL: Exotic/Erotic/Electronic, WEAM, Miami, Florida 2007
GARTEL: "Art Basel Miami", A.N.E.W. Museum / Galleries, Miami, Florida 2007-2009
GARTEL: Exotic/Erotic/Electronic, WEAM, Miami, Florida 2007
ART BASEL MIAMI, 2007
Christian Cipriani: Article on GARTEL
SECTION: Radar ART
Laurence Gartel at the World Erotic Art Museum
MIAMI Modern Luxury
By Christian Cipriani
Art Basel has its sexy moments, but this year a new venue will flash its goods to patrons in need of something a little steamier. The World Erotic Art Museum (WEAM) in Miami Beach marks its entrance into the international fair with "Gartel: EXOTIC/EROTIC/ELECTRONIC," a retrospective of the renowned digital artist Laurence Gartel.
For 30 years he's been called the father of digital art, tinkering with computer-based creativity since before it had a name. Feats like bending photo images on an X-Y axis seem simple in hindsight, but the now-ancient technology predated the digital age by more than a decade. When critics dismissed Gartel's early efforts as irrelevant he proved them wrong—exhibitions at major museums like MoMA and the Whitney, and iconic ads for Absolut Vodka made him the figurehead of a radical movement.
Gartel explored plenty of harmless visual topics like cars, flowers and India, but eroticism continually resurfaces with increasing intensity; it is the thematic constant in a diverse career.
"A lot of artists get into a comfort zone," Gartel says. "Take Picasso for instance. Over time his style changed, but the work remained potent."
SECTION: Radar ART
Laurence Gartel at the World Erotic Art Museum
MIAMI Modern Luxury
By Christian Cipriani
Art Basel has its sexy moments, but this year a new venue will flash its goods to patrons in need of something a little steamier. The World Erotic Art Museum (WEAM) in Miami Beach marks its entrance into the international fair with "Gartel: EXOTIC/EROTIC/ELECTRONIC," a retrospective of the renowned digital artist Laurence Gartel.
For 30 years he's been called the father of digital art, tinkering with computer-based creativity since before it had a name. Feats like bending photo images on an X-Y axis seem simple in hindsight, but the now-ancient technology predated the digital age by more than a decade. When critics dismissed Gartel's early efforts as irrelevant he proved them wrong—exhibitions at major museums like MoMA and the Whitney, and iconic ads for Absolut Vodka made him the figurehead of a radical movement.
Gartel explored plenty of harmless visual topics like cars, flowers and India, but eroticism continually resurfaces with increasing intensity; it is the thematic constant in a diverse career.
"A lot of artists get into a comfort zone," Gartel says. "Take Picasso for instance. Over time his style changed, but the work remained potent."
Art Basel Miami
The arty softness of his olds nudes seems vanilla next to newer work like The Art of Fetish. In the latter book and film project, pop colors and icons blend with images of amateur bondage, but the effect remains intensely sexual. The WEAM itself has plenty of ancient fertility pieces, but a good chunk of the collection celebrates carnal indulgence and alternative lifestyles at their most Caligulan. The best of Gartel's erotica falls along such lines, titillating the eyes and mind without becoming pure pornography.
His Basel show will be three-tiered: A look back at early works like the 70s-era Nude Series, examples of his seamier fetish material, and 12 new works made by digitally manipulating photographs of the museum's permanent collection.
Strolling through the WEAM considering pieces to shoot, the 51-year-old artist sports a slight paunch and graying ponytail. He's a survivor, a true child of New York's creative golden years. But in fighting to legitimize computer art, he buried friends like Andy Warhol, Sid Vicious, Keith Haring and Wendy O Williams. Now in his own golden years, Gartel confidently embraces his place in art history: "[The art critic] Pierre Restany called my work 'living lightning.' By using photographs as the basis… I try to create a metamorphosis of the past and future."
Rounding a corner past a reproduction Catherine the Great throne festooned with genitals, Gartel talks about more firsts. A Cybernetic Romance was the first book devoted to one person's computer-generated art, and later, during the Gulf War, Gartel staged an exhibit where visitors' photos were manipulated and put on display, instantly turning the viewer into the piece. It was the first show of its kind.
As an artist whose training predates the digital boom, Gartel doesn't stay fully abreast of the latest computer imaging technologies, nor does he feel he must: "Having the technology doesn't make you an artist, it's what you do with it – having an original idea."
Today his work still uses a primitive digital language akin to low-grade Photoshopping, but his power to grip the viewer remains strong. Like an old electronic musician silencing the "laptop producer" with a vintage synthesizer, Gartel is a pioneer still relevant in a digital world. Just ask him: "There's only one Henry Ford," he says, "and there's only one Laurence Gartel."
The World Erotic Art Museum is located at 1205 Washington Ave. in Miami Beach.
"Gartel: EXOTIC/EROTIC/ELECTRONIC" opens Dec. 3, 2007 in tandem with Art Basel.
ABM 2006
"Erotica", Lurie Gallery, Miami, Florida 2006
ABM 2005
"GARTEL INDIA: The Journey"
Pfew…Welcome to Miami.
Where does one start? ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH means different things to different people. Depending on what your goals and objectives are, it could be very different person to person. If you are a bartender, that means dealing with a bunch of high class and loud people demanding extra vodka in their free drinks. If you are an artist, you are hoping you will sell work. (And get paid by your art dealer). If you are a dealer, you are hoping to meet new collectors, make exchanges with other deals and basically SELL your wares to recoup the tens of thousands of dollars you have just laid out for the privilege of rubbing elbows with every international art person who has the same idea as you. – NOT TO MISS A THING.
If you are a hotel owner, you are looking to pack in the place with premium rates, and show minimalism art in your lobby space. Minimalism is back in by the way. ) If you are a DJ you are looking to get steady gigs during the entire week and hope to get paid by the promoter who hired you. You can put on your resume that you just performed during the HUGO BOSS party at the SETAI and hope that the guy driving the Rolls Royce parked right in front of the hotel will notice you and hire you for his kid’s “Bat Mitzvah.” (Second marriage so there is a young kid in the house.)
There is a running theme to ART BASEL: Frustrated sex, lots of what people called art, a ton of alcohol, and an infinite amount of absolutely gorgeous Brazilian women in every nook and cranny of every elitist nightclub. Gosh you have to love it. The vodka is flowing and the VIP cards are scarce. The big question everyone asks is, “Whom did you meet?” I’m not sure where the art part comes into all this, but it sure does get people out of the house, get them on airplanes, renting hotel rooms, and for the wealthy and famous, they can now buy condominiums which will eventually be the new art center of the world, at least for one week out of the year. (Yeah yeah, there is ART MIAMI the first week of January, but does that count anymore?)
I wandered through Convention Centre to see the show and of course it’s the same cast of characters, same artists, same people smiling and same overpriced sushi at the food court. IF anyone wants to feel like anyone there is the UBS VIP AREA, and that just isn’t for everyone. You have to be a major player just like at Las Vegas. I saw the next incarnation of the “Orange Mattress” and the “Dental Case” by artists whose names will go unmentioned. One year the focus is on one artist who’s in every booth and then the next year you don’t see them at all. You wonder if the deck is stacked?
My event during ART BASEL was great fun. We showed some of the original untouched prints taken during my tour of INDIA. People were surprised because they never saw “original” photos taken in documentary style before by me. (What’s to manipulate?) When you see a starving child in the street, you cant exactly swirl his head with a filter. What you see needs to be exposed as is. “Poverty is all too hyper-real” and thus the story needs to be told without modifications. My multimedia DVD however, is a completely different story. It is my interpretation or shall I say impressions of emotions witnessed by the trip. You cannot be in such a unique and spiritual place without coming away feeling different. There is no place on earth like INDIA. How people live, how they survive, how they suffer, and how they maintain their complete focus toward religion and leading a relentless spiritual life.
Once someone is touched by the imagery and iconography of INDIA its very hard to be impressed by anything else. The color and joy depicted by the gods, exemplifies the joy of living. One is rich without having possessions. - “Rich” to me always represented experience. Hence the “GARTEL: INDIA” DVD is indeed a celebration of journey, a celebration of new knowledge and a vision of what others can bring you to heighten your spiritual self. Be on the look out for the DVD this coming Spring 2006.
Laurence GARTEL
December 19, 2005
Where does one start? ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH means different things to different people. Depending on what your goals and objectives are, it could be very different person to person. If you are a bartender, that means dealing with a bunch of high class and loud people demanding extra vodka in their free drinks. If you are an artist, you are hoping you will sell work. (And get paid by your art dealer). If you are a dealer, you are hoping to meet new collectors, make exchanges with other deals and basically SELL your wares to recoup the tens of thousands of dollars you have just laid out for the privilege of rubbing elbows with every international art person who has the same idea as you. – NOT TO MISS A THING.
If you are a hotel owner, you are looking to pack in the place with premium rates, and show minimalism art in your lobby space. Minimalism is back in by the way. ) If you are a DJ you are looking to get steady gigs during the entire week and hope to get paid by the promoter who hired you. You can put on your resume that you just performed during the HUGO BOSS party at the SETAI and hope that the guy driving the Rolls Royce parked right in front of the hotel will notice you and hire you for his kid’s “Bat Mitzvah.” (Second marriage so there is a young kid in the house.)
There is a running theme to ART BASEL: Frustrated sex, lots of what people called art, a ton of alcohol, and an infinite amount of absolutely gorgeous Brazilian women in every nook and cranny of every elitist nightclub. Gosh you have to love it. The vodka is flowing and the VIP cards are scarce. The big question everyone asks is, “Whom did you meet?” I’m not sure where the art part comes into all this, but it sure does get people out of the house, get them on airplanes, renting hotel rooms, and for the wealthy and famous, they can now buy condominiums which will eventually be the new art center of the world, at least for one week out of the year. (Yeah yeah, there is ART MIAMI the first week of January, but does that count anymore?)
I wandered through Convention Centre to see the show and of course it’s the same cast of characters, same artists, same people smiling and same overpriced sushi at the food court. IF anyone wants to feel like anyone there is the UBS VIP AREA, and that just isn’t for everyone. You have to be a major player just like at Las Vegas. I saw the next incarnation of the “Orange Mattress” and the “Dental Case” by artists whose names will go unmentioned. One year the focus is on one artist who’s in every booth and then the next year you don’t see them at all. You wonder if the deck is stacked?
My event during ART BASEL was great fun. We showed some of the original untouched prints taken during my tour of INDIA. People were surprised because they never saw “original” photos taken in documentary style before by me. (What’s to manipulate?) When you see a starving child in the street, you cant exactly swirl his head with a filter. What you see needs to be exposed as is. “Poverty is all too hyper-real” and thus the story needs to be told without modifications. My multimedia DVD however, is a completely different story. It is my interpretation or shall I say impressions of emotions witnessed by the trip. You cannot be in such a unique and spiritual place without coming away feeling different. There is no place on earth like INDIA. How people live, how they survive, how they suffer, and how they maintain their complete focus toward religion and leading a relentless spiritual life.
Once someone is touched by the imagery and iconography of INDIA its very hard to be impressed by anything else. The color and joy depicted by the gods, exemplifies the joy of living. One is rich without having possessions. - “Rich” to me always represented experience. Hence the “GARTEL: INDIA” DVD is indeed a celebration of journey, a celebration of new knowledge and a vision of what others can bring you to heighten your spiritual self. Be on the look out for the DVD this coming Spring 2006.
Laurence GARTEL
December 19, 2005
Delano Hotel
ABM 2004
GARTEL & Kenny Scharf, ABM 2004
ABM 2003
"Cyberotica"
CYBEROTICA - Miami, Art Basel Laurence Gartel's CYBEROTICA:
THE DIGITAL ART EXPERIENCE, Dec 4-7, 2003 in downtown Miami, Florida
Dream Flesh at "GARTEL's World of Fetish" , CAMEO Theatre video of ART OF FETISH party.
THE DIGITAL ART EXPERIENCE, Dec 4-7, 2003 in downtown Miami, Florida
Dream Flesh at "GARTEL's World of Fetish" , CAMEO Theatre video of ART OF FETISH party.
CYBEROTICA - Miami, Art Basel, Laurence Gartel's CYBEROTICA:
THE DIGITAL ART EXPERIENCE, Dec 4-7, 2003 in downtown Miami, Florida
Wall Text for CYBEROTICA ART SHOW,
Wynwood, Miami, Art Basel Dec. 4-7, 2003
CYBEROTICA
The erotic world, freed from the stigmas of guilt and repression is a powerful path to self-discovery. Our erotic sexual lives are not to be discounted or discounted as nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification and pursuit of orgasm. It can be the road to erotic connections, psychosexual liberation, to fantasy and excitement, to living our dreams, to erotic transcendence. It may even help us heal our mind/body split.
NEURO-TICA:
Forbidden Fruits and Technoshamanism
Iona Miller and Bob Judd
Technoshamanism is the process of altering consciousness through technology. It implies using the artistic, psychosexual, healing and mind altering techniques of ancient shamanism combined with modern technologies for altering consciousness, culture, and the holistic mindbody.
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is” man" in a higher sense -- he is 'collective man' -- one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.” -C. G. Jung
Beyond the Forbidden
Are there things we should not know? There are many responses to the impulse toward experience. We pass through the essential stage of experience on the way to wisdom. But it remains a stage, not an end in itself.
Religion generally answers yes to the question, while philosophy answers no. Sex, death, and religion are the three taboos to question. They are also the most interesting subjective experiences to examine.
Freud contrasted sex and death as Eros and Thanatos. Are there things we shouldn’t know about the erotic impulse? Are there things we shouldn’t know about the relationship of death and religion? Sex and death are givens of our existence, and so is the spiritual instinct. Experiential awareness of these domains is gnosis, direct knowing.
If no one is allowed to venture into the forbidden we cannot know what it is like. No one is allowed to talk about, or represent it. It becomes a dirty secret, surrounded by fear and shame.
Adopting this forbidden spirit, we even begin to hide this side of our nature -- our fantasies and dreams -- from ourselves. The next step is to condemn, ridicule, even fear ourselves. Then we exile ourselves from ourselves, recreating the so-called result of Original Sin, kicking ourselves out of the garden of earthly delights. With this mindset, passion is twisted and turned toward anything around us that threatens to expose this hidden reality of who we are, what we want, how we dream, and what we desire. Is this self-denial not the true perversion of the human spirit?
Where is the freedom in sexual dictatorship, in rigid political and religious morality? There are many forms of masochism, and wherever there is a masochist there is likely to be a sadist or persecutor. We play this game with ourselves, splitting ourselves into judge and victim, repressing the exploration of our own erotic limits. How dare we even think these things?
Life becomes split in two, into false polarities and we are forced to choose sides: good/evil; proper/improper; rational/emotional; light/dark; order/chaos; madonna/whore; heterosexual/homosexual; self/other; mind/body; sane/sick. We embrace a false self when we learn to blindly accept one or the other. To become whole we need to consciously carry the tension of the opposites.
All sexual things become polarized as we are taught to choose the approved pole over the other, once and for all. If we do, we are praised, accepted, admired; if we don’t we are condemned, ridiculed, exiled to the underworld, the erotic frontier. Shame and fear can torture as surely as any pain inflicted on the body.
It is important we hear directly from these frontiers, no matter how we react to erotic perspectives different from our own. Our minds have been programmed with toxic shame and moral strictures that seek to preserve parental, spousal, and religious power. When sexual stories are depicted accurately, we can separate the reality of erotic exploration from the confines of our cultural conditioning that reinforces our fear of the unknown.
Knowledge of these frontiers, and our personal “edge,” helps us make informed choices about our erotic lives. Since the sexual revolution, the parameters of acceptable erotic behavior have steadily expanded, multiplying our erotic options.
Yesterday’s fringe activity is today’s simple recreation, a matter of entertainment, fashion and fun, rather than perversity. There is an on-going revolution in sex-role mores. Who is to say what is a politically-incorrect dream?
The controversial sexual world becomes one where we work out our issues of power, trust, vulnerability, shame, and the nature of sensation. These issues are important pathways to personal growth and increased self-awareness. There is a thrill in moving toward our fear, toward and beyond our boundaries, shattering our cherished notions. It allows us to see and be seen in much more than a voyeuristic way.
Erotic power and trust are always the issues, whether in romantic relationships, marriage, the fetish and bondage scene, or even S&M. Love is not the only “tie that binds,” and some prefer to act out that metaphorical relationship quite literally. Perhaps they are merely “dreaming out loud” what some of us cannot even allow ourselves to consider. In that sense, they carry or embody our cultural “shadow” side, our unlived potential.
Sex (and erotic art) is always political not only because of gender issues, but also more fundamentally because of power. Political correctness aside, polarized dynamics require one another to play out. Thus, the dominator becomes essentially the slave of the submissive who is needed for the other to feel and express the urge to power. One validates the other.
Thus, not all working relationships are based on equality, but on finding a suitable match psychologically. Whether sexual preferences are “right” or “wrong” is not necessarily for others to say. Who grants or withholds the permission for such exploration and multiplication of erotic delights? Erotic play can be “edgy” without being emotionally toxic.
The erotic world, freed from the stigmas of guilt and repression is a powerful path to self-discovery. Our erotic sexual lives are not to be discounted or discounted as nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification and pursuit of orgasm. It can be the road to erotic connections, psychosexual liberation, to fantasy and excitement, to living our dreams, to erotic transcendence. It may even help us heal our mind/body split.
Ties to the Past
This confrontation, moving toward the fear and pain wherever it occurs, brings us close to the core of our transformative process – the essentially sacred dimension of life. The root of the word religion is “religio” which means to yoke or to bind back. Do we need to point out that this can also be another form of “bondage”?
Before philosophy and the dogma and dictates of religion, before forbidden knowledge and forbidden fruit, there was shamanism. Shamanism is the primordial spirituality of humankind. Evidence of our spiritual evolution is at least 50,000 years old.
Shamanic beliefs and practices are implied by the earliest ritual burials and later the birth of art as a means of contact with or reflection of the spirit world. Art is philosophy expressed in symbols and imagery. For the sensation function, art serves the same purpose that science does for thinking. Other analogies for art include philosophy and psychology for the intuitive function, and the emotions of human society for feelings.
Traditional shamanism is still practiced throughout the world, particularly in third-world countries, which might more properly be referred to as first-world countries. Shamanism has enjoyed a resurgence, explicit and implicit in postmodern culture. Its idiosyncratic nature is well suited to the zeitgeist of our age, which has deconstructed and rejected all metanarratives.
The drive to directly experience the inner realm of being is universal and reflected in the myriad ways the majority of human cultures find to incubate alternative phases of consciousness. In the shamanic worldview, art is not separate from transformative magic.
Technoshamanism
Technoshamanism is the interactive integration of futuristic technology with ancient pathways of the past. As an artform, it implies access to full-immersion experiences, virtual realities that have consequences in the real world.
This gnostic experience for the new millennium explores the final frontier: the untapped powers of the human mind. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination.
The world of the shaman is the world of the spirits, psi powers, psychic phenomena, initiation, altered states, dreams, death, rebirth, and healing. It is the irrational realm of body, faith, trust, and belief.
Shamanism reveals the uncanny world of superstition, disruption, dissolution, intuition, mysticism, transcendence, psychedelia, cosmic consciousness. It shows the polarities of Dionysian and Apollonian spirit: sex and madness vs. conventionality, intellect, morality, and dogma.
Technoshamanism is also the world of what we can call extrasensory science. We can bridge the archaic and modern with cutting edge science and art, which dares to trespass into the forbidden realms. We can play the human sensorium with modulated electromagnetic energy.
We can move shamanically through our blocks by heading directly into the fear and pain, which are the doorways to our transformation and head chaotically toward the creative Source. This is the shamanic journey. It is a restructuring process that dissolves old, outworn forms, and fosters spontaneously emergent new images and manifestations.
Technoshamanism is a voyage into the holographic matrix of experience, reflecting both our tribal heritage and global citizenship. In mythology Prometheus, staling fire from the gods, represents the archetypal technological man.
Arguably, two defining characteristics of the modern age, icons of our times, are the omnipresence of the Promethean spirit and the pervasiveness of sexuality and its imagery, soft and hardcore pornography.
But even more important and fundamental is the power of imagination and passion, pathos. We can each tap the spirit of Prometheus and Promethea, grasping our share of the fire of the gods, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit.
Neuro-tica as Fetish
Our modern culture is bombarded with an overload of hypersexualized imagery, both idealized and bluntly realistic. It transports us out of the mundane into the surreal. It is clearly noticeable, even raised to cult status in such subcultures as multimedia, haute couture, gaming, cyberculture, the gay community, the fetish world, and bondage scene. Sexuality spans the spectrum of highbrow and lowbrow artistic expression. We have accessorized our quest for erotic gratification.
Sex has become even more of what it always was a hot commodity. Harnessed, the erotic image becomes a potent penetrator of the neural nets of the observer, subtly affecting and rearranging biochemical makeup. This is the compulsive arousing power and penetrating eroticism of the fetish, it’s symbolic value, its fecundity or fertilizing power.
Cutting-edge art is fetishistic in that it connotes an object regarded as having magical power, eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect and devotion, even a psychosexual response or fixation. It exerts a push-pull attraction, fearsomely fascinating yet simultaneously repulsive to the conventional sensibility. Still, it has the tremendous ability to lure us.
The erotic drive challenges us boldly to go where we ourselves have never gone before, into unexplored territory. And how we yearn to be seized, to lose that emotional control, surrendering to erotic catharsis: the sense of awesomeness, ravishment, rapture. It keeps us intoxicated, coming back for more.
This fetishistic power is clearly visible in the various denominations of the virtually religious cult of the art world. Sex sells, but does it sell art? Not necessarily, even though provocative art invokes this archetypal power even more strongly than representational or “safe” art.
However, “safe art” is a bit like “safe sex” it isn’t very “wet.” It hangs over the couch hardly worthy of mentioning. It may be easier to live with in the living room, like an old partner. Still, it lacks the seductive power, fantasy, risk, juice, tension, fire, renewal, and mystery of a new lover.
Curiously, often the less explicitly sexual an image is, the more erotic it becomes through the power of suggestion. What is important is its power to mobilize imagination, to intimate unfathomable depths, the Unknown and perhaps unknowable. Yet, often things are not what they seem. Image does not always match reality, nor should we confuse the artist and the art.
In modern parlance, we might think of playing the hot-wiring of the human neural system as “neuro-tica,” (a hybrid of neural erotica, manipulating the pleasure centers). Neuro-tica, the ambient sexual background, combines both elements of transformative spirit and the libidinous power of the erotic, our instinctual drives. Ideally, it collapses those polarities in a powerful subjective experience. Sensory overload leads to paradoxical transcendental release.
Freud informed us that all human energy is sexual energy, and Jung expanded that notion redefining it as psychosexual energy, since the mind is the most potent of all sexual organs. In the east it has been called the life force (chi, prana) or serpent power, Kundalini, spanning the spectrum of expression from sexual to illuminative.
Jung observed that every creative person could be considered a "duality or a synthesis of contradictory attitudes," a unique human with a personal life, but also the carrier of an impersonal creative process. The artist's creative achievement cannot be accounted for by an examination of his personal psychology.
Joseph Campbell states, “The creative mythology of the modern artists arises when the individual has an experience of his own -- of order, or horror, or beauty -- that he tries to communicate by creating a private mythology. So it is the creative individual who must give us a totally new type of nontheological revelation, who must be the new spiritual guide.”
There is always the puer complex [eternal child] at work motivating the artist, as well as an element of narcissism. The artist has a love relationship with the image of himself, which is projected onto the performance, canvas, print or screen.
Both imaginal art and archetypal thought enliven the world of fantasy and imagination, by turning vision inward. They are a release from the literalization of object-orientation. They take the psychic energy, which normally flows outward, and turn it in.
In order for the values of, let's say the archetypes of anima or animus, to be incorporated into the personality of the artist, he or she must assimilate the psychological significance of their own work, in a self-fertilizing movement.
Dynamic feedback from the creation influences the creator and informs the process. Otherwise, the creative urge may be just another way of projecting one's inner reality into the outer world. This integration does not always happen spontaneously to the artist. If this were so, every great artist or poet would be a self-realized individual. History has shown different.
Discipline is not the only distinction between the true artist and the dabbler or dilettante. To subject oneself to hard work and the evaluation of one's fellow man is no small accomplishment. The development of artistic insight rather than an externalization of one's specific neurosis is another. One must combine the innate curiosity and vitality of youth with the maturity and dedication of experience.
Joseph Campbell sees creative artistic work as a "response to the need to escape from danger and chaos and find some new security." This inner quest repeats the main theme of the hero monomyth. “Further development of consciousness leads the artist to acute perception. He no longer simply reflects the collective values, he is now free to criticize them.”
Campbell states, "...the world of the artist or the intellectual must be fierce, accurate in its judgment of the fault in a person or society. But along side this judgment there must be affirmation and compassion. What is important is to keep the dissonance between judgment and compassion."
Under the influence of shamanic spirit, we may attain direct transpersonal experience that vivifies multiple realities. Shamanism means mastery of the sensorium, the symbolic world. The World Soul becomes embodied Eros, illuminative, and informs our existence, giving life to spirit. Cyberspace is buzzing with ELF machine Logos: the 60-cycle Om.
Artist as Shamanic Personality
To the extent that the shamanic personality (like any artist) has great power, he or she penetrates deeply into the basic roots of the structuralizing process, and brings that symbolic information back. In the realm of “metaphorms” our brain images reality and the universe in its own structural terms. This surreal vision attempts to portray the working of the subconscious mind.
The future is being created in the imagination of the now. Herein lies the tremendous power of both art and invention. All the symbolic iconography of the ages is perpetually recycled and morphed at warp speed, and the vanguard senses that breakthrough is near.
In Creation Myths, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz says, “ ...these four factors -- originality, consistency, intensity, and subtlety, [show] the differences between someone who has creative fantasies and someone who is only spinning neurotic nonsense...the continuity of devotion an individual is capable of giving his fantasy is very important and shows the difference between someone who is gifted with creative fantasy and somebody sucked into sterile unconscious material.”
Shamanic personalities work at the creative edge of chaos where it is often difficult to distinguish spiritual emergence from spiritual emergency, bloom from doom, breakdown from breakthrough. Technoshamanism is connecting contemporary society with the mythic roots of humanity, warming it with electric fire.
The world's great performers and virtuosos of art, (the great painters, instrumentalists, vocalists, dancers, sculptors, photographers, writers, athletes, etc.), all need the skills which come only from excited concentration on an activity for long periods. No other type can mobilize what virtuosity takes: untold hours of continuous action. In a sense they do not work, for work implies production, completion, and accomplishment.
They largely have no desire for closure, completion, finishing but are process-oriented. What ensues from action is mere product, mere outcome, mere result, and is incidental. The true artist’s "work" is essentially play, but with the dedication usually reserved for one’s beloved. The bliss of the process lies in the subjective flow state experienced during creation.
A more fundamental level of our existence is tangibly revealed; connection to Source erupts spontaneously. Shamanism is beyond time; it's a primal spirit. Anything that is created is linked into that spirit. Technology is the interface between what exists now and what is coming into existence.
We are all capable of transcendent awareness, of becoming shamans. The shaman is a shaman because he has been empowered by treading the road others wish to follow. The shaman is a symbol to others of their projection of a degree of personal insight, power, heart, and growth.
We can all make the journey between two worlds, exploring the “ancient-future” created in the here and now. Its legacy is always one of hope, understanding, and empowerment. Above all it means direct experiential connection to creative Source.
The shamanic principle is ubiquitous in art, religion, healing, and transpersonal activities simply because its activity is essential to neurocognitive and physiological development. The inner shaman is a percept that penetrates to our neurocognitive intentionalities: exploration of self and multiple worlds, transformation, and social flow.
Shamanism has enjoyed a resurgence in the West in a variety of forms including multimedia, raves, yoga, fen shui, martial arts, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Amazonian shamanism, fire-walking, trance dance, hypnosis, Sufism, Voodoo, and more. They connect us, calm our nerves, or inspire the soul, even heal the spirit.
An archetypal example of a highly developed technology is the Asklepian Dream Temples of ancient Greece. The afflicted went for cures through healing dream incubation when conventional medical treatments had failed. The cures came not from the priests or any interpretations, or even drama, but from immersive experience -- direct contact with the divine in the dream, an epiphany with the healing image.
The shaman lives at the threshold of the unconscious. A main characteristic of the liminal shamanic personality is living with a foot in each world, the conventional and supernatural. All these technologies, the hallmarks of modern culture, involve ritualistic forms for altering states of consciousness, with and without psychotropic drug plants. Art, of course, has been at the forefront all along, illustrating, creating and transforming worldviews.
Like traditional magick and ritual, these technologies rely heavily on accessing multisensory cues, emotions, dreams and imagination. They range from process to product, temporary rites of passage to stabilized lifestyles. They actively change us. This is the engine that engineers culture, it’s imaginative driving force.
Art and music have played a big role in emergence of this technoshamanic spirit, especially explicitly shamanic artists, such as performance artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Thee Majesty. His outlandish role in magick, (Temple Ov Psychic Youth), psychedelics, sexual freedom, and organizing raves led to his being the first person exiled from his homeland England in 250 years.
There are many more examples, too numerous to mention. Electromagnetic means of altering consciousness have superceded chemical means. What matters is the quantum and electromagnetic modulation of the brain chemistry and neuronal circuits. We now have a fairly accurate map of what modulations control what subjective experiences.
Part of the artist's gift is his relative lack of adaptation to the values of "average" society. The artist is aloof from daily life, in a world of his or her own. Or, if they are close to the streets, they have a radically different perspective on things that produces unique vision.
Rodin, Picasso, and Dali are all examples of psychological "rugged individualism." An artisan has a trade; an artist lives an alternative lifestyle. It is impossible to analyze why this impulse occurs to one individual and not another.
The electronic occulture is dancing through the doors of perception into a hyperspatial reality. It is a pilgrimage into the mind out of time, the body out of space, and the universal spirit that beckons beyond.
This story is told through images -- ceremony and ritual, music and dance, sight and sound, science and religion. Written with living light, it fosters a reunion with the sacred, the Divine, the Other. Its church is in the temples -- the left and right temporal lobes. Its bell is the ringing radiance of the A-ha! moment. It is fueled by energized enthusiasm. Its altar is the Temple of Living Light, millions upon millions of screens, including our inner “screens.” We may be witnessing the creation of new species: Homo Mutans and Homo Lumen.
Neuroaesthetics
It hardly matters whether these technologies emerge from disciplines such as shamanism (inner journeys), hypnotherapy (neuralfeedback, frequency-following response), psychology (process work), psychiatry (neuropsychology), neurology (TMS; Persinger's 'Relaxit'; Murphy's 'Shakti', shock-ti; Dr. Gilula’s Alpha-Stim), mysticism (Tantra; meditation; trance dance), or anthropology (biogenetic structuralism).
The ends are often the same whether the aim is explicitly artistic, mystical, spiritual, psychosexual, or psychotherapeutic. The brain, or rather mindbody, is actively and intentionally driven toward the experiential creative edge and changed by the process.
Art communicates and transforms the destructive, isolating and individualizing effects of genetic difference. It channels them into a culturally informative mode. It brings the “outsider” in. The conventional is thus confronted and transformed in a non-threatening manner. Yet, the art itself may still be perceived as “unsafe,” pushing the observer to the edge, to psychological boundaries, as in the case of cyberotica or fetish art.
The apprehension of beauty leaves a physical “footprint” in the brain. Some people, such as artistic geniuses, are more receptive to aspects of imagery, forms, and color than others. This extra sensibility is called neuroaesthetics. Their works reveal previously unforeseen neural pathways, elusive links to subjective states.
Brain scientists like Vilayanur Ramachandran have conducted brain monitoring studies and identified eight essential rules for the perception of art. He claims his rules, including “less is more”, can predict which art movements will succeed, as they have broad-based neurological appeal.
Each brain center for form, motion, and color responds dramatically to strong, clear representations. Connecting things in seemingly unrelated ways, metaphorical linkage, is fundamental to artistic expression. Art allows the externalization of inner, subjective life in tangible images -- “meta-phorms.”
Ramachandran’s law of peak shift discloses that it’s not about representing or duplicating reality, but about hyperbole, exaggeration, and idealization. They create neural shortcuts, hypernormal stimuli that excite the relevant neurons, and liberate us from the tyranny of our particular viewpoint.
Logic can overpower blunt neuronal stimulation acting as a filter to pigeonhole, discount or judge art. However, at the neuronal level the brain still responds positively. The message still reaches the pleasure center.
Not all technologies necessarily involve hardware, wet ware or ars electronica, though in the future technoshamanism will undoubtedly evolve to include a variety of cybernetic enhancements. A range of related research (Charles Tart's altered states; John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks; Mantak Chia's 'Darkroom' technique), consciousness studies (Chalmers; Hameroff) and the administration of psychedelics in laboratory situations (Rick Strassman; Robert Goutarel) can be included.
Postmodern visionaries and process oriented experiential psychotherapies also fall under this rubric. Among the notables are Marshall McLuhan (Media; "The medium is the massage"), Buckminster Fuller (whole systems; Spaceship Earth; Synergetics), Stanislov Grof (LSD therapy; Holotropic Breathwork), techno-shaman Terrence McKenna (Alien Dreamtime), stand-up philosopher and psychonaut Timothy Leary (Chaos & Cyber Culture).
Scientific proponents include Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell (process-oriented psychotherapy), shaman/therapist Graywolf Swinney (Consciousness Restructuring Process), Ericksonian hypnotherapist Ernest Rossi (Ideodynamic Healing), neurologist Antonio Damasio (Proto-Self Model), and a variety of essentially hypnotic alternative therapies like NLP, Psychosynthesis, and RET (Rapid Eye Treatment, formerly EMDR).
Digital Art and Multimedia Magic
Multimedia, and digital art in particular has led to a technological revolution in both our creative and perceptual experience. At the top of the list are digital pioneers such as Nam June Paik and “Digital Dali” Laurence Gartel. Not many artists have the unique opportunity of introducing a new medium as well as their vision and message.
They, and the pantheon of their successors, taught us to see the inner and outer worlds in new ways and expanded not only the perception of what art is, but also what it could become. The result, after a long uphill battle, is that digital fine arts has been accepted as a medium co-equal with the classical modes.
All technologies begin to alter consciousness with a variety of traditional shamanic techniques, and then proceed through an experiential journey, again in the shamanic tradition. The commonality among the artistic processes, therapies, and electronic multimedia is facilitation and exploitation of natural process in the stream of consciousness, the 'waking dream,' or REM (rapid eye movement) state.
Perhaps in the digital world, where an orgy of variations on a theme are rendered with the click of the mouse, perhaps the greatest talent is knowing when to quit, to stop manipulating the image, to not overwork, it, to let it speak for itself. Gartel considers his works detailed narratives. His FETISH SERIES was an exploration that pursued “an internal and external truth.”
"What should be photographed? This question is the foundation for the entire process. What merits taking a picture? I juxtapose imagery as objects, shapes, graffiti, abstractional forms in two dimensions. The careful balance configures these objects allowing the viewer-voyeur to delight in the collaged works, similar to a listener of music who embraces a symphony. One might hear and discover unheard melodies and sounds, as hidden pictures, and imagery acting as enrichments to the investigative eye. Perhaps there might be a seductive image lying unobtrusively, beckoning to be noticed. What does it mean to the overall semblance? What spirit does it breath? Color, shape and form of any object(s) add symbolic meaning. Why wear a red shoe with sparkles rather than one of deep purple? Does one wish to express oneself as hot and excited, or subdued and contained? Why something larger and powerful rather than diminutive and unassuming? These are several techniques and insights that contribute to a "GARTEL." While abstract in nature, its structure is very real as its construction is based itself on the solid foundation of an original photograph." (Gartel: Fetish, 2001)
Perhaps nothing comes closer to emulating the waking dream than filmmaking. Gartel recently explored this medium for himself with his fetish documentary. Rather than just another consumable voyeuristic peek into this taboo world, his view is one for the ages, a valuable window into the soul of that world, a compassionate yet historical portrait. When the scene has evolved or died out, the art will remain.
Both cinematography and electronic animation help to mirror the inner life of the filmmaker. Nothing so clearly captures the living essence of the psyche as the aptly named ANIMAtion.
The anima is not only the “inner feminine” of men and his soul guide, but also the embodiment of the World Soul, that restless panoply of imagery and pervasive mystification that is evident in the anthropological insights about animism. A spirit animates every object. The world and cosmos is alive, not merely dead matter. The secret of the Universe is that “It’s Alive.”
Video-wizard, animator Bob Judd has used psychosexual dreamlike imagery in his award-winning film work (Down, Bovine Vendetta and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America) and his Flash MX projects. He combines highly manipulated still composites with languid dissolves that reveal layer after layer of meaning and hypnotic ambient texture with mind-bending provocative reveals. Buried beneath the interactive presentational image are an array of “gotchas” that dive into the psyche of the observer causing visceral reactions.
This is true cyberotica, not in the pedestrian sense of internet sex, cheesy skin flicks, or even canned virtual reality fantasies. This is art, in the classical sense that truly moves us from where we are toward where the artist wants to take us. It captivates, enchants, even seduces. It triggers the sensual self. We journey as close as we may come to peering inside the head of another and sharing their dream life in an intimate form of co-consciousness.
The transformative processes, including art, pull us into states of rapport, confrontation, and identification. Even beyond that, it can take us out of ourselves into an expanded awareness. Instead of mundane sorcery like “I Dream of Jeannie” it exalts us and hurls us toward our own potential, more like “I Dream of Genius.” Great art speaks to our own inner Daemon, in the Platonic sense of the word. It changes not only our brain chemistry, but can modify our hardwiring.
Waking dreams can be induced through techniques which function to drive the state, such as ritual, performance and interactive art, hypnosis, intense breathing, drumming, dancing, chanting, imagery, meditation, etc. In neurological terms, they facilitate neural plasticity and exercise or reprogram neural circuits.
Thus, our society is transformed by dynamic art, by beauty, by quantum leaps one synapse at a time. We’ve been kicked out of the garden of forbidden fruits with a basket of goodies. Meanwhile, Prometheus has stolen the electronic fire of the divine. Today what was once forbidden has become virtually mandatory. We now consciously carry the burden of that forbidden knowledge without knowing where our journey will take us.
Bon voyage, fellow travelers
THE DIGITAL ART EXPERIENCE, Dec 4-7, 2003 in downtown Miami, Florida
Wall Text for CYBEROTICA ART SHOW,
Wynwood, Miami, Art Basel Dec. 4-7, 2003
CYBEROTICA
The erotic world, freed from the stigmas of guilt and repression is a powerful path to self-discovery. Our erotic sexual lives are not to be discounted or discounted as nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification and pursuit of orgasm. It can be the road to erotic connections, psychosexual liberation, to fantasy and excitement, to living our dreams, to erotic transcendence. It may even help us heal our mind/body split.
NEURO-TICA:
Forbidden Fruits and Technoshamanism
Iona Miller and Bob Judd
Technoshamanism is the process of altering consciousness through technology. It implies using the artistic, psychosexual, healing and mind altering techniques of ancient shamanism combined with modern technologies for altering consciousness, culture, and the holistic mindbody.
Art is a kind of innate drive that seizes a human being and makes him its instrument. The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him. As a human being he may have moods and a will and personal aims, but as an artist he is” man" in a higher sense -- he is 'collective man' -- one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind.” -C. G. Jung
Beyond the Forbidden
Are there things we should not know? There are many responses to the impulse toward experience. We pass through the essential stage of experience on the way to wisdom. But it remains a stage, not an end in itself.
Religion generally answers yes to the question, while philosophy answers no. Sex, death, and religion are the three taboos to question. They are also the most interesting subjective experiences to examine.
Freud contrasted sex and death as Eros and Thanatos. Are there things we shouldn’t know about the erotic impulse? Are there things we shouldn’t know about the relationship of death and religion? Sex and death are givens of our existence, and so is the spiritual instinct. Experiential awareness of these domains is gnosis, direct knowing.
If no one is allowed to venture into the forbidden we cannot know what it is like. No one is allowed to talk about, or represent it. It becomes a dirty secret, surrounded by fear and shame.
Adopting this forbidden spirit, we even begin to hide this side of our nature -- our fantasies and dreams -- from ourselves. The next step is to condemn, ridicule, even fear ourselves. Then we exile ourselves from ourselves, recreating the so-called result of Original Sin, kicking ourselves out of the garden of earthly delights. With this mindset, passion is twisted and turned toward anything around us that threatens to expose this hidden reality of who we are, what we want, how we dream, and what we desire. Is this self-denial not the true perversion of the human spirit?
Where is the freedom in sexual dictatorship, in rigid political and religious morality? There are many forms of masochism, and wherever there is a masochist there is likely to be a sadist or persecutor. We play this game with ourselves, splitting ourselves into judge and victim, repressing the exploration of our own erotic limits. How dare we even think these things?
Life becomes split in two, into false polarities and we are forced to choose sides: good/evil; proper/improper; rational/emotional; light/dark; order/chaos; madonna/whore; heterosexual/homosexual; self/other; mind/body; sane/sick. We embrace a false self when we learn to blindly accept one or the other. To become whole we need to consciously carry the tension of the opposites.
All sexual things become polarized as we are taught to choose the approved pole over the other, once and for all. If we do, we are praised, accepted, admired; if we don’t we are condemned, ridiculed, exiled to the underworld, the erotic frontier. Shame and fear can torture as surely as any pain inflicted on the body.
It is important we hear directly from these frontiers, no matter how we react to erotic perspectives different from our own. Our minds have been programmed with toxic shame and moral strictures that seek to preserve parental, spousal, and religious power. When sexual stories are depicted accurately, we can separate the reality of erotic exploration from the confines of our cultural conditioning that reinforces our fear of the unknown.
Knowledge of these frontiers, and our personal “edge,” helps us make informed choices about our erotic lives. Since the sexual revolution, the parameters of acceptable erotic behavior have steadily expanded, multiplying our erotic options.
Yesterday’s fringe activity is today’s simple recreation, a matter of entertainment, fashion and fun, rather than perversity. There is an on-going revolution in sex-role mores. Who is to say what is a politically-incorrect dream?
The controversial sexual world becomes one where we work out our issues of power, trust, vulnerability, shame, and the nature of sensation. These issues are important pathways to personal growth and increased self-awareness. There is a thrill in moving toward our fear, toward and beyond our boundaries, shattering our cherished notions. It allows us to see and be seen in much more than a voyeuristic way.
Erotic power and trust are always the issues, whether in romantic relationships, marriage, the fetish and bondage scene, or even S&M. Love is not the only “tie that binds,” and some prefer to act out that metaphorical relationship quite literally. Perhaps they are merely “dreaming out loud” what some of us cannot even allow ourselves to consider. In that sense, they carry or embody our cultural “shadow” side, our unlived potential.
Sex (and erotic art) is always political not only because of gender issues, but also more fundamentally because of power. Political correctness aside, polarized dynamics require one another to play out. Thus, the dominator becomes essentially the slave of the submissive who is needed for the other to feel and express the urge to power. One validates the other.
Thus, not all working relationships are based on equality, but on finding a suitable match psychologically. Whether sexual preferences are “right” or “wrong” is not necessarily for others to say. Who grants or withholds the permission for such exploration and multiplication of erotic delights? Erotic play can be “edgy” without being emotionally toxic.
The erotic world, freed from the stigmas of guilt and repression is a powerful path to self-discovery. Our erotic sexual lives are not to be discounted or discounted as nothing more than sensory stimulation, ego gratification and pursuit of orgasm. It can be the road to erotic connections, psychosexual liberation, to fantasy and excitement, to living our dreams, to erotic transcendence. It may even help us heal our mind/body split.
Ties to the Past
This confrontation, moving toward the fear and pain wherever it occurs, brings us close to the core of our transformative process – the essentially sacred dimension of life. The root of the word religion is “religio” which means to yoke or to bind back. Do we need to point out that this can also be another form of “bondage”?
Before philosophy and the dogma and dictates of religion, before forbidden knowledge and forbidden fruit, there was shamanism. Shamanism is the primordial spirituality of humankind. Evidence of our spiritual evolution is at least 50,000 years old.
Shamanic beliefs and practices are implied by the earliest ritual burials and later the birth of art as a means of contact with or reflection of the spirit world. Art is philosophy expressed in symbols and imagery. For the sensation function, art serves the same purpose that science does for thinking. Other analogies for art include philosophy and psychology for the intuitive function, and the emotions of human society for feelings.
Traditional shamanism is still practiced throughout the world, particularly in third-world countries, which might more properly be referred to as first-world countries. Shamanism has enjoyed a resurgence, explicit and implicit in postmodern culture. Its idiosyncratic nature is well suited to the zeitgeist of our age, which has deconstructed and rejected all metanarratives.
The drive to directly experience the inner realm of being is universal and reflected in the myriad ways the majority of human cultures find to incubate alternative phases of consciousness. In the shamanic worldview, art is not separate from transformative magic.
Technoshamanism
Technoshamanism is the interactive integration of futuristic technology with ancient pathways of the past. As an artform, it implies access to full-immersion experiences, virtual realities that have consequences in the real world.
This gnostic experience for the new millennium explores the final frontier: the untapped powers of the human mind. It means dancing through the doors of perception into the hyper-spatial realities of the unfettered collective imagination.
The world of the shaman is the world of the spirits, psi powers, psychic phenomena, initiation, altered states, dreams, death, rebirth, and healing. It is the irrational realm of body, faith, trust, and belief.
Shamanism reveals the uncanny world of superstition, disruption, dissolution, intuition, mysticism, transcendence, psychedelia, cosmic consciousness. It shows the polarities of Dionysian and Apollonian spirit: sex and madness vs. conventionality, intellect, morality, and dogma.
Technoshamanism is also the world of what we can call extrasensory science. We can bridge the archaic and modern with cutting edge science and art, which dares to trespass into the forbidden realms. We can play the human sensorium with modulated electromagnetic energy.
We can move shamanically through our blocks by heading directly into the fear and pain, which are the doorways to our transformation and head chaotically toward the creative Source. This is the shamanic journey. It is a restructuring process that dissolves old, outworn forms, and fosters spontaneously emergent new images and manifestations.
Technoshamanism is a voyage into the holographic matrix of experience, reflecting both our tribal heritage and global citizenship. In mythology Prometheus, staling fire from the gods, represents the archetypal technological man.
Arguably, two defining characteristics of the modern age, icons of our times, are the omnipresence of the Promethean spirit and the pervasiveness of sexuality and its imagery, soft and hardcore pornography.
But even more important and fundamental is the power of imagination and passion, pathos. We can each tap the spirit of Prometheus and Promethea, grasping our share of the fire of the gods, taking a bite of the forbidden fruit.
Neuro-tica as Fetish
Our modern culture is bombarded with an overload of hypersexualized imagery, both idealized and bluntly realistic. It transports us out of the mundane into the surreal. It is clearly noticeable, even raised to cult status in such subcultures as multimedia, haute couture, gaming, cyberculture, the gay community, the fetish world, and bondage scene. Sexuality spans the spectrum of highbrow and lowbrow artistic expression. We have accessorized our quest for erotic gratification.
Sex has become even more of what it always was a hot commodity. Harnessed, the erotic image becomes a potent penetrator of the neural nets of the observer, subtly affecting and rearranging biochemical makeup. This is the compulsive arousing power and penetrating eroticism of the fetish, it’s symbolic value, its fecundity or fertilizing power.
Cutting-edge art is fetishistic in that it connotes an object regarded as having magical power, eliciting unquestioning reverence, respect and devotion, even a psychosexual response or fixation. It exerts a push-pull attraction, fearsomely fascinating yet simultaneously repulsive to the conventional sensibility. Still, it has the tremendous ability to lure us.
The erotic drive challenges us boldly to go where we ourselves have never gone before, into unexplored territory. And how we yearn to be seized, to lose that emotional control, surrendering to erotic catharsis: the sense of awesomeness, ravishment, rapture. It keeps us intoxicated, coming back for more.
This fetishistic power is clearly visible in the various denominations of the virtually religious cult of the art world. Sex sells, but does it sell art? Not necessarily, even though provocative art invokes this archetypal power even more strongly than representational or “safe” art.
However, “safe art” is a bit like “safe sex” it isn’t very “wet.” It hangs over the couch hardly worthy of mentioning. It may be easier to live with in the living room, like an old partner. Still, it lacks the seductive power, fantasy, risk, juice, tension, fire, renewal, and mystery of a new lover.
Curiously, often the less explicitly sexual an image is, the more erotic it becomes through the power of suggestion. What is important is its power to mobilize imagination, to intimate unfathomable depths, the Unknown and perhaps unknowable. Yet, often things are not what they seem. Image does not always match reality, nor should we confuse the artist and the art.
In modern parlance, we might think of playing the hot-wiring of the human neural system as “neuro-tica,” (a hybrid of neural erotica, manipulating the pleasure centers). Neuro-tica, the ambient sexual background, combines both elements of transformative spirit and the libidinous power of the erotic, our instinctual drives. Ideally, it collapses those polarities in a powerful subjective experience. Sensory overload leads to paradoxical transcendental release.
Freud informed us that all human energy is sexual energy, and Jung expanded that notion redefining it as psychosexual energy, since the mind is the most potent of all sexual organs. In the east it has been called the life force (chi, prana) or serpent power, Kundalini, spanning the spectrum of expression from sexual to illuminative.
Jung observed that every creative person could be considered a "duality or a synthesis of contradictory attitudes," a unique human with a personal life, but also the carrier of an impersonal creative process. The artist's creative achievement cannot be accounted for by an examination of his personal psychology.
Joseph Campbell states, “The creative mythology of the modern artists arises when the individual has an experience of his own -- of order, or horror, or beauty -- that he tries to communicate by creating a private mythology. So it is the creative individual who must give us a totally new type of nontheological revelation, who must be the new spiritual guide.”
There is always the puer complex [eternal child] at work motivating the artist, as well as an element of narcissism. The artist has a love relationship with the image of himself, which is projected onto the performance, canvas, print or screen.
Both imaginal art and archetypal thought enliven the world of fantasy and imagination, by turning vision inward. They are a release from the literalization of object-orientation. They take the psychic energy, which normally flows outward, and turn it in.
In order for the values of, let's say the archetypes of anima or animus, to be incorporated into the personality of the artist, he or she must assimilate the psychological significance of their own work, in a self-fertilizing movement.
Dynamic feedback from the creation influences the creator and informs the process. Otherwise, the creative urge may be just another way of projecting one's inner reality into the outer world. This integration does not always happen spontaneously to the artist. If this were so, every great artist or poet would be a self-realized individual. History has shown different.
Discipline is not the only distinction between the true artist and the dabbler or dilettante. To subject oneself to hard work and the evaluation of one's fellow man is no small accomplishment. The development of artistic insight rather than an externalization of one's specific neurosis is another. One must combine the innate curiosity and vitality of youth with the maturity and dedication of experience.
Joseph Campbell sees creative artistic work as a "response to the need to escape from danger and chaos and find some new security." This inner quest repeats the main theme of the hero monomyth. “Further development of consciousness leads the artist to acute perception. He no longer simply reflects the collective values, he is now free to criticize them.”
Campbell states, "...the world of the artist or the intellectual must be fierce, accurate in its judgment of the fault in a person or society. But along side this judgment there must be affirmation and compassion. What is important is to keep the dissonance between judgment and compassion."
Under the influence of shamanic spirit, we may attain direct transpersonal experience that vivifies multiple realities. Shamanism means mastery of the sensorium, the symbolic world. The World Soul becomes embodied Eros, illuminative, and informs our existence, giving life to spirit. Cyberspace is buzzing with ELF machine Logos: the 60-cycle Om.
Artist as Shamanic Personality
To the extent that the shamanic personality (like any artist) has great power, he or she penetrates deeply into the basic roots of the structuralizing process, and brings that symbolic information back. In the realm of “metaphorms” our brain images reality and the universe in its own structural terms. This surreal vision attempts to portray the working of the subconscious mind.
The future is being created in the imagination of the now. Herein lies the tremendous power of both art and invention. All the symbolic iconography of the ages is perpetually recycled and morphed at warp speed, and the vanguard senses that breakthrough is near.
In Creation Myths, Jungian analyst Marie-Louise von Franz says, “ ...these four factors -- originality, consistency, intensity, and subtlety, [show] the differences between someone who has creative fantasies and someone who is only spinning neurotic nonsense...the continuity of devotion an individual is capable of giving his fantasy is very important and shows the difference between someone who is gifted with creative fantasy and somebody sucked into sterile unconscious material.”
Shamanic personalities work at the creative edge of chaos where it is often difficult to distinguish spiritual emergence from spiritual emergency, bloom from doom, breakdown from breakthrough. Technoshamanism is connecting contemporary society with the mythic roots of humanity, warming it with electric fire.
The world's great performers and virtuosos of art, (the great painters, instrumentalists, vocalists, dancers, sculptors, photographers, writers, athletes, etc.), all need the skills which come only from excited concentration on an activity for long periods. No other type can mobilize what virtuosity takes: untold hours of continuous action. In a sense they do not work, for work implies production, completion, and accomplishment.
They largely have no desire for closure, completion, finishing but are process-oriented. What ensues from action is mere product, mere outcome, mere result, and is incidental. The true artist’s "work" is essentially play, but with the dedication usually reserved for one’s beloved. The bliss of the process lies in the subjective flow state experienced during creation.
A more fundamental level of our existence is tangibly revealed; connection to Source erupts spontaneously. Shamanism is beyond time; it's a primal spirit. Anything that is created is linked into that spirit. Technology is the interface between what exists now and what is coming into existence.
We are all capable of transcendent awareness, of becoming shamans. The shaman is a shaman because he has been empowered by treading the road others wish to follow. The shaman is a symbol to others of their projection of a degree of personal insight, power, heart, and growth.
We can all make the journey between two worlds, exploring the “ancient-future” created in the here and now. Its legacy is always one of hope, understanding, and empowerment. Above all it means direct experiential connection to creative Source.
The shamanic principle is ubiquitous in art, religion, healing, and transpersonal activities simply because its activity is essential to neurocognitive and physiological development. The inner shaman is a percept that penetrates to our neurocognitive intentionalities: exploration of self and multiple worlds, transformation, and social flow.
Shamanism has enjoyed a resurgence in the West in a variety of forms including multimedia, raves, yoga, fen shui, martial arts, Tibetan Buddhism, Native American spirituality, Amazonian shamanism, fire-walking, trance dance, hypnosis, Sufism, Voodoo, and more. They connect us, calm our nerves, or inspire the soul, even heal the spirit.
An archetypal example of a highly developed technology is the Asklepian Dream Temples of ancient Greece. The afflicted went for cures through healing dream incubation when conventional medical treatments had failed. The cures came not from the priests or any interpretations, or even drama, but from immersive experience -- direct contact with the divine in the dream, an epiphany with the healing image.
The shaman lives at the threshold of the unconscious. A main characteristic of the liminal shamanic personality is living with a foot in each world, the conventional and supernatural. All these technologies, the hallmarks of modern culture, involve ritualistic forms for altering states of consciousness, with and without psychotropic drug plants. Art, of course, has been at the forefront all along, illustrating, creating and transforming worldviews.
Like traditional magick and ritual, these technologies rely heavily on accessing multisensory cues, emotions, dreams and imagination. They range from process to product, temporary rites of passage to stabilized lifestyles. They actively change us. This is the engine that engineers culture, it’s imaginative driving force.
Art and music have played a big role in emergence of this technoshamanic spirit, especially explicitly shamanic artists, such as performance artist and musician Genesis P-Orridge, of Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and Thee Majesty. His outlandish role in magick, (Temple Ov Psychic Youth), psychedelics, sexual freedom, and organizing raves led to his being the first person exiled from his homeland England in 250 years.
There are many more examples, too numerous to mention. Electromagnetic means of altering consciousness have superceded chemical means. What matters is the quantum and electromagnetic modulation of the brain chemistry and neuronal circuits. We now have a fairly accurate map of what modulations control what subjective experiences.
Part of the artist's gift is his relative lack of adaptation to the values of "average" society. The artist is aloof from daily life, in a world of his or her own. Or, if they are close to the streets, they have a radically different perspective on things that produces unique vision.
Rodin, Picasso, and Dali are all examples of psychological "rugged individualism." An artisan has a trade; an artist lives an alternative lifestyle. It is impossible to analyze why this impulse occurs to one individual and not another.
The electronic occulture is dancing through the doors of perception into a hyperspatial reality. It is a pilgrimage into the mind out of time, the body out of space, and the universal spirit that beckons beyond.
This story is told through images -- ceremony and ritual, music and dance, sight and sound, science and religion. Written with living light, it fosters a reunion with the sacred, the Divine, the Other. Its church is in the temples -- the left and right temporal lobes. Its bell is the ringing radiance of the A-ha! moment. It is fueled by energized enthusiasm. Its altar is the Temple of Living Light, millions upon millions of screens, including our inner “screens.” We may be witnessing the creation of new species: Homo Mutans and Homo Lumen.
Neuroaesthetics
It hardly matters whether these technologies emerge from disciplines such as shamanism (inner journeys), hypnotherapy (neuralfeedback, frequency-following response), psychology (process work), psychiatry (neuropsychology), neurology (TMS; Persinger's 'Relaxit'; Murphy's 'Shakti', shock-ti; Dr. Gilula’s Alpha-Stim), mysticism (Tantra; meditation; trance dance), or anthropology (biogenetic structuralism).
The ends are often the same whether the aim is explicitly artistic, mystical, spiritual, psychosexual, or psychotherapeutic. The brain, or rather mindbody, is actively and intentionally driven toward the experiential creative edge and changed by the process.
Art communicates and transforms the destructive, isolating and individualizing effects of genetic difference. It channels them into a culturally informative mode. It brings the “outsider” in. The conventional is thus confronted and transformed in a non-threatening manner. Yet, the art itself may still be perceived as “unsafe,” pushing the observer to the edge, to psychological boundaries, as in the case of cyberotica or fetish art.
The apprehension of beauty leaves a physical “footprint” in the brain. Some people, such as artistic geniuses, are more receptive to aspects of imagery, forms, and color than others. This extra sensibility is called neuroaesthetics. Their works reveal previously unforeseen neural pathways, elusive links to subjective states.
Brain scientists like Vilayanur Ramachandran have conducted brain monitoring studies and identified eight essential rules for the perception of art. He claims his rules, including “less is more”, can predict which art movements will succeed, as they have broad-based neurological appeal.
Each brain center for form, motion, and color responds dramatically to strong, clear representations. Connecting things in seemingly unrelated ways, metaphorical linkage, is fundamental to artistic expression. Art allows the externalization of inner, subjective life in tangible images -- “meta-phorms.”
Ramachandran’s law of peak shift discloses that it’s not about representing or duplicating reality, but about hyperbole, exaggeration, and idealization. They create neural shortcuts, hypernormal stimuli that excite the relevant neurons, and liberate us from the tyranny of our particular viewpoint.
Logic can overpower blunt neuronal stimulation acting as a filter to pigeonhole, discount or judge art. However, at the neuronal level the brain still responds positively. The message still reaches the pleasure center.
Not all technologies necessarily involve hardware, wet ware or ars electronica, though in the future technoshamanism will undoubtedly evolve to include a variety of cybernetic enhancements. A range of related research (Charles Tart's altered states; John Lilly's sensory deprivation tanks; Mantak Chia's 'Darkroom' technique), consciousness studies (Chalmers; Hameroff) and the administration of psychedelics in laboratory situations (Rick Strassman; Robert Goutarel) can be included.
Postmodern visionaries and process oriented experiential psychotherapies also fall under this rubric. Among the notables are Marshall McLuhan (Media; "The medium is the massage"), Buckminster Fuller (whole systems; Spaceship Earth; Synergetics), Stanislov Grof (LSD therapy; Holotropic Breathwork), techno-shaman Terrence McKenna (Alien Dreamtime), stand-up philosopher and psychonaut Timothy Leary (Chaos & Cyber Culture).
Scientific proponents include Jungian analyst Arnold Mindell (process-oriented psychotherapy), shaman/therapist Graywolf Swinney (Consciousness Restructuring Process), Ericksonian hypnotherapist Ernest Rossi (Ideodynamic Healing), neurologist Antonio Damasio (Proto-Self Model), and a variety of essentially hypnotic alternative therapies like NLP, Psychosynthesis, and RET (Rapid Eye Treatment, formerly EMDR).
Digital Art and Multimedia Magic
Multimedia, and digital art in particular has led to a technological revolution in both our creative and perceptual experience. At the top of the list are digital pioneers such as Nam June Paik and “Digital Dali” Laurence Gartel. Not many artists have the unique opportunity of introducing a new medium as well as their vision and message.
They, and the pantheon of their successors, taught us to see the inner and outer worlds in new ways and expanded not only the perception of what art is, but also what it could become. The result, after a long uphill battle, is that digital fine arts has been accepted as a medium co-equal with the classical modes.
All technologies begin to alter consciousness with a variety of traditional shamanic techniques, and then proceed through an experiential journey, again in the shamanic tradition. The commonality among the artistic processes, therapies, and electronic multimedia is facilitation and exploitation of natural process in the stream of consciousness, the 'waking dream,' or REM (rapid eye movement) state.
Perhaps in the digital world, where an orgy of variations on a theme are rendered with the click of the mouse, perhaps the greatest talent is knowing when to quit, to stop manipulating the image, to not overwork, it, to let it speak for itself. Gartel considers his works detailed narratives. His FETISH SERIES was an exploration that pursued “an internal and external truth.”
"What should be photographed? This question is the foundation for the entire process. What merits taking a picture? I juxtapose imagery as objects, shapes, graffiti, abstractional forms in two dimensions. The careful balance configures these objects allowing the viewer-voyeur to delight in the collaged works, similar to a listener of music who embraces a symphony. One might hear and discover unheard melodies and sounds, as hidden pictures, and imagery acting as enrichments to the investigative eye. Perhaps there might be a seductive image lying unobtrusively, beckoning to be noticed. What does it mean to the overall semblance? What spirit does it breath? Color, shape and form of any object(s) add symbolic meaning. Why wear a red shoe with sparkles rather than one of deep purple? Does one wish to express oneself as hot and excited, or subdued and contained? Why something larger and powerful rather than diminutive and unassuming? These are several techniques and insights that contribute to a "GARTEL." While abstract in nature, its structure is very real as its construction is based itself on the solid foundation of an original photograph." (Gartel: Fetish, 2001)
Perhaps nothing comes closer to emulating the waking dream than filmmaking. Gartel recently explored this medium for himself with his fetish documentary. Rather than just another consumable voyeuristic peek into this taboo world, his view is one for the ages, a valuable window into the soul of that world, a compassionate yet historical portrait. When the scene has evolved or died out, the art will remain.
Both cinematography and electronic animation help to mirror the inner life of the filmmaker. Nothing so clearly captures the living essence of the psyche as the aptly named ANIMAtion.
The anima is not only the “inner feminine” of men and his soul guide, but also the embodiment of the World Soul, that restless panoply of imagery and pervasive mystification that is evident in the anthropological insights about animism. A spirit animates every object. The world and cosmos is alive, not merely dead matter. The secret of the Universe is that “It’s Alive.”
Video-wizard, animator Bob Judd has used psychosexual dreamlike imagery in his award-winning film work (Down, Bovine Vendetta and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America) and his Flash MX projects. He combines highly manipulated still composites with languid dissolves that reveal layer after layer of meaning and hypnotic ambient texture with mind-bending provocative reveals. Buried beneath the interactive presentational image are an array of “gotchas” that dive into the psyche of the observer causing visceral reactions.
This is true cyberotica, not in the pedestrian sense of internet sex, cheesy skin flicks, or even canned virtual reality fantasies. This is art, in the classical sense that truly moves us from where we are toward where the artist wants to take us. It captivates, enchants, even seduces. It triggers the sensual self. We journey as close as we may come to peering inside the head of another and sharing their dream life in an intimate form of co-consciousness.
The transformative processes, including art, pull us into states of rapport, confrontation, and identification. Even beyond that, it can take us out of ourselves into an expanded awareness. Instead of mundane sorcery like “I Dream of Jeannie” it exalts us and hurls us toward our own potential, more like “I Dream of Genius.” Great art speaks to our own inner Daemon, in the Platonic sense of the word. It changes not only our brain chemistry, but can modify our hardwiring.
Waking dreams can be induced through techniques which function to drive the state, such as ritual, performance and interactive art, hypnosis, intense breathing, drumming, dancing, chanting, imagery, meditation, etc. In neurological terms, they facilitate neural plasticity and exercise or reprogram neural circuits.
Thus, our society is transformed by dynamic art, by beauty, by quantum leaps one synapse at a time. We’ve been kicked out of the garden of forbidden fruits with a basket of goodies. Meanwhile, Prometheus has stolen the electronic fire of the divine. Today what was once forbidden has become virtually mandatory. We now consciously carry the burden of that forbidden knowledge without knowing where our journey will take us.
Bon voyage, fellow travelers
©2011, Laurence Gartel, All Rights Reserved
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