Theurgic Art

I talked to an Internet acquaintance the other day, and she said she has a hard time caring about art: “it isn’t real”, she rather argued for creating a way of living - doing creative work that actually improves peoples lives. Now this endeavor is something dear to me as well, but I am still not able to fully give up creating art objects, that indeed run the risk of becoming very little more than a sort of luxury commodity to circulate in exclusive domains. Now then, what can we say on the line of Art Apologetics? Is there a space for art - in the limited sense of the sort of stuff you might find in a museum or gallery - in the new field of theo-philosophical world-smithing?

There are multiple things one could say here, but to me the most titilating is also something very speculative, a daring wager of a motive. The basic idea is that an artwork, as a symbolo-material field, can act as a proxy for other symbolic (and symbolo-materialst) systems, and if set up in the right way can elaborate and speak of the latter. The idea is an allegorical theurgy, that is as much an intuitive Tarot spread as it is a quantum simulator.

The process would go something like this: correspondences are set up: a pre-existing philosophical framwork of sufficient resolution and coherence is mapped to a series of symbols (images), materials, forms, and objects. These symbols, materials, forms and objects are then deployed in the field that is the artwork: a landscape of meaning production, a symbolic particle collider. Work is then performed upon this field: the unconscious is wired up in a feedback loop through the hand-eye machine in an intuitive gallop through the undergrowth of the magic forest. It is very much a sort of conjuring. It’s the legacy of Iamblichus shot through the quivering bones of Rauschenberg and the grinning skull of Bosch. Then one may ask, if this is the gambit, does it work? How many theorems has a found-object combine spat out? Well, none, I think. But I have experienced a transformation of consciousness to some degree. It also seems to give support for thinking. Like how those people with World Record memories, who remember things by telling a story and connecting bits of data to symbols and persons and events; the theurgic art process at the very least functions in this way, and if the symbols and materials and objects and forms are carefully chosen it seems to hold a lot of promise; maybe, if we can align all the stars just right, set up the crystals properly, then maybe, just maybe, things will click into place and the working will conjure… something.