With the risk of putting legs on a snake, the following notes are not meant as an exhaustive explanation of my work but rather as an intimation of the intuitions, ideas and influences that have informed my methods and output of the art works which I characterize as ‘Archestructures’.
Although my Archestructures have evolved over a long period of time, trying to find a way to resolve seemingly nebulous issues and doubts about their veracity, it slowly dawned on me of the certainty of direction in which my work as a sculptor was going. I began more and more to realise that all the elements were coalescing and that I was in a position to understand more what had previously been arrived at intuitively: I felt I had found a plausible solution that could possibly point beyond old dualisms; works that could deconstruct polar limits whilst utilising disparate entities, so as to occupy a mysterious centre space/ground.
The term ‘Archestructure’ was coined by Stan Gooch in order to represent “….a perceived or felt attribute or function of the nervous system, acted out or discovered in the physical, social and cultural environments”*2. Gooch’s structural theory is founded on the observation that nerve impulses cross over between the cerebrum and cerebellum, an Archestructure is a representation of this; examples of these he gives as the Christian cross, emblems like the swastika, cross bones and similar symbols. He also sees there is a relationship to Jung’s pronouncements on the epiphanies of universal Archetypes. I have appropriated Gooche’s useful term in order to describe the nature and making of my wall-related sculptures, which in their genesis, take advantage of Gooch’s fertile concept of an Archestructure’s neurological origin.
My sculptured wall pieces embody primarily the synthesis of two very different structural realizations. On the one hand, is the conviction and implicit trust in (Jungian and Goochian) projections into the consciousness of intimations and images such as universal mandalas or mandorlas of light to be found for example, in the ‘sacred’ geometry of icons. Typical of the representation of an archetypal numinous constellation from the deep regions of the mind/body is an emanation like Kekulé’s discovery of the structure of the benzene molecule through his dream/vision analogy of a snake biting its own tail. My own use of an archetype ‘surfacing’ should be seen as imagistic and biological rather than metaphysical. These structures are essentially of the mind giving credence to the mind-body-intuitional.
On the other hand, is the concept which has been described as “Creating from nature’s own structural process level of reality”; this theory of visual art was conceived and promoted by the great American artist and theorist, Charles Biederman of Red Wing, Minnesota. His major thesis ‘Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge’, which came to influence many constructivist artists, resulted in his own endeavours in a cool (despite the bright colours) ‘classic’ non-mimetic ‘Structurist’ (his term) art which he derived from Monet and Cezanne via Mondrian (namely Mondrian’s ‘floating’ planes compositions of 1917).*3 While my own work owes something to Biederman, I am indebted to him most especially for his primary concept of creating art from an emphatically structural level of reality. It was after reading Biederman’s theories that I realised I had been utilising structural procedures since well before he came to my notice; his writings made it conscious for me that, ‘Vision has now gone to a depth at which, in the very act of reaching this level, vision has not only become new, but has also become transformed into another kind of vision of nature and art. This is to say that another, entirely new structural level is now involved in abstractions from nature to art’.*4 I should add that for me there is no real boundary between nature and art, one could site the bower bird’s elaborate constructions in order to entice a mate as an example.
It has however been necessary for me to respectfully oppose what I see as Biederman’s exclusive determinism, which culminated in the evolution of his own work, as he would have it, of a “rational art”. His structurist art, composed of coloured machined rectangular metal planes, screwed to a flat colour field, resulting in a system of orthogonal reliefs. Needless to say my wall sculpture would have been anathema to him; as they would have been to Mondrian, they both abhorred from the inception of their mature work, anything that could be construed in any way as mimesis.
It is with an alternative understanding and vision, regarding the meaning and nature of form/structure; I have found my own ‘Way’ (this, in the Japanese sense of a ‘Do’ as in Budo or the ‘Way of the Warrior). I needed to be open to other more fluid means and structures in the facture of a work than those demonstrated by Biederman. It has therefore been important for me to bring the above exclusive but ‘internally’ consistent though different structural concepts together; the one to embrace the perceptual, visual, the other the deep-corporeal/numinous, So, by achieving this, give the works a combinational and synthetic appellation; hence the suitability and aptness of the description ‘Archestructure’.
My ‘Janus Face’ Spagiric Procedure
General art-historical descriptions such as ‘construction’ or ‘relief’ do not properly relate to the genesis, or synthetic spirit of my Archestructures, where the primary actions are spagiric. This term formerly used by alchemists who spoke of ‘dividing their materials then putting them back together again’ in their search for wholeness, is important to the nature of my work, where the primary material plus graphic glyph or paraph (see below) is divided up then rejoined. In a fully rejoined and realised Archestructure the surfaces are more in the nature of intaglio; surfaces are for the most part below the original panel’s surface, They do though share something with the bas-relief, there is the occasional ‘integration’ of Euclidean wedge like form elements projecting into traditional relief space.
From the above, it might well be construed that mine has been a somewhat intellectual approach to making. However, I should like to state and emphasise this is far from the case; it is only latterly that I have sought to rationalise my procedures in print, with I am bound to say, an inherent distrust in a noun subject/object based language.
Despite the fact that the works are not representational, I have no doubt that they are resonant with remnants of the morphology and experience of the body as well as the topography of landscape; they can possibly function as a kind of atavistic embodiment of these areas of our experience. This should however be qualified: it is not my intention to deliberately represent any particular entity. However, for me to consciously and deliberately refuse any accidental manifestation of these tenors, seeking to obliterate them, would be perverse and the work would therefore possibly fail to resonate. I should describe the above ‘mimetic references’ as enfolded (see below) and hopefully function as a contemplative ‘gateless gate’ (Mumonkan*5) ‘site’ or ‘locus’ that ‘includes’ the viewer-participator; in this I may have been influenced by the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty’s work on the nature of perception.
Pointing Beyond Opposites
Apart from the observations above, my chief concern has been to make works that harmonise and at the same time transmute binary opposites, in the first instance at the level of my materials; for example, the polarities Romantic/Classic, Organic/Geometric, or Dionysian waywardness opposing Apollonian order and vice versa. It has been part of my ‘mission’ to explore and find a solution, representative and made actual in the Archestructures, in order to go beyond these and other dualities. I rather feel it is only conventional discrimination that sees ‘romantic’ expression and ‘classic’ cool structuralism as necessarily exclusive to one another. Ultimately I do not accept this situation; for in any event, each can only be known by its projected linguistic opposite; besides, at their historic roots both have, according to Robert M. Pirsig, an identical foundation that he describes as the Greek concept Areté or ‘quality’,. He does go on though to suggest that quality is indefinable but that we know it when we see it!*6
So I prefer to see the above dualities as two sides of the same coin; a coin with the head of Dionysius and his chaotic quality attributes on the obverse side and with Apollo’s head on the reverse. I choose to engage with the tension between polarities, seeking a potential for harmony. Seeing the polarities certainly not as absolutes but rather in the Tantric sense of the Maithuna*7 or erotic play between as well as with ‘opposites’. In the final analysis, there is the hope that an Archestructure can ‘persuade’ the attentive viewer to embrace even if only momentarily, the conflation of polarities so to simultaneously see through their relativity. There is a great deal of freedom to be had with this understanding of what the Archestructures can ‘represent’.
Further, regarding duality, I was persuaded in my youth by the validity of the philosophy of novelist and poet, Nicos Kazanzakis. His philosophy, which he described as “The Cretan Glance” was very influential on my thinking and feeling with regard to the resolution of opposites. He was concerned ‘…not so much of permanent synthesis (my italics) as of momentary harmony, which in turn builds into a greater tension and explodes into a higher and more inclusive synthesis in an ever upward and spiralling onrush, leaving behind it the bloodstained path of man’s and nature’s endeavours’.*8 Kazantzakis also felt it was possible for there to be a balance between the apprehension of realities of the Occident and the Orient, that Crete was the cusp of these realities. It should be noted that Crete is the land of the Labris or Double Axe with its left/right orientation, an emblem of duality ‘unified’ Later in life I was also further persuaded of the validity, of the Taoist prescriptions for harmony, found in the Tao Te Ching pointing beyond all duality. These ideas and insights had a profound influence on my ownendeavour and engagement with my materials.
Resolving the Modernist Dichotomy
At the inception of my mature work, I was drawn equally to both wings of modernist painting and sculpture, namely Abstract Expressionism, particularly the New York school: Barnet Newman, Mark Rothko, Ad Reinhardt, Jackson Pollack, et al, also the west coast painter Mark Tobey together with the joyful Sam Frances. The expressionists contrasted by the cool ‘classical’ structural examples of the work of Constantin Brancusi, Eduardo Chillida, Ben Nicolson, and to a lesser extent, Victor Pasmore (who also had been strongly influenced by Biederman’s structuralist theory and vision).
Honesty compels me to admit, being at the time (1969/70) under the spell of these very contrary Modernist isms, that apart from my own more traditional explorations with clay, marble and wood, they created in me the most acute tension, compounded by my love for the human figure. This all provoked me to search over time to find visual art solutions that would demonstrate a concrete resolution of the above apparent polarities.
In order to resolve, for myself at the very least, the oppositions presented by Abstract Expressionism and cool Structuralism, the Romantic and the Classic, the organic as opposed to the inorganic/linear, it was important to find through practical effort the means to this end; not I might add by mere juxtaposition of disparate entities.
My gradual dawning ‘ambition’ was to bring about a ‘therapeutic’ harmonization or transcendence of this tension and not only for myself. I felt compelled with a good dose of bisociative thought and much contemplation together with hands on action, to engage with both what Donald Kuspit has recently called, alternately, “the Expressive Cure” and “the Geometrical Cure”*9. I recognised that artists representing either of these of Modernist ‘cures’ sought to escape in their own way, the everyday world of illustrative representation, in this they have ‘succeeded’ with their abstractions, but for me at least, their real failure was that each was cut off and estranged from the opposing ‘other’. Barnet Newman, Rothko and Ad Reinhardt possibly did recognise their status Vis a Vis the romantic/classic divide but were too hoist with their own petard i.e., the picture plane and the grid.
My own feeling regarding the fetish of the flat picture plane is to understand that as Myron Stout observed: “The eyes are not conditioned to see flatness and we come nearer to knowing it through the sense of touch”*10. They chose or failed to go deep enough to seek out more rewarding structural levels. One artist, namely the writer, alchemist and painter Frank Avray Wilson decidedly did recognise the need to integrate both wings of Modernism*11. He demonstrated his awareness of underlying structural levels of reality, for instance, the sub-atomic and the need to find like Biederman, a ‘new art’ that would more fully represent a truly modern view of our experienced reality without falling into the ease of Post-Modernism. Wilson’s paintings, full of energy in the Abstract Expressionist manner, included geometrical shapes painted in vibrant impasto. For me his attempts, though full of spontaneity, were finally unsatisfying as his ‘integration’ of the geometric and expressionist were in the last analysis rather desperate, and superficial being essentially a symbolic unity and not the ‘real thing’. In respect of Kuspit’s ‘cures’ I needed to overcome for myself, first the dichotomy they represented then penetrate to that deeper axiomatic and unifying structural level I was longing to ‘uncover’; and in so doing, hopefully find a ‘compassionate’ material solution to transcend these seemingly exclusive ‘cures’ with a new order of inclusive enterprise. In my attempt, I needed to arrive in my efforts at a convincing tangible aesthetic concinnity. I do though prefer the word ‘healing’ rather than ‘cure’.
Calligraphic Gesture and Subsequent Dimensional Development
In making an Archestructure, there is firstly an expressive gesture resulting in marks drawn on paper with either brush or pencil. These marks will be the ‘genetic rune, ideogram, paraph, or glyph. The glyph is the essential precursor or primary ‘ground plan’ for an Archestructure. Sitting utterly still for a duration not in any narcissistic sense of navel gazing but rather of patient waiting for the ‘moment’ (monastic contemplatives appreciate this waiting, daily). The rapid drawing is made somewhat in the manner of the surrealists, vis a vis their use of ‘automatic’ writing, associated with paying close attention to the sensations of the mind/body in order to plumb the psyche. Also, with regard to the speed of the action in order to overcome deliberation and overt control, I have looked to the oriental brush calligraphers that I admire, particularly modern calligraphers like Yu-Ichi and Fukushima Keido with their sense of verve and immediacy of ‘abstract’ creation; this particularly in relation to what Fosco Moraini has called ‘calligraphic space’.*12 This space is deeply significant and of great importance in order to penetrate the connotations that space represents to the enlightened calligrapher; more of which below.
The spirit of my own resulting glyph finds a parallel in the ideograms of the Tao-tsang where: “… the beautiful secret script of calligraphic ideograms by Taoist mystics portray deep intuitions of cosmic time, workings of forces of Earth and Heaven, the inner realities of sexual mysticism and meditative practise”. *13
The liminality of the initial glyph is made with my trust in absolute subjectivity, even on those rare occasions when I might consciously base the graphic gesture on an actual ideogram, such as the Chinese ideogram, ‘WU’ which translates as ‘No’ or ‘Nothing’;*14 ;(see the Archestructure titled ‘Mumonkan’ (Gateless Gate) as an example).
Now depending upon the aptness (how it ‘speaks’ to me), appeal and usability as I see it of the graphic glyph (many are discarded), the graphic will be transferred to a panel, in many cases MDF (or set of wooden frames in my earlier dimensional canvas works). The original spontaneous drawing undergoes at the succeeding stage what I describe as a process of ‘truing’, proceeding again with an intuitive and contemplative attention.
This ‘making true’ is achieved using a set of French Curves, together with a flexible rule, the kind used by Japanese carpenters. My use of these instruments is as aids, for when I come to cutting the curves etc., the rationalized and controlled lines enable the smooth action of the saw-blade. Using these aids, I would argue, is in no way mechanical, their use is purely expedient as with any other tools used the sculptural process. Further to this, the French Curves are not used slavishly and they are never used as a template or object, such as one finds in many of Frank Stella’s cut-out reliefs, based on the ‘found object’ of the said curves in many of his works. This act of ‘classical’ making true impinges on the seemingly ‘expressionist’ glyph, for me this can be like a ‘marriage made in heaven’!
There is a need for me at this juncture to address what I mean by the ‘expressionist’ way of work. Much as I have admired the modernist Abstract Expressionists, I am at variance with what amounts to essentially an expression of the ego. The ego ‘self’, when ultimately seen through, is nothing more than an illusory social construct, one can see this powerful illusion of a separate ego for what it is, and can then pursue the Archestructural endeavour, so go beyond personal and idiosyncratic expressionism. One is then free to fathom and express universal structural epiphanies derived from levels such as that which Carl Jung termed the Psychoid, where there is no clear division between deep mind-body consciousness and matter.
Co-dependent Origination
The overall ‘look’ of balanced asymmetry is (for me) an essential condition, fundamental to the Archestructure’s dynamic. To this end, I recognise that the requirement for the Archestructure to be asymmetrical is recognition that in order to embody the possibility of change, it is necessary to exclude overt static symmetry. However, there is a paradox; during the process of transformation at the moment of dividing the glyph, a ‘secret’ symmetry is structuring the defile. Simultaneously in the facture of the pieces, the structural ‘defiles’ or ‘fissures’ are manifest when all the elements are married together. Further symmetries become apparent where the defiles reflect one with the other, through a subtle mirroring where a reflecting colour surface is often found. So not only is the Archestructure structured by ‘emptiness’, this emptiness is made ‘concrete’ by the space within the defiles. But equally by a primal ‘cause’ which is in essence a subtle symmetry.
The sawn panel and subsequent component ‘parts’ are kept strictly to the vectors of the transformed glyph’. The glyph of course still survives in the depths of the Archestructure. The act of severing the panel could also be seen as a metaphor for creation out of the uncreated or the void, analogous to Barnet Newman’s ‘act’; an act which produced his paradigmatic ‘Zip’ on his painting ‘Onement 1’ 1948. Analogous too to the razor slash made in the canvas of painter Lucio Fontana; his first signature cut was, however, made initially as a result of his deep frustration the challenge of serious painting presented.
Now with all the parts together and with the runes or defiles in place, the principle of co-dependent origination is apparent. This concept derives from the Mahayana Buddhist view of reality, in which nothing stands alone and all autonomy is illusory as everything is co-dependent and co-relational. Co-dependence and co-relationship function for me somewhat as a mantra that generates the syntax governing how an Archestructure will develop; together with my self-imposed rules as to what the parameters should be for each and every segment. No doubt all the resulting dimensional ‘entities’ would mesh with Arthur Koestler’s fertile notion of what he has described as “Janus Faced Holons”;*15 Janus being the god with two faces simultaneously looking in opposite directions. As an artist having sympathy with Jung’s ‘discovery’ of synchronicity and myself being born in January (named after Janus) I see it is my lot to perpetuate the search for holonic harmony concretely with the Archestructural approach to making. So with Koestler’s innovative and important proposition of the Holon, I found with this entity a good working term and indeed further principle which enables a descriptive discourse.
Regarding calligraphic space mentioned above, the calligraphers were aware of the importance of the portrayal of space, though not I hasten to add, in the Western manner; space seen as ‘background’ where objects dwell in their perspectival separation. But rather ‘space’ as that very emptiness which ‘precipitates’ into ‘objective’ reality; somewhat as the physicists view the nature of matter. The Cubists too arrived at a similar understanding by representing objects and space in a conflated field of passages.
The intention at the stage now reached is to further harmonise the tension between the expressionist and classic means by engaging the edges of the curvilinear defiles with carving the taut warping surfaces. I hasten to add that each Holon as a signifier is essentially neutral, without any extra linguistic meaning. Further to the Holons surface warping, I see the warps essentially in terms of space made ‘concrete’ between and supported by the defiles.
Beyond the Grid?
I hate the word “grid.” It’s more like a matrix. An intense field.
Sam Francis.*16
My awareness of the modernist grid particularly in abstract painting, is to recognise it somewhat as a tyranny.
However, I feel it need not simply be a rational system of order or tool of location but can be relieved of its limited purpose. In the Archestructure, the fissures ‘deconstruct’ the grid, if not do away with it altogether.
As a parallel illustrating the deconstruction of the grid, one can see in the Oriental board game of ‘Wei-chi’ or ‘Go’,*17 where there also appears to be a cultural intuition that the grid is in some way dynamic. The player’s stones, rather than occupying squares as in chess, sit on the lines at the intersections. This ancient aesthetic game was understood by the players to have the capacity to lead them to Enlightenment, thence bringing them to an understanding of true emptiness. With this in mind, the
‘emptiness’ of the runes may be further understood (?) as a ‘concrete’ metaphor for an apophatic (via negativa) genesis of the three-dimensional ‘object’. The subsequent array of the runic defiles need not necessarily be interpreted as a symbol of the apophatic, but rather understood as simultaneously embodying in their materiality the actual.
The ‘between’ aspect of the defiles is deeply ‘personal’ (that is universal!) and may relate as a projection on the part of an observer, to the labia of the beloved, or the lover’s kiss; for, as Norman O. Brown says: “All meanings are bodily meanings”*18. This observation of the essentially ‘erotic’ (though impersonal) character of the Archestructure’s congregation of Holons can be understood again metaphorically on this occasion at the kataphatic (tangible, earthy) level derived doubtless(?) from ‘Tantric’ desire, as in the closeness of and subliminal resonance of bodies.
The grid, as useful as it has been, as so much else of the twentieth century output, remains for me a Cartesian remnant of a Newtonian reality. Though this reality still dominates so much of world culture, at the cutting edge of many disciplines, it has been superseded by a new paradigm of dynamic awareness. Mondrian had a strong intimation of this, as he was heavily influenced in his search for the ‘real, by the mystical theories of Theosophy, which may have provided him with an alternate understanding of the possibilities for going beyond the grid; where ‘his lines and planes “annihilate” each other’.*19 As a lover of ballroom he should have allowed the dance to influence further his otherwise ‘puritanical’ straight line focus; but then we would not have ‘Mondrian’!
At another (three dimensional) level, Biederman was tarred with a similar restrictive ‘brush’. As much as I admire both these great artists and the nobility of their dedication in pursuit of truth, as they saw it, and their influence on me apart, I feel that the holistic ambience of the Archestructure resolves issues their works raised for me, most particularly the transcendence of the plane by the warp, together with the usurpation for the most part, of the straight line by the curve. There still remain many straight lines in an Archestructure where the straight lines and curves can be equated as masculine and feminine signs. The overriding search for a mandatory balance of these forces is for me sine qua non.
The Topology of Surfaces and Undulating Edges of the Holons
The surfaces of an Archestructure are governed by the nature of the continuous edge of each Holon, its rise and fall, like an arabesque seen sideways on. The undulation of these edges at the limit of their extension or ‘border’, determine how the surfaces will be resolved in the carving and the nature of its influence on the other associated Holons.
The carving of the edges is carried out intuitively multiple decisions as to how each Holon will relate laterally to all the others. This procedure applies equally too, to any Holon supporting an occluding surface which necessarily resembles the underlying warp. My intention is to avoid flatness altogether, the only exception being any wedges that may ‘emanate’ from the Holons. There is a necessary refusal of any vitalist modelling; the temptation to model as if there were some fictional pressure exerted from below the surface, as for instance in an organic form in a Henry Moore sculpture, would inevitability betray the verity of the Holon’s surfaces by my failing to follow with consistency my adopted principles of Topology or so called ‘rubber-sheet’ (non-Euclidean) geometry, a geometry I hold to, offering infinite possibilities of change, ambiguity as well as structural freedom.
There is a seeming exception the warping surfaces being determined by the edge of each Holon this is where there is an occasional ‘worm-hole’ motif, sunk into a Holon. These holes in the surface have an analogous relationship to the black-holes in the warping grids used in the portrayal of such ‘objects’ in stellar physics. Having said this, there is no intention to symbolise stellar spaces. My placing an orifice within the parameters of a Holon is primarily one of intuitive necessity. This placement follows the demands of the vectors of all the Holons that function in a fully realized work. Also the orifice or ‘wormhole’ may signify an ‘erotic’ space of imaginative penetration and mystery; so further to transcend our “…usual rubrics of understanding that tend to give more weight and value to what is inside and at the core and implicitly denigrate the outside as superficial’. Shin’ichi Hisamatsu also has it that: ‘The true inside of the inside is not having an inside or an outside”*20; this in turn recalls the continuous surface of the Mobius strip (e.g. a strip of paper twisted once and the ends stuck together to produce a one dimensional surface).
During the course of developing my Archestructures, I came to see how the majority of the their Non-Euclidean elements may partially be seen to echo something in the order of physicist David Bohm’s theory of an ‘Implicate Order’; whereby all the disparate aspects of our reality, at a deep level are ‘enfolded’. (“We must learn to view everything as a part of undivided wholeness in flowing movement”)*21. At the macro level of manifestation the Archestructure points to and demonstrates the possibility of an implicate order, though I do not necessarily endorse Bohm’s implicate order; in fact I would warn against any interpretation of the Archestructural ‘principal’ that did away with dynamism to result in a deathly monism implied by an implicate order.
As a succinct analogy and close to the ‘spirit’ of the Archestructures, is the topological ‘object’ known as the Calabi-Yau Manifold.*22 My discovery of this computer-generated mathematical image was I felt ‘confirmation’ of my rather more concrete structural procedures; and to describe an Archestructure as a manifold would be very close to the mark.
Further to the ‘signifying’ surfaces and to reiterate, there is no intention to symbolise; it happens that by the very nature of the ongoing development of the work that possible mimetic resemblances can arise; to wilfully obliterate these would betray the demanding strictures of the developing work as they arise, as well as the intuitive spirit in which they are made.
Nothing inside,
nothingoutside,
For what's inside is also outside
So, do grasp without delay
Holy open mystery. *22
Wedges and Other Elements
Occasionally ‘regular geometric’ planar wedges and truncated frames can be seen at ‘nodal’ points within the defiles; usually the wedges are above the level of the original panel plane where their shadows are thrown back onto the surface warps. These runic ‘creating’ wedges can be viewed as splitting/penetrating the Holons or alternately protrusions of coloured ‘light’, naturally depending on how they are perceived. The placing is not arbitrary as these elements depend entirely on the relevant site for their suitability and function; determined again by the vectors in the ongoing work as the Archestructure takes on a life of its own.
Moreover, all Holons and other elements are not composed or built in the constructivist manner as are, for instance, in the constructed works of Victor Pasmore. Pasmore stuck/screwed blocks of wood to a ground claiming the works to be ‘organic’ in their development. Contrasting with Pasmore’s constructions, the Archestructures’ planar wedges exist because of the Holons). Like the wedges, the spacer-frames are also fully holonic, fully co-relational and ‘erotically’ co-dependent, therefore all the warps and curvilinear Holons, defiles and other features could be said to ‘give rise’ each to the other simultaneously.
The Relationship of an Archestructure to the Traditional Bas-Relief
Very briefly, in order to appreciate the status of an Archestructure in relation to a bas-relief one needs to reprise the generality of the traditional relief, its truth or otherwise. In the traditional bas-relief, space is essentially ambiguous and fictional; figures or objects are seen conventionally in relation to a background or matrix. The background creates a sense of distance; subjects within the conventions of the relief space will have been submitted to perspectival procedures creating depth. Foreshortening further aids the sense of pictorial space as well as containment. These dynamics enforce the experience of separateness not only of the subjects or objects portrayed, but more to the point, the distancing sense the viewer has of the relief as a pictorial object. As far as comparison with an Archestructure is concerned, the felt separation of the space
between viewer and the relief seen in ‘ordinary everyday’ reality is really an illusion. With an Archestructure, both foreground and background do not exist; our conditioned subject/object and figure/ground ‘reading’ has been overcome, there is no dichotomy. The space engendered by the undulating surfaces and wedges etc., is a shared space with the viewer and any sense of separation purely depends on the degree or depth of engagement of the viewer.
The Archestructure as Dyad & Seeing through Duality
In a number of works there is an orientation of the holons that reflect the ancient Greek idea of the Dyad or couple, often in left/right or side-by-side proximity, though asymmetrically balanced. A corresponding insight, of great concern to me, is the significance of the Dyad, pointed to by Stephan Bann: “….the nature of seeing (such as the Lacanian principle of the dyadic nature of the gaze enshrined in his title ‘What We See, What Looks at Us’, prevent(s) us from holding any simple minded views about what is an object and what is not “*24 (my emphasis).
These ideas are, for me, profoundly central to the Archestructural intuition. It is the co-dependence and co-relationship of all the holonic forms, with their ‘emptiness’ (no narrative content), which affords the aniconic Archestructure cultural and, dare I suggest, their spiritual significance?
To reiterate, all the elements that constitute an Archestructure exemplify its interdependent origination, so ‘pointing’ beyond duality to non-duality. Because of this, the Archestructures simultaneously demonstrate the fact that they have no separate object-hood, or autonomy. It is my hope that the notion, nature and quality of the ‘Archestructural Way’ can extend new ways of ‘picturing’ the world through a structural approach rather than directly abstracting from the macro level of seen reality and without falling into the ease and eclecticism of certain kinds of Post-Modernism.
The Zen of seeing
I was convinced many years ago by the compelling validity of Zen’s insight into the nature of tangible reality as it manifests visually in the present moment and how necessary it is to see clearly. However, it was much later that I began to view the above conflicting isms and polarities in the light of my Zen studies and subsequently in that light, see a tentative possibility of a resolution for myself at the very least. Further, it was for me rather like the Zen story of a young herdsman searching for the bull and just seeing its tail disappear round a corner, analogous to the beginning of the journey towards Enlightenment*25. As a result Zen has become my major ‘validating’ resource despite its seeming contradictions and paradoxes; the Kensho (seeing into one’s nature, hence, being wide awake) person is enabled to dance from one foot to the other with the ease of a child, seeing things from an ever new and non-dual perspective.
Zen and the development of the initial glyph or paraph
Regarding the subjective genesis of the glyph or paraph as mentioned above, together with its subsequent development through the various stages of realisation, further clarification of the nature of the subjectivity involved needs explanation. Essentially the approach is non-verbal, non-conceptual, non-ideational, rather intuitive attention to the field of relationships within the glyph and Archestructure in the most objective way,
with no symbolisation as such. Zen scholar Suzuki Daisetz informs us with a seeming outrageous contradiction: “Absolute subjectivity is absolute objectivity”*26. Alexander Eliot too prompts: “Ask your heart to discriminate between objective and subjective truths, it will not
so discriminate, the heart refuses to do so. Or rather, for the heart, such distinctions are like snowflakes on a hot stove”*27. To emphasise further these thoroughly important observations, John Gilmour writes: “Since visual (my emphasis) languages enter into both perception and pictorial creation, we cannot any longer divide the world between the objective and the subjective”.*28
Structure vis a vis emptiness
Buddhist philosophy sees the ‘ten thousand things’ as essentially empty and all phenomena as illusory and in order to see clearly it is necessary to go beyond all duality and reach the state of ‘grace’ called by Buddhists: Enlightenment. The Zen schools aim is to reach this ‘state’ in this life. It is not enough to have an intellectual understanding or otherwise of the ideas sited in this paragraph, there is the paramount requirement that the ‘Way’ should be lived.
Along with the ten thousand things, the Archestructures too are phenomena like everything else, with however, a didactic proviso: the determined structure is one the one hand empty and on the other ‘pointing’ to that Buddhist insight found in the Prajna Paramitta Sutra that ‘Form is emptiness and emptiness is no other than form’. Zen Master Dainin Katagiri tells us: True reality is structured by emptiness (my emphasis).*29
There is something somewhat tongue-in-cheek regarding the ‘solution’ posed by an Archestructure per se: the longing for unity as in so many areas of human consciousness engendered by the perennially conditioned absolutist sense of separation of the ‘subject’ from the ‘object’, together with attendant alienation and suffering. My resource of Zen’s profound ‘philosophy’ expresses with much humour and the ‘method of
no-method’ that there is ‘unity’ already (or to avoid any sense of totalization or monism, as Zen has it: “Not two”*29) it should be emphatically emphasised that this is not mysticism, therefore, the search for unity or oneness is illusory and thoroughly vain. This goes for all our dichotomization: Nature apart from Man; and as the rhetoric has it: we ‘know’ we are part of nature, but with all our technologies, vanity and unsustainable ways etc., we really experience ourselves and act out our lives as if separate; how we delude ourselves! So where does this leave the Archestructure with its ‘unifying’ raison d’être? The answer is simple: ‘one’ is in the presence of (serious) multifarious play; from the ‘point of view’ of Zen there is nothing left to do but wake up and enjoy. From the ‘point of view’ of Zen there is nothing left to do but wake up and enjoy.
“Of forms that suffer transformations strange my muse will sing.”
Ovid
David Iona 2009
Notes and references:
1 Reginald H. Blyth: ‘Zen and the Zen classics’ Vol. five, The Hokusido Press, 1962.
2 Stan Gooch: ‘Personality and Evolution, the Biology of the Divided Self’. Wildwood Press, 1973. Gooch: “…. the archestructure is a concept of my own. It is not unrelated to the notion of the archetype, and hence deliberately echoes Jung’s earlier term. I define an archestructure as a somehow perceived or felt attribute or function of the nervous system, acted out or ‘discovered’ (actually, of course, in some sense of that term, projected) in the physical, social and cultural environments. Instances of archestructures include the already mentioned cross, both the Christian variety and the much older swastika, as well as the widespread symbolism of the crossroads, crossed knives, cross bones, and so on these being essentially, as I suggest, representations of the crossing over of impulses between the cerebrum and cerebellum”.
3 Charles Biederman: ‘Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge’. Red Wing, Minnesota 1948.
4 Leif Sjöberg: ‘Charles Biederman’s search for a New Art’. From Charles Biederman: A Retrospective. The Minneapolis Institute of Arts 1976 – 1977.
5 Mumonkan or Gateless Gate (Wu Men Kuan) a most important document containing koans ( a ‘riddle’ or public document) used by Zen Masters to test the depth or otherwise of their students enlightenment.
6 Robert M. Pirsig, ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’: The Bodley Head, London 1979
7 Maithuna: a sacred image of sexual intercourse in Hindu mythology, e.g. Shiva-Shakti.
8 From the introduction by Kimon Friar to ‘The Odyssey a Modern Sequel’ by Nicos Kazantzakis. Secker and Warburg, London 1959.
9 Donald Kuspit: The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, Cambridge University Press, 1993. As I understand it,
Kuspit sees these ‘cures’ in opposition to each other and as false solutions in either case.
10 ‘Abstract Geometry Painting’, Albright Knox Gallery 1989, page 132.
11 Frank Avray Wilson: ‘Art as Understanding’ Routledge & Kegan Paul 1963.
12 Fosco Moraini: Meeting with Japan, Hutchinson, 1958.
13 Phillip Rawson and Lazlo Legeza: ‘Tao’ the Chinese Philosophy of Time and Change. Thames and Hudson, 1973.
14 Wu’ meaning ‘No’ or more aptly ‘Nothing,’ is a famous Ch’an’ Buddhist koan by Zen Master Chao-chou (778-897 CE).
15 Holons: The concept of the sub-whole, originated by Arthur Koestler “Quasi-autonomous wholes, they are Janus-faced……parts and wholes in an absolute sense do not exist in the domains of life, the concept of the Holon is intended to reconcile the atomistic and holistic approaches. Koestler: ‘Janus a Summing Up’ Hutchinson and Co. Publishers Ltd., 1978.
16 Sam Francis: ‘Saturated Blue’: writings from the notebooks 1995, The Lapis Press, Santa Monica, Ca.
17 ‘The Game of Go: An Unexpected Path to Enlightenment’ William S. Cobb, ‘Tricycle’ The Buddhist Review, vol 111 No.3
18 Norman O. Brown: ‘Loves Body” Vintage Books, New York 1966.
19 Victor A. Grauer “Mondrian and the Dialectic of Essence. http://doctorgee.worldzonepro.com/modrian.htm
20 Shin’ ichi Hisamatsu, quoted by William R. LaFeur: “The Karma of Words”, University of California Press, 1983.
21 David Bohm, ‘Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Routledge, 2002.
22 Calabi-Yau Manifold: HYPERLINK "http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/calabi_manifold" http://enwikipedia.org/wiki/calabi_manifold
23 Goethe: from the poem ‘Epirrhema’, quoted in ‘Art and Consciousness’ by Gottfried Richter, Spring Valley, N.Y. Anthrosophic Press 1985.
24 Stephen Bann: ‘The True Vine’ On Visual Representation and Western Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1989.
25 A series of pictures that represent ‘stages’ of progress towards and including Enlightenment originated by the
12th.centuary Chinese Zen Master Kakuan.
26 Daisetz T Suzuki Zen and Japanese Culture, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1959.
27 Alexander Elliot: ‘Zen Edge’, Thames and Hudson 1976.
28 C. Gilmour: ‘Picturing the World, State University of New York Press 1986.
29 Dainin Katagiri: Returning to Silence; Shambhala, Boston & London 1988.
30 Zen prefers not to reduce everything down to a monist ‘one’ but uses the expression ‘Not Two’ with a good deal of humour. RETURN TO TOP!