copyright ∞  Mysti Easterwood EXORDIUM:          With all due respect to Suzi Gablik, I don't think art has to be re-enchanted -- I would argue that by definition, it never left the realm of enchantment.  The question remains whether we are qualified to meet it there.   Such a meeting will be feasible only to  the extent we have learned to think throughthe object--a process I have discussed at length elsewhere 1.  This involves learning to shift from analysis into what the Greeks (and their descendants, the Lacanians) called anamnesis--recognizing art through the process of unforgetting it.2  First we must repair to the crossroads of anthropology and art criticism, an intersection that has seen some heavy traffic in the last decade.  From the side of anthropology, one of the more important issues is the destruction of traditional cultures that has attended the expansion of international capital. It has been suggested that the easy assimilation of ceremonial and everyday objects into the category of art has abetted, if not accelerated this process.   But we must understand that this flattening of cultural-into-aesthetic objects comes with a one/two punch: not only is the object stripped of its functional context, it is then inducted into a category that has had for our society only minimum sociopolitical importance: art.  Whereas anthopology has at least put forth some effort to resist the first part of this movement (cf Steven Levine, Ivan Ivansk, James Clifford), responsibility for the second rests with an art industry that juvenilizes 95% of its artworkers, and deifies the rest.  To deal adequately with this absurdity means that we must not only change how we think and talk about art objects, but what we do with them.   This essay maps a journey of 'counter-assimilation,' one which looks to an art that embodies ('bodes') a future we long for, whose roots are buried in a present we may yet learn to 'un-forget.'   ******************** i. Thresheld In 1993 I made several visits to an on-site sculpture by Lisa Tamiris Becker entitled The Gold Room.  For the first viewing I went with a friend whose background included more literature than art.   Making our way through the manufacturing wing of a University of Texas art building, we threaded past the acetylene tanks and stacked canvases to a darkened corridor, lined to the left by a row of industrial gates.  I spotted Lisa's name and shunted the boxcar door; we  peered into metallic darkness.   The first impression was one of great spatial pressure, which, after an instant of intensifying, yielded to being seen.  The cell dimensions, cinder-block construction and industrial appendages delivered the image of a prison cell.  My friend said, "So, where's the sculpture?"  "It's coming," I joked. After a few seconds our eyes began to use the gilded walls as a source of light, and soon the  soft, black floor came floating up out of the darkness.  Earth never looked so insolid, the slight convexity of the surface triturated, echoing the surface of the cinderblocks.   This granular texture linked and separated the surfaces, as the heavy horizontal gold of the walls massed around the rising floor. Over in the near left-hand corner of this burgeoning floor, a ceramic embolism --which Lisa would later describe as an omphalos3 caught the heated color of the walls, drawing it into the floor.    This glassy knob, set out against the rough texture of its enfolding angles, was juxtaposed to the awkward resident of the diagonal niche -- the corner sink, being undetachable had been painted black and left to sulk in the corner.  It's  uncouth hunkering demanded a name: I dubbed it 'diabolos' -- after the angel so awkwardly (dia-)thrown (-bolos) from the heavens.4  The other foil to its laconic sinkliness was overhead, picked up by an ebony lattice upon which the artist had stretched several meters of silk, a gold darker than the walls. Strangely, the rim of light appearing at the edge of the lattice made me conscious of another line of light at the bottom of my visual field.  The threshold of the room was scored with a rut the width of the industrial door and filled with a mysterious yellow substance.  To the touch it was as smooth as oiled glass.  Sniffed: a vanishing sweetness.  "What via Lactea is this?" I wondered.   The ground had grown ruddy with the  gloaming from the walls, and little green sparks began to rutilate the field just over the soil.  I thought at first it was an optical effect, some coruscation in the twilight of the room, but in focusing I saw that the grass seed in the unsterilized soil had sprouted, sending tiny green filaments toward the ceiling. My initial and secondary impressions of the space were keyed to two elements, one avoidable, the other unexpected.  The pressure of the space was immediately enforced by the blacked-out sink.  But the second impression, that of space disclosing itself, was only revealed when I relaxed my vision enough to see the grass.  That gaze, which seemed less 'mine' than a property of the space itself, was now able to follow its helical organization.  Tracing the fine green lines back to the ceiling surface, for the first time I was able to see how it hung just slightly off-center, so that the whole room--with the sink pulling and the grass pushing -- seemed ready to pivot. (Reduced images of the Gold Room) ******************* ii. Blake  vs. Yeats: Wynding the Helical Gaze Shortly after my first visit to the Gold Room, I came across an essay written by the artist's husband and collaborator,  Willard Uncapher.   This meditation, "Yeats, Blake and the Election of the Temporal"  examined the nature of choice in the work of these two visionary poets, and the ramifications of choosing  what may seem to lie beyond volition. Philosophically as well as scientifically,  Western civilization has drawn firm lines between perception and cognition, limiting choice to cognition: I see three colors, I choose one.  "Election of the Temporal"  not only situated choice in the space before cognition, but pulled it back even farther, to  experience beforeperception.   In the primary layers of awareness, percepts are limited to two 'bases':  three dimensions giving us space, and with the addition of the fourth dimension, space-time.   Our relationship with space-time --though highly variable-- almost always seems compulsory, our senses reporting it as a 'pre-existing condition.'   Yet we do exist --both spatially and temporally--'before' the senses (the very word present derives from the etymology 'pre-sens,'-- anterior to flow or direction).   Thus the essay explored a volition that may be literally insensible. It begins: "Yeat's work is dominated by a struggle with temporality."    The author had once characterised the essay as 'mean' but as I read, I understood that its brevity --some five pages--  did not signal parsimony so much as an insistent translation of its terminus (the meaning) into its procedure (the means).   The recursiveness was strategic, forcing the reader to re-enact a passage through the spiral lumina of William Blake's imagination.  First, there was the irresistable present tense of its voice, as the writer  placed Blake and Yeats' work on contemporaneous ground, then drew them into the epoch of the reader.   This was done by explicit invitations to enter each literature as a conceptual order, and, more intimately, as a way of being in the world. Yeats  felt himself to be 'elected' and therefore compelled to report from a position beyond time.   Yet as a participant in history he also felt obligated to "rescue this [privilege] from a transcendental solipsism in which the power of words ... decrease as their truth ('their original unlimitedness') increases."5 This struggle with temporality caused Yeats to vacillate between vision and history,  privilege being implicit in the former, corrupted through the latter.   Yet their separation meant enforcing a a rigid exclusion of 'common' experience.     In desiring to place himself  'beyond' time, the poet created a time conditioned by that refutation, so that its passage was experienced as a steady not-now, not-now, not-now,  Such repudiation by definition obscures its orgins in the present moment, since 'here' under this dispensation, is never allowed to fully arrive. The alternative was Blake's helical time, produced when one imagines (desires) desire.  Helical time "factored the temporal" into the visionary equation, as a "portion of our own rejected, unregenerated vision."   This inclusiveness came from within the visionary stance, by actively eliciting the revitalizing powers of time: "For Blake, the imagination precedes desire, informs it."    Yeats, arguing against his time, is revealed as Modern to a Postmodern Blake,  who radically collaborated (with) his milieu. Like circular, dialectical time, helical time is based in repetition, but it is the repetition of a trialectical movement between the environment, "the  image of the observer (within that environment) and the actual observer."   Unlike dialectical or circular time, helical time does not merely produce consciousness of the 'other';  rather, it includes the other's other.   Not the reflected self, but the charisma, the shine of the self in the other.  Otherwisdom. ***************** Shortly after my first expedition, the Gold Room came under review by a string of  visiting critics as a part of the nomination process for a Univerity fellowship.  I wasn't surprised by this development; but oddly, the visitors had not shown any interest in the uses of such a space.  This seemed especially inattentive given the alchemical cast of its elements.   I, on the other hand, jumped into the breach this 'critical' oversight had created: "Lisa, would you consider letting me spend the night in the sculpture?"    "By yourself?"  she laughed, then quickly consented. On the following Saturday evening, I entered the building through a door marked "Peligro: Art" ***************** iii.  Intraview The grass was gone.  I stepped over the clarified butter (ghee)6 rather unceremoniously and cast the herbs I brought onto the ground, unrolled my sleeping mat, lit a candle and sat down. I was immediately struck by a sense of refuge, of safety -- in this environment which had appeared so oppressive from the threshold.  I began to gradually lower my senses into a twilight state.  Instead of the play of surfacing I had observed while outside of the space, from inside there seemed to be no restless cross-indexing of texture, no juggling of form, no uncanny light.  I waited.  Not for anything in particular to happen, but for the <vague/vogue> surge of expectation to subside. 7 Working with the hypnogogic/twilight state is like training a big dog.  (Stay.) But it is the simplest way I know to become consciously anamorphic (more on this term to follow) to one's environment.   Nonetheless, the room was becoming boring, a bad sign for maintaining twilight vigilance, since it is so easy just to reach over there and flip on the dreamstate.  (Stay.) Finally I noticed my 'hold' on things, both visual and kinesthetic,  beginning to loosen (I said, Stay) and a kind of primitive curiosity unfolding.   Problem: I couldn't maintain enough boundary to distinguish if I was the one being curious, or the one being examined.    There was no chance to find out because the next thing I knew an opening had appeared under my mat and a geyser of butterflies came flaring up through the floor -- a sign that I had probably fallen asleep.  I woke myself up to find out. Not yet!, I scolded the room.  I realized then that the 'boredom' I was experiencing had to do with the space itself.  Not that it was boring, but that its arrangement worked against the detentions that produce conventional consciousness. I had been drawn to the Gold Room because I had seen, from the threshold, a transformative algorithm that was the precise cognitive and sensory contestant of the Blake essay.   Now inside I was not so interested in how this was accomplished as what to do with it.   Even though most intellectuals have a pretty good idea of how subjective ego consciousness is produced, we generally remain unconscious of it while actively 'speaking/being-in-time'.  Likewise, having been incorporated into the Gold Room I went from being 'conscious of' the environment, to being conscious withit, engaging its productive and regulatory mechanisms as a kind of attentional prosthesis. So what was I conscious 'with' in this environment?  The same quality I had initially remarked upon approaching the space: pressure.  Now I began to comprehend the feeling of safety that had enfolded me during the first seconds after entry.  In viewing the space from outside,  I had initiated a link that would be activated once I had crossed the threshold, becoming integrated with the room itself.  From within I could see how the pressure was deployed in a strophe/antistrophe movement between the elements, whose net effect was a lively stillness at their interstice: 'moving and staying/like whitewater.' And like the radial oscillation of an oceanic wave, there was a deceleration that was not entropaic, but transferred the momentum (of the differential) to the room as a whole, giving it the feel of a sanctuary.   ****** iv.   Alice in Syllogism Land Dialectical (circular) and trialectical (helical) movements can be distinguished through the following allegory:  in the dialectical situation it is as if one were looking into a mirror with a translucent backing.  At first, one looks and sees his or her own image.  In the trialectical, one is beckoned to the reflective surface,  but upon closer investigation, the mirror turns into a window.   The key distinction is not in what one sees, but rather in the 'turning'  itself; what I am calling helicity or the trialectic appears in that evanescent moment when one's face and the environment flare upon the same surface. In Modernist mythology, we have sought the presence of the artist in her touch upon the canvas-- since Impressionism associating the physical mark of the brush upon the pictoral surface with authenticity, presence, decision.    But in the context of a sitesculpture, where arrangement of the component elements (usually) replaces the brushstroke,  choices become the 'mark'; decision, the artist's touch. It is the dual-orientation  of this choice that compells the tropaic moment I am calling helical.   In the moment that an artist focuses (peers) through her own image to distinguish its larger context, one is not only seeing, but (consents to) being seen.   Thus in the trialectical moment, one is not only choosing, but agrees with being chosen.   Yeats and Blake shared the sense of having been chosen by their time, but only Blake fully presentified the moment by electing, in turn, to be in time. Do these choices show us the interplay between the artist and her environment?  or between the elements in that environment?  The answer is both.  Choosing to prolong into form the instant in the mirror when the self gives way to the opening other,  this choice records both the feeling of privilege (or more basically, becoming visible) and the artist's desire for the present moment that discloses this transaction.   In other words, the choice to be in time. ******************* v. the Vth Element The trick to remaining in the hypnogogic state is in yielding to the onset of the dreamstate while remaining conscious of your location.  It helps to hold something in your hand, primarily because of our association of the hand with holding or retention; but also for its role in making, or constructing.    The weirder the object, the better, preferably something that you would never carry around during the day, much less take to bed. The function of the object is to make you anamorphic to the dream.   Anamorphosis is a deeper phase of the hypnogogic state,  attained by  gentle intensification of what brought you to twilight to begin with:  yielding (but not surrendering) to the dreamstate.   In the classical sense, anamorphosis is a distortion in the visual field which can be corrected or normalized when the viewer changes position.8  The held object produces an anamorphosis in the dreamstate, a distortion that prevents the normal process of moving from twilight vigilance to REM sleep.   This artifice, a kind of planned accident, condenses the multiparous productions of the dreamstate into a single image (and the more compelling the dreamstate, that is, the more uncathected material in the unconscious, the more equilibrium the object produces out of the dream gravity).   Even though this 'shell' or secondary level of the hypnogogic is engineered by the waking self, it still has to play by the rules of Hypnos ("j'autre est").  The dreamimage of the object forms the dreamer's transitional environment; which also, because it is held in the hand, becomes a place-of-making.    Thus, emptyhanded, I became the object held by the space. ******* By now the candle had gone out, and I lay in the darkness, sensing the room with what surrounded me.  I was lying on my right side, my body echoing the curve of the ceramic omphalos.  Suddenly I understood its mediation of the space.  The ground/goldwall convergence formed a triangulated opening that modeled the more languid trine of rut/omphalos/diabolos.   From the other direction, the diabolos appeared at the end of a corridor of rectangles, the lattice floating in a squarewell of light; it's shape confirmed in the walls behind the diabolos.  Thus, from its corner, the ceramic anamorphized the room, becoming the center of levity for the clockwise space; the center of gravity for the counterclockwise. Although I had seen the 'cyclone', the helicity of the space from threshold, only by repeating the curve in my body (actually, both curves: my body's comma, and the meniscus of earth that bulged beneath me) could I discern the pivotal function of the omphalos, and how the 'two' spaces conspired to educe one another. To be held by this space was a tutorial in the dynamics of yielding.  There was no ineffable quality to this instruction, no feeling of grandeur or mystery, just the smooth, insistent translation of attention from one interstice to another: water falling into water waiting. ### (Large images of the Gold Room) Notes 1. "Art  is only going to be as accessible as our critical objective allows; and this 'objective' must become fundamentally iambic: a) to   disable any ideological structure that would seek dominion over the object, by b) the creation of an opening (a space) in our attention to accommodate its larger effects. . . .  [I]n order to comprehend  a work, one has to invent a relationship with it, bypassing the mechanisms that produce the appearance of objectivity in the critic.   It is not that such objectivity doesn't exist; rather, it  inheres to the object under investigation, and has to be mimetically conceived by the  critic. " Mysti Easterwood, "Cybersoma/space: Touching on Reflection," fn 1,  (Sarah Zupko Cultural Site), 1994. 2. "[I]n psychoanalytic anamnesis it is not a question of reality, but of truth, because the effect of full speech is to reorder past contingencies by conferring on them the sense of necessities to come, such as they are constituted by the little freedom through which the subject makes them present."   Ecrits: Function and Field in Speech and Language, p. 48.   That 'little freedom' is the  space which arises in the moment of  anamnesis.   3. Omphalos (literally, "navel") is a sacred oval or hemispherical stone in Delphi, situated in the center of the temple of Apollo (currently a museum). To the ancient Greeks this stone was the center, the 'navel', of the earth. According to legend, Zeus determined the spot by sending forth two eagles simultaneously to fly from the eastern and western ends of the earth, and they met at Delphi.    Keep in mind this theme of sheering forces moving toward the omphalos as we enter section iv of the essay. 4.  Speaking of flying from opposite ends... Diabolos, Latin for 'devil' means 'thrown at an angle,'  presumably a reference to the fall of the archangel Lucifer.    Curiously, 'angle' shares an etymological root with the word 'ankle' as well as the more obvious 'angel.'   The ecclesiastical Greek word 'angelus,' meaning 'messenger from heaven,'  is derived from the older 'oneiros'  referring of course to that earlier messenger from the dreaming heavens,  Hermes.  You remember Hermes, the lad with the wings on his ankles and the lie on his lips?   Evidently the Byzantine Greeks did, since the later Greek diabolus came to mean 'slanderer.'   Thus we can see how whole heavens (and the sacred spaces that refer to them) include their fallen others. 5.  "Yeats, Blake and the Election of the Temporal." Willard Uncapher.  Unpublished paper, Columbia University, 1985. 6.  Ghee (clarified butter) is one of the five substances derived from the sacred cow used in for ritual purpose in Hinduism; I suspect that the other four follow the alchemical schema that underwrites Agamic practices.  For now, I can only say with certainty that ghee represents 'atman,' the imperishable aspect of human being.  Throughout India, ghee is normally used to anoint the lingam, sexual symbol of the god Shiva.  To pour it into an earthen rut was a bold complementary gesture; a decidedly non-traditional offering to his wife and consort, Parvati. 7. Detecting the movement of thought takes a kind of wry attention to its constant, objectless hankering.  This takes knowing how to hang out in the slur between perception and thought.  Anywhere but Austin this might have been a challenge.  Here, where Linklater's Slackers was filmed, the ability to go into a deconstructive trance is practically a residential requirement. 8.  See  "the Ambassadors" (1533) by Hans Holbein the Younger.   Be sure to scroll down to the bottom of the screen.

Unless otherwise noted on this and all subsequent pages, copyright © 1980-2007 Mysti Easterwood, all rights reserved.