ART006: Week 7, 11/12

Freeland, “Cultural Crossings”

• Far east gardens have spiritual dimensions, influenced English gardens
• Culture travels
• In the modern world, no culture is isolated
• Art is the best possible window into another culture
• Art is a universal language, but must be acquired
• Art as the expression of the life of the community
• To comprehend the social meaning of art requires understanding of how and why it is made
• Knowledge of context helps enhance our experience of other art forms
• Ignoring context can lead to cultural appropriation
• Much indigenous art emerges from a complex history reflecting many interactions during colonial rule
• Intercultural contact is age-old
• Various “indigenous” art forms have developed through cultural exchange
• Good/bad cultural connections hard to determine
• There is a form of art in all cultures
• Art as “culturally significant meaning, skillfully encoded in an affecting, sensuous medium”
• Anthropologist have influenced the cultures they study
• Interactions with markets changes the traditional forms
• Political powers often suppress art as it provides a point of critical resistance
• Diaspora and the spread of culture and hybridization
• Identity politics in the ‘80’s

Jung, “On the concept of the Archetype”

• The unconscious as the state of repressed or forgotten contents
• For Freud, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature
• The personal unconscious rests upon the collective unconscious
• A common psychic substrate of suprapersonal nature present in all of us
• “Psychic existence can be recognized only by the presence of contents that are capable of consciousness”
• The contents of the personal unconscious are the chiefly the feeling-toned complexes” that constitute the personal and private side of psychic life
• Archetypes as the contents of the collective unconscious
• The contents of the unconscious are primordial
• Myth and fairytale as the expression of archetypes
• The archetype is the unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious
• There is no essential difference between man and all other creatures
• Man has a preformed psyche
• Behavior results from patterns of functioning as “images”
• “images” are the human quality of the human being and are hereditary and present in the germ-plasm
• Everything psychic if preformed, such as creative fantasy
• Fantasy finds the expression of the primordial archetypes
• Archetypes not determined in content but in form
• Archetypal content if produced by the conscious mind
• The representations are not inherited, only the forms

Krippner, “Shamans, Sacred Places and the Healing Earth”

• Shamans as interface with the numinous for the community
• Personification of nature
• Each culture defined its own pantheism
• Animism was a perspective that saw nature as alive and sacred
• Totemism conceptualized various animal species
• Shamanism as “applied animism”
• Europeans justified “civilizing” indigenous peoples because they had no homes and further their territorial and economic goals
• Amazonian ayuhuasca art, Navajo sand paintings, Diegueno ground painting puberty rite
• Indian medicine wheels resembling placenta
• North American Indians felt that nature-in-movement had magical power
• Some locations are held to be more sacred than others
• The Balinese concept of dual worlds (niskala and sekala)
• The symbolic reality must learn to be seen
• Ceremonial landscapes as from the mind
• The shaman can utilize sacred locations
• Whenever two or more things are in harmony, energy is exchanged
• Earth as a living organism

Zak, “The Spirit of Space and Place Among the Inuit”

• Inuit: “the real people”
• Eskimo: “people who eat raw fish” (from the Cree)
• Inuit value space as the Modern man values time
• Inuit as hunter-gatherers
• The spiritual landscape exists within the physical landscape
• Flesh is perishable, the soul immortal
• Men and animals have the bladder as the spiritual locus
• Belief in animism
• Hunting objects decorated with spiritual symbols to please the objects themselves
• Everything possess an awareness
• 3 concepts: 1) the power of a person’s thought. 2) the importance of thoughtful action in order to not injure another mind and 3) the danger inherit in following one’s own mind
• There is no empty space and everything needs to be treated with respect
• Traditional life revolves around avoidance of taboos
• Tattooing as a ritual observance
• Women have both powerful negative and positive energy
• Traditional Inuit houses serve many functions and cultural dimensions, becoming a nexus between sacred and secular worlds
• Women’s small houses analogous to wombs
• Walking a straight line in anger to measure the rage
• Garments as spiritual transformation
• The igloo divided into masculine and feminine space
• The home is considered sacred
• Inukshuit: Piling up stones to mark the passage of the dead, and the visual language of the people
• The land and game belong to everyone
• Lodgings and authority regularly rotated
• Everything pertaining to the natural world is a sign

Carroll, “From Huacas to Mesas”

• Healing and esoteric wisdom reside in the same place as the creative
• Sacred sites are natural altars
• The function of altars to challenge to expand in heart, mind and spirit
• Maslow: mystical experiences and psychological health go together
• The role of mountains and high places as sacred
• Unification experiences as a type of shamanistic journeying
• Sacred sites as the first altars
• Altars serve spiritual and utilitarian purposes
• The significance of building more permanent sacred structures near sacred sites
• The altar of the shaman as different from a temple altar
• The practice of invocation is essential to the creation of an altar that works, that produces and effect
• Altars are the mirrors, reflecting the illumination hidden in the unseen regions of the human psyche
• Altars represent pluralism: this reality and the other, distant or invisible realities they reflect

Baker, “Unlikely Finds”

• Can Buddhist art be made where there is no Buddhist tradition?
• The artist embodies the tradition in which he works, but may be misinterpreted by those unfamiliar with the tradition
• In the West, prevailing notion’s of art’s functions tend to be vague, superficial and malleable
• The body is physical and public, the mind intangible and private
• Dualistic thinking is affirmed and reiterated as truth
• The demand that mindfulness of modern art can function as a spiritual method
• The belief in the healing power of modern art us the cornerstone of modernism
• 2 points: 1) modern Western art is allied with the individual ego’s struggle to shore itself up and 2) traditional Buddhist art if a function of the community
• If we look for things in unlikely ways we will find them in unlikely forms
• Art has been increasingly open to redefinition
• The uncertainty of art in the Western tradition is more akin to Buddhist insight