Random Order Revisited

Random Order Revisited:

Collage Jumps the Canvas to Multimedia Art

The Multimedia Art of Iona Miller, Laurence Gartel, and Bob Judd

By Iona Miller, 5/2004

Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes, and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its unifying panpsychic life-principle. Rather let us imagine the anima mundi as that particular soul-spark, the seminal image, which offers itself through each thing in its visible form. Then anima mundi indicates the animated possibilities presented by each event, as it is, its sensuous presentation as face bespeaking its interior image--in short, its availability to imagination, its presence as a psychic reality. Not only animals and plants ensouled as in the Romantic vision, but soul is given with each thing; God-given things of nature and man-made things of the street. ~ James Hillman

Robert Rauschenberg originally legitimized collage as a valid artform with his curatorial manifestos, The Art of Assemblage (1961) and Random Order (1963). He revisioned many presuppositions about art and older notions of the avant-garde in his own non-nihilistic oppositional strain. In fact, his notion of “random order” prophetically prefigures the scientific discovery of Chaos Theory by decades.

At his most ambitious, Rauschenberg hoped technology would allow him to create a machine to integrate spectators into its functioning, reactions setting it in motion transforming the participants. This is multimedia interactivity, with feedback and feedforward loops. He wanted to educate the predictable public to risk, including in the realm of sexuality. He wanted to reflect and modify the desires of the viewer.

Many of the goals of today’s multimedia “Know-Brow” artists are similar, aiming at embodied experience and pushing those insights further as CG images become more compelling. The larger question remains, “What does it mean to be human?” American film and video critic Gene Youngblood once wrote that “all art is experimental, or it isn’t art.” Innovation brings radically new frames of reference or discards frames entirely.

“Indeed the new materials artists use today have radically transformed art, and our globally-linked planet has brought the plurality of artistic forms, the diversity of styles, the ways in which statements about art can be formed and framed to the surface. Within this we find that the wide array of technical practices, this virtual reality theatre being one example, now make it easy to see that technology has had a tremendous impact on how we engage with art, how we engage with the question of what art is, and how we view the many ways artists exploit technology in our time.

“New tools, of course, have always resulted in new forms and, in the largest sense, we can say that technological innovations add imaginative possibilities to the artistic toolbox. When we place the results into a mix that includes social, cultural, political, and scientific contributions we find the enlarged vantage points new technologies offer are even more intriguing.

“Perhaps as striking as the number of ways in which artists use technology is that forms of experimentation, like artistic goals, vary widely today. Given this it is not surprising that, sometimes, technologically informed work simply excites our senses and, at other times, even an educated viewer may wonder how best to address a work he or she simply does not understand. There is also the challenge of engaging with work that invites us to be participants rather than passive spectators. And, of course, work presented in more traditional ways, so to speak, continues to raise traditional questions about what art is.

“One might ask: Is it the visceral quality of a work that excites us or will we more fully experience an artist’s intention if we read the work as a text and interpret the levels of meaning embedded in the project? Then, again, perhaps an interpretation based on ferreting out meaning compromises key elements that might be optically-centered or intended to emotionally-charge our experience?” ~Amy Ione, 2000, http://users.lmi.net/ione/sf3.html

Philosophically defined concepts such as ideology, aesthetics, meaning, emotion, embodied or situated cognition, complexity, anticipation, inspiration, signification, psychophysical coordination, emergentism, depiction, focal-point conflict, and other elusive models fit into the well-honed categories, bracketing themes such as picture organization and gestalt, metaphor, interpretation, subjectivity, enculturation, neural processing, language and history.

They depend crucially on our psychophysical constraints (compensation, accentuation, contrast, occlusion, dissonance, blur, grain, codes, projection, distortion, denotation, etc.) and enabling of our sensorimotor apparatus. They also depend on the ecological and sociocultural environment in which our apprehending and productive capacities come into being. Rhythm perception and production involve a complex, whole-body experience.

The avant-garde attempted to break down the false division between “art” and “life.” This medium has morphed again, and the message of the art and science of depiction morphs with it. The generative approach is multidisciplinary. Insightful connections and correlaries are described, not truths or explanations. Collage, montage, and assemblage have gone digital -- jumped the juxtaposed canvas into graffiti, into digital fine art, into art music as sampling and into animation, which draws from the entirety of art history stringing together its pastiche.

Early digital films of the1990’s such as “The Mind’s Eye,” “Beyond the Mind’s Eye,” and “The Gate,” are good examples of the later. Some of these vignettes draw explicitely from art history, using works of Picasso, allusions to Dali, Magritte, etc. They also draw on the genre of science-art. Their immediate predecesors were computer-generated dynamics, such as “Fractal Fantasy”, and a host of other mathematically driven animations like “Voyage To the Planets”.

Multimedia with its efficiency of rendering takes us beyond the aesthetic block of static art that hangs on the wall and becomes p(art) of our lives. Home studios and user-friendly programs and interfaces now allow individual digital fine artists, such as Laurence Gartel and filmmaker Bob Judd, to produce their own audio-visual visions on DVD. Trial and error process focus the artist’s eye on the current state of he image and his/her reactions to it. Trained image makers know what they need and choose the relevant tool.

Art history language is translative and descriptive, not generative. Validity has standards, but they become outmoded periodically, and must be revisioned to prefigure inevitable transformations. The aesthetics of juxtaposition is fundamental; it is a primary modality of simultaneous display that can either 1) temporarily shock, negate, or scandalize, (cultural value); or 2) lead toward lasting aesthetic and symbolic tensions (aesthetic and psychological value).

Juxtaposition can shock, surprise or inform. However, once the shock circuit [artifact of the DaDa era] is closed, the effect will not repeat again in the same individual. There is a world of difference between threat and shock or lasting aesthetic effect. Primary tropes tend to characterize the creations of those who work in this assemblage modality, revealing their mental shorthand, their private symbolic and iconographic lexicons.

The second form ignites the potential of disparate elements in a new ‘force field.’ It becomes a ‘strange attractor’ around which our eye and consciousness can circulate and recirculate. This is one form of the iconography of high art, Rauschenberg effectively argued. His was a challenging balance between aesthetic signification and spectatorial reception.

Collage can seem random or purposeful, assembling symbols or elements that “want to live with one another.” Some artists just ‘know’ what wants to live together, what is aesthetically pleasing and psychologically congruent or challenging, what juxtaposition still has something to say beyond simple pattern saturation. Minimalism, or classical juxtapositions of opposites, is too sparse for such rich, complex vision.

Rauschenberg continually rejected an aesthetic of nihilism, shock and negation through his whole career preferring complete esthetic freedom, eschewing art and historical battles already waged by predecesors. His works changed focus, evoked multiplicity, and multiple perspectives. He preferred the unresolved.

Neo-dada attitudes of the pre- and post WWII era have carried over into post Postmodern underground art with multimedia performance artists, who are socially disengaged or culturally and politically frustrated. Even this seemingly negative response to pain seeks to engage with “process” and “life” which is not separate from “art.” But, by definition, much of this “art”, often identified with the Fluxus movement, is not lasting, frequently consisting of artifacts or ephemera.

These edge and extreme artists are idiosyncratic and narcissistic, but generally not socially toxic, anarchistic or apolitical – but quite political and often spiritual in their statements, rhetoric, and performances. They have broken free of the museum and the artworld and found their own validation. But provocation can’t last indefinitely.

The history of the avant garde is discontinuous, turbulent, nonlinear – chaotic, just like its art. All of its metaphors strongly suggest the randomly punctuated rhythms of Chaos Theory. Its reference points reinforce this description, reiterating complex feedback loops, strange attractors, and producing big effects [such as radical cultural and political effects] from minor perturbations.

Iona Miller’s Psychogenesis:
http://www.geocities.com/iona_m
Updates: http://www.subcutaneous.org/Iona.html

In the 1990’s, Iona Miller created 400 posters, 24 x 36, from the most prevalent form of trash available – discarded magazines, the base of the garbage pyramid. While they are commonly used, she found a unique means of doing so. Of course, the strongest constraint of this medium is availability, listening to one’s inner voice on where to go when to find the raw materials. If you listen closely enough, knowing what to save and discard, they call to you.

Miller recycled this ‘found’ imagery into a series of self-therapeutic works, which she later discovered contained a virtual encyclopedia of psychological archetypes, the “strange attractors” of the psyche. She compiled the more symbolic, rather than merely aesthetic, of these process art works in Psychogenesis: A Journey through Inner Realms of Wonder and Imagination via Modern Iconography and Recycled Imagery, at the turn of the Millennium. http://zero-point.tripod.com/psycho/genesis.html

The avant garde alleged the praxis of life is to be renewed and renewal was the unrelated therapeutic purpose of this project. But this ‘art’ was uncontrived, naïve, claiming no commercial purpose or drive. It has nothing to do with the institutionalization of art nor discursive rules, nor social criticism, nor overarching historical frameworks.

Nor is it expressing the avant garde strategy of using shocking assault on the division of art and life. It had to do with getting what was inside out. It is life in motion and its strategy is to take the commonest most discarded thing, appropriate it and activate its healing talismanic potential, turn lead into gold, giving it a new potency beyond the transgressive power – a force that comes from the emergent power of the one true thing.

These works reappropriate the ordinary, the mundane and recontextualize it within a meaningful whole of which the viewer is an integral part. It is motivated by the urge to connect with the life stream, the flow of psychophysical energy or libido that animates us. It is driven by jealousy of time to fulfill its expressive goal before death finds another unreleasable hostage, for even as I am writing this I hear about the sudden death of a friend of 25 years. Now, I have gone digital and begun merging myself in this series, particularizing the images even further.

The Psychogenesis preface begins:

“Welcome to my world--a world ensouled and enlivened by imagery. A world of the seemingly familiar, yet peculiarly mysterious…the vast landscape of consciousness, fluid temporal movement, the undivided flux of creation. Many people have allowed me to tap into their dreams, their inner streams of realities, their nether realms. I conclude that our local existence is nested in a vast collective domain, abode of symbols, guiding archetypes, and myths."

We contain and are contained by Universe, and we are not different from that. This eternal world outside spacetime is the contact point for sacred time and space, the container for that which never was but is always happening. Since its source is complex, its coding is intense. Archetypal images enfold multiple meanings, modes, potentials, dimensions. The human psyche is inherently polytheistic, polymorphous, continually in motion.

We are experiencing not just the revival of ancient images, but also the harvest of all the world's cultures, belief systems, ways of knowing, seeing, doing, being. Gradually we discover that these stories are our own stories, that they drive the amplified rhythms of our own lives, depending on and enhancing us, filling us with a sense of the fractal resonance of the mythic life within our own.

In our modern culture every image, mundane or divine, has been used and abused. In the Postmodern Era there is no new iconography. In imagery and art, there is nothing new under the Sun. Everything, which can be used from religion, myth and symbolism, has been used and can only be recycled -- recycled like these collaged images from the trash-heap of society. The material for these images was literally someone's garbage. My task was therefore, as usual whether doing art or therapy, trying to turn alchemical lead into gold."

Here, in this animated world, images are lovingly juxtaposed with their complements and contrasts in naturally corresponding clusters of symbolism. They share the same metaphysical essence. Some images just want to "live together." Symbols held in the subtle net of a visual field become particularized imagery – they become personal, unique. The familiar is combined with the mysterious, reflecting a singular surrealistic vision. It embodies a truth rather than providing meaning.

The familiar becomes unfamiliar or “unknown” once again in the juxtaposed context. It helps us confront mystery, to stand in the Mystery. Reflectaphors, or reflective metaphors, repeat themselves in each image or poster, as well as jump from image to image--i.e., they echo themes among the various pieces as the series unfolds itself in self-similar fashion, like the iterations and reiterations of fractals.

Anima Mundi

So, Anima Mundi bids you welcome and acts as our tour-guide or hostess. She coaxes us deeper into the labyrinth of desire and fulfillment, where each of us finds our own resonance, the imagery, which speaks the loudest or clearest, or beguiles with the mere whisper.

To experience psychic reality means to be in soul, in the realm of the imagination, as if interacting with its inhabitants and locales. Inner visionary experience, be it wrathful or beatific, is an expression of soul. Through images the unconscious affects our worldview, health and relationships. Imagination not only conditions our reality – it is our reality. Soul is the middle world between gross materiality and the spiritual world.

Matter, spirit, and ego fight over the soul. Yet soul is a primary experience, virtually our only way of being. Each wants its unique fantasy to reign uppermost. So, the first task is to distinguish soul from spirit, so the body may unite with and be enlivened by both.

This is a psychological approach to art and life--giving voice to soul, living life as art. It means the return of a subjective feminine eye on reality. It means the enlivening of our bodies and the world of nature with imagination. When we see soul as the background of all phenomena, we become aware of the animating principle and develop a relationship with Her.

All images arise either from body processes (instinct) or psychic forms (spirit). Whether instinct-controlled or spirit-controlled, images are related to physiological processes. They appear psychologically as images, but work physiologically. They produce emotional or visceral manifestations, but not in any causal way. The images don't produce reactions. The image is the entire psychophysical gestalt.

The soul generates images unceasingly. Artists are able to capture and express some of that ceaseless flow. The soul lives on images and metaphor, especially epistemological metaphors--how we know what we know. These images form the basis of our consciousness. All we can know comes through images, through our multi-sensory perceptions. So, this soul always stays close to the body, close to corporeality, to what "matters."

Let the images come into your body. Embrace the image. This is art that is not separate from life.

Imagine Nothing:

Physical reality becomes psychic, and psyche becomes real--it "matters." The difference between soul and external things no longer matters. Inner and outer world are both real and in fact One World.

Image, metaphor and symbol bridge the abyss between matter and spirit. Images are the subtle net that unites symbols. They are integrated with feeling, mind and imagination. We can see soul in all natural objects. We can notice our fantasies constantly conditioning our experience of reality. Knowledge of spirit doesn't come from ideas, even revelations, but through a reflective process.

I began this series of collages shortly after the death of both of my parents three days apart from one another. Though I painted years earlier, I am not a trained artist, but a clinical hypnotherapist with a strong Jungian background in symbolism. Realizing I could use this for processing my own pain and grief, I began them as Art Therapy. I had originally made a few as examples of process work for my students in a college class I taught, called "An Introduction to Depth Psychology."

I found in my therapy practice a tendency for clients to present certain recurrent motifs, such as black holes, "blacker than black," tunnels, images of chaotic breakdown, etc. Prior, I had been writing a book called Dreamhealing, about Asklepian dream healing, a technique developed around the metaphors of the then-new science of Chaos Theory which is now known as Complexity. In this deepening process, the client becomes each element the imagination presents in turn. Immersed in this process imagery, I sought to create some visual images, which might intimate this experiential material.

So, my posters are gestalts—waking dreams, where all elements are co-temporaneous, existing in time holographically--presented together even though they image a dynamic process. Each of them constitutes a shamanic dream journey--a full immersion in the inner world. They are postcards from the inner journey, snapshots of milestones along the Way.

None of them are contrived beforehand -- all were emergent experiences of just letting the images work themselves. No theme was determined in advance. The posters themselves dictate some of what must happen on them. In order for them to appear seamless, I had to hide or disguise the seams in various fashions. Yes, sometimes "less is more," but most often more was needed to insure a seamless quality. This was not a project where minimalism could ever prevail.

Part of the burden and joy of working in this medium is using what one has, or can find, what is spontaneously available. Jungian psychology uses the notion of the bricoleur, the craftsman who works with that which is at hand, including self-imposed rules. This includes the psychological situation as well as the materials. My grief work accentuated the death-rebirth motif, which is ubiquitous in therapy in any case.

In their formative stages, the elements were not fixed on the canvas, and sometimes due to electrostatics, heat, and gravity "things moved of their own accord." Almost invariably, this was an improvement over any intuitive or deliberate placement I might have made. So, it was a process of flowing with the animating process, rather than dictating the process.

Later, they organized themselves into larger groups. There were obvious thematic connections for some of them, but others were not so obvious until there were hundreds of them. Their order has no relationship to the time of assembly. I have never re-sorted them, but for some reason the over-all story of the text for each leads seamlessly into the next, providing a narrative stream. The text for each piece suggested itself long after completion through a recognition process, or sometimes immediately by synchronicity. They assembled themselves and with one another by a process I can only describe as "synarchy."

The awesome pandaemonium of imagery flowed forth spontaneously and my ego could not fight its way free. Rather, I had to surrender to the forces that often crossed my subjective will. I was a slave to the process for some time, producing several pieces a week for long periods of time, and sometimes even doing more than one per day.

The mystery images are a compelling source of transformation and healing, and it worked! The physician healed herself, or rather opened to the inner healer and let time take care of the rest.

Postmodern Baphomet

[The Psychogenesis poster originals are 24 x 36, and are assembled completely by hand. No computer enhancement has been used on any of them, except as I have later done (2000--) combining them with my Digital Diva “Faux-tos”. All were done between 1994 and 1999.]

Laurence Gartel: The Digital Underground

http://www.gartelmuseum.com

Though trained as an artist from youth, Gartel came up in the mid 70’s from his native Bronx, mingling with both mainstream art and underground personalities. His pioneering work in digital fine art is rooted in his apprenticeship with mentor videographer, Nam June Paik. Graffiti artist, Keith Haring was his classmate. For years Gartel struggled, knocking on many doors in the artworld to find acceptance and validation for his new medium, with mixed responses.

In the beginning of his arc there was still no PC computer, and he had to invent procedures that quickly drew the attention of established artists. Thus, the young Gartel, now the godfather of digital fine art, wound up teaching American master Warhol how to create digital secrets on the old Amiga computers before there was software for effects.

Collage is story telling. The puzzle pieces are all elements that make up the whole. One picture does not describe the story. Success of a good artwork has a succinct message that is embedded with multiple views. Thus each picture is carefully chosen, and carefully placed. It is the placement that makes someone a true genius of story telling. Place an element in the wrong place, wrong size, it sends a completely incorrect message. As in music if the sound is placed in the wrong location, the score has no order, and thus the music sounds awful. Same with visuals. If the collaged item is put in a position that doesn't make sense it is hard on the eyes. Collage should have a flow, moving from one part of the picture to another. Looking at the over all image from a distance you see a sea of color. That color should take you on a visual journey. Moving the eye from one location to another. Again, like a ballerina moving from one spot on the dance floor to another, the movement should be graceful. I would tend to think, that if a collage artist couldn't write something like the above, then they have no sense of why they are developing the pictures that they do. It would then be completely random with no thought pattern whatsoever. What's happening in art today, is that visual skill is getting lost, and good taste is slowly diminishing. The untrained eye prevails just like the unskilled palate of a wine taster maneuvers his/her way down the spirits aisle of their favorite liquor store.

Laurence Gartel, Comments on Collage / Montage, May 20, 2004

He has constantly expanded his repertoire of skills keeping pace with the digital revolution and has now returned to his roots with digital movies that are also an acoustic experience. The new medium plays in home computers, DVD players, or stereos. His stimulating visual imagery is combined with musical mixes by DJ’s from around the world, such as DJ Laboratory from New York and DJ Alura from Chicago. "GARTEL: DANCE / TRANCE and other LIVING THINGS" DVD is scheduled for release in Fall 2004.

As a photographer, he sees subcultures offering a unique opportunity for the visual artist, whether a chance to historically document the rapidly changing culture of fetish, the music scene, the South Beach club scene, and even world-class motorcycle rallies. Gartel’s Fetish series is not as heavily collaged as some of his past series, but are still in that genre. His work has often been semi autobiographical, emerging from his experiences.

Gartel: The Art Of Fetish (2003) -

“A full-length documentary film about an artist's journey into the fetish world. Long-time international digital artist and photographer, Gartel has taken a gr! ea! t leap into a very intriguing subculture - FETISH. His obsession and fascination with the people, the practices and the lifestyle led him to shoot over 20,000 digital pictures with his camera, from which he created a series of very provocative artworks. But the other side of this documentary is the people we meet along the way. This documentary gives the viewer a very rare entrance into a world that is often kept behind closed doors. Witness revealing interviews, shocking "performance" footage, irreverent and candid moments with the our subjects, at home, at fetish clubs, at parties as they delve into the activities that bring them pleasure - food fetishes, medical play and human suspension to name a few. This documentary is packed with visual stimulation, eroticism, music, enthralling people & the art of GARTEL.”

For Gartel, these images and the explorations he has while he captures them are all grist for the mill. His unique understanding of the history of art informs and infuses his work with an eye trained for impact and meaning. It has punch, capturing each unique moment at the climax of a tale. Every picture tells a story, as the saying goes, and his latest digital story is ‘Slashers’, which repeats Gartel’s commitment to collage, new digital forms, and multimedia.

Gartel’s’s ‘Slashers’ – Cut Ups from Lotus Land

“The first question anyone asks an artist about his/her work is: Where did the inspiration come from? Where did the ideas emanate from? So in looking at the overall series, one might inquire: "What happened to you?" (Hahaha.....) Nothing really...but I believe that an artist's work, if he/she is in tune with the world, or is sensitive to people's current emotions, depicts the state of affairs that is currently taking place. It is not for nothing that Andy Warhol depicted Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe, or the Watts Riots. It is the same as Otto Dix painting the horrors of both World Wars and just as valid as Bruegel's depiction of peasant life during the Renaissance. Truth is, every artist of any great measure says in his own personal style what is taking place in society.

Alas, what IS going on in the world right now? History will look back and see this series and look at our culture, asking what is going on? - A cyber world for one, where people are one face over the internet, and another face in reality. It can also be two faces in reality as well. America's President George Bush saying one thing, but things happening behind the scenes. Are we not slashing faces in reality, invading a country and tearing apart their culture? What is fact and what is real? "SLASHERS" illustrates the answer of people that have been lied to. So the psychology here is NOT what is going on with me the artist personally, but reactionary, to what is taking place in the world. This is first and foremost. The art is an emotional out pouring of false images, facades, and sense of isolationism. Like a normal "GARTEL" work, it is filled with interaction with so many puzzle pieces, like all my collage,s talking and communicating to one another. Here in "SLASHERS" the subject is completely alone. Beckoning for reply. Talking outward. It is indeed a sad state of affairs, that we live in a time when there is no sense of fellow mankind support and comfort. We needed a tragedy for people to ban together. Almost three years later since 9/11, the reverse has taken place. There is no sense of community but only of solitude.”

Looking at the art, there is pathos. All that might have been beautiful is now torn apart, in a post war view of devastation. Each face could represent a country, a city, a community, an individual. Once magnificent, now disfigured and taking on a new persona. Beauty and ugly, but the look of desperation and desire. They each have a voice. Living in the region of flora and fauna, and perhaps the unofficial "Riviera of America," no one would ever feel the penetration of this pain. All appears to be beautiful, elegant and pristine. High rise buildings with marble lobbies, oak wood appointments, and magnificent furnishings cloud our view of what's behind the door to the rest of the world. The opulence of wealth is abundant in the area I am surrounded by. "SLASHERS" would be considered an "amusement" for no other reason. To the rest of the world, it is a flag raised, in the form of understanding the human condition outside this lovely peninsula called Florida.”

“Everywhere the blades turn, in every thought the butchery, and it is raw where I wander; but you hide me in the shelter of your name, and you open the hardness to tears.” ~Leonard Cohen, ‘Book of Mercy’

Lucio Fontana slashed his first canvas with a razor in 1958, only a couple of years after the birth of Laurence Gartel, <http://www.gartelmuseum.com>. Fontana's raw, vigorous, and richly expressive works overturned the conventions of art and challenged existing ideas about the role of the artist in the age of rapid technological development. Gartel has done the same for the 21^st century geist; he has “returned with a vengeance,” staging a bloodless coup with his ‘Slashers Series’ that opens new multimedia artistic territory.

Fontana’s gold slashed and perforated canvases echo the alchemical quest of transforming lead into gold, everyday neurosis into deeper spiritual authenticity. Gold is inherently appealing and seductive, but spiritual gold remains even more elusive than monetary success for most of us. It lies not in our famous names, our house and gardens, our vain accomplishments or escapist travels, our garages, our designer labels, or brainwashed tastes and opinions. In this quest, we cannot dig deep enough. The alleged surface is gashed not with senseless Postmodern violence but with surgical precision that seeks to release that which would be born anew.

Like Fontana, the prolific Gartel is driven by the spirit of exploration, constantly questioning and extending the boundaries of his own practice, his own digital media, confounding expectations, provoking and amazing an ever-growing audience. Gold, suggesting richness and light, implies a votive or spiritual aura. But it is just one color in Gartel’s bold digital palette of living light. Real inspiration comes in an unexpected instant as a mysterious flowering after silent incubation – a stab in the dark that surrepetitiously adds multifaceted dimensions underlying the screen presence.

What Futurist Fontana did to breakthrough to underlying artistic concepts, digital pioneer Gartel does to break through the thin veneer of human personality, trapped as it is in its 21^st century cocoon. The deeper, unseen dimension of authentic personality lies comatose, buried beneath the commercial trappings or armour of the social mask or persona, which ‘protects’ us from our own humanity…from that which would cut through our spiritual materialism, exposing our tender cores, which we guard and adorn so zealously with the ‘lead’ of surgical falsifications, programmed mediocrity, and fashionable conformity.

Moving beyond his photographic investigations, Gartel slashes through these spiritually vacuous, bloodless corpses -- “Lotus Eaters”, somnambulistic consumers mesmerized by the fool’s gold of earthly treasures. GARTEL’s ‘Slashers’ mirror the internal splits in our psyches, the wounds society inflicts on us by confronting us with unresolvable cognitive dissonance. We are caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of a clashing call to a higher humanity and the vortex of crass consumerism born of global cultural imperialism that has become our true religion, imposed by a heartless media machine and pathologically-driven peer pressures – the very opposite of integration, wholeness, authenticity.

Gartel’s visual syntax slashes into the last unexploited space left, the interior of our humanity where we keep our deepest secrets and desires, opening a way back to soul that cannot come from the contemplation of vacant eyes. He invites us – with an uncharacteristic minimalism -- to look below the surface, beyond the snares of entrapment in the so-called “good life,” such as his own in sunny Southern Florida. Does he seek to awaken us from the persistent dream of conformity, of pointless striving, of meaningless rage, of despair over a materialistic world that has stopped evolving and is heading toward the Abyss?

Gartel’s bloodless slashing is not malicious, but revelatory. Neither theatrical or farcical, his aggression is not toward the canvas nor the subjects. It reflects not the violence of Gartel’s soul, but his compassion. It is not a displaced attack against himself, but an attack on outmoded form. He brings the hyper-material playfulness characteristic of all his work to this new collection. In a multimedia twist, Gartel’s societal portraits ‘speak for themselves’ both figuratively and literally. The images seem contained by the screen but their deep cover (underlying ground) contains the intensity of the whole world.

In this way he is also revealing a metaphor of global cyberculture, where image is everything. Net life has added another dimension to our existence – the “chip body.” Slashers are not portraits of ‘real’ people, but archetypal embodiments. “Our double sided cyber/human selves come across the internet, revealing our second selves. Perhaps Gartel’s genius lies not only in seeing it and feeding it back to us with a scintillating mobius of morphing imagery, but also in living it.

We decorate our egos so they look a little nicer. We become secretly superior though, in fact, parasitical. The spiritual ego is subtle, cunning, superior, secretive. It develops because ego has to live somewhere until it dissolves. Authenticity and playfulness are the antidote. Authenticity and playfulness give you the space to face yourself as you are and to confront your darkness and internal splits consciously. This conscious self-encounter brings purity indirectly, without the hypocritical burden of a spiritually pure ego.

Gartel’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Joan Whitney Payson Museum, Long Beach Museum of Art, Princeton Art Museum, PS 1, Norton Museum and in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of American History and the Bibliotheque Nationale. His biography for his pioneering efforts is included in "Who's Who," "Who's Who in the East," "Who's Who in America," "Who's Who in American Art," and "Who's Who in the World."

Bob Judd, Interactive Animation:

http://www.subcutaneous.org

Bob Judd began working in digital media in 1993 and now hosts Subcutaneous Productions. Both cinematography and electronic animation, as well as interactive webart, help to mirror the inner life of the post-Transgressive filmmaker.

Nothing other term so clearly captures the living essence of the psyche as the aptly named ANIMAtion. The anima is not only the “inner feminine” of man and his soul guide according to Jung, 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 montage 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.

Judd has worked in both the corporate and maverick art arenas. He was a lip-synch animator for the smash comedy show and movie, ‘Southpark’ during its first two years. Disenchanted with the Hollywood factory environment, he returned to his own vision, creating award-winning films (one judged by Coppola).

Cinema of Transgression as an invisible movement, pioneered by Nick Zed, came out of NYC with roots in the ‘60s, including the film work of Warhol. Its risk-taking extreme thematics, aesthetic of shock and humour, Dionysian sexual and political alignment, confrontational nihilism, psychodrama, and liberatory strategy warranted this new category. Its therapeutically subversive influences included Warhol, with roots in Dadaism and Nietsche, combining it with Punk. It represented a clear break with ‘70s avant garde film schools. This expanded cinema, including its use as a backdrop for performers, offered transformation through transgression: quasi-existential anarchism.

Judd’s contributions to this contemporary underground cinema include: ‘Down’ (2000), ‘Bovine Vendetta’ (shown on SciFi Channel), and the ironic ‘Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America.’ His work is covered in the Bible of underground cinema, Deathtripping: the Cinema of Transgression, by Jack Sargeant (1999, Creation Books). Judd has returned to dreams for some of his inspiration while remaining true to transgressive sexual and political subversiveness.

I was urged by my high school teachers to go into the arts, but it would be like "taking basket-weaving" according to my father, so I began college as a Journalism major. I found Journalism incredibly boring and quickly changed my major to "Intermedia" one of the newest art majors that were available at ASU at the time. I then noticed that it was much the same as Journalism except I enjoyed what I was doing with the core art classes and I especially liked Art History. I found that creating art was much like being a "reporter of culture". If I could try to express what is happening RIGHT NOW as an American Artist I would have to create versions of 'The Scream' because THAT is the only thing that I can report that I hear on the news --- one massive primal "scream of consciousness". All I see in the world when I view media news is nothing but pain, war and division. This is what I must report. I think you'll see that I ONLY use collage even in my drawings. I always would look at images from different sources and draw them as one composition. Political juxt-a-position with sexual and ancient and medical imagery has ALWAYS been there and likely stay there because that is the way I like to communicate. I don't really see any other way except for my newer "Narsissy" series that are all self portraits where I do the same thing. Like the tumor in my lung that I put Dahmer's dog skulls underneath to scare away any malignancy. I think it worked because after the PET scan there was no cellular activity. Collage work on self is self-surgery.

There are some filmmakers who have produced work which, whilst having no relationship to the Cinema of Transgression, nevertheless explores and negates contemporary taboos, moreover they do so in their own style, and by mobilizing their own iconography. The following are merely a soupcon of underground filmmakers currently producing works that may be regarded as transgressive due to its engagement wih cultural, social, and psychological taboos.

These filmmakers include Bob Judd who has directed two award-winning experimental shorts using digitized video and computer animation, Bovine Vendetta (1998) and Jesse Helms is Cleaning Up America (1999). Inspired by a dream, Bovine Vendetta features footage of a house-fly intercut with a cow’s head. (“a 4-H competitor and winning heifer at the Arizona State Fair, 1996,” states Judd) on which a human mouth is superimposed. These images are intercut with effected stills and dissolves of people in preparation for elective surgery. A voice is frantically discussing the absolute state of the now. The voice, the audience are informed in the closing credits is that of pop icon Charles Manson. The film – Judd suggests – is a “satire on people’s infatuation with Manson.

Judd’s second video Jesse Helms Is Cleaning Up America (1999), is a satirical look at ‘Helms’ ‘war on the arts’. Like its predecesor the film was dream-inspired, although Judd acknowledges the film was also motivated by his own desire to attack the Senator. This film once again focuses on dislocated body parts; legs, lips, and penises mix with morphing images of Helms’ head and squirming maggots. The soundtrack was to have been supplied by Hustler founder Larry Flint, but unfortunately this was not possible, and Judd utilized Don Bolles’s audio-archive as a soundtrack source. Like the Cinema of Transgression filmmakers, Judd’s work confronts America with the matrices of death and sex that lay confined within the darkest recesses of the media psyche.

Judd’s third millennium shows include web-based (www.onenationundergods.com) interactive computer installations (blown up screens with Proxima projectors) co-created with multimedia phenom and digital diva, Iona Miller, in Gartel’s Miami Cyberotica show (Dec, ’03). He reprised the show, ‘Forbidden Fruits & Technoshamanism’ in downtown Phoenix (Febuary ’04) at Icehouse Gallery with a screening of his films.

Judd is currently composing a website for gay icons, The Cockettes, collaborating with founding members Kreemah Ritz and Sweet Pam. He sees himself, and his alter persona ‘Precious’, as the spiritual heir to the legacy of ‘Angel of Light’, Hibiscus, who shared his deep love of free-spirited Isadora Duncan, a cultural harbinger of what became the ‘underground’ spirit. He considers himself an ‘Isadorable.’

The Tell Tale Art

What a picture or dynamic multisensory image means to the viewer is strongly dependent on past experience and knowledge. In this respect the visual image is not only a representation of “reality” but also a symbolic system. Language distinguishes between the functions of expression, arousal and description, or symptom, sign, and symbol. It is important to distinguish the expression of an emotion from its arousal, the symptom from the signal, especially in the “communication” of feeling.

Communications may be symptomatic of emotive states or they may function as signals to release certain reactions. Human language and art has developed the descriptive function to inform others of a particular state of affairs past, present, or future, observable or distant, actual or conditional, visionary or imaginal.

The visual image is supreme in its capacity for arousal, while its use for expressive purposes is problematic, and unaided it may require a matching statement for clarity or illumination to convey the creator’s intent or experience. Art can fail to communicate its message because the viewer lacks the experience or context or code to “get it,” as the artist saw or intended it.

We are “programmed” to respond to certain visual signals; but this arousal function of sights is not confined to definite images. Configurations of lines and colors have the potential to influence our emotions. What is usually described as communication is concerned with matter rather than with mood.

Like verbal messages, images are vulnerable to the random interference engineers call “noise.” They use the device of redundancy to overcome this hazard. In art, this redundancy of imagery and themes creates the “style” of the artists and the body of work reflects the issues and concerns to be communicated.

The chance of a correct reading of the image is governed by three variables: the code, the caption, and the context. Jointly the media of word and image increase the probability of a correct reconstruction or effect on the beholder. The mutual support of language and image facilitates memorizing or memorability.

The use of two independent channels guarantees easier reconstruction in the mind’s eye. The image works in conjunction with other factors to convey a clear-cut message that can be translated into words. But the real value of imagery is its capacity to convey information that cannot be coded in any other way, frequently through the use of allusion or metaphors of known objects or entities.

The information extracted from an image (in particular, an archetypal image) can be quite independent of the intentions of its maker. However faithful an image or reproduction conveys visual information, the process of selection always reveals the maker’s interpretation of what he considers relevant.

The “TELLTALE PICTURE” requires that interpretation on the part of the image-maker must always be matched by the interpretation of the viewer. It is only when we are confronted with a totally unfamiliar kind of structure that we are aware of the puzzle element in any representation.

The easier it is to separate the code from the content, the more we can rely on the image to communicate a particular kind of information. A selective code that is understood to be a code enables the maker of the image to filter our certain kinds of information and to encode only those feature that are of interest to the recipient. Such renderings are transitions from a representation to diagrammatic mapping and the value of the later process for the communication of information needs no emphasis.

What is characteristic of the map is the addition of a key to the standardized code. It is only a small step from the abstraction of the map to a chart or diagram showing relations that are originally not visual but temporal or logical. A network of logical dependencies (images held in the network of a piece), the diagram will always spread out before our eyes what a verbal description could only present in a string of statements. The image is non-linear.

Reading an image like the reception of any other message, is dependent on prior knowledge of possibilities, we can only recognize what we know, consciously or a priori from the unconscious. Mysticism and alchemy have often employed imagery or visual symbols to appeal to seekers after revelations. To such seekers the symbol is felt to both convey and conceal more than the medium of rational discourse.

One of the reasons for this persistent feeling is the diagrammatic aspect of the symbol, its ability to convey relations more quickly and more effectively than a string of words. A symbol can become the focus of meditation. If familiarity breeds contempt, unfamiliarity breeds awe. A strange symbol suggests a hidden mystery, and if its known to be ancient, it is felt to embody some esoteric lore too sacred to be revealed to the multitudes.

Art is not produced merely for aesthetic effects. It is the arousal function that determines the use of the medium. The cult image and its shrine mobilize the emotions that belong to the prototype. The power of such images is stronger than any rational consideration.

There are few who can escape the spell of a great cult image in its setting. The mnemonic power of the image means the power of symbolism to transform a metaphor into a memorable image through vivid portrayal. Allegorical images turn an abstract thought into a picture, a poetic evocation of feelings.

There is a contrast between the prose and the poetry of image-making. The Romantic concept of genius stressed the function of art, as self-expression, but the expressive symptoms of emotions are to be distinguished in the theory of communication from the dimension of arousal or description.

The Creative Process

"The science of art sounds like an oxymoron because art is about individual human experience, creating originality. Science seems to be dealing with universal principles - the opposite," he says. "But I believe the brain has evolved principles that allow you to deal efficiently with the visual world. They allow you to capture objects, identify objects and mate with objects." ~ V. Ramachandran

Innovation in either the sciences or arts occurs only when a single mind perceives in disorder a deep new unity. Science is an attempt to control our surroundings by entering into them and understanding them from inside, and in a subjective reality, so is art and mysticism. Both employ the processes of discovery, invention and creation. A contemplative civilization values mystic immersion in nature and the immanent emptiness within all nature (the ground state), the union with what already exists.

Art is a personal, though often anonymous creation. And scientific discovery may be as well. It has been suggested by Lazslo (1994, The “Genius Hypothesis”: Exploratory Concepts for a Scientific Understanding of Unusual Creativity) that genius is the result of collective conscious and unconscious forces impacting an individual:

“Unusual acts of artistic and scientific creativity — associated in the popular mind with the concept of "genius" — do not have a satisfactory explanation in terms of the cerebral or mental processes of individuals. The 'genius hypothesis' suggests that such acts of creativity involve an interaction between the mind of the creative individual and other minds, bent on similar creative endeavors. The interaction envisaged in the hypothesis relies on the spontaneous transmission of the crucial Einfall that catalyzes the creative acts. Following the presentation of pertinent evidence culled from the fields of cultural development, scientific discovery and artistic production, the mechanism of transference is illustrated with the analogy of networked computers. It is also shown to shed light on what Jung called 'archetypal experience.' The phenomenon of instantaneous spatiotemporal connectivity is not limited to human brain-minds but has counterparts in quantum physics and evolutionary biology. Its explanation poses one of the greatest challenges to the contemporary natural sciences.” (Lazslo)

Both science and art seek to find the design of nature in her detail. It requires inductive thinking followed into the detail of nature, and our nature to develop visionary insight. Theories are imaginative choices, which often outstrip the given facts; the same might be said for the manifestos of various art movements which are self-defining. They are not based on logical deduction, but on induction.

Induction images more than there is ground for and creates relations, which at bottom can never be verified. Every induction is a speculation and it guesses at a unity which facts we know suggest. Every innovator has a particular way of looking at and arranging the facts, guided by a sense of aesthetic unity and beauty. Science shows us that nature has a unity, and this unity makes her laws seem beautiful in their simplicity. Our demand that nature be lawful is a demand for unity. We seek it instinctively.

We become creative, whether as artistes, scientists or mystics, when we find a new unity in the variety of nature, a likeness between things (symbols or images) that were not thought alike before, and this yields a sense of richness and of understanding. The creative mind looks for unexpected likenesses, new analogies, and engages the whole personality.

Laws of Art?

Even if 90 per cent of art is culturally driven, 10 per cent may be driven by universal laws linked to the way the brain has evolved to process vision, according to Vilayanur Ramachandran, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, San Diego, author of The Emerging Mind and one of the world's leading neuroscientists.

The eight laws
of artistic experience

1
The ‘peak shift principle’ makes exaggerated elements attractive

2
Isolating a single cue helps to focus attention

3
Perceptual grouping makes objects stand out from background

4
Contrast is reinforcing

5
Perceptual ‘problem solving’ is also reinforcing

6
Unique vantage points are suspect

7
Visual ‘puns’ or metaphors enhance art

8
Symmetry is attractive

The starting point for Ramachandran is the fact that the brain actively processes and interprets visual signals. "The eyes are not cameras. They don't take an image, send it down the cable and get it displayed on a screen in the brain. Clearly the image is encoded in the form of nerve impulses.”

"It's a symbolic description in the brain, the analogy of which would be a piece of paper on which you write something about your house. The squiggles of ink bear no resemblance to your house but a person can decode the letters and conjure up an image of your house.

"The brain is using a similar code, which is where art comes in. Humans have art because the brain actively must process the signals coming from the retina." Artists manipulate, distort and exaggerate images to optimally titillate the 30 areas of the brain dealing with vision.

Art and science may likewise bridge the conflict between paradoxical analogies, between poetic metaphors, and enrich our understanding of the world without completing it. The images we create depend on our factual grasp of the relation between the symbols in the image. Power is contained in conjoining minute particulars, which denote the change of scale between the metaphor and its application. This is the value of originality.

We expect artists and scientist to be forward-looking; to fly in the face of what is established, to create new paradigms, not what is acceptable, but what will become accepted. Like art, science is preoccupied less with facts than with relations, less with numbers than with arrangement.

New vision is the continuing search for structure. A theory is the creation of unity in what is diverse by the discovery of unexpected likenesses. In all of them innovation is pictured as an act of imagination, a seeing of what others have not yet seen. It is indeed, a creative observation of outer or inner worlds: "The Tell-tale Art."

Art practice and appreciation are generally considered products of human culture, rather than areas for scientific investigation. Yet, perhaps because art that is quintessentially exquisite speaks so deeply to us, it is difficult to see human culture as a map for one’s individual experience with art. No doubt this explains why analyses of art have traditionally been closely tied to aesthetic theories, formal analysis, and philosophical discourse. These kinds of investigations, however, tend to evaluate works of art in and of themselves and offer a stark contrast to the views of many who research and practice art. Ideas, aesthetics, and formal qualities, while easily fit into the scientific quest for universals, often lose sight of the dynamism, complexity, and richness of art. Moreover, as the literature shows, in recent decades art historians and artists have increasingly challenged the legitimacy of the aesthetic/formal agenda. Instead, the field has expanded to include a closer examination of complex social, economic, religious, and political influences. This art discourse, while addressing some of the limitations of the
aesthetic/philosophical framework, often diffuses the cognitive contributions that accompany art practice and art appreciation.

Now, with the explosion of brain research on cognition, perception, and sensation it seems a third approach is emerging. Scientists/philosophers/psychologists are beginning to explore the nature of art in ways that include neurobiological and neuropsychological questions. What is exemplary within this is the way researchers of the brain have begun to open a door for all of us to re-think our ideas about art. ~Amy Ione, 2002

Bibliography

A. Print

Mieke Bal, Seeing Signs: The Use of Semiotics for the Understanding of Visual Art, from Cheetham, M., Holly, M.A., Moxey, K. (1998), The Subjects of Art History, CUP

Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image and Myth Today, from Evans, J. & Hall, S. (1999), Visual Culture, the Reader, London

Kemal, S. and Gaskell, I. (1991), The Language of Art History, Cambridge, esp. ch. 1. Another difficult read is Mitchell, WJT (1994), Picture Theory, Chicago, but try to tackle at least ch 1, The Pictorial Term. Also Bryson, N. (1981), Word and Image, London, 1981, esp. ch 1, Discourse, Figure or his (1991) ed., Visual Theory: Practice and Interpretation, London and Shapiro, M., On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art in Innis, R. ed.: Semiotics: an Introductory Anthology. London, 1981; and Krauss, R., In the name of Modern Culture, Hebdige, D., Post-Modernism and the Politics of Style’in Frascina, F. and Harris, J. (1992), Art in Modern Culture, OU. A helpful survey of semiotic thinking is Alex Potts, Sign, in Nelson, R., Shiff, R. (1996) Critical Terms for Art History, Chicago. Bryson, N., Bal, M. offered an influential defence of the use of semiotics in Semiotics and Art History: A Discussion of Context and Senders in Preziosi pp.242-256. For discourse theory and Michel Foucault (who stands a little outside some of these debates), see the excellent Rose, G. (2001) Visual Methodologies, London, chapters 6 and 7.

Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999).

Journal of Consciousness Studies 7 (2000).

Richard Gregory, John Harris, Priscilla Heard and David Rose, eds. The Artful Eye. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Dominic Lopes. “Pictures and the Representational Mind.” Lecture, University of Houston, November 1999.

Jennifer A. McMahon. Aesthetics and Cognition in Visual Beauty: Towards a Unified Theory of Beauty. Manuscript, 2000.

Daniel N. Osherson, Stephen M. Kosslyn, and John M. Hollerbach. Visual Cognition and Action. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990.

V. S. Ramachandran and William Hirstein. “The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience.” Journal of Consciousness Studies 6 (1999): 15-51.

Ilona Roth and Vicki Bruce. Perception and Representation. Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1995.

Robert L. Solso. Cognition and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994.

Semir Zeki. Inner Vision: An Exploration of Art and the Brain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

B. Websites

Neurosciences on the Internet, ed. Neil A. Busis.

Cognitive Science, Humanities, and the Arts, ed. Cynthia Freeland.

Sensorimotor Control Laboratory, ed. Chris Miall. Explores the research for The Painter’s Eye, an exhibition from 16 April-13 June, 1999.

Synesthesia and the Synesthetic Experience.

Art and the Mind-Brain, Syllabus, Mark Rollins.

The Whole Brain Atlas, ed. Keith A. Johnson and J. Alex Becker.

VisCogNet: Visual Cognition Research Links, ed. from Daniel Simons.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Transdisciplinarian, Iona Miller is a writer, hypnotherapist and multimedia artist, living in Southern Oregon, USA. She has developed extensive groundbreaking work on the relationship of chaos theory and negentropy to emergent paradigm shift or worldviews in philosophy, cosmology, biophysics, medicine, experiential psychotherapy, creativity, art, and society. Many of these articles are collected in her annual journal Chaosophy, available on her homepage.