You can tell a lot about a culture based on the subjects it will not ascribe to it’s authors. Yet, what is culturally marginalized is not without good reason. All forms of dissidence and witchcraft take place without participation in a wider spectacle, yet pervade throughout history due to their accidental success or eccentricity, maintaining the still hidden nature of their embedded images (or myths). What is most deceptive is not against that which is most true. Indeed, the aim is not to lie, but to veil in themes obscure or universal so that the possibility of identity is never apparent, yet it pervades. A universal solvent cannot contain any single definition of itself.
Were not the early avant-garde appropriated against their purposes, whilst clearly being against art, Anti-Art (if not, merely Human, a breather)? They were not even interested in being classified. The wish is still “burn all Art silently and ecstatically, that is, without knowledge.” Avant-garde, to sweep behind the front lines directly into institutional territory–so, perhaps appropriated within their purposes. Like a great fisherman, Hooke, Lyon and Cinquer. How surprising is this though, since most art is a practice of a memetic, rather than initiative. The roundelay remains to not act insensitively with a Witch.
It struck scholar William Camfield, that studies of “artist” Marcel Duchamp were not subjected to rigorous exploration from the alchemical angle in spite of the fact this was a sincere interest of the Symbolist movement of which Duchamp emerged from. This makes sense because our “Art” is sedating and religious—we hesitate to associate our pure, albeit eccentric Scientific and Artistic heroes with deeper, darker waters and substitute it for rationalizing them (didactic, white walls of Institutional “Art” or “Artists”). We hail identification with it and halt weighing our reverence through the same trials that the alchemists would subject themselves, which they called Ars Magna (the Great Art).
“Rational intelligence is dangerous and leads to ratiocination. The painter is a medium who doesn’t realize what he is doing. No translation can express the mystery of sensibility, a word, still unreliable, which is nevertheless the basis of painting or poetry, like a kind of alchemy.”
Marel Duchamp, 1985
In 1970, bio-acousitician Roger Payne produced an album of recordings that publicly demonstrated for the first time the elaborate vocalizations of the Humpback Whale. The whale song became recognized as one of the most complex in the animal kingdom. While on first listen, the structure may not be obvious amidst spiraling, modulating frequencies, grunts and siren howls, yet the Whales demonstrate precise reproduction that admits mnemonics and order.
No one really knows what the songs are about. They are heard and not understood. It always depends on the model you are using (and many artists do not use models, preferring intoxication in submersion).
Because we never saw Duchamp at work in his laboratory, the evidence is still circumstantial. Yet Duchamp was astutely aware that you could not ‘practice alchemy’ by throwing words on the surface in full consciousness. How ambiguous. Nevertheless, he is still heralded as the Modernist Artist of the Century. Yet still—no one understands this song, what it is about. That’s the genius of getting behind enemy lines though.
Names of Invocation
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