Influence And Linage In Art

There are people who will ask me if I like the Abstract Expressionism. And honestly I have to say I am not overly interested in the genre. That may be surprising because my work looks to many to be influenced by that movement.

Firstly though I want to deconstruct the term that is attributed to this period. Many of these terms are pronounced by critics to describe what they see happening in artistic circles, as is so in this case. Artists, of course, resist categorization, and perhaps there were artists from this period who did not agree with this term to describe their work. Certainly for me, neither word has any accuracy.

Abstraction strictly speaking means a derivative or a rarefaction of form. This was certainly occurring in art in the first half of the 20th century with depicted imagery moving away from representations that were for the most part very pictorial. However for me in my work this method of rarefaction is not in my process. My marking is spontaneous and automatic. I do not even think about form or placement on the picture plane when marking. A process of abstraction does not take place.

I also do not see my work as expressive. Again Expressionism was used to describe works also in the early 20th century that tried to create an extreme mood though color and exaggerated imagery. I would not be able to tell you what my work is expressing because I have no intention of expressing anything, emotional nor otherwise. And I have no way to express anything in my process in anyway even if I wanted, as it is again an automatic process. As a side note though I think in this way I solved the great artistic problem put forth by Samuel Beckett in his wonderful early piece “Three Dialogues.”

Again this criticism of the term could be applied to artists of the period whose work deviates in process from an accurate reading of the descriptor Abstract Expressionism, even though their work may be classified as such. In this respect the term may then only be useful in pointing to a group of artists of a certain period and place who hold somewhat similar stylistic concerns.

Coming back now to on viewing my work one would assume that it is influenced by Abstract Expressionism; I can assure you that it absolutely is not. In fact when I started to draw automatically, through involuntary movement, I was very dismayed to do work that resembled that period. Even in my college art days twenty years earlier it was considered a hackneyed form. I did not want to do what I called “splat art”, but was so extremely intrigued by this discovery of an automatic process I had to follow to see it through.

Again I come back to this being automatic to point to the impossibility of this coming from an outside artistic influence. There is no way for a decision of influence to arise in that context. I also must point out that I had no intention of trying out an automatic drawing exercise, which is something that some Abstract Expressionists explored as a visual arts adaptation of Surrealist writing exercises. It just showed up in me as I followed a movement in my body. At one point when opening my eyes after closing them to focus on the movement, I saw my hand moving on it’s own, and the usual link it had to my mind was gone. How can there be any cultural influence to this?

This also calls into question the nature of artistic influence and of artistic linage in general. It is a matter of convenience that art critics and historians portray a movement from period to period as only a development or reaction to a previous period. It is such a common occurrence to ask someone of their influence and expect a list of former artists. But this would only be a minor aspect of influence for an artist overall. This is like in an interview when Sun Ra was asked what were his influences, to which he replied, “The planets, nature, the birds.” He understood the greater creative force, and it is not for me to guess at Sun Ra’s tremendous mind, but I don’t think the idea of artistic lineage even came up for him in response to the question. What prompts an artist to make art as they do, or even engage in the endeavor at all, as fully committed as some do, is a far greater question than can be answered through a model of evolving and passing artistic fashions.

About my my own sense of artistic lineage, here is the telling of a dream and a poem I wrote, both within the first months of when I started to do ecstatic automatic drawing.

The Dream

It is early in the morning and I have the feeling of heat on my chest covering my sternum. I am still dozing, half between sleep and wakefulness. I see an image of a large reddish black lacquer stroke on a yellow sandstone wall which is the same size and shape as the heat on my chest. The image on the wall and the heat on my chest are connected, are in fact the same. I hear the words; every stroke, every letter, every word, every sentence, every page, every volume, as I see that the stroke is now part of a letter, Hebrew in appearance, which is now part of a word and now part of a line and now more lines and even more and more lines that keep multiplying reaching back to a beginning beyond where my eyes can see.

The Poem

STIGMATA

Trying to wash the stigmata away that keeps gushing beneath the faucet as it flows diluted red down the drain forever but the hole doesn't rinse away. It gets deeper, deeper than the width of a hand as it reaches into the well of all blood.

O Stigmata, O Bleeding Stigmata, you stain my life with ink down to each finger which cannot move and not write endless lines of flowing blood flowing like lines of blood flowing like life.

O Blessed Stigmata, please stop your flowing as I am obliged to drip lines of endlessly flowing lines writing the history of all blood lines that connect all life and this I do not want to do.

Stigmata says, Do you know the flow is endless? The lines are endless? I will use you until you are empty and then I will take another to let flow the well of all blood to bleed the endless blood of all blood that writes endless lines of life's blood endlessly.

You are blessed and the bleeding is a bleeding of the blessed blood that flows endlessly until it flows in you no more. You are blessed and you will write the flowing lines of all blood flowing like lines of blood flowing like life.

You are blessed, blessed to bleed the blessed blood of all blood, blessed to be obliged to bleed the endless lines which writes the history of all blood that connects all life. You are blessed to bleed until there is no more blood to bleed. And when you are fully bled then you will be written endlessly in the endless flow of all blood that flows into lines of blood flowing like lines of flowing blood flowing like life.

Inseminating Gravity

 Recently a friend commented on social media to my Proximity Scroll drawings, “Making love to space.” This was an insightful response and had me think of my work entitled “Inseminating Gravity” from my Emerging Imagery series. In the series I incorporated images into my usual automatic marking though stencils and reliefs with the images coming from my own ideas on my ecstatic experience and the formation of conceptualizing in general. I have taken some time to reconstruct my thoughts on the imagery of this particular work.

The three main elements are a cross section of a bowl shape, the outline of a guiding gateway and the main element, the dark entropic field from which the other elements emerge while also outlining and containing the field. This metaphysical construction is based on the attention I give to my body for eliciting the ecstatic response and to the response that comes itself.

When I do my work I have words I say to myself to focus - Gravity, Look, Forward. I also have words of gratitude.

The word Gravity comes from a walking meditation I derived decades ago where I wanted to have my body be as relaxed as possible. I would say to myself “A body at rest is aligned with gravity” and imagine gravity pulling all that didn’t need to be supported downwards. This exercise was built upon with similar thoughts and yielded some astounding results, but which is another tale. The bowl shape is a metaphor for the pelvic bowl which I focus on relaxing when I elicit an ecstatic response and which allows the excitation of the response to move more uninhibitedly throughout my body.

Look is represented by the dark entropic field, which in this case is functional as well it representative. Looking into the image of my artwork also will elicit an ecstatic response in me and I can see the image open up accordingly. I must add it is a very soft look which can yield this seeing of something emerging, mostly as a systemic perceptual shift. And this generally passive but active investigation is the basis for the title. The field also holds to possibility of permeability and the mystery of the what may be found when entering further into it, like peering into the night.

Forward comes from trying to be more aware of the ecstatic movement as it comes to me. When I first started doing automatic drawing, it would just come, as it still does. But in my curiosity I wanted to have more awareness of what was transpiring, so the word forward has me focus on that movement so I can become more aware of the propelling impetus within it. Just recently I have been doing drawings on a vertical surface, something I have not done for many years. When standing back a distance from the surface the ecstatic response will extend my arm and propel me towards the drawing. This remedied me of when I was astonished to first feel that many years ago when drawing on another vertical surface. This forward is represented by the guiding gateway.

It is through surrender which allows the ecstatic experience to emerge. And it is through more surrender to enter into it more and more fully. Then what is there to be revealed can be more and more fully experienced. What may transpire can completely surprise me. It may encompass experiences I could never have formulated. Anything goal related has to be eschewed then the discovery will emerge.

This also requires an experiential foundation to the inquiry, and which steps away from an object/subject conceptualization out of functional necessity to enter into the ecstatic state, as I have discovered. Experientially, a view of cause and effect arises as a purely conceptual construct and cannot be accounted for nor implemented. The philosopher David Hume stated “When we look about us towards external objects, and consider the operation of causes, we are never able, in a single instance, to discover any power or necessary connection; any quality, which binds the effect to the cause, and renders the one an infallible consequence of the other.”

Being more in the moment, events are experienced and known as they come, arising in the instance of their occurrence outside of the possibility of consideration on how or why they arise. This experience of witnessing the continual unfolding of happenstance comes with a bit of a mysterious sensation. I have thought of this with the simple description of “grace”. And metaphorically, the continual arising of grace is much like the continual pulling of gravity. In the surrender agenda, aligning with grace, the mysterious unfolding of continual happenstance and following the movement that comes to me, is similar to the bodily aligning with gravity. So I have equated the two.

A question though comes up, where does volition appear? This bring up the reoccurring philosophical debate of free will versus determination. However, since cause and effect, which is the underpinning of the deterministic perspective, cannot be considered in an experiential framework, this perspective is rendered inoperable. It also doesn’t follow that if there is no determinism, there is only free will. My own conditioning and compulsions I can feel arise in me. Causation is not a useful explanation here, which is the concept that an abstract notion that is the cause of these compulsion. It is more of an awareness of when these types of compulsions arise with in my body and mind from how they feel, how I experience them. And interestingly enough it is through surrender to the ecstatic experience that has let me begin to see these compulsive tendencies in me more clearly though their contrast to the experience ecstatic state.

Volition in this state is active surrender to what arises and doing the best to eschew compulsive responses, which is kind of like hopping on hot sand to find a cool spot, as moving away from one compulsion will land right into another. And the effort to resist compulsion will show up as compulsion too. To be sure of violation means removing it from compulsion, so it becomes very reduced. And then this tiny refined amount of pure volition can be injected into the surrender and the following of grace and the movement that comes. There is nothing else to do with it.

This is not a passive act. It is very active one that goes forward with the movement and the experience of grace. A passive act would easily fall into continual compulsive behavior. We really need to be honest about the omnipresence of our compulsions and conditioning, otherwise condition will be mistaken for volition and volition will never really be seen.

This faint act of volition into the surrender and alignment of grace is what the title “inseminating Gravity” is denoting. However, mythological speaking, a metaphor needs be compounded, which is when the phenomenon of “constellating” as described my Karl Jung can appear. Joseph Campbell also speaks of the multifaceted dimensions of mythological symbolism. Whomever asserted the adage “don’t mix your metaphors” was surely trying to regulate the creative literary mind away from a path of thought which could bring danger to the maintained status quo of conceptual dominance, ensuring it through metaphorical constraints convenient to their designs. So the metaphor must be compounded to include the personal emotional intimacy and physical excitation of the ecstatic experience.

As somewhat described above, gravity in the title also refers to the physical aspect of relaxing and aligning. And the forward sensation, depicted as the guiding gateway in the image, is also a physical propulsion. The aligning and relaxing in the ecstatic state can yield a very intense physical excitation, not dissimilar to orgasmic release. This has also been represented in traditional art forms depicting ecstatic behavior, such as in images of Saint Teresa in her ecstasy. The base of the pelvis is symbolically depicted in the painting, which is the focus of the physical relaxation and alignment practice. The forward propulsion can also arise from the same spot giving a sexual sensation to the physical excitation, but not exclusively so. It is in fact very much subordinate to the systemic body wide and emotional excitation. But the forward propulsion does feel like a penetration into what yields and reveals the ecstatic outcome, which is often entails the bliss state as depicted in those homages to Saint Teresa.

This is what makes my friend’s comment so insightful. This excitation gives an overwhelming intimate sense with my surroundings. It is a sense of extreme vulnerability, as being observed as much as I observe, and may be what is referred to an interpenetrating experience, the love making connotations are here apparent. The work references and confabulates multiple expressions of physical, emotional, psychological and metaphysical observation and practice in a mythological symbolistic fashion, with the entropic field as the main focal point, which is both a result of and a stimulus to an ecstatic response, it then being functional as well as metaphorical simultaneously, further compounding the mythological construct.

The work depicts the method of willful surrender into the ecstatic state which then can overwhelm the surrenderer though their own participation, and who can then begin to observe through that shifting perspective what can only be experienced by being in that shifting perspective, willfully following towards what is mysterious to experience what was veiled before. It is the willfulness to surrender and follow the movement in which the ecstatic state arises and reveals what it will reveal. This revelation, a result of the interaction of the personal with the flow of mysterious happenstance, is the creative act. The willful following is the insemination into this relationship, that which enables this creation of revelation to occur.