Sunday 8 June 2014

Mythopoeic Bookwork


The nature of my practice is occult-led and deals aesthetically with the manifestation of primal atavistic energies. It is through the invocation and channelling of these essentially spiritual energies in paint, sigil, found object, cut-up or spell that I have in mind the intention to create poetry through these magickal children and offer to the reader and  also myself (as creator) the sense of  an ongoing social/cultural and historical mythology. These atavisms apply themselves to both the conscious and perhaps more importantly the unconscious mind.

 

This mythopoesis takes the form of a book which as you read around aids the magickal process and unifies us for art’s sake for the chance of division.

 

Thus to all I offer, a reification of the Shamanic Playground and a transmutation of flesh to spirit   

 


Friday 30 May 2014

MURAL777


Originally intended as a response to Crowley’s mural’s at the Temple of Thelema in Sicily, I soon realized that the constraints of time, space and audience were important contributory factors in its realization.

 

The mural was executed at a bar/restaurant called “La Campania” in the Church Square of a village called Los Montesinos on the Costa Blanca in Spain.

 

The space given to me was approximately one metre square, not as large as I had hoped but definitely achievable in the time I had to realize the project. It was an excellent creative feeling to know that I had free reign to do anything I wanted in the space but I also understood that it had to be suitable for the owner “Stacy Burnett” and his clientele

 

I began by whiting over the space with emulsion, after two coats, the surface held none of its original colour and we were good to go.

 

The painting was executed over three days and I worked on it for about three hours on each of those days. I worked steadily, applying the paint in patterned formations until a subject seemed to will itself out of the foundations. This was the point when my creativity really started to take hold and its subject matter achieved dominance.

 

The resulting picture is an example of a Shamanic avatar; the project shows an arcane preacher complete with Medicine Hat and third eye. It used patterned motifs to build up the picture and fills the space nicely. I used all the skills taught to me in my academic career at the University of Lincoln and I am more than happy with the result. 

 

It was great working with the people in the bar; they were all very inquisitive and more than happy to give their opinion. There was a point when I realized that I had actually got to pull the project off and it made me feel very nervous indeed what with everyone standing around watching me paint. Thankfully I had no problems and everything went well. A great experience.                

Saturday 22 March 2014

The Cutup....


The Cutup in the work of William S. Burroughs


“Life is a Cutup”-William S. Burroughs


 
Burroughs was introduced to the cutup technique by Brion Gysin (a painter) whilst they were staying in the Beat Hotel in Paris in 1959.The cutup technique is somewhat similar to montage techniques used in painting and structural film editing popularized by Eisenstein. “Burroughs immediately saw the similarity to the juxtaposition technique he had used in Naked Lunch (Grove Press 1959) and began extensive experimentation with text, often in collaboration with other writers”.[1]

 

The cutup is essentially a mechanical method of juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them back together at random. Burroughs often supplemented this literary version of the collage technique by transcribing taped cutups(several tapes spliced into each other),film cutups(montage) and mixed media experiments(results of combining tapes with television, movies, or actual events.[2] The fruition of these experiments can most clearly be seen in two avant-garde films with which he collaborated with Gysin and director Anthony Balch entitled “Towers Open Fire”(1963) and “The Cutups”(1963).

 

Cutup Theory

 

As Burroughs experimented with the Cutup technique he began to develop a theory of the Cutup and incorporated this into his pseudoscience of addiction. “Along with drugs, sex and power as examples of man’s addictive nature, Burroughs added an analysis of control over human beings exercised by language (“The Word”), time and space (i.e man’s physical existence and mental constructs he uses to survive and adapt).”[3] 

 

“In Burroughs cutup theory drugs, sex and power control the body, but “word and image locks” control the mind, that is “lock” us into conventional patterns of perceiving, thinking and speaking that determine our interactions with environment and society. The cutup is a way of exposing word and image controls and thus freeing oneself from them, an alteration of consciousness that occurs in both the writer and reader of the text”[4]

 

For Burroughs as an artist, the cutup is an impersonal method of inspiration, invention and an arrangement that redefines the work of art as a process that occurs in collaboration with others and is not the sole property of artists. Thus Burroughs cutup texts are comparable to similar contemporary experiments in other arts, such as action painting, happenings and aleatory music. His theory of the cutup also parallels avant-garde literary theory, such as structuralism and deconstruction.[5]          



[1] Jennie Skerl, William S.Burroughs,1985,Massachusetts,G.K Hall and Company
[3]  Jennie Skerl, William S.Burroughs,1985,Massachusetts,G.K Hall and Company
[4] Ibid.

Cutups....


ZONE TRIPPER

 

 

 SOMETIMES I FEEL DOOMLORD OR SPACE DESERT COWBOY HEAVY METAL SEX MACHINE  ALWAYS A FUCKIN PIRATE….

 

EITHER WAY WE’RE ON MY SHIP WE ROCK THE OCEAN PSYCHEDELIC ONE-WAY TRIP A MAGIK CARPET PILOT….

 

RIDE MY SONIC WAVEFORMS DIGGIN’ SOME LOWDOWN FREQUENCIES SELF-AFFLICTED BASSLINE JUNKIE SILENCE OFFERS INSULTS NOISE ATTACKS WITH NECCESITY LOUDNESS IS SO CALM TO MAXIMUM VOLUME YIELDS MAXIMUM RESULTS….

 

THERE IS ALWAYS TIME N’ER TO WORRY GOT TO KEEP IT FOOLISH IF YOU ARE CHASING THEN YOU CANNOT KEEP UP DON’T JUST SAY IT DO IT

 
 
The Cutup
 
Heavy low-down bass line frequencies, Desert doom-lord ship, cutting through psychedelic space ocean, silence always yields a one-way fuckin’ pirate….

 A magic-carpet, sex-trip cowboy upon this volume affected metal tripper.

A junkie pilot digging the ride, noise attacks my zone, chasing sonic waveforms offering loudness which yields maximum results….

 

It is never foolish to feel calm necessity,in order to keep myself, I insult worry,either way, just keep on it…. 

 
 
 
 
 
 
The Original

 
An eclectic measure

Some hectic leisure

It’s electric treasure,

With narcotic pressure,

 

Nerves explode to erupt with pleasure

Rainbow space, LSD coloured nebula,

 

Always partake,

Never say never,

You cannot predict,

Heavy cosmic weather.

 

 

Version1:

 

And cut:Heavily-spaced explosion.

All with-in, hectic cosmic weather.

 

Some leisurely prediction and always rainbow-coloured LSD25,

Eclectic pleasure in other peoples leisure.

 

Some say-thee electric eclectic nebula.

Never, never cannot measure-erupt!

Nervous breakdown treasure….  

 

Version 2:

 

I-always take a heavy measure of narcotics.

LSD pressure, it erupt in electric cosmic rainbow coloured azure.

Nerves explode, nebulizing predictions…

 

Ion’s, the weather you partake.

T’is omega pleasure with narcotic pressure,

Never cannot say with never.

I-infinite space….
 
 
My friend Tom Walsh sent me some short poems so I created some cutups from them in the manner of Bowie,Burroughs and Gysin-Enjoy!x
 

 

 

To-ward thee Avant-Garde....


According to the Oxford online dictionary the definition of “avant-garde” is someone who is working with new and experimental ideas and methods in art, music and literature. Or  a group of artists, musicians or writers working with new and experimental ideas and methods. This is an accurate description of the pathway I am travelling in my artistic practice and it is with this in mind that I seek to flesh out some of my  influences  and attempt to hone the parameters of my artistic journey and workout exactly what I am actually trying to investigate within the context of my postgraduate study. 

 

 

I remember reading Kerouac’s “on the road” when I was in my mid-teens and was inspired by it’s viscerality and immediacy, from then on I always wanted to write and make art, whether it be performance, fine art or the written word.

 

In Burroughs groundbreaking first successful novel Naked Lunch (1959),named so by Kerouac,(the analogy being that you can see exactly what is on the end of your fork), Burroughs presents his humanity in the upmost honesty and is unequivocally nude. Burroughs writes in the manner of a set of routines which accurately prognosticate the instruments of control(algebra of need)that manipulate our socio/political horizon. This relates more especially to the authors constant battle with heroin addiction and the modus operandi which that implies. It is non-linear yet perfectly formed with the most beautiful poetic sense and is “savagely funny.”(newsweek)

 

 

 Since then Burroughs has always been my favourite author, his non-linear style, routines and shocking honesty about himself has always struck me as being the  best that literature can offer. The way he uses the time and space continuum as an artifice to exorcize a socio-political point, (for example in the “Cities of the Red |Night” trilogy) the inherent intelligent of his prose urges me to keep inverstigating his prose and the “novels” they are contained in. I find his cutups to be sublime and the denizen of a lot of hidden truth as to the nature of our existence,for example the uncanny merging of dream and reality. As Burroughs says in the 1991 documentary “Commisioner  of Sewers,” “Your life is a cutup.”

 

For Burroughs image and word can be substituted, for when you read a word or collection of, an image definitely pops up in your mind.The random sublimnity of these words and images makes the cutup a great tool for exorcizing the control that others have over your destiny, opens your mind and allows you to feel freely and open your mind to new ways of thinking.

 

This idea of the cutup translates well to the world of avant-garde cinema, more epecially in Burroughs and Bryon Gysins,“Towers Open Fire,” which plays with ideas of word and image control and the concept of  a “persistence of vision, ”brought about by treating the image and soundtrack as if it were a dream, the reification of the open mind if you like engaged by the opening of the pineal gland/third eye.

 

The jump-cut, montage and energizing of sign and symbol can also be seen in the cosmic artifice and occult laden work of Kenneth Anger’s “Magick Lantern Cycle”. Painstakingly created over many years and often-reworked in new editions Anger’s films use image, sign and symbol as a direct link to Jung’s “collective unconscious” and is influenced heavily by |Crowley’s Thelema, the mysteries of Hollywood and in later years the counter-culture of the late sixties.

 

In terms of avant-garde music, arguably the most surreal and groundbreaking is Captain Beefhearts 1969 double album “Trout Mask Replica.” The record has the intention of being taken as an anthropological field fecording,it is experimental and abrasive and although it sounds extremely chaotic,there is within it an extreme control and trust in this chaos, legitamized by the vision of Captain Beefheart and the tireless diligence of his magic band.

 

On the record sounds spill around, mistakes become motiff’s on cappella tracks such as “orange claw hammer” and “the dust blows forward and the dust blows back,” the recording benefit’s from the Captain(Don Van Vliet) hitting pause on the tape recorder and starting lines over again. The recording was documented and produced  by Frank Zappa on a SHURE eight-channel mixer and an UHER portable tape recorder. Many of the vocals were initiated without the use of headphones, rendering them only slightly in synch with the instrumentation.

 

To develop the album the band lived together and practiced for up to fourteen hours a day, they were so attuned to each other that when it came for the band to record it only took four and a half hours. Beefheart wrote most of the album on piano and the parts were transposed for the benefit of the magic band, learning and executing this music must have took extraordinary effort, however the recording does not sound like the work of control freaks.

 

So during this term I intend to explore the notion of word and image in relation to the avant-garde. I shall write a book which will be illustrated by my paintings and also make recordings which refer to this material in an attempt to understand the juxtaposition between word and image and how greater truths can arguably be gleaned through this juxtaposition.                 

Monday 3 February 2014

RED 777


As both artist-practitioner and post-graduate student, my primary objective in terms of the “serious and diligent matter,” regarding the creation of “new work,” centres around the eclectic logistics of “studio life” and the harnessing of the “promethean fire”of creativity which when alchemically filtered, through liminal planes of “silent memory”-from eye to hand, allows for inspiration to energize and fulgurate ones own “creative flow”.

 

The base matter of my academic investigation concerns the creation of an ascetic modus operandi developed through ceremonial and solitary ritual means, utilized through fasting and sleep deprivation for the purpose of creating a new aesthetic. The unified symbiosis of this line of inquiry both practical and theoretical has arisen from the notion of the known universe as unquantifiable and therefore stoically subjective in philosophy this is known as “logos,” the sentient principle governing the cosmos and is central to my practice.

 

I traverse an aesthetic pathway of creative endeavour which involves the tireless investigation of surreality, in flux. I seek to record and legitamize  states of consciousness reified through the current of what author Alan Moore terms “The Art,” an archane concept elucidated in his illuminating article “Fossils Angels.”[1] A “razor-sharp firestorm”  treatise, which seeks to petition the idea of making the symbiosis between the occult and contemporary art vital again.

 

 Although the planes of consciousness that partly make up my being and the mirrored reflection that is my “magical reality” is tangible to mine own perception- “as a means to art,” the draughting and production of my (good not great)[2] artefacts  is driven by natural laws, thus the nature of it’s ontology can never be truly apprehended

 

The dealt implications of this chosen journey suggest on all levels that I harness the opportunities afforded me by the coterie of “well-adjusted” peers and “sympathetic” academic staff allowing the substance of my endeavours in studio and seminar to be tempered  by quiet time of reflection and critical anaylsis. This implies beyond the academic sphere and into the world of concept and exhibition. My practice therefore  is primarily concerned with the relationship between the occult and the avant-garde

 

The intention of my practice is not dissimilar from the shamanism of Beuys and owes not a little from the “paranaoic-critical method” of Dali. I take as my polemic that of the artist-mage, my remit being, not unlike the Antoepedian entity “Orryelle Defenstrate-Bascule’, “the shamanic services of bringing back visions and their wisdom to the tribe in dance, or chant or symbol.”[3]  It is with this “backbrain resurgence” in mind, I seek to reify my own “surreality”, in the flesh, in pencil and paint and in performance.

 

And so it is that I seek to  reify the “path-indirect,” in pencil, in ink, in flickering colours of righteousness, the cracks and hollows of the immediate, liminal spaces inbetween -a true record of my magical reality.

 

It is through private study of the art and ethos of Austin Osman Spare(1886-1956) that it  can arguably be said that no-one can deny the mastery of Spare’s line and form. It is with this in mind that I seek to perpetuate my own drawing and painting skills, harness the vital and submit my endaemonic ethos to THE(good but not great)ART. It is with due fortitude that i seek to develop and create a body of work based on Austin Osman Spare’s (not only but also) tract in his final Grimmoire(Zos Speaks!,Fulgur Limited (1997) concerning “The Ecstoicism of Zos vel Thannatos.”This mindset being a preliminary setting of the consciousness in order to drive my “Zos” (the body considered as a whole), to the shores of “mythos,” there I shall ride the “kia”(the reification of the Shamanic playground) to the second position of the death posture.[4]

 

 

The Audio-Visual has also nascently genesized itself in the form of tentative ritual/ambient soundscapes. At this moment (in the (inner) time/space continuum), the visual aspect is not unlike John Dee’s[5] obsidian mirror, whose scrying. analogised itself in the form of the “Traces du Sacre” exhibition at the “Centre Pompidou” (2008). The exhibition’s raison-d’etre, was to document not only esotericism but those practitioners whom have developed their aesthetic within the context of secular non-monotheistic tone and collectively intend to invoke (through their art) a relationship with the unknown. The time frame for this being the last two-hundred years(nineteenth and twentieth century). My conclusion, there is little vital and truly occult until DuChamp’s readymades and the freedom of Dada, the realm of the heathen?

 

Anger’s “Magick Lantern Cycle”(1948-1980) was my first inspirational portal into the realm of occult artifice, sign and symbol. It introduced me to the possibilities of the jump-cut, juxtaposition and montage which the filmmaker manipulates. It is based on Eisenstein’s structural theory of editing which Anger utilizes with total effect, aided by his sense of the visionary.The notion of Hollywood being a kind of Twentieth Century  Babalon and the “do what thou wilt,” attitude of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema.

 

Anger wields the cinematograph as a magickal weapon often spending years splicing  rendering, painting on the celluloid, often the only product surviving is a sketch of the original vision.

 

 The magnum opus of the cycle is undoubtedly “Lucifer Rising”(1972), it is within it’s cell’s that the cinematographers utopian vision is reified “as now,” in qabbalistic symmetries of Luciferian invocation.

 

Through “suspension of disbelief”  (ourselves the viewer as acolyte)  we actually see the Egyptian deities calling forth the Aeon of Horus the idea being that Crowley’s Book of the Law[6] reifies itself on the moving image-the auteuric perambulations offer something else entirely, beyond the abstract and the shock of Warhol’s “White Car Crash x 24.”

 

In the coming months I hope to develop my audio-visual skills and create more performance based work embodying a more total harnessing of the possible occult and conscious changing properties available through the creation of “sonisphere’s of aoratic power,”  possibly using actual instrumentation. I am also interested in collaborations with likeminded individuals.

 

I would also like to continue writing, drawing and painting and hopefully create my own book.

 

 


 

 



[1] See ABRAXAS-Journal of Esoteric Studies,SPRING EQUINOX (2012)
[2] Ibid.
[4] [4] “A simulation of death by the utter negation of thought, i.e the prevention of desire from belief  and the functioning of all consciousness through the sexuality” Spare, Austin Osman, The Focus of Life(REDUX)(1921),London, Fulgur Limited,2013
 
[5] John Dee (1527-1608)
 
(a)”For the nature of true alchemy is that it changes not only the “Al-Khem” but the alchemist “Himself”.(Sister Nema of Horus-Maat Lodge.)
 
(b) “As within:So without”
…(Austin Osman Spare (1886-1956)
[6] A complex work setting out the word of Thelema delivered to Crowley by his guardian angel Aiwaz in Cairo(1904)
 

Saturday 11 January 2014

ALTAR




I thought the best way of consolidating all my work for my Master's in Fine Art this semester,was to build a Shrine/Altar in the Project/Space of the M.A studio.I really enjoyed collaging all the elements together and the project hopefully gives off a strong aura of the esoteric and the liminal.We seem to hang in a vacuum of sheer Surreality as we study it's contents and I feel that I am finally getting somewhere in terms of the strength of the line in my work,how this relates to form,the use of colour and the concept of creating a ritual/devotional environment that may very well give birth to further installation work! x

https://soundcloud.com/james-sheer-phaily/hekt2

Please check out the soundscape above which informs the installation! x

 

Monday 6 January 2014

SATURNALIAN ONSLAUGHT


PERFORMANCE - Greyfriars, Lincoln, XMAS PARTY-2013

 

After the success of my Samhain Vigil I was conscious I should mark and give some recognition to the onset of the Solstice and the start of the Ancient Roman (twelve day) feast of Saturnalia.

 

  On the morning of the party I decided I would like to perform, so rang up my friend Tom (who was helping organize it), who gave me the go-ahead. I was thrilled. Tom asked me if I had a mystic cowl to wear (as I have done on previous occasions) but explained that I only borrowed that. It was decided then that I would perform shirtless and go barefoot, which I have become used to ritually, after hanging out with my friend the Australian Artist/Mage Orryelle Defenstrate-Bascule.

 

The performance went really well, things seemed to flow really well and everyone was in good “spirits”. I got a good reaction. The highlight of my performance(for me) was undoubtedly Orryelle’s TIA-MAAT chant from his Labyrinth LP.

 

Overall I think it flowed seamlessly, allowing the performance to be a moment in itself. I really liked being in the Zone and making people happy. PLEASE LISTEN TO THE RECORDING OF MY SET BELOW x 

 
https://soundcloud.com/james-sheer-phaily/greyfriars1-wav