|
The history of art may be seen as an oscillation between the art work as object and the artwork as virtual reality. Perspective replaced the icon; modernist abstraction replaced the multiple perspectives of cubism. In the decades to come, we will be seeing many more of these virtual reality systems, even institutions, which seem so real that the viewer or the spectator begins to believe in them and the ambiguity of their actual existence becomes the source of pleasure and insight. This reflects the reality that we live in a network of institutional settings, each one with its own rules, goals and rewards, the ensemble of which mediates our existential reality. The cumulative effect has long been identified under the rubric of alienation for which the corporate institutional power brokers have supplied their own palliative, epitomized in the term "spectacle", whose main manifestation has been television.
For many, however, existential pain is too strong and they seek other, more authentic solutions. A small coterie of these seekers have come together around the charismatic figure of Madame F. A. Mesmer, who has established a therapeutic community expanding and updating the principles of her illustrious 18th century eponym, Franz Anton Mesmer, the physician founder of the original "Société de l'harmonie universelle".
The contemporary group seeks solutions for its spiritual dislocations through the symbolically mediated treatments devised by Mme Mesmer, as illustrated in the photograph. Here you see three acolytes bound together in ecstatic excercises. Starting with images of orbs mundi, they utilize eidetic imaging and hyperventilation to place themselves in rapidly alternating states of hilarity and terror, that ultimately combine into a feeling of vertiginous imbalance leading to cathartic collapse.
Lenore Malen
New York
|
|
|