The Art of Ecstasy

Art originated as a means of representing the sacred. It originated to make visible what cannot be seen, to represent what is unrepresentable.

And as long as art was tied to the sacred, it had purpose and vitality.

The modern profanation of art was its undoing. Without a sacred purpose, art has no purpose. 

The history of modern art is the history of the sterilization of art. Modernists went so far as to make the uselessness of modern art its distinguishing virtue.

Inexorably, art was forced to stage its own degradation as its purpose, incorporating into itself everything that was once foreign to it: ugliness, banality, artlessness.

But even in this fallen world, the sacred lingers. 

Like the gravity well of a black hole, at once massive and invisible, the sacred inclines toward an abyss. It is a fall into ecstasy.

The closest to sacred art today is art that expresses a longing for self-extinction.

 

Music does this best, music that inspires trance and abandon. 

In visual art, the ecstatic is misidentified as "expressionism,” but the truly ecstatic art is always about the obliteration of the self not its expression.

When painting, Jackson Pollock was not himself; he was channeling something biger. 

Van Gogh's Starry Night is a samadhic vision. 

Contemporary shamans must learn to fly on their own. 

Many crash.

Calling

In primitive man as in all human beings the desire to enter into contact wi!h the sacred is counteracted by the fear of being obliged to renounce the simple human condition and become a more or less pliant instrument for some manifestation of the sacred (gods, spirits, ancestors, etc.).

—Mircea Eliade, Shamanism

This is why every authentic prophet is a reluctant one.

Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1600.

Of this kind of "interpellation" Althusser knows nothing.

Consciousness of a real and meaningful world

is intimately connected with the discovery of the sacred. Through experience of the sacred, the human mind has perceived the difference between what reveals itself as being real, powerful, rich, and meaningful and what lacks these qualities, that is, the chaotic and dangerous flux of things, their fortuitous and senseless appearances and disappearances. . . . In short, the " sacred" is an element in the structure of consciousness and not a stage in the history of consciousness. On the most archaic levels of culture, living, considered as being human, is in itself a religious act, for food-getting, sexual life, and work have a sacramental value. In other words, to be—or, rather, to become—a man signifies being "religious."

—Mircea Eliade, A History of Religious Ideas

Per Rudolf Otto,

Maurizio Cattelan, L.O.V.E. (2010). Courtesy of Ralf Steinberger.

the Sacred is the “Wholly Other” and thus outside of the scope of discursive understanding and accessible only to a cognitive faculty open to revelation. In traditional societies, artistic forms are symbolic representations of what cannot actually be seen. In the modern era, sacred knowledge is dismissed as superstition, and art, now discnnected from the sacred, becomes Art, an object of purely aesthetic veneration. Early modernists like Rilke and Mallarme could still sense the presence of the sacred in art. The glow was faint but still there.

“Postmodernism” is the triumph of banality, the total subjugation of art to materialism. This is why what floats to the surface in this period is the idea of art as anti-art, art as the spectacle of its own self-degradation. The concept of art is retained strictly for the sake of its abuse.

In the ancient caste systems (which were not exclusive to India), the merchant classes always came third, after the priestly class and the warrior class (the nobility). The merchant class had its place but was not ever considered fit to rule. The revolutions of the modern era undid this sacred order and gave the top spot to the bourgeoisie. The cultural consequences did not show themselves immediately because the rich legacy of the pre-democratic age and its aristocratic standards briefly outlived the passing of the aristocratic age. Today, however, we cannot escape or contain those consequences. We are subjected to the collapse of all boundaries and distinctions inherited from the old world and the monstrosities that proliferate when money overtakes nobility.

Modernism attempts to resacralize art by elevating art itself to a religion. It fails because art is meant to serve the sacred not mimic it. The beauty of sacred art resides in its pious humility, in the fact that it does not advance itself as something more important than the symbol it embodies. Form is a nullity when all it conveys is a will to form. And ultimately, that is the most that modern art can express, a will to form.