“Eidetic Bush” text by Andrea Morucchio, 2003, eng

_ The important task of all art is to destroy the static equilibrium by establishing a dynamic one that has destructive-constructive quality. _ (Piet Mondrian, Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art and other Essays, Schultz, New York 1945)

_ Today, the avant-garde is so completely controlled and domesticated within the Empire’s framework that a whole new series of different regulating and resistance models must be found to counterbalance the Empire’s globalization attempts. _ (Okwi Enwezor, Documenta 11, Platform 5, Exhibition Catalogue, Cantz Ed., Ostfildern-Ruit 2002)

_ The avant-garde, which used to be the cultural ‘cutting edge’, an oppositional or transgressive counterculture that possessed the deftness to rearrange the terms of our culture or inspire fundamental reform, has been defeated and rendered impotent by its absorption into the mainstream. _ (Ronald Jones, as quoted by Suzi Gablik in, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1991)

_ The ’70s represented not the last flowering of a new consciousness, but rather the last incandescent expression of the old idealism of autonomy. After this no cultural expression would be outside the commodity system…a crystalline world responsive only to numerical imperatives, formal manipulation and financial control. _ (Peter Halley, Notes on Abstraction, from Arts Magazine, New York, Vol. 61, June/Summer 1987)

Values imposed by the contemporary ‘Empire’, based on mere economic logic, are replacing human values, _ intrinsic values have been replaced by simulated, synthetic values. Just as the church provided the universal spirit for the feudal age, the abstract value systems of business management provide the universal spirit in the current age. _ (P. Graham, 14 Theses on Future Research into the Impacts of New Media, Real Time, Open City, Sydney, no.52, 2003)

False values spun by the system-dependent media are justifying pre-emptive wars, ecological disasters and intolerable repressions of opposition movements. The level of torpor, of cultural conformity into which the individual consciousness has sunk within the world’s democracies is due to the annihilation of the ability to assess events autonomously.

_ We use the communication medium, the culture medium to preserve mass drabness and indifference, to hold the masses in a subaltern function. _ (Luigi Nono, Musica e Massa popolare, forum, Music School Cimarosa, Avellino, recorded 1978)

We are controlled by those who control the media. _ TV topicality insidiously tends to increasingly become a normative, prescriptive order, by manipulating and treating situations which are subsequently dished up as real. _ ( Renè Burger, Verso un Paradigma mobile?, Km/n, EFFE srl Perugia, Gennaio 2001)

‘Videocracies’ have actually replaced formal democracies, thus making public opinion more easily controllable. _ Passivity in front of TV spectacle is the very opposite of waking up, looking at events critically, seeing reality and feeling responsible – that is to say, responding to what is going on. _ ( Suzie Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1991)

Capital is the now-dominant form of ‘socius’, the register for organising bodies as conduits of desire. The organised desiring-body in capitalism is the subjugated group of the human. Prior to capital, the major forms of socius were territories of tribes or clans. _ Socius and organised bodies are always held together by some dominant spectacle. With the morphing of socius from territory into capital, spectacle has morphed from ritual body-marking, into the ubiquitous surveillance known as panopticon. _ ( Deluze G. and Guattari F. as quoted by K. Kang, Microcosmos and Micropolitics, Real Time, Sydney, n. 52, 2003)

At this point, it’s rapidly becoming obvious that the achievments of modern technocratic society have been a mixed blessing, and that _ our profit-maximazing, competitive attitudes will have have to be transformed, because the present values of growth, power and domination are not sustainable. _ (Suzie Gablik, op.cit. ) _

If we consider the freedom of artistic creation not just as a road of escape but as a necessary means for discovering and perhaps even changing the features of the world we live in, how can contemporary artistic production respond to the demands for cultural renewal and change? So what are the models for regulation and resistance? How can we exorcize, _ …the nightmare of materialism, which has turned the life of the universe into an evil, useless game which holds the awakening soul still in its grip. _ ( Wassily Kandisky, The Art of Spiritual Harmony, Constable, London 1914 )

_ We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious folly of these times. _ ( Jean Arp, Arp on Arp, Viking, New York 1970)

I believe Suzie Gablik may have some answers: _ The holistic paradigm is bringing inner and outer subjective and objective worlds closer together. When this perception of a unified field is applied to human society and to culture, it makes us the codetermining factor in the reality-producing process; we are not just witnesses or spectators. _ ( Suzi Gablik, op cit.)

By virtue of an interactive system, we should restore the power of the imagination, revive myth, the archetypes, the symbols, and reawaken our vision and dreaming.

_ When we retrieve this vision, by making it explicit, by bringing it to light, the consensually legitimatised vision of the social ego is radically called into question. _ ( David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation, New York-London 1988 )

A savage change that would lead to a reassessment of the relationships between the individual and society and emphasise the severance of the human-nature bond. Through Art, this change in the sphere of spirituality and ethics can become part of the collective project to remove the false values, the destruction and the stereotypes that play such big role in today’s life from our planet.

_ The artist must try to discover the religious essence, the major sense of things… that of the primitive people. _ ( Joan Mirò, as quoted by G. Duthuit, Enquête, Cahiers d’art 14, n.1-4, 1939 )

To cease to be hypnotized by the rational bias of Western society, through developing a more open model of the psyche, so that as culture we can recover the ability to ‘dream forward’ and reclaim the power and importance of vision.

_ The visionary function, which fulfils the soul’s need for placing itself in the vast scheme of things, has been suppressed, with the result that, as culture, we have lost the gift of vision. We have lost access to the magical world of archetypal myth and symbol, the world of Dreamtime. _ ( Suzi Gablik, op.cit. )

_ The investigation of the subconscious roots of human representation, the fascination with the ideal of the universal sign, and the matter of linkage between the deep irrational past of man and his present science-dominated culture are hardly passing infatuations or unworthy concerns for art … these broader recurrent aspects of modernist primitivism persisted as challenges endemic to modern culture. _ ( Kirk Varnedoe, Abstract Expressionism, Primitivism in 20th Century Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1984 )

In only a single field of our civilization has the omnipotence of thoughts - the power of homeopathic magic or the Primitive’s beliefs in the power of mental forces to affect the world - been retained, and that is in the field of art.

_ There can be no doubt that art did not begin as art for art’s sake. It worked originally in the service of impulses, which are for the most part extinct today. _ ( Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, W.W. Norton, New York 1950 )

The "Eidetic Bush" installation project expresses a spiritual identification of contemporary artistic ideals with the motivating forces behind the creativity of primal man. It is a work inspired by the very same deep, ancestral and now almost extinguished sensitivity that would make it possible to creatively connect with nature, or, even more so, with what is one of nature’s most dramatic and suggestive expressions, namely the Australian burnt bush landscape. The Eidetic Bush project is based on the deep and direct connection of my spiritual energy with that of the burnt bush, whereby the creative act becomes a _ production of new authentic values by delving into the memories of the immemorial past and expressing them in pure forms. _
( John Graham, System and Dialectics of Art, Delphic Studios, New York 1937)

The artist’s intervention acquires a “shamanic”, sacredness-bestowing meaning, which can reactivate the contact with vision and “dream up” new myths and new rituals. "Eidetic Bush" restores the dimension within which the sacred and nature are as one with life, where each act becomes a ritual, where sacredness is the fusion between man’s nature-bound imagination and his instinct, where the original, primal bond that makes man part of the Earth is sacred. "Eidetic Bush" underlines contemporary man’s need to rediscover this ancestral dimension by a ‘primitivizing’ work the function of which is, _ …necessarily antagonistic, running disruptively against the grain of conformist, repressive Western society in order to revivify the anarchic energy of primal man. _ ( Kirk Varnedoe, op. cit. )

I am talking about an acute and urgent need to be collectively shocked by the geopolitical tragedies caused by the Empire’s increasingly intolerable economic logic.

"Eidetic Bush" is, therefore, a work which, whilst rediscovering ‘the savage within’, the irrational, the ideals that suggest an escape from the Western tradition towards a primitive state, aims at emphasising the importance for contemporary man to acquire a new kind of awareness which would enable him to become enraged about and react against the most blatant signs of injustice toward and despair of entire peoples. As we meditate on the human soul, we detect, _ … two principles preexisting reason, of which one strongly concerns our wellbeing and preservation whilst the other instills into us a kind of natural revulsion for watching the death or the suffering of any sensitive being, especially our own kind. When we look at human society, it appears to be only showing the violence of the mighty and the oppression of the poor. Our spirit rebels against the harshness of the former and we tend to deplore the blinding of the latter. _ ( J.J. Rosseau, Origine della Diseguaglianza, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1949 )

It is generally assumed that the seeing of apparitions is far commoner among primitives than among civilized people, _ in my view… psychic phenomena occur no less frequently with civilized people than they do with primitives. I’m convinced that if a European had to go through the same exercises and ceremonies, which the medicine-man performs in order to make spirits visible, he would have the same experiences. _ ( Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche )

The burnt bush is the very place that at the one time stimulates our vision as well as the creative act representing it. The fire has transformed the colors of the bush into a monochromatic variation of grey shades and has sublimated any living form by creating an aesthetic condition typified by a primordial silence in which, _ … all actions are stilled and we need to rely on a state of being which encompasses and harmonizes the affirmative and the negative, any opposites, any antonyms. _ (Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Una Nuova Formazione Estetica, p.7, Km/n, n1 Gennaio, 2001)

_ Only silence lets us discover the error at the basis of our existence, only in the silence that hushes up the din of our existence are the premises for our thinking to be found. _ (Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Sguardo e Destino, Sagittari La Terza, Bari, 1988)

In the silence of the bush we feel and this is possible because we are close to the spectral, to the yet-to-be-awakened consciousness or inner becoming. In this dramatically suspended atmosphere, the silence of the newly burnt bush is charged with visionary tension; _ the eidetic ability that elevates the mind’s eye to co-equality with visual sensation, dissolving the boundaries between imagination and perception, myth and reality is stimulated. It produces representations that are held to be medians between subjectivity and objectivity, between the rational unconscious and the individual experience. _ (Kirk Varnedoe, op cit.)

"Eidetic Bush" is the outcome of complex creative dynamics which utilize otherwise antithetic expressive means and cause them to interact in order to represent how normal boundaries between the products of the mind and the evidence of the senses can be broken down. Eidetic Bush has been developed in two stages: the first one is an act carried out in some burnt bush areas where I created spirals on the tree trunks either with strips of clay or by carving marks into the charred bark.

_ All the images of the spiral, of the emergence of light from shadow express the ideas of movement, of cycle, of duration, of passage from one mode of being into another passage of the “unformed”, the shadow, into the “formed”, to the light. _ (Mircea Eliade, Symbolism, the Sacred and the Arts, Crossroad, New York, 1986)

The burnt bush, the inspiration for visionary power, at the same time is also, _ … a plastic space within which to arrange objects and bodies conceived as performance or visual presentation. _ (Dario Evola, Fare il Vuoto per Abitare l’Arte. Percorsi dall’Arte alla Scena del Novecento, Km/n, no.1, Gennaio, 2001)

_ The sacred space is the place where communication is possible between this world and the other world, from the heights or from the depths, the world of the gods or the world of the dead. _ (Mircea Eliade, op. cit.)

I see the primitive artist as a model of purified spirituality, the creator of abstractions that embodied the basic underlying order of nature. The tribal artist’s shape and content was _ … dictated by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding. _ (Barnet Newman, The First Man was an Artist, Tiger Eyes no.1, 1947)

Modelling strips of clay over the trees or carving their bark represents the expressive gesture of a pre-reflexive being creating elemental forms of a quasi-anonymous archetypal universality, _ … an instinctive expression of the individual without a system of representation, a primal creativity as evidence of form-giving energies that replaces anything that could traditionally be called technique. _ (Kirk Varnedoe, op. cit.)

Shapes of essential plasticity, such as a spiral wrapping itself around a charred tree, express a bond between reduction and regression, between basic forms and the ‘ur-forms’ of the mind.

_ Art has demonstrated that universal beauty does not arise from a particular character of the form, but from the dynamic rhythm of its inherent relationships. Art has revealed that the forms exist only for the creation of relationships, that forms create relationships and that relationships create forms. _ (Piet Mondrian, op. cit.)

In the second stage of creating "Eidetic Bush", the digital images of the landscape where the ‘installation ritual’ took place were enhanced, using 3D software, to make virtual spirals. In this way the ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ appear as a mutual interaction of two expressive means – the simple human act and digital manipulation – of similar value, but of different aspect and nature. The images thus produced are projected for the visitor to experience as a vision of the landscape in perspective. Actual and virtual spirals appear and disappear on the trees with pulsating semi-transparently as they follow the rhythm of Luigi Nono’s musical score, Caminantes…Ayacucho.

_ The aesthetics consists of the ‘resonance’ flashing and lighting up which creates sense-driven relationships between the objects and the events taking place, starting from a secret order inside reality. The aesthetics is the light thrown on one aspect of coexisting elements, where one element generates the next against a backdrop of shared signs, along a pathway made up of inner, secret ‘rememorization’ links so that thinking is also remembering. _ (Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Una Nuova Formazione Estetica, Km/n, no.1 Gennaio, 2001)

The artist’s intervention acquires a 'shamanic', sacredness-bestowing meaning, which can reactivate the contact with vision and 'dream up' new myths and new rituals. Eidetic Bush restores the dimension within which the sacred and nature are as one with life, where each act becomes a ritual, where sacredness is the fusion between man’s nature-bound imagination and his instinct, where the original, primal bond that makes man part of the Earth is sacred. Eidetic Bush underlines contemporary man’s need to rediscover this ancestral dimension by a ‘primitivizing’ work the function of which is, _ …necessarily antagonistic, running disruptively against the grain of conformist, repressive Western society in order to revivify the anarchic energy of primal man. _ (Kirk Varnedoe, op. cit.)

I am talking about an acute and urgent need to be collectively shocked by the geopolitical tragedies caused by the Empire’s increasingly intolerable economic logic.

"Eidetic Bush" is, therefore, a work which, whilst rediscovering ‘the savage within’, the irrational, the ideals that suggest an escape from the Western tradition towards a primitive state, aims at emphasising the importance for contemporary man to acquire a new kind of awareness which would enable him to become enraged about and react against the most blatant signs of injustice toward and despair of entire peoples. As we meditate on the human soul, we detect, _ … two principles preexisting reason, of which one strongly concerns our wellbeing and preservation whilst the other instills into us a kind of natural revulsion for watching the death or the suffering of any sensitive being, especially our own kind. When we look at human society, it appears to be only showing the violence of the mighty and the oppression of the poor. Our spirit rebels against the harshness of the former and we tend to deplore the blinding of the latter. _ (J.J. Rosseau, Origine della Diseguaglianza, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1949)

It is generally assumed that the seeing of apparitions is far commoner among primitives than among civilized people; _ In my view… psychic phenomena occur no less frequently with civilized people than they do with primitives. I’m convinced that if a European had to go through the same exercises and ceremonies, which the medicine-man performs in order to make spirits visible, he would have the same experiences._ (J.J. Rosseau, Origine della Diseguaglianza, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1949)

"Eidetic Bush" is the outcome of complex creative dynamics which utilize otherwise antithetic expressive means and cause them to interact in order to represent how normal boundaries between the products of the mind and the evidence of the senses can be broken down. "Eidetic Bush" has been developed in two stages: the first one is an act carried out in some burnt bush areas where I created spirals on the tree trunks either with strips of clay or by carving marks into the charred bark.

The burnt bush, the inspiration for visionary power, at the same time is also _ … a plastic space within which to arrange objects and bodies conceived as performance or visual presentation. _ (Dario Evola, Fare il Vuoto per Abitare l’Arte. Percorsi dall’Arte alla Scena del Novecento, Km/n, no.1, Gennaio, 2001)

The spirals are created as elementary gestures; a creative and cathartic act of deep empathy with the ‘spaceless’, timeless dimension of the burnt bush. It might be the ritual expression of ancient peoples, all traces of whom have been lost/destroyed, aimed at creating a sacred space of communion– an installation that represents an effort to join opposites and articulate polarities. _ The sacred space is the place where communication is possible between this world and the other world, from the heights or from the depths, the world of the gods or the world of the dead. (Mircea Eliade, op. cit.)

I see the primitive artist as a model of purified spirituality, the creator of abstractions that embodied the basic underlying order of nature. The tribal artist’s shape and content was _dictated by a ritualistic will towards metaphysical understanding. _ ( Barnet Newman, The First Man was an Artist, Tiger Eyes no.1, 1947)

Modelling strips of clay over the trees or carving their bark represents the expressive gesture of a pre-reflexive being creating elemental forms of a quasi-anonymous archetypal universality.

_ An instinctive expression of the individual without a system of representation, a primal creativity as evidence of form-giving energies that replaces anything that could traditionally be called technique. _ (Kirk Varnedoe, op. cit.)

Shapes of essential plasticity, such as a spiral wrapping itself around a charred tree, express a bond between reduction and regression, between basic forms and the ‘ur-forms’ of the mind.

_ The aesthetics is the light thrown on one aspect of coexisting elements, where one element generates the next against a backdrop of shared signs, along a pathway made up of inner, secret ‘rememorization’ links so that thinking is also remembering. _ (Aldo Giorgio Gargani, Una Nuova Formazione Estetica, Km/n, no.1 Gennaio, 2001)

Whenever the digital spirals appear in full it is impossible to distinguish them from those physically created in the bush. The inability to distinguish between an actual gesture and a virtual replication is essential to a project that aims to reawaken the sensitivity that allows one to see the invisible, to embody the disembodied, to materialize the spiritual and spiritualize matter. In a synergy with the environment, the spiral shapes, be they the outcome of a primitive gesture or a digital creation _ manifest their inner core to man’s senses by an outer imprint, a signatura rerum. _ (Jacob Böhme, De Signatura Rerum, Stoccarda,1620)

_ From the period of pre-dialectic thought, the essential function of the symbol is precisely in disclosing the structures of the real inaccessible to empirical experience. _ (Mircea Eliade, op.cit.)

The choice of the spiral shape that moves snake-like up the charred tree was completely instinctual and visionary; I have subsequently discovered that, … the mythological world, like Aboriginal society, was segregated into two great moieties, on one side was fire, and on the other the serpent. Though antagonistic, incompatible, they remain symbolically and emotionally linked in a dialectic of life and death…That dialectic endowed the mythology of Aboriginal fire with a special power. It divided the universe into the burned and the unburned, and it granted to humans alone the power to shape that universe guided by their ancestral totems and songlines. _ ( Stephen J. Pyne, Burning Bush, H. Holt and Company, New York, 1991)

_ One fundamental experience is to unlearn, to no longer know what one knows, to let oblivion operate so that it can perform the unpredictable reshuffling of the sediments of the cultures and creeds we have passed through. _ (Luigi Nono, Lecture at the Giorgio Cini Fundation, 1985)

The choice of the musical piece "Caminantes Ayacucho" by Luigi Nono as the sound component of the video installation is connected to both the visionary tension of the composition and its references to Ayacucho, a symbol of the struggle against colonialist oppression, and Giordano Bruno’s ‘visionary esotericism’, of whom the choir sings an extract taken from De La Causa Principio e Uno. _ The composition is characterized by the dialectic created between the silences or the pianissimi and the rapid rising of contrasts, the sudden burst of a fortissimo. For Nono, silence is the origin-source of thought, hence of sound. _ (G. Cresta, Intuizione e Metodo nell’Opera di Luigi Nono, da L’Ascolto del Pensiero, Rugginenti, Milano, 2002)

_ The infinite longing to go beyond what is not there, beyond reality’s narrow dimension, this very longing creates a yearning for a higher level, for flying, for nature. But do not forget, however, how in a spiral the symbol for elsewhere is the central axis, the home. This means that coming and going are complementary. _ Like sound that tends to move towards the World’s Openness and silence that brings it back to Earth. _ (Renzo Cresti, Il Suono Nascente per una Nuova Lettura Estetica, from L’Ascolto del Pensiero, op. cit.)

Nono’s gesture is ritualistic. It is a breath of air that stirs sound out of its quiet, this possible sound reverts to silence at once: there it ceases to be. _ (Renzo Cresti, op. cit.)

_A music where the astonishment discovered not only at the origin of thought, but of emotion as well dominates. The world of the imagination is therefore a pre-logical realm. _ (Renzo Cresti, op. cit.)

_ Humankind’s progress continuously distances it from its primitive state, the more we gather new knowledge, the more we remove the means to acquire the more relevant one. _ (J.J. Rosseau, op.cit.)

My use of a ‘primitive language’ to assist artistic expression within "Eidetic Bush", respects and reflects ancient man’s capacity to connect with nature, _ at the time of the Europeans’ arrival in 1642, the Tasmanian Aborigines, thanks to an exceptional isolation lasting 10,000 years, possessed the most elemental material culture in the world _ (Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel. The Fates of Human Societies, W.W. Norton and C. NY-London, 1997), and therefore one most closely connected to and dependent on the Earth and its cycles. Before falling victim to one of the most brutal and successful genocides in the history of world colonization, the Tasmanian Aborigines, at most 4000 hunter-gatherers, represented the expression of the most profound and purest connection that man could establish with nature, the original, primal bond whereby man becomes part of the Earth and his every gesture acquires an evocative, ritualistic dimension.

In accepting the invitation to undertake the Claudio Alcorso Foundation residency, I assumed that my investigation of man’s capacity for spiritual connection with the land would occur within the pristine Tasmanian wilderness. However the coincidence of my visit with the catastrophic wave of bushfires during the development of the Eidetic Bush project - summer 2003 - prompted some major reconsideration of how best to represent a site for such reflection. The worst drought in Australia since reliable records began in 1910 the nation -wide catastrophe is the direct result of the human-induced global warming.

_ The actual trend in Australian temperatures is now matching climate models of how temperatures respond to increased greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. These greenhouse gas increases occurring today are due to human activity. _ (Nick Soudakoff, Global Warming Contributes to Australian's Worst Drought, Green Left Weekly, n° 525, 2003)

Not only that, but the destruction caused by bushfires metaphorically recalls the destructiveness of a clear-felling old growth forests. _ Although Tasmania is one of the last remaining wilderness havens, more than 20,000ha of Tasmania’s native forests are clear-felled each year. _ (Annual Report of Forest Practies Board, Tasmania 1999-2000)

2003

Andrea Morucchio