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The Sculpting of Mind: The Postmodern Leap Out of Time
I have put in a few slides to illustrate, but the vast majority of the images intended to accompany this piece have been cut for the sake of space.
This is how I got the theme for this lecture- whenever I have an important assignment, either given or self imposed, so with term papers in college, or character notes for a shoot with Len, or this lecture, I invariably have a specific, and I will admit, slightly neurotic mini freak-out. Wherein, I go to the library and check out a huge stack of books which I could never possibly read in whatever amount of time I have. Nevertheless, I am convinced that all the back-up I need for the project, is in those books. All I have to do is find it. Usually this results in a massive distraction, I get side tracked by something I find in the books, or just in reading them. I am a serious and well developed procrastinator.
But this time I hit pay dirt, finally the practice panned out. I found, while looking for another book, Sculpting in Time by Andrea Tarkovsky, a book recommended to me, long ago, as just what I needed, but long forgotten. It is an artistic memoir and treatise by the Russian film maker and was first published in 1986, the year of his death. And so there this book was. You know how that happens sometimes, you just find the book you need, it just sort of comes to you, it’s sitting on top of another stack you are searching through, or it has fallen off the shelf, and is just lying on the ground in your path? That’s how this went, now, Tarkovsky was a director of much acclaim throughout the 60’s and 70’s. Some of his most well known films are Solaris, The Stalker, and this, is a still from his film “The Mirror”.
So, I get home and read this Sculpting in Time and I get all excited. His writing is dead on what I want to say. I decide to title this lecture, The Sculpting of Mind; the post-modern leap out of time. That is how carried away I’m getting with the encouragement of Tarkovsky’s romanticism. So I call my friend Jon, all in a tizzy, which I am wont to do when I am all in a tizzy, and I’m all like: this guy is perfect! He talks about art’s ability to, through its inherent self-reflection, generate an awareness of a greater collective self. He even asserts that art creates a second reality (there might be a thesis in here somewhere after all) and I read to my friend Jon, in my excitement- you know, just listen to this (you get these calls too, sometimes, from somebody, I’m sure) and I read-
“When a link is established between the work and it’s beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpiece and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the fullest reaches of our emotions.”
That is what I read to Jon, and this is what he said in response
Umm, Jessie, you know how these post-post modernist types are (He, I guess was making a sweeping generalization about what you all were going to be like). They really hate it when you talk all metaphysical like. You really can’t speak un-ironically about second realities, and the nature of identity in relation to the spirit. I hate to burst your bubble but you are going to have to take a more wised up tone, you can’t be this romantic, you can’t use this quote, people just don’t talk about these things- spirit in art or artistic planes of existence, they don’t take them seriously anymore.
And so I picked my theme

my true thesis, which is
Oh yeah?
This is a Barbara Kruger piece by the way.
And so, I will end my rambling introduction with this quote from Tarkovsky’s poetic introduction:
“My hope is that those readers whom I manage to convince, if not entirely then at least in part, may become my kindred spirits, if only in recognition of the fact that I have no secrets from them.”
By looking deep within ourselves, by examining the nature of the self, and examining our relationship to others, we begin to see through to an understanding of both this physical world and the worlds, internal and external, of our conscious and unconscious creation and engagement. Through our self consciousness, our aware experience of the world, we perceive and know reality and also become aware of the extent to which our perception shapes the reality we know. As Tarkovsky said
“. . things that exist ‘in themselves’ only come to have existence for us in the course of our own experience.”

In examining our subjectivity and reflecting upon the unreachable subjectivities of others, and in recognizing the distance between this abstract Other and The Self, we approach a deeper understanding of the I itself. We begin to understand its relativity, its contingency. And we proceed to consider the other possible worlds and perspectives of the other “I”’s, which are implied by that relativity. Art is the record of self examination, and self description and as such art mirrors this consideration of the other and its own implied subjectivity.

Myth is considered to be an expression of our self understanding and also a creation of self. In both cases this self refers to a personal self, as well as the social self, as a whole. Jung said that “Myths are original revelations of the preconscious psyche, involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings.” To that extent myth is also the self description of the psyche. In that way it shares a face with art.
As Barthes said “A great photographer is a great mythologizer”
This is a photograph by Nan Goldin, a photographer that epitomizes Barthes dictum. This photograph is not only part of the ongoing myth of her life, which she has created and propagated, but also references the extent to which myth making, and the self examination that such myth-making is built upon, expands the limits of this perceived reality. In our self reflection and story telling we make our world, and the worlds of our creation, more multidimensional.
In that sense, as in others, the invention of photography was the moment Pygmalion kissed Galatea. With photography, the dimensions of our creation began to overlap with the components of this, time based reality. Photography enabled, for the first time, the commingling of our specific, temporal selves (as opposed to our described selves in painting or sculpture), with The Eternal of art. Photography personalized mythology. Through this personal engagement we have not only more fully included our specific natures in the great myth of human life, but we have brought to life, brought a self, to the myth.
We are for the first time considering, philosophically, scientifically, and artistically, the effect of our observation on the subject and not just considering the subject itself or our relationship to him, her, or it. This brings us to a stage of artistic consciousness which can be compared to what the philosopher, Ken Wilber describes as the advanced formal operational stage of cognitive development. In psychology or artistic consciousness, this stage is reached when -The Subject- can consider the nature of -The Subject- abstractly. Wilber further argues, and in keeping with Tarkovsky’s theories, that it is through this internal examination of self that we get to a broader awareness of consciousness in general. Wilber’s discussion of the progressively inward and outward development of human consciousness recalls Heidegger’s concept of Dasein,(da- sign) - explained excellently by Heideggar’s translators Gregory Fried and Richard Polt as “a condition into which human beings enter, either individually or collectively, at a historical juncture when Being becomes an issue for them.”
The current theoretical assignment of consciousness to art, found, for example in the writing of Jeannette Winterson, when she says
“Art is consciousness and its effect on its audience is to stimulate consciousness” is the formal operational stage of art’s consciousness, of art’s developing Dasien. It is when artistic consciousness first begins to assert and then examine the actual being of artistic consciousness.
So as we mature as social organisms, and as organic societies, we first tell myths as truths, we then acknowledge and examine the process of, our myth making (thus Jung and the analytic era), and then we assert the primacy of the myth, as again, a greater truth, by giving ourselves, our ideas of being, our unique consciousness, to the myth- through art. Then the myth itself, self aware and conscious of its casting, also becomes a player on the stage of consciousness. By self consciously giving ourselves to myth, to art, and by assigning art an independent consciousness that interacts with our own, this is to say: we are of this-it creates us- and it is to this that we go.

In looking squarely at myth, at art, as a reflection of ourselves (individually and collectively), we perceive the world to which this Mirror Self belongs, spreading out behind it and beyond it, visible through the reflecting surface. The most dynamic frontier of human consciousness is the noosphere, to use the term prophetically coined in the 1950s by the French paleontologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin. Defined by another writer as the "sphere of the mind, as opposed to, or rather superposed on, the biosphere or sphere of life, and acting as a transforming agency promoting progressive psychosocial evolution", the noosphere is a term now frequently applied to the internet and to the rapidly evolving interactive and expressive media to which the internet has given rise?U-Tube, the blogosphere, MySpace, and so on. The exciting thing about this new age of human self-awareness and mental construction is that we are now sparking an autonomous consciousness in our collective self. We are giving this new sphere its own being, so to speak. We not only see our reflection but the other world to which it belongs expanding out beyond it.

This consciousness not only now meets our voyeuristic gaze but it has the autonomy to return it. And I am reminded of Jung:
“The collective unconscious . . .constitutes a common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal (beyond the self) nature. Psychic existence can only be recognized by the presence of contents that are capable of consciousness. . . The far reaching implications of this statement must not be overlooked. For it means that there are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious but nonetheless active- living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense, that perform and continually influence our thoughts and feeling and actions.”
Jung was very clear that he believed in the consciousness, of these archetypal dispositions.

Now, the points I’ve just been outlining, about collective self awareness bringing our shared artistic dream to a new level of consciousness are the grand theme of this slide show. But I want to spend the rest of our time together illustrating these points in reference to the examination of self and subject in art, particularly the representation of the female figure.
Before we get to the autonomous and replying character, we must first start with the objectified and silent muse. This slide show will take us from the abstracted character as placeholder to a discussion of the place and the place holder,
and finally we will get to a discussion of the Anima behind and supporting the subject. Of the Anima Jung said “It is a factor in the proper sense of the word. It is something that lives of itself, that makes us live; it is life behind consciousness that cannot be completely integrated with it, but from which, on the contrary, consciousness arises.”
Examining ourselves as we had examined the natural world, we start with the freestanding and isolated form in light. The body as landscape.
Then we began to involve our selves, the artist, the viewer, and a specific subject in this examination, this is a photograph by Emmett Gowin of his wife, Edith. We include a relationship to the abstracted character in the image, and it becomes myth.
From a syntactical perspective, we go from- “A being” to “A being I know”, and the so the artists’ personal experience is included in the image, along with the viewers perception.
With this knowledge, about the relationship of the artist to the subject, comes the woman’s identity. She brings with her not just the story you invariably design for her, nor just the story told by the image, but also her history; the story of her being, in our time. Ms. Kiki Smith, whom I portray here, was undoubtedly A Character. Her crafted public identity becomes as much a part, of the narrative of art, as the picture itself. Our knowledge of her as both a character in the infinitely expanding moment of an image, but also as an historical person transforms the sentence to “WE know this woman, or more precisely, We Have Known this woman”, the author of course exists, she herself exists, and we the reader exist, but now too some external time frame is implicated. History joins the party. And so the collective, as well as specific, identity both are engaged with the unconscious.
At which point this examined subject, looks back, and the myth/mirror self, has had its first stirrings of consciousness. To stick with Jung, he said “The archetype is essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its color from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear”. Georgia O’keefe was not a model, not just a place filler, a form, she was not a character sketch, nor was she just a muse, engaging the artist in an examination. What she was, was- self possessed. She knew what she was giving of herself. She owned her casting, so to speak. She, in a self aware manner, played her part, and in that way, she brought herself, and not just her character, to life.
It is Georgia O’Keefe, the concept that looks back at us.
She demonstrated what Kandinsky said, “the photograph always carries its referent with it.” The self is now being specifically and self consciously applied to the myth, to art. When she posed she understood and believed in the cameras action, she was asserting herself in the landscape of the mind.
This other self not only looks back, but is aware of the viewer- whose now noticed presence- leaves neither unchanged. The subject then acknowledges their own subject- ness, the viewer his own effect. Now, there is an engagement of both the author and the reader- in the character’s dawning awareness of self. The character senses that you are reading their story.
This photograph refers to the moment in Peter Pan where the membrane separating audience from drama melts away. In an act of heroic self-sacrifice, Tinkerbell has drunk the poison intended for Peter. The only way to save the expiring sprite is for the audience to clap, if they believe in fairies. What does it mean, then, really, for our Neverlands, when we clap? To engage ourselves as the viewer, as the subject, the author, and to include as well an interaction between all three, all of it, all of that, collectively, is to give all of ourselves to the story. We thereby, make ourselves, and our experience of the story, and the story itself, more real.
Roland Barthes said, to pose is to transform oneself, in advance, into image.
In that sense, all art is, in a way, humanity setting its face for a portrait. When we hold still and look into the camera, we are giving ourselves to the concept, acknowledging posterity, looking into a future memory, and of course, catching sight of our reversed reflection in the lens. But the action of posing also opens a door for the viewer to enter.
There is an implied acknowledgement of a gaze to meet our collected projection, there is the assumption that there is someone or something to see our intensifying image. Once we have acknowledged that myth is not just a projection of self, but that it is being reflected on some great mirror, we are not just aware of our self assertion, or self possession, but we become collectively self-conscious of our collective selves as subject.
In addition to my new best friend Tarkovsky, I also found in my compulsive reading, the phrase “the self conscious genre”. That is, artistic productions distinguished by their makers' attention to the mysteriousness and contingency of, artistic production. Photographs that do not seek to conceal the slop and splatter of the darkroom, or the lens's distortion; novels that fuss over the author's?or his narrator-proxy's?position in a larger system of communication, even as they are trying to get on with the business of telling a story. The patron saint of the self-conscious genre may be Don Quixote. The hero of Cervantes's novel discovers that a spurious book about his adventures has been published, that everyone is poring over and gossiping about it. Outraged, he starts to alter his plans in order to prove the writer a liar. His flight from the destiny predicted for him by his unauthorized biographer takes Don Quixote to Barcelona, where he wanders into a printing shop and finds that a new edition of the offensive volume is being prepared there. Don Quixote is thus the first character in literature who knows he is being written about, the first character in literature who enters a printing shop, and the first character in literature who sees his own life being turned into a commercial product. Nowadays we are all of us in that Barcelona printing shop; but who is the reader for whom our lives are being re-edited?

"How", asks the critic Robert Stam, ". . . in the absence of the Gods, the muses, or any communal tradition", how can the artist "validate the narrative? The epic order," Stam says, "The epic order, once intimately linked to a social and mythological ethos, no longer exists, and the artist is thrown back on meager personal resources."
To which I say- Meager What? In this image I am playing the Comtessa de Castiglione, a woman who understood that she could use herself, her image, her life, her public character, to create a story powerful enough to break past any bounds her sex imposed on her, powerful enough even to grant her a godlike immortality. By commissioning hundreds of photographs of herself, she managed save herself from a life of dusty storage, and instead she brought to light a future, a future of freedom, for her character. Through an examination of our abstracted and reflected selves we have come to understand “the best sides of our souls,” in Tarkovsky’s glorious phrase. The self consciousness, and even irony, of postmodernity allow us to reclaim some of the structure and much of the meaning of the old mythic order. By examining our mask and projection themselves, we can see both the mask alone, and the self exposed, as themselves art. This is a photograph of Olga De Meyer, taken in 1898, by her husband Adolph De Meyer. And so we see not just the play, not just the costumes and the acting, but the audience as well.

As one school of contemporary philosophy maintains, with Wilber at the helm, by going within we reach greater withouts, and in keeping with this theory, as art has expanded its sense of its self, by including both our stories and our collective self as audience, its range of acquisition, its ability to claim objects - as Sontag would say- also expands. The radius of self reference in art now includes that collective knowing, that next plane of consciousness. It includes the greatest without of our collective self.
Our obsession with our characters, our stories, and the noosphereic meteor belt of images, is an even broader example of this, to again use the words of Barthes, cunning dissociation of consciousness from identity, at work in our culture. The point is, that we are now aware that our perception of iconic figures involves a process of abstracting a character from an identity- an object from a person. Again I will use the words of Sontag “Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of that consciousness in its acquisitive mood. . . to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed.” But seriously, this, this consciousness in its acquisitive mood- it all sound very much like the romantic effusions of Tarkovsky. It is easy to see in our current popular culture an increasing tendency to think that we own stars, that romantic notion that we in some way shape their identities. As if our attention were prayer, somehow

protecting them.

as if the sustained gaze and mass replication both blesses them and creates them. Maybe to switch it up and be Freudian for a second, a mothering complex, a sense of generative ownership, is reflected in the behavior of the populous. In this, way we begin to
collectively examine the effect of collective perception on the object.

In what way is the object changed by its mental possession, in what way does the gaze bring to life an existence? To quote a great master of 20th century painting “In a mysterious, puzzling, and mystical way, the true work of art arises ‘from out of the artist’. Once released from him, it assumes its own independent life, takes on a personality, and becomes a self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject that also leads a real material life; . . it possesses – like every living being, further creative, active forces.”
And now for sure I am making people nervous. “You can’t pair the mystical writings of Kandinsky with Christo sweety.” But, when we think about the beliefs we hold about our public personalities, we have to address the subtle ways in which we feel complicit in their fates, the ways in which the effect of the viewer is assumed. So, IT IS fair to address the ways in which our examination brings to life a character
and in what ways we believe it can make a spector of the self,

because the idea that observation alters the thing observed is now well-established in our culture. What does it mean to be possessed by the viewer, what do we really mean when we speak, in our post modern tone, of the tragedy of the imprisoned spirit? Is there some actual risk here? What do we mean when we talk about an image having a sprit at all? Do we, when we affirm the consciousness behind the image, and then engage in a collective transformation to and assertion of the image, in a way, deny the real self and assert a less substantial one? Photos, As Barthes said “transform subject into object, to become an object is a microversion of death, it is to become a specter” so do we, when we take on the perspective of the anima, when we move our greatest significance from reality to the collective unconscious, damn the self to a moment, no matter how infinitely expansive, nonetheless, static?
I contend that this growing self awareness and self possession within art supply answers to those questions. To dissociate consciousness from identity, does not necessarily endanger the identity, but it certainly frees the consciousness. Whatever death the identity may endure in its transformation, only brings more fully to life, the self. It is a metaphoric death which brings the infinite closer. Tarkovsky again nails it “to tell of what is living, the artist uses something dead; to speak of the infinite, he shows the finite. . . . the infinite cannot be made into matter, but it is possible to create an illusion of the infinite: the image.” .
Self consciously asserting the unconscious existence is to make life art.
It makes life the subject of, and thus in some way somewhat subservient to, art. Warhol, in his attempt to turn his self and his life itself, into a work of art, made of himself a sacrifice to the story. Through his life and art we realize that the use of both life and death as a way to speak of the infinite, again, is again not the end of the individual but the beginning of a new existence. Tarkovsky, in his conclusion, in a way sums up the sacrifice Warhol made of his identity “Finally, I would enjoin the reader – confiding in him utterly—to believe that the one thing that mankind has ever made in the spirit of self-surrender is the artistic image. Perhaps the meaning of all human activity lies in artistic consciousness, in the pointless and selfless creative act.” If that should not be Andy’s epitaph then it should be this quote by Nietzsche, “Art is the proper task of life, [. . .] art is life’s metaphysical existence [. . . ] art is worth more than truth..” In the end the story becomes bigger than the subject, the story becomes the story, and so the myth again refers to some bigger truth.
To assert the image, to assert our mirror self, is to have faith in the story that has yet to be told. It is to have faith in our infinitely generative power of perception. To turn ones life, ones whole being, into art, is to assert the primacy of the story and the greater truth behind it. But that is to also admit that we depend on perception for existence.
As Joseph Campbell said “For nature, as we know it, is at once without and within us. Art is the mirror at the interface.” By going within we truly saw our selves and then we saw ourselves as a reflection itself, we saw this reflection as our collective story, and we are now then, just beginning to look at what nature is within and without our selves on the other side of this reflection.
Who is listening when we all become participants in the story, which seems to happen through the very action of our listening? What is this other world that is said to have existed before us, to which we continuously contribute ourselves. Currently, the abstracted character, and this is a photograph by Florence Henri aptly titled “A Reclining Woman”. not only looks back at us as herself
[SLIDE: SHERMAN], the free standing anima, but she also examines her own nature, she too looks at her reflection.
To refer to one of Chicago’s great adopted sons, our current state of self-consciousness mirrors in the existential crisis of a Bellow character- aware of the mythic structure unfolding in and giving shape to their lives, aware of the seemingly a priori nature of their selves, these character’s in their angst reflect both their mysterious place in your mind or imagination, and your equally puzzling place in the collective mind. In the anima’s incipient self examination, will she find she, too, is a reflection?
This is perhaps what will prove to be the case after we give our mirror selves feet and the chance to self report.
And so, we are now just about at the point where we can consciously examine, the other world. Bellow and, more recently, Rushdie offer literary examples of how the capacity for infinite self-reflection, built into the process of storytelling, has become part of the plot. We have not only cast ourselves as characters. We have set the narrative in consciousness. In Rushdie's Ground Beneath Her Feet, for example, figures from our collective unconscious begin to do strange things in his character's dreams and hallucinations: Lou Reed appears as a female rock star, and so on. And so art is now no longer the mirror at the interface, it is mirrors infinitely reflecting themselves
And the system of reflections approaches a state of Dasein, self-aware and thus developing the capacity to assign consciousness. Our self-reflection has opened into other worlds. Our self-consciousness has now taken up a place outside the self. It is in the mirror self and collective self both, giving us the capacity for self-regard from the outside in.
We are, in new shoes, examining this emerging world, one which perhaps challenges old beliefs. For instance, could this other world really have some physical existence? Could art have something fundamental in common with its so called saner twin, science. Is the shared gene not the common focus on perception? Karl Pribram, a neuroscientist who specializies in the study of perception and memory, who at Yale, in the late 1960’s developed the controversial holographic model of perception has said
“ It must be that we are creating and projecting a virtual image of the object out in space, in the same place as the actual object, so that the object and our perception of the object coincide. This would mean that the art of seeing is one of transforming. In a sense, in the act of observation, we are transforming the timeless, spaceless world of interference patterns [or simply light] into the concrete and discrete world of space and time . . .” .

Is the mirror image then, not also subject to duration, is this idealized existence
we assume to be eternal, perhaps not just outside of our time?

Is there an identity which is not defined by another’s gaze
Is there something more than the self which is also gaining consciousness?
By pushing into and then past the self we come to a new modern era with a oddly romantic moral- when we go beyond even our self-consciousness we get to a spirit consciousness. And now this has to make everyone a little nervous. It makes me nervous to use the word spirit at all. But Bueyes would be proud. To infinitely regress the perspective in which aesthetic experience is resolved, and to recognize the consciousness of the whole system is to include the spirit in art, and thus to allow both consciousness and spirit to operate on all planes of existence. And again I am reminded of Jung’s sprites, his psychically active little influencers. As Bueys predicted art is now, acting as the science of spirit. Today, post-Warhol, post-Sherman, art theory like quantum theory is able to frame a discussion of the metaphysics of identity and consciousness- a discussion, at its most basic level, about spirit. And I am back again to myth- we have told this story so many times- we recreate ourselves, in the very act of creating, we reference our own existence as creation. We fall in love with our own creation, we assert it as superior to ourselves, we give our selves to it, and in that act of sacrifice we suffer that death- rehearsal and then finally, we breath life into the story. What is different now, form this newly living other side, is that we see things from Galatea’s perspective.
From Shakespeare’s mirror held up to nature, to Cambell’s mirror at the interface, to going through the looking glass, all of this, I do not know on what level of allegory these concepts and theories belong. But my experience has shown me that to believe in the story, to give oneself to art, is to make the experience of possibility, personal and universal, more alive. Art is, to close with Tarkovsky, the limitless given form.