BENJAMIN SPALDING

what rituals do we engage with as a means of regaining strength?

David Abrams The Spell of The Sensuous, pg. 10

“But in generally oral, indigenous cultures, the sensuous world itself remains the dwelling place of the gods, of the numerous powers that can either sustain or extinguish human life. It is not by sending his awareness beyond the natural world that the shaman makes contact with the purveyors of life and health, not bu journeying into the personal psyche; rather, it is by propelling his awareness laterally, outward into the depth of a landscape at once both sensuous and psychological, the living dream that we share with the soaring hawk, the spider, and the stone silently sprouting lichens on its coarse surface.”

The shaman holds the ability as the enchanter within these social structures, called on in an instance that ranged from singular healing to great communal outpourings of emotion and psychic power. 

Within all of these instances, the context created by the shaman in whatever social milieu elicit a charged energy when ‘activated.’ It is within these spaces and rituals that the mundane can transcend into wonder and supernatural power. --> Does this remind you of Walter Benjamin in Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm the ability to provide/conjure ‘aura’ through intent, resulting in the establishment of context. 

///As a means of relating to phenomena of our natural world (as a means of attempting to gain understanding of the reality that we both create/inhabit), we animize the unknown, the unsure and the supernatural. Deities carry the weight of an individual ailment to large-scale natural disaster. These effigies and symbols are deposits of human emotion, threads of archived experience and spaces to relate or to placate through offerings.    

Task one:

Make a sigil,

https://thecreativeindependent.com/people/eileen-myles-on-writing-and-social-media/

Some great means to approach aspects of creative production:

How are you look­ing at this thing? There’s al­ways a piece of writ­ing or a piece of work that I should be do­ing. Part of what I love about these new medi­ums is it’s some­place that I get to fuck around, and yet I al­ways have felt like part of me is dy­ing to work in the vi­sual field in some way, and it’s a lit­tle bit like … like when Bob Dy­lan used to cover Woody Guthrie songs, and then the way Bob Dy­lan started to pre­sent his own songs. Just for a while, he pre­tended he was just play­ing Woody Guthrie songs. You know, like he just pre­tended those were ob­scure Woody Guthrie songs. I feel like I might al­ways stay in this pre­tend place, like I’m not mak­ing art. I’m just fuck­ing around. It gives that op­por­tu­nity in this way to start to turn to­wards some­thing that you’ve al­ways been look­ing at, and in­stantly be mak­ing in that field, and throw­ing stuff out. It’s re­ally sat­is­fy­ing.

TO READ:

http://www.on-curating.org/index.php/issue-31-reader/societys-richer-yet-shes-thin-as-a-rake.html#.V-lIfpMrK8G

FB: Well, in the last five years I have started to have the idea that the essential meaning of art is the reactivation of the erotic social body. The body is a crucial tool in art, dance, and politics.

When I took part in the movements of Occupy, I personally never understood it as a political movement. In politics the goal is power, and in Occupy there was no question of power, nobody craved it. Yes, it was against the global economic power, but something that size was never going to be conquered by this action. What was happening in Zuccotti Park and on the streets and the plazas was not politics as such, but a need to reactivate the erotic body of society away from stagnant financial abstraction. It’s a new way to think about art. The physical presence of being with others, it’s something we have lost.

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PR: I have strong reservations about art and the political gesture in general. From community arts to rehashing “the protest” in the museum—but for me, I ask the question, why is this art? Why are we shying away from the term activism?

FB: Well, if your artwork is able to create a possibility of people being together, that is an artwork. Where you are physically means nothing; you could be on the Gaza Strip or just writing on the wall—it means nothing really. But if it has the chance to move people, then it could be art.

PR: This is true, but it is an active gesture. Why must we call it art? Surely, activism is a much purer form than art—take your Engaged Art as a case study.

FB: Because people aren’t confident they need more than politics to identify themselves with, they need emotional discourse. If the intentions are to make people happy, then why not? Of course, it doesn’t make them an artist but they are producing art. I think you are saying it’s not enough for an artist to just have good intentions to produce good art, and I agree, but we must all try to reactivate the erotic body. What we must do in art now is to emancipate ourselves from the dictatorship of abstraction.

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Intimacy, the erotic as important. Instances of erotic possibility, moments where the body moves out of measured time. Spaces that allow the ego to be superseded by erotic, sensuous desire. 

the current society is one steeped in reinforced lack

These places are charged and the body is displaced. 

YOU ARE MORE THAN JUST THIS MINUTE

YOU ARE MORE THAN JUST THIS BODY

YOU ARE MORE THAN YOUR OBLIGATIONS

YOU ARE MORE THAN ANY RELATION YOU ARE MORE THAN THE ANXIOUS SECOND

YOU ARE A DIVINE ECHO. YOU ARE A DIVINE ECHO.

YOU ARE A DIVINE ECHO. 

YOU ARE A DIVINE ECHO.

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