Ritual, virtual, sacred space

Ancient Strategies in Contemporary Art by Deni DeBon ©

Dominique Mazeaud began a project called “The Great Cleansing of the Rio Grande,” in 1987. Once a month, on the same day each month, like clockwork she went to the Rio Grande river, near her home, and removed garbage out of the river. Part of her work involved keeping a diary. Sometimes the diary was documentation of the day’s events and other times she wrote “prayers” or poems about her ritual.12 Though Mazeaud is not making a grand ecological impact, her art reaches out through compassion, for one day a month she coexists with the river. Her ritual is personal and usually involves herself, and the people who pass by. Personal rituals work to reclaim one’s own identity, which cannot be found in today’s industrial culture. There is a longing to obtain an intrinsic sense of identity within the individual. Artists are turning to interactive processes which often seem simple and down to earth, working towards finding a sense of function within the world which also heightens the sense of self. Within the current traditions, there is little understanding of ritual art forms. In Mazeaud’s piece, her diary is the only commodity available. The function of the work is the interaction between artist and subject, the ending result is only known to the artist

I am adding this as it follows up on the Suzi Gablik item below. There are some important elements here.

Ritual
prayers
diary

These are the things that move us into the virtual, and that is where the gods are.

Virtual and ritual – connected?

Stuff that dreams are made of

2.03: The Economy of Ideas

Last line from the JPB item linked before:

And finally, in the years to come, most human exchange will be virtual rather than physical, consisting not of stuff but the stuff of which dreams are made. Our future business will be conducted in a world made more of verbs than nouns.

Stuff that dreams are made of… there is the clue… to psyberspace.

BUT… Information is as much a real product as material goods – it arises not only out of dreams but hard work. I think it un-psychological to not see the real thing and then to see into it imaginatively. It is particularly skewed to selectively imagine.

That is central to my whole way of doing therapy. It goes back to the “seduction theory”. Must dig up an article I wrote on that. To put it simply: just because it really happened does not mean we should neglect our dreams.

One thing I loved about this article is the opening quote from Jefferson. JPB certainly found the right bit to quote.

Movie: A Beautiful Mind (2001)

A Beautiful Mind (2001)

“Plot Outline: John Nash, diagnosed as paranoid-schizophrenic, goes on to win a Nobel Prize for work on game theory.”

Warning: Spoilers ahead:

Of course I was entertained. That said, this is the second time in a short time I have seen such a form of inner aggression in the name of a psychological solution on the screen. Fight Club was the other movie – similar in concept.

The characters in John Nash’s psyche (as shown in the movie) had little connection with his own history and dynamics. In a way his isolation in the outside world spills into his inner life and in the name of sanity he treats his inner child, except for one parting moment, not unlike his own real son – with neglect.

As a therapist I have worked with people with similar dynamics. It is almost a law of the inner world that these characters have good intentions poorly executed. Role reversal and re-education can make them effective players in the soul.

So, I found it less than satisfying that these potentially interesting and rich aspects of the psyche – the best friend, the inner child, and the great protector were all dismissed as having no value.

It is a folly to interpret the symbolic as literal. Are there hidden codes in magazines? Are they dangerous? Yes. The consumer society promoted in the magazines kills people. He was not so silly really! A case of category confusion.

On the positive side, Nash’s solution was far better than the one the psychiatric system was trying to impose. Still, I would have liked to have been his therapist!

Mona Lisa

Mona Lisa . [dead] . Now http://web.archive.org/web/20010222162001/http://studiolo.org:80/Mona/MONASV12.htm

“Most probably it was Sigmund Freud’s influential essay on Leonardo’s homosexuality and Freud’s consequential analysis of the Mona Lisa which was the direct or proximate impetus for Duchamp’s image. But, whereas Duchamp seems to imply that the picture fuses artist and sitter, male and female, Freud suggests that the Mona Lisa (specifically her smile) is a manifestation of Leonardo’s submerged memory of the birth mother from whom he was estranged at age four and who Freud theorizes expressed an unnatural affection toward her young son. In fact, Freud refutes the notion that there is a physiognomic similarity between the artist and the sitter, but goes on to suggest that the device of the smile was obviously so meaningful to the artist, using it frequently in his works of the time, it must have repressed significance. The person behind the Mona Lisa, Freud suggests, may have had such a smile, a smile that evoked long ago suppressed memories of his mother. Indeed, as Freud is quick to point out, this seems to have been a persistent theme: Vasari even noted that at the earliest age Leonardo was known for having created images of smiling women:

Let us leave the physiognomic riddle of Mona Lisa unsolved, and let us note the unequivocal fact that her smile fascinated the artist no less than all spectators for these 400 years. This captivating smile had thereafter returned in all of his pictures and in those of his pupils. As Leonardo’s Mona Lisa was a portrait, we cannot assume that he has added to her face a trait of his own, so difficult to express, which she herself did not possess. It seems, we cannot help but believe, that he found this smile in his model and became so charmed by it that from now on he endowed it on all the free creations of his phantasy.

“(Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: A study in psychosexuality. tr. A.A. Brill. New York, Vintage Books, [1955] Originally published by Freud in 1910, p. 79.)”

Psychotherapy Online with Walter Logeman

Psychotherapy Online with Walter Logeman

My invitation….

Write to me, in
an an email, about one of the following:

One of your dreams.
A difficulty or dilemma you are having.
A challenge or crisis in a relationship.
Strong feelings you have now.
A topic of your choice.

I will respond by email, free of charge, from my psychological perspective.

I will also let you know how to continue psychotherapy online with me if you choose to.

To get started email me:walter@psybernet.co.nz

I have updated my Psychotherapy Online pages.

August 2021

to be clear… this was 21 years ago.  I did that work for decades and loved it .  I could do so again.  But not now.  Other projects occupy my life. Training psychodrama, running groups .