Another interesting short quote from Breaking Open the Head, page 65:
As the modern era gathered force, artistic depictions of fantasy rather than inner experiences of altered states became the only way most people preserved a tenuous link to magical realms. That remains the situation today.
And then he later on says that the artist took over the role of shaman. Having gone to art school (okay, fine, I dropped out), this is a sentiment I’ve heard often enough before: artists as shaman. But for whatever reason, the bridge that Pinchbeck makes here puts this into proper perspective for me. What the artist is, in one way, is actually a counterfeit shaman. He creates depictions or images of ecstasy, rather than ecstasy itself. Not all art and artists of course. Some truly do have the shamanic power of initiating people to their own experiences - absolutely. But far more function as priestly intermediaries, mediating experiences for other people of the sacred and the beautiful. No wonder artists today have such an identity crisis over what their real role is. I’ve seen it again and again through my personal contacts and history. We think that painting pictures of shamans is the same thing as being a shaman, or that it will lead us to being a shaman. It’s the hope of transubstantiation, the transmutation of image into reality, the word made flesh. It’s a perilous route, but it’s all many of us know.
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3 Comments
Hmmm… IMHO shamanic art can also act as a portal into non-ordinary reality which allows the viewer to enter a different plane and encounter the entities depicted therein. In that sense it does serve a ritual function.
Numerous shamanic cultures actually do have a category of “ritual art,” e.g., Haitian voudon flags, tantric folk art, etc… the art itself functions as a tool for entering other worlds or allowing being from other world to enter this one.
I agree that the word shamanic is thrown around too losely though. I like harner’s definition of shamanism as using certain techniques to approach an altered state and interact with beings in nonordinary reality.
If you aren’t doing that then I guess it ain’t shamanism… its something else.
I guess what I was getting at was understanding my own frustration with art, art school and the art world. I thought they held what I wanted, but what I wanted turned out to be much deeper, which these worlds were only scratching the surface of. And as I said in the original article, I do recognize that some art and artists really do still serve this deeper function. But how many do not?
I disagree with artists being counterfeit shamans. Non-representational and Abstract art cause internal transformation. Either you love it or hate it, accept it or deny it. But the effect that non-rep/Abstract art has on people is noticeable and profound.
I have noticed a polarized reaction to my non-rep/Abstract works as opposed to my literal, representational works. The ones that look like something ( a woman’s face, a graveyard, the sky) are labeled “nice”, while the ones that are masses of paint and lines provoke extreme reactions.
In other words, an artist can depict ecstasy, or they can induce it. But one man’s ecstasy is another man’s agony– thus, the anger that erupts from those who do not “get” experimental avant-garde works. I count myself in this company, and only recently have I been making strides to “get” Abstract art, by creating my own and gauging the feedback and reaction.