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
