Originally published September 4, 2012.
It became instantly apparent to me and Maia Panos that we, collectively, were indeed dealing with a new art form, iphonic art, after the first eight hundred submissions came in for the our first gallery show back in late 2009 and early 2010. P1xels has been home to the pioneers of the medium ever since.
I have been reading Paul Levy for some time. In lieu of the upcoming show (call for submissions to be announced soon) at the Garden Gate Center, and a lengthy conversation I had last night with one of the new directors, harpist Diana Rowan, and Evelie, a singer and teacher, about the healing power of music and singing, I thought I would share this article as a small reminder of what the artists of Pixels, in a small way, are a part of. At least I like to think so.
Paul Levy is the author of The Madness of George Bush: A Reflection of Our Collective Psychosis,* as well as Wetiko: The Greatest Epidemic Sickness Known to Humanity. This is an excerpt from his article, The Artist As Healer Of The World.
Art-making is a process in which the artist is continually articulating, refining, and creating an ever-evolving form of symbolic language. In being a conduit for the formation of a new language, the artist is shedding light on and participating in the creation of language itself. How language gets created invariably leads us right back to the psyche, which is simultaneously the subject and the object of the new language. The psyche is both source and recipient of the creatively emerging new form of language, just like in a dream the psyche might produce a written text for another part of itself to read. In its crafting of a new symbolic language, the psyche is literally building a bridge so as to telepathically communicate with itself. The shaping and re-shaping of ever-new forms of expression is the psyche’s continually evolving way of knowing itself and deepening its – and our – realization.
As the newly created language clothes and animates itself in its novel forms, it is as if the “Word” becomes flesh. Interestingly, we make a word by “spell”-ing it. Discovering novel iterations of language is itself a “spell-casting” activity, in that it serves to dis-spell the veil of illusion which seemingly obstructs us from our own experience. In unveiling novel forms of language, the artist conjures up a more coherent state of consciousness within themselves as a result of their creative act. Because we are all connected, their state of integration instantaneously, in no time whatsoever, gets registered in the collective unconscious of each one of us, where it nonlocally impacts the entire field.
You can read the rest of the article here.
Paul and I had a very interesting email exchange some time back about how women are by nature connected to the cycles and energy currents of the Earth, how men connect through women (not necessarily through sex, but that is one way), and how the Bush White House seemed to be fundamentally cut off from those essential energies, thereby warped into perversions of great destructiveness, war, greed, and lust for power. He is a great thinker, an artist, and I highly recommend his writings.
On a last note, favorite quote of a little more levity, one I feel entirely applicable to iphonic art as pursued here on P1xels:
“Our fine arts were developed, their types and uses were established, in times very different from the present, by men whose power of action upon things was insignificant in comparison with ours. But the amazing growth of our techniques, the adaptability and precision they have attained, the ideas and habits they are creating, make it a certainty that profound changes are impending in the ancient craft of the Beautiful.”—Paul Valery, Aesthetics
*Little did we know back then how much crazier things would get.
Happy Sunday.
Here is an hour and a half of perfectly sublime music, “The Best Of Ryuichi Sakamoto.”
00:00 Energy Flow; 4:08 The Last Emperor; 8:38 Rain; 12:00 Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence; 16:05 The Last Emperor OST; 22:04 The Sheltering Sky; 28:05 Forbidden Colors; 32:56 A Flower is Not A Flower; 39:38 Undercooled; 43:14 Solitude; 48:11 BABEL; 53:26 Blu; 58:42 Amore; 1:03:52 Wuthering Heights; 1:10:16 Opus; 1:15:10 Rain; 1:18:22 Moon; 1:22:03 Anna
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