Primitivism

Since 2012 I have been asked to give academic lectures in Virtual Reality about what became my specialist area of expertise and justifies the foundation of all of my research into the study of Magick: PRIMITIVISM. Within the Art Academy it is recognized and valued to be a specific sub-jecture which I have gone far, far beyond with my own practical explorations of it.

The core of Primitivism is that the Artist is Shaman; and thus continually interacts with the Creative Source Energies. How this works and how we may work them to our own advantage, beyond use of paint s mere pictorial re-presentation, enters us into the Magickal Arts. Academic art history is a developing record of motions and manifestations within this, which does take professional study and access to the specific bodies of arts to appreciate, contemplate, understand and integrate. There are many threads of a story which is taking thousands of years to tell. Thanks to modern technologies we can now do this from our own home, however correlating it into a sufficient body of knowledge traditionally takes a college course, ability to travel, a study of history through art as well as development of society and creative techniques. Academically requires 2 years pre-college level, 2 years college level, 3 years university Baccalaureate degree level (the word associates with Bacchus the Greek God also known as Dionysis) and 2 years Masters degree level.

What I do is mixed between all of that and hands-on, multi-dimensional, mind-expansive voodoo in its most primal form.
But it all has to begin somewhere.

Imposing my own sense of order upon 'primitivism' seems to me to be a futile endeavor, however one that I must nevertheless engage myself with so as to be able to express it in useful terms; minimal yet retaining sufficient information so as to transmit the essentials for practical use to an audience. This dilemma has held me back from finishing that which I agree with my teacher, a great Artist.

"Nothing is ever finished." Pete Robinson


It begins, Academically, with Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp was inspired by examining Objet d'Art which had been brought back from Africa by 19th century 'explorers'. We had nothing like them in European culture and so they were identified (incorrectly) as being ornamental. They were actually made as a method of communicating with the Spirit world, as tools.

As a result of questioning what these thigns were for, Duchamp re-evaluated his own environment and decided that we take for granted that a thing is what we are told it is. Once we have a label for a thing, we ignore what it actually is and no longer see the reality of it. By this, he came to the decision that the majority of Westerners exist in a permanent state of delusion in our interaction with our physical world and probably also in our human relationships with each other.

Duchamp hanged a urinal from the men's toilets on a gallery wall. He painted a pipe, the sort my grandfather smoked, and on the painting he wrote the words 'c'est ne pas une pipe' which to my very basic knowledge of French language is not the correct way to write 'this is not a pipe'. The point being that it is a symbol for a pipe, you cannot actually use the paining to smoke tobacco with.

Duchamp was very manly, no doubt inspired by the Age of Reasons integration of what Rousseau who was also inspired by the reinvented Africa of the Western explorers, described as 'The Noble Savage'.

At this time I asked the question: For what purposes were these African objects originally used? How did one use them? A sincere and belief in and a practical working relationship with the Spirit World are quite evidently the missing essential component from Western approach to how we go about using our artistic and creative abilities. Could painting, sculpting, drawing, printing, crafting, clothes-making, poetry, singing, writing, and so forth - be used as portals by which to access...

... there is a thing we call Nature and there is a thing we call super-nature, and there is a line which we draw between them. On one side of this line is the 'normal' and mundane world of commercial-capitalism (or is that capitalist-commercialism?) and on the other side of that line is, mysterious, spiritualism, all that which we are told by the schooling system, pharma-psychological model, 20th century scientific model, is a load of nonsense and not actually real at all.

It was and still is very real to every culture on earth which was not conquered by Christianity, Science and Capitalism. It still remains very real to most of the underground groups even within the nations who were.

At the end of the second year of my BA (hons) degree course, i made a big decision. I stepped over that line.

Previously I had dabbled in it, one foot in either world. I was inquisitive but I still required what the authoritarians (those with no real authority but bullying and position in the masonic social structure) called 'grounding in reality'.

Stepping over that line which Humans impose upon our external and internal worlds alike, but which no other species see's or need's to, was very strongly connected with returning to a balance with 'the natural world'. It was actually two lines very closely interlinked. This can best be explained by the following diagram of the Aborginal Australian world view. It is the ideal place for us to begin the journey for many reasons.

What the Authoritarians were describing as 'grounded in reality' actually to my understanding meant 'detachment from the world of nature' and 'detachment from the world of supernature'. The two things went hand in hand.

I agree wholly with Duchamp that most Westerners are indeed walking around as zombi's in a catatonic state, not interacting with the really real reality around them but existing

Primitivism, then; is the attempt if not the success, to return to a more natural, immediate, real experience and relation with the world of our surroundings. I studied the Yaqui sorcerer Don Carlos Casteneda as a part of my education into Shamanism. I began to assimilate that there is a lot going on in the world which westerners deny is real, largely because the chemicals in our diets shrivels up the parts of our brains, and our cultural indoctrination prejudices against any knowledge base, which orientates us toward experiencing that which primal shamen know, as a continuity, as a factor of life, to be involvement with the Spirit World. During my twenties I became clair-audient.


TO BE CONTINUED...