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PHOTOMORPHOSIS
There is always the Wedding Night that prefigures the golden hour, the
central inclusion running like a myth through the interior landscape, where
the real and the imaginary come to feed at the same table, bathe in the same
water and embrace under the same light. This interior model, at the heart of
photomorphosis, provides the most desirable place, the Red Table, upon
which all things are conjured...
The interior model, as the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer says: "is shaped
by both conscious and unconscious elements. The impulse coming from the
world around (from reality) is treated in the unconscious boiler of an internal
laboratory to which I have no access. Inspiration is, then, the doorbell to the
door of a house which tells me that the internal model is ready and I can
come up and collect it. During the course of this process the pre-product
emerges into the conscious several times for a moment to form further
reality impulses so that it may once more submerge itself below the surface
back to the unconscious where it carries on its work. I cannot control the
rhythm of this process until the moment when that little bell rings."
The "Red Table" is where the process works its magic by speeding up the
landscape and the beings that have come, like the sun when it moves a little
closer to the earth, to linger a while longer into the evening. Here the
movement is both frenzied and haunted, like caressing a phantom lover who
never stops dancing. This is that "certain point in the mind where..." as
Andr Breton said, "life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and
present, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low,
cease to be perceived as contradiction."
The arrival of the Wedding Guests signals the movement of the Secret Art,
and the precise moment when the lovers hands are dipped into the darkest,
deepest solution of the luminous body of the Photomorphose. It is the
moment of the eclipse and the utter stillness that verges on hysteria The
moment when the body is the veil perceived in the mind; where the body of
perception, unlike the human body, except on rare occasions, is mostly a
transparent vessel with a deafening hum, a disorienting glow and an endless
gaze that changes its shape in an instant its flesh is consciously chosen
for one reason and unconsciously selected for quite another. The Secret Art
is the shadow of the golden hour.
On the Red Table in the center of the Wedding Night, the sun is a reflection
of the wolf when it comes to lick your face
A Precise Poetic Introduction
The great black stone is pulled out of the belly of the shark, and the taking of pictures
begins. Like a wildly swinging rainbow coaxed out of night's fearful prism with a
delicious eye, this camera obscura, this catcher of internally generated flashes of light,
tears its tripod out by the roots and begins its delirious reconnaissance of the unknown.
The camera enters the dream and is torn to shreds. But that was yesterday... Now the
crystals are coming together, now the insects are reconstructing the light, now beasts are
scratching at the vortices, and now the wind seals the whole thing with its blood. The
witches have smeared their 'flying ointment' over it, sorcerers divine by it and madmen
look into its future... The camera obscura is a man and woman lying down to make love.
DEFINITION
Under the sway of obsessive desire, I combined the words photograph and
metamorphosis to signify the photomorphic process, without realizing that
such a word already existed. But, further research revealed that
photomorphosis was no longer used by the scientific community to denote
the organic process of light-induced metamorphosis, and had been replaced
by photomorphogenesis. Thus, by my investigation I have given a new
meaning to the abandoned word 'photomorphosis'... by surrealizing it. To
paraphrase Breton: photomorphosis has been given to me to make surrealist
use of it.
With Max Ernst, the art of collage became a weapon of desire. In his work
there is the awareness of the interpenetrating resonances and frequencies of
things, of diverse actualities aroused by the dissolving limitations of reality
as it appears. He rightly proposes "the alchemy of the visual image." With
the Photomorph this weapon reached for a more radical blending of the real
and the imaginary. In a frenzy of desirable attractions and unreasonable
possibilities, things, beings and objects relinquish their familiar
appearances... they have all already begun the process of transformation,
long before they are recognized and chosen. No longer a matter of simple
juxtaposition, displacement or disruption, the photomorph is a pure and
unrelenting fusion of many realities, where the field of experience disrobes
and unravels the thread of appearances... At the intersecting points of a
strange design, a dream design, a design pulled out of the dream by it's
threads.
The movement of the wolf stalking its prey, becomes the instinctual dance
unleashing the phases of the moon. The frenzied gathering for the Wedding
Portrait forms the water of dreams into the shapes of desire. Imaginary
solutions to actual events bring stars to the marrow and place the vanishing
point in the middle of a thought, between the shadow and its weapon,
between the serpent and its specter. Here, every whisper gives off sparks,
every kiss blackens the sun and moves by veins through the conscious glass
of more than just here and always more than there.
Movement is the key to the process... Movement, both wildly delirious and
calmly sensuous, exploratory and guided by lunatic lights, slips of the mind
and sudden lapses in orientation. Cryptic and magical movements following
their own prey, in their own space and time... By moving things on the glass
of the copier, while the machine illuminates and captures this movement,
this almost prurient gesticulation, I enter into a phase of temporary
communication with the things that I move and their desire to become
something else. The unknown is moved into the light of day, into perception
and recognition. The movement of things translates into a hunt for that
"space" where the essence of things becomes visible.
A Pathology of Movement
Unseen: Aleatory movement by which luminous bodies meeting for the first
time leave their shadows behind like the sparks of a secret language.
Violent: Projective movement which counterbalances the wolf with its prey
in the glow of bathing lunatics.
Seductive: Transparent movement out of which the light that strikes the eyes
of beasts enters into the body of water when it dreams.
Hallucination of Movement
The convulsive phases of movement engage both the light and the dark in a
joyous exhalation of the mind through the body... The fire burns in the
water, while the night begins to glow with each passing moment. He is the
darkened sun in a lunar gown, and She, the ruby of witch's milk in the prism
of dawn... They multiply in a bloody fountain, while their shadow plays
"dream" with the moon's golden salamander. They are the beings of lighted
water, the luminous vessels... inhaling the body through the mind.
A reflection going backwards, turns around, each movement passing into the
next. The animals pass through our shadows, clawing out stars. When the
female spreads her legs, she is a dark pool disturbed by desire she devours
her lover with light, teeth touching, almost breaking. The Photomorphose
enters in through the window.
The soft clicking sounds (behind), the deafening movement of images on
water, and the distant howling (ahead), the heavy breathing (outside), of
knowledge, hunger and transparency There is an animal substance in the
gaze, a glowing presence that yields the veil of appearances reveals us
through our absence. The ape is a doorway through which one passes in a
rush of sparks.
There are those aspects of being that move faster than the speed of light and
thus cannot be seen. To enable capture, I must move just as fast. Then, at the
right moment, when the object comes into view and moves close, one must
be very cautious and move so slow that movement becomes the silent urging
of desire... One must, at that moment, stop looking, because to look is to turn
into stone and lose the essence.
Moving up against, folding into, crumpling and tearing up, setting on fire...
the friction of rubbing ignites and draws into, enfolds into itself all that
comes close, as if to feed. All is destroyed and the remains are fire-washed
in blood's moonlight... the motion is captured in the photomorphic map; the
map of perceptual cross-pollination. What can be seen is not there and what
is invisible moves in another direction... The wind swirls above the
compass-points...
Strange Encounter...
When the machine is turned on and the humming begins, the veils of night
part and spin out of control. A supernatural breath communicates with the
tiny granules of ink-black toner and weds them to the clairvoyance of
elemental particles from here to there and back again, deeper in the mind
than stars. The image has vanished, replaced by the disquieting sense of the
image... a tangible substance to be shaped. This is the phantom space (as a
perception of reality many times removed, and seen from a distance) that
one grapples with, attempts to seduce with nearly obscene gestures,
whispered possibilities of delight, and endless temptations. One must be
relentless, like a lover in a mirror whose sexual reflection follows you
everywhere, like a shadow in the blade of a sword. Then, ever so slowly, the
eyes begin to open... eyes that have not been opened in a thousand years.
THE RED TABLE
Quite without knowing it, I discovered the Red Table, and it set up a
shadowy field of understanding, a reference point from which all things
radiate outwards. I was strongly attracted to the idea of images gathered
together in a field, where the well-known idea of the "fortuitous encounter"
of Lautramont played a part, but more importantly a place where great
magic was conjured. The Red Table was the rupture into consciousness of
an object that became a central locus, a magnetic field, a landing-site... an
entire space wherein here and there, vast and minute, real and imaginary
came to play and cast the most irresistible shadows and reflections.
Many years later I discovered that the ordinary copy machine was a great
facilitator for opening the door to this lost world of childhood and bringing it
out into the daylight of the present, into the real world, by placing it on top
of the table (the glass of the copy machine)... where I flooded the darkness
with light. I was a child again playing with magical things. The table being
an analogy for the alchemist's work table where the prime materials are
transformed; the magician's or shaman's table or ground where the objects of
power are assembled... The flashes of light from the copier, in unison with
the mind's sparks of disruption and recognition, capture the sudden stirring
of phantom forms. Attracted to being watched, they respond by returning the
gaze, and are thus provoked into further change...
Seeing into the depths was as important as being seen, being looked at,
watched and observed...
Everything becomes anything else, as I rescue the ordinary from its confines,
and watch as desirable attractions are formed... New desires of the hive
summon earthquakes for honey, breathing guides forest fires through the
mythologies of the Glass-Breakers. What is the secret then, as I enchant only
those things which catch my eye and place them where they've never been
before? Or am I merely taking photographs in the dark?
During the Wedding Night, the owl burst out of the King, shedding light on
the surrounding landscape. The Queen takes in the shadow and gives birth to
reflections from the future. The androgynous Child plays with its magical
thorns, grooming itself with the threads of a dream... a being lighted from
within, it illuminates the Magician with the shapes of it's language. Time is
the ruby when it ignites, the emerald when it vanishes...
The great crystal resonates in its unceasing self-germination, while the vast
gears of night slowly grind down to a halt and the beings of lighted water
move forward to whisper: "The Wedding Guests have arrived... they are
coming to touch you."
*
On the Red Table can be seen the place far below the surface of our
particular perception of reality, where all things imagined come to groom
each other... like virginal stem cells before they metamorphose in the glow
of recognition and become the reflections above, that we've come to know
and love, and watch die...
The sorceress comes to me and tears out my eyes, and she whispers to me:
"Now you can see that light shimmering in the vessels..."
The light vampires...
It remains necessary, at all costs, to extend the field of vision; which points
to Pierre Petiot's paraphrasing of Breton's statement concerning Matta: "The
need to call upon the support of the most modern resources, (even those of
science), simply expresses the aspiration to extend the field of vision." The
Image in the field of subatomic particles; the Object in the realm of quantum
physics; The Great Transparent Ones from the standpoint of Morphic
Resonance and the holographic paradigm, etc. But the ultimate goal is to
drive the imagination far beyond the concerns of mere science and
speculation; beyond the trivial pursuits of "Art" and make it real.
Marcel Duchamp called Matta: "the most profound painter of his
generation," saying further, that "His first contribution to surrealist painting,
and the most important, was the discovery of regions of space until then
unknown in the field of art." What is called for is the discovery of regions of
space unknown in the field of being; to extend the dream, to step outside of
the dream... Matta says: "The power to create hallucinations, is the power to
exalt life."
*
As Allan T. Williams explains: "The four known fundamental forces in our
material universe that affect all tangible and intangible forms of matter are
electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and
gravitation.
Just as visible light is embedded within and represents only a limited portion
of the full electromagnetic spectrum, so is relative human consciousness
embedded within and represents only a limited portion of the full continuum
of phenomenal consciousness."
David Bohm says that: The tangible world of our everyday lives is an
illusion, like a holographic image. Beneath that is a deeper order of
existence, a more primary level of reality that gives birth to all objects and
appearances of our physical world.
"In the field of art," writes Andr Breton, "a work can be considered
surrealist only in proportion to the efforts the artist has made to encompass
the whole psychophysical field (in which the field of consciousness
constitutes only a very small segment). Freud has demonstrated that at those
unfathomable depths there reigns the absence of contradiction, the relaxation
of emotional tensions due to repression, a lack of the sense of time, and the
replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure
principle alone."
Diabolical Molestations...
Sometime during the early summer of 1971, the exact day I cannot recall,
while on a train from Florence to Zurich, I was looking out across the Lake
of Lucerne... the sun, just above the mountaintop in the distance, cast it's
sparkling on the surface of the lake. Suddenly, for only a few brief moments,
time itself seemed almost to slow down to a stop, I found myself not only
looking intently at this landscape, but, at the same moment, looking inward
at it as well. My field of perception had infinitely expanded to such an extent
that exterior vision and interior vision had merged and become
simultaneously apprehended on a single plane.
I was struck by the realness of it and it's absolute clarity. Also, I should
indicate that this experience was naturally occurring and not attributable to
the influence of any drug... nor was I dozing, or asleep and dreaming. It was
such a profound experience that everything else, since then, seemed to be
utterly lacking... and I have never been able to duplicate it naturally. But it
did appear to have opened a door somewhere... because very soon after I
discovered the secret art of photomorphosis.
"The red sun rises over a city and landscape. Aurora, or dawn, indicates the
moment when light and dark are not yet separated into two distinct entities,"
as Salomon Trismosin writes in the original 16th Century alchemical text
Splendor Solis; and as Adam McLean writes in his commentary on a 21st
Century translation of the same text: "The forces above have been incarnated
in earthly substance, but have, in a sense, died through this process... the
interface, the border between conscious and unconscious, has dissolved. The
conscious, radiant part of the soul has entered into the unconscious realm,
which itself, now like a dark sun, makes its forces felt in the conscious
sphere."
It is this which gives impetus to our splendid revolt against every formality,
that impels us perhaps deeper than we've ever imagined into this alien
world we once sought to escape, and restores to us that imperative, that
intoxication of refusing to participate in the games of a dying world.
I have never dreamed about anything in my work, nor have I ever imagined
anything like it... it is not planned in any way, but rather forms itself out of
the darkness. You will not find in my work what I have dreamed, or thought,
or desired, whom I've loved or how I've struggled to attempt real life... only
my navigations through the unknown, through the latent and implicate
essence of germinating realities.
One afternoon in 1979, Philip Lamantia, the great surrealist poet, asked me
if I would provide a photomorph for the cover of his book of poems:
Becoming Visible. I went to work immediately and, simply by turning on
the machine, the very air about me seemed to come alive with whispering. In
a frenzy of anticipation I tore out illustrations from National Geographic
magazines, and fashionably dressed women from Vogue and Bazaar. When
the machine signaled its readiness I began, as I have always begun since the
beginning, spinning into enchantment the invisible forces, the waves and
elements, the visible needs and desires of base materials, cupping between
my warm, almost burning hands the rapidly accelerating miasma, inhaling
and exhaling...
I recall the birth of this one very simple image more than any other, because
of the haunted atmosphere surrounding it, the magical correspondences that
were at work and the hallucination of the "arrival" of those hybrid
messengers called The Owl People. They were the harbingers of revelation.
Those who brought things into being, who directed, as it were, the shaping
of desire.
Later, when cutting out (separating) and setting (integrating) the most
important parts onto the ground, the dazzling bits of treasure I extracted
(chose) and arranged on, what is not, or erroneously thought of as the
foreground, but on the magician's table, the Red Table, where these things
seek their own pleasure of being and form themselves.
I was sitting in the living room looking through a recently acquired book
about owls, those supremely supernatural creatures... when suddenly the air
once again came alive with the sound of whispering, and sunlight came in
through the windows like honey, flooding over everything. I was
overwhelmed by the sense of presence in the room. I seemed to be seeing
tall, robed figures "becoming visible" before me, out of their own darkness.
Though they never fully materialized, they were there and they were real,
and the words that came to mind were: "The Wedding Guests have
arrived..."
I knew in an instant who these beings were and what I had to do. I rushed
into the studio and began subjecting pictures of owls to the whirlwind of the
machine. I cut out several heads and fixed them instantly in the right places.
These were the Owl People, the messengers and guides between here and
there. They were the ones who unveiled the Red Table and made it ready for
the Wedding Night...
There may have been one "intention" over all, and that was
not to use anything recognizable, that resembled something
else, when cutting out these 'parts'. I enjoyed only the most
unknown, never-before-seen things. The more unknown,
the easier these things fell into place.
Splendor Solis was the last series and the final phase of
Photomorphosis. Begun in 1993 and finished in January of
2000, this series of 22 works was not merely a culmination
of everything I had done since 1973, but an attempt to go
beyond that personal history. I began the series as an
exploration of the unfettered imagination, attempting to
delve as deeply as possible into the source out of which
evolved magic, sorcery and the occult, shamanism,
alchemy and surrealism...
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