On the far side of modernism artists may find
they have a great deal to 'learn from Lascaux'. This is not a
matter of scavenging the 'primitive'. There has been enough of that
in the twentieth century. Too often the effort to salvage ancestral
images has been animated by a domineering consciousness, one that
insensitively ransacks or even plunders the tribal cultures.
Lately, spokespeople for traditional societies have taken issue
with such invasive practices. Jerome Rothenberg's 'ethno-poetics'
is a better approach. It seeks to redress this essentially
colonialist attitude by preserving and enhancing the human values
that connect us with primitive people. Our goal should not be to
borrow from elsewhere, but to search among our own cultural
resources, perhaps even in modern science and industrialism, for
ways to restore art to the status it has always held among primary
people as a form of knowledge..
In the modern western world, the Romantics were
the last major cultural movement to assert the 'truth of the
imagination', defending art as a way of knowing the world that
equalled or surpassed scientific reason. In their resistance to
what Blake called 'Satan's Mathemitik Holiness', their goal was not
to reject science but to enlarge it. Newtonian science sought to
understand the world by a process of reductionism. The method may
be legitimate enough, but it can carry over into reducing in value.
Phenomena deprived of their dignity and vitality become 'nothing
but ... nothing but'. They are cheapened by the very act of
knowing. In contrast, the Romantics sought to understand by
augmentation. In Blake's terms, they sought 'fourfold vision'
rather than 'single vision'. From the Romantic perspective, a
landscape by Constable makes our knowledge of nature bigger: art
adds to what we learn from any combination of physics, biology,
geology and chemistry. It tells us the world is (to offer a poor
verbal translation) magnificent, perhaps sacred, therefore
deserving of reverence. At its highest level, it transforms our
consciousness by uniting us with Deep Form in the natural
world.
By 'Deep Form' we mean the correspondence between
formative processes of mind and formative processes in nature. As
Coleridge put it, 'the rules of the imagination are themselves the
very powers of growth and production.' For the Romantics,
recognizing this congruency between creativity in art and in nature
was not a mere subjective reflex, it was as much a fact as anything
a botanist tells us about photosynthesis or a geologist about
continental Drift. Deep Form offers us the knowledge that an
authentically deep ecology requires, in order to place us in a
respectful, sustainable relationship with nature.
'Great works of art,' Goethe believed, 'are works
of nature just as truly as mountains, streams and plains.' The
oneness of art and nature has not been wholly beyond the reach of
scientists themselves. Even as tough-minded a Darwinian as Thomas
Huxley once admitted to the fact that 'in travelling from one end
to the other of the scale of life, we are taught one lesson, that
living nature is not a mechanism, but a poem.'
Georg Groddeck, Freud's most eccentric follower,
was among the few psychotherapists who granted art an
epistemological status of its own. An admirer of Goethe, Groddeck
regarded art as the key criterion of sanity. Healthy art creates a
healthy soul, sick art creates neurosis. Groddeck believed that,
since the renaissance, the art of Western society has been
corrupted by an excessive humanism. He warned that when we turn
away from nature we lose 'the chance of cultural development, cease
to recognise our dependence upon the universal whole, and direct
our love, fear and reverence only upon the strivings and sufferings
of our fellow men. ' This degenerates into a narrow psychologism
especially as our lives come to be bounded by what the neo-
Romantic poet Robinson Jeffers called 'the incestuous lie of the
cities'.
It is heartening to see how the sense of Deep
Form has managed to survive in the arts, despite all that urban
industrial society has done to shatter the natural continuum. We
can find celebrations of Deep Form among some of the masters of
modernism, a small, gallant contingent who never lost their
nourishing connection with the Earth beneath the pavement. While
their style is distinctly of our time and place, their sensibility
allies them to the dawn of human culture. Paul Klee is a leading
example. He once gave this advice to a fellow art teacher:
'Lead your students to Nature, into Nature! Let
them learn by experience how a bud is formed, how a tree grows, how
a butterfly opens its wings, so that they will become as rich, as
variable, as capricious as Nature herself. Perception is
revelation, follow the ways of natural creation, the becoming, the
functioning of forms. That is the best school.'
According to Werner Haftmann, Klee collected
skeletons of small animals, mosses, bark and lichen, shells and
stones, beetles and butterflies. 'They were most carefully
selected, but if one can see through them and master the laws
governing their existence, and their form, nature itself becomes
transparent, the spirit moves, and the artist feels compelled to
attempt similar acts of formal creation.'
Similarly, Emil Nolde subscribed to a deeply
organic aesthetic. He too sensed the forces of nature that work
within the artist, bringing us the knowledge of an animated
universe. 'My aim,' he said, 'was that colours should be
transmitted to the canvas, through myself as the painter, with the
same inevitability as when Nature herself is creating forms, just
as minerals and crystals are formed, just as moss and seaweed
grow.'
One can name many others whose work is an
expression of Deep Form. They are not the dominant movement in
twentieth-century art, but they appear here and there like upstart
springs that flow from the distant shamanic sources of their
vocation. The voice of the Earth sounds throughout Walt Whitman and
his major disciple Pablo Neruda. Georgia O'Keeffe must be numbered
among the company and so too Emily Carr, who so vividly recalls in
her diaries the unitive experience that comes with the discovery of
Deep Form. 'I woke up this morning with 'unity of movement' in a
picture strong in my mind. . . . For long I have been trying to get
the movement of the parts. Now I see there is only one movement. It
sways and ripples. It may be slow or fast but it is only one
movement sweeping out into space but always keeping going - rocks,
sky, one continuous movement.'
The Artist, like a tree, drinks up nourishment
from the depths and from the heights, from the roots and from the
air, to bring about a crown of leaves. The organic metaphor is
essential here to the concept of Deep Form. Nature is reborn
through artistic vision. 'Think what it would be like, [Italo
Calvino once wrote] to create a work outside the limited
perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves
like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language, to
the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in
spring.'
Yes, and to the stones, clouds, and stars.
Deep Form reveals the web of vital relationships
embedded in all things. Its vision of the universe is
what Read called 'a prodigious animism'. It reminds us that the
great drama of our time is the discovery that all things and
creatures on Earth share a common destiny. We are linked to one
another in what the poet Robert Duncan once called a 'symposium of
the whole'.
Duncan's poetry is among the most eloquent
appeals for the creation of what the Deep Ecologists have called an
'ecocentric community'. She writes, 'to compose such a symposium of
the whole, such a totality, all the old excluded orders must be
included. The female, the proletariat, the foreign, the animal and
vegetative, the unconscious and the unknown, the criminal and
failure - all that has been outcast and vagabond must return to be
admitted in the creation of what we consider we are.' The words
echo Klee's profession: 'I sink myself beforehand in the universe
and then stand in a brotherly relationship to my neighbours, to
everything on this Earth.'
As examples of work that embodies the full
ecological significance of Deep Form in the visual arts, we have
chosen two artists; both are English now living in California.
Gordon Onslow Ford began his artistic lie as a surrealist. From
that school he took his powerful introspective orientation. Now in
his eighties, Onslow Ford has gone well beyond the purely personal
subconscious that delimited surrealism. In his major work we enter
territory where inside and outside, microcosmos and macrocosmos,
merge and mirror each other. He inhabits 'an inner world beyond
dreams', where 'the world is the subject and the painter eventually
becomes one with what is happening in the world.'
Onslow Ford's is an activated space where, in an
instant, matter becomes energy and energy matter. He speaks of his
paintings as experiments in 'ecomorphology' that offer us the
inner, vision experience of such otherwise speculative scientific
concepts as the black hole and the Big Bang. His canvases become
visual hymns to the material foundations of life and mind in the
cosmos.
Christopher Castle's art is also a vision of the
inner energetic spaces, the worlds of inner earth. Both he and
Onslow Ford are concerned with an organic concept of space and
matter. Castle, who identifies his work as 'geomantic', creates
layered archaic images that reverberate with those hidden, telluric
forces that our ancestors experienced as animate and divine. This
requires the closest attention of the viewer: lines of force,
growth patterns, seeds, stones, the folds and fissures of land, and
the dark pulsating symbols of ancient sites. In Castle's work we
view the landscape, usually a sacred site, simultaneously from
above, from below, from the air, from beneath the earth.
Both artists present us with a world of unbroken
inter-relationship, with a space vibrating with energy, with a
depth not of perspective but of multiplicities. Oscillations of
figure and ground occur in which images appear, disappear, then
appear again. In Onslow Ford's work, as in the tracings of
subatomic particles in a cloud chamber, form appears and disappears
mysteriously in that boundary zone at the moment of creation.
Castle draws upon Neolithic patterns spirals and zigzags imprinted
on sky or earth. He reclaims the runic script of nature, the
sinuous serpentine movement of dark, telluric powers, rising from
great depths to mirror the heavens.
As stylistically different as the two painters
may seem at first glance, both assert the vital link between the
artistic celebration of form and the real existence of it in the
world. In their work, aesthetic pleasure becomes knowledge, the
mind is thrown open to that primordial form-making power from which
the cosmos has arisen.
Deep Form offers the artist a new repertory of
gestures instead of grasping, seeing, mastering, struggling, it
attempts a tender touching, a non-interfering gaze, a receptive
bonding with Earth and the other. The dark, submerged feminine
reappears as an image and informing spirit, a new anima mundi with
her rich welter of sensuous experience in colour, scent and sound.
Wherever Deep Form wells up among the poets, the painters, the
architects, the performers, life is made whole again and the
universe is re-animated. The creative imagination returns us to an
aesthetic both old and new, to a mode of knowing the natural world
which can be the ally of science. The human again becomes an
integral part of nature, life and mind become part of a vital
matrix as vast and as old as the universe. This primal ecological
insight views human art not as anomaly or arbitrarily fashionable
decoration, but as integral to the natural order, the common root
being inherent formative processes at work at every level of
reality from the structure of atoms to the formation of galactic
clusters.