Actual Contact: A Personal Retrospective of the Abstract.

When I was young I was captivated by an abstract mosaic that was displayed above the doors of a modern Protestant church in my hometown. Though it was called art, I recall seeing it clearly as a pattern of nature, just as organic as a pattern found on a leaf. Its message was immediate to me. I related to the image directly. It expressed something that seemed timeless.

I can also remember my parents taking me to an area outside my hometown called Paint Rock to see the drawings left behind on rock formations by people who had lived there long before us. While looking at these mysterious pictographs and petroglyphs, I felt a deep urge to participate, to draw, to communicate.

Paint Rock, TX

Drawing became a natural process for me, consisting of several stages of development. I began with symbols and abstract patterns, discovering that beauty and meaning are connected to the form and function of the line. This encounter with creation opened my eyes to the actuality of a common visual language in which expression is not a consciously creative act but an impulse “which is produced by internal necessity.” It was now possible for me to see the language of the soul expressing itself outwardly through all the visual arts.

Impressionism is a word which describes a momentous mutation in Western art history when the doctrine of objective reality began to dissolve. For the first time, light and color took precedence over form. Unlike the singular visions of William Blake, or Hieronymus Bosch, a generation of artists were exploring the act of creation as a direct encounter with nature, going inward to create art that wasn’t lifelike.

Impression Sunrise by Claude Monet, 1873

This initial “impression” then split apart into tiny images made up of evenly placed colored dots, illuminating the natural landscape as a vibration of primary colors.

Seascape at Port-en-Bessin, Normandy, Georges Seurat, 1888

Floating past these colored dots of divided matter, some artists ventured beyond the visible world, glimpsing an inner landscape of symbols. These artists uncovered the personal power of utilizing myths and dreams,
dissolving the line between the outer and inner surroundings.

Stepping over the threshold and diving deeper into the psyche, Paul Cézanne uncovered the foundations of the forms proclaiming, “Treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, and the cone.”

Corner of Bibemus Quarry by Paul Cézanne, 1900-1902

Influenced by Cézanne’s discoveries, new artists flattened the object and fragmented the picture plane. A natural step that soon congealed into cubes bound to representation, creating a Modern art academy of the elite class. This wall of cubes effectively protected the artist’s new found status in society, and successfully separated itself from the so-called “decorative arts,” like Art Nouveau.

Landscape with Two Figures by Pablo Picasso, 1908

Those who understood art as a means for psychic survival knew the immediate nature of art and its power of not only self-transformation, but collective-transformation. By uncovering the mandala, Carl Jung was in effect the modern world’s first shamanic healer. In a time of world war, Jung was able to articulate the utility of the ancient ideas of art as magic to the rational scientific mind. He wrote volumes on the subject of alchemy, involving the union of opposites, not only in its relation to individual psychic health but also in its relation to the psychic health of mankind. Jung noted that in both religion as well as alchemy this union was personified as a rounded, androgynous Anthropos, “the original or primordial man,” which contains the opposites of “the one and the many,” male and female, matter and spirit, good and evil.

Mandala, C.G. Jung

Wassily Kandinsky wrote, “That is beautiful which is produced by internal necessity, which springs from the soul.” He saw art as a step towards “an epoch of great spirituality.” Like Jung, he understood the mystical power of the image. He saw an overall narrative in the lineage of art history. He spoke of art as a realm “corresponding exactly to the physical process of the conception and birth of man.” Kandinsky had walked through the looking glass of the initial ‘impression’ of “external nature” and discovered not only the impressions of “internal nature,” but an embryo of a “biomorphic” spirit.

Various Actions by Wassily Kandinsky,1941

Descending deeper into the abyss, new modern visionaries moved beyond the bourgeois stronghold of Cubism. Jackson Pollock atomized it by plunging directly into the primordial levels of abstraction. Clyfford Still transcended the conventional forms by literally revealing another layer. These two creative mystics had balanced the arrival of the bomb. While Pollock expressed the disintegration of Western history, Still’s paintings appear to be mapping another space beyond it, describing his own work as “life and death merging in a fearful union.”

As the linear events of the Western world continue to unravel, Aboriginal forms of artistic expression remain as they had always been: sacred acts upholding the social network of the tribe. Without even realizing it, they already express the views of Kandinsky, because for them art is their “internal necessity,” their existence. While aboriginal art varies across the world’s indigenous cultures, its common central function is to maintain the psychic health of the tribe.

My travels to the rainforests of Peru brought me in contact with the distinctive visual patterns of the Shipibo Indians. I was especially moved by one Shipibo woman who told me their designs were not “officially taught.” She described it as being part of their collective, shared experience. I watched as a woman painting a piece of pottery left to tend to her child while another immediately took her place. They were like midwives to this organic pattern, which was in essence a reflection of the soul of the tribe.

This Aboriginal way of living with art that “springs from the soul” is alive and well in urban areas across the globe. Driving through Los Angeles, it doesn’t take long to notice the encroachment of spray-painted images and their impact on the urban landscape. Tagging is the root of graffiti art, a kind of organic variance of the written word. The inherent power of this is in the creation of a unique style where an artist can be hard for authorities to identify, while simultaneously being renowned within the community. As potent as that is, the more mature graffiti artists transcend visual word play into patterns that look as if a syntactical world is breaking through the walls of the city.

Graffiti Art, Los Angeles

Although I have focused specifically on the visual arts, I do not intend to discount other kinds of artistic expression. My intention is to express my connection to the creative process as “an internal necessity.” It’s how I’ve come to understand that history is an alchemical process. I’ve been shown through my drawings that humanity is a network of centers, whose order depends on the harmony of these centers. These images express a soul of infinite centers that wants you to do what they do; to live in harmony. They are a pattern of nature, an organic visual symbiosis. You could say it looks indigenous, but it’s not tied to any one culture. They’re an empathic communicative world of anthropomorphs born from a union of the archaic and the modern.

“Whilst the totem-animal expresses a deeply unconscious form of wholeness and a symbol of social coherence, we find on a somewhat higher cultural level a new symbol which takes its place: the great all-encompassing human figure which Carl Jung calls the Anthropos. The ancestor of all human beings. Regarded as the life principle and meaning of all human life on earth, the totem not of a single tribe but of mankind as a whole.”

- Marie Louise von Franz, Individuation and Social Contact in Jungian Psychology, 1975

Actual Contact

I have found that if I just concentrate on hand/eye co-ordination, I allow this inner world to reveal itself. I become open to chance so this world can pour through me. I am a conduit. Our current modes of communication are not equipped to handle this experience, this expression. The cultural languages of this planet have exhausted their usefulness when it comes to matters of the heart like this. And it is the experience of this heart, this spirit, this oblique symbolic approach to language that lifts the veil of dogma, and the isolation of being separated from the source. It is recognizing the patterns that alchemically combine both spirit and instinct that connects you to the never ending current of creation. Marshall McLuhan stated that “the affairs of the world are now dependent upon the highest information of which man is capable. The word information means pattern, not raw data.” An empathic language that communicates our wholeness depends not on dictionaries, but on consciousness.

“These paintings, sculptures, objects should remain anonymous and form part of nature’s great workshop as leaves do, and clouds, animals, and men. Yes, man must once again become part of nature.”
-Jean Arp “Abstract Art, Concrete Art”, Art of This Century (NY) 1942

Many stores in less gentrified areas in cities around the world have a place set aside for people to drop off fliers that promote upcoming events. This is where I leave small stacks of cards for people to pick up. There are no words on the cards, only an image on each side.

By Jason Tucker
website: http://www.actualcontact.com/
interview: http://www.tripzine.com/listing.php?smlid=255