Artist and Familiars
by Joseph Nechvatal
°
"The predominant element in the pleasure to be obtained from overthrowing
Power, from becoming a master without slaves, and from rectifying the past,
is the subjectivity of each individual. The cause of free self-realization
must always embrace subjectivity - and thus cease to be a cause. Only from
this starting point can we accede to those vertiginous heights where every
gratification falls within the grasp of each."
Raoul Vaneigam
The Revolution of Everyday Life
I
Austin Osman Spare is an artist in whom we cannot be satisfied. Among the
many complexities that have transpired in today's society primarily due
to the delirious effects of information-communication proliferation, is
the changing nature of artistic definition. Recently contemporary thought
has been concerned with the poststructuralist deliberation on the notion
of the subject; in order to question its traditionally privileged epistemological
status. Particularly in respect to the artist, there has been a sustained
effort to question the role of the artist/subject as the intending and knowing
autonomous creator of art - as its coherent originator. For me, the semi-automatic
drawings of A. O. Spare from the 1920s have become emblematic of the rigorous
scrutiny of what Jacques Derrida has described of as logocentrism: the once
held distinctions between subjectivity and objectivity; between public and
private; between fantasy and reality; between the subconscious and the conscious
realm.
Today these distinctions are breaking down under the pressure of our speeding
and omnipresent computer communications technologies. We are now part of
a technologically hallucinogenic culture that functions along the lines
of a dream, free from the strictures of time and space; free from some of
our traditional earthly limits which have been broken down by the instantaneous
nature of electronic communications. The modernist existential concept of
the singular individual has been supplanted by the media-reproduced individual,
in a way liberated from what used to be thought of as historical time, vaporously
existing in a technologically stored eternity (simulacrum-hyperreality).
This quality of phantasmagorical and perverse displacement has formulated
a new vision of existence which Baudrillard has called pornographic and
what Deleuze & Guattari call schizoid. Teleologically, both of these
descriptions apply aptly to the drawings of A.O. Spare in a collection of
ways which I will make apparent shortly. For those, and they are numerous,
who are not familiar with the work of Spare, let me first provide some rudimentary
background on him.
Austin Osman Spare (1888? - 1956) was born the son of a London policeman.
Doom loomed large in Fin de Siècle England as Spare came to age;
and thus his development into what can now be recognized as a late-decadent,
perversely ornamental, graphic dandy in the manner of Felicien Rops and/or
Aubrey Beardsley can be contextualized. As a young man he was for a brief
period of time a member of the "Silver Star"; Alister Crowley's
magical order. Spare's lifelong interest in the theory and practice of sorcery
was initiated, he recounted, by his sexual relationship at a very young
age with an elderly woman named Paterson. To perform sorcery, for Spare,
was a practice meant to ensorcel, to encircle, and to ensnare spirits. It
is not quite the same thing as practicing magic, which is the art of casting
spells or glamours. For Spare, as well as for Crowley, Tantricesque sex
held the means of access to their magical systems. However it is in Spare's
conception of radical and total freedom, consisting in the unrestricted
expression of what he held to be the "inherent dream", where we
first detect the seditious and chaotic philosophy which drove a prong between
himself and Crowley and every other esoteric system but his own brand of
chaos magic. In 1905, at the tender age of 19, Spare self-published his
first collection of drawings in a book of aphorisms entitled EARTH INFERNO
. In it, he lamented the death of the "universal women lying barren
on the parapet of the subconscious's", and he called for a revival
of the "primitive women", castigating what he called the "inferno
of the normal". EARTH INFERNO disparages the world of humdrum banality
in favor of an exotic orb which Spare began to reveal in a spate of awesome
drawings somewhat reminiscent of the decadent artists previously mentioned.
In 1907, Spare self-published a second collection of drawings in a publication
named THE BOOK OF SATYRS which contained acute insights into the social
order of his day. In 1909, Spare began work on a third book of drawings
entitled THE BOOK OF PLEASURES on which he worked for four years. In 1914
he held his first one-person exhibition at the Baillie Gallery in London.
It included many of the semi-automatic sketches he drew while half asleep
or in a self-induced trance. Most of Spare's semi-automatic work from 1910
onward were produced in self-induced trances which he claimed were sometimes
controlled by intrusive occult intelligence's working through him. He considered
his best accomplishments those which he said were produced through him rather
than by him, often by the hand of the revenant spirits of Blake, da Vinci,
Holbein, and Durer. Not bad virtual company. Spare quite wildly would declare
that his was the automatic hand utilized by these deceased masters. Through
this automatic and delirious technique he claimed to be able to draw upon
"..the profoundest depths of memory.." and to "..tap into
the springs of instinct." It is in this highly extravagant practice
of openness and swank self-denial that Spare's relevance to the poststructuralist-postinternet
conceptions of the decentered subject are found with his obvious bearing
on the antisocial aspects of collective on-line self-permutation. By participating
whole-heartedly in his insertion (and semi-faux disappearance) into the
transpersonal symbolic economy of the sign through the assumed equivalence
of life and death (in what perhaps can be imagined for us as digitized-stored
existence after personal death) Spare remains truly individual if not altogether
alone. Such a radical egoless gesture (at the same time, what a bogus collaboration)
he fabricated - creating an imposing egotistical conception of a collective
and collected self - is a view which counters the long-standing Western
Metaphysical phallocratic heroic portrayal of male-selfhood which we all
know too well. And yet, doesn't this view of a compiled self, akin to the
essence of the death of the subject, offer just a sort of resistance to
the structures of logocentric civilization that simulationist theory claimed
was impossible? Spare's quite early conception of the illusory coherence
of the "I", renders everyone and everything equally phantasmatical
(as fabula) akin to the way the electronic-computer-media network can do.
In effect his "I" exists only as the passive construct of a system
of forces which act through him on the creation of an occult synergistic
complex image. This synergistic compounding of the mnemonic threshold encapsulates
our current postpostmodern-networked predicament in that the fabulated digital-self
today feels sublimated and eclipsed but also freed up by the mammoth computer-media-web.
Phantom information bits flow continuously around and through us in a vague
endless whirl of unverifiablity. This questionable (and perhaps imaginary)
data proliferation forms slowly, imperceptibly, bit by bit, into an extensive
hypothetical aggregate somewhere deep in the abstruse recesses of our collected
digital subconscious, awaiting discharge and reformation.
Perhaps Spare can be understood then as an expression of this eternal verity,
recording as he does, vis-a-vis the disinterested trance, this releasing
of disembodied fabula. His remarkable magical method suggests a resurgent
atavism based on obsession and ecstasy. The subconscious is impregnated
by a sustained desire that becomes energized by the supposition that deep
memory, the void, responds to longings and can relive original obsessions.
Each era has its circumlocutions, its compliances; yet Spare felt it his
privilege, even his obligation to sally forth, and to be inordinate in his
openness to past representations; but not in any placating or merely plausible
way, as often the meager appropriatonists and samplers do do. For Spare,
only excess may be recompensed. Only opulence which borders on the decadent
can offer us this kind of examination of the illusory self, as it arises
out of the present day climate of technological and information abundance.
Only ideas of multiple selves can adequately represent artists as social
communicators anymore. Only transformative notions of the self can accurately
reflect the massive transformational effect of webbed high-technology.
II
It is extremely relevant then to consider Spare's means of becoming courageously
individual through this kind of frenzied tranced-grouping of the Superego
- a transgression of (and by!) his artistic "Masters". The internet
is the collective Superego now. In one of Spare's artistic statements he
wrote, "Speed is the criterion of the genuine automatic. In the ecstatic
condition of revelation from the sub-memory strata, the mind elevates the
sexual or inherited powers and depresses the intellectual qualities. So
a new atavistic responsibility is attained by daring to believe - to possess
one's own beliefs - without attempting to rationalize spurious ideas from
prejudiced and tainted intellectual sources! Art becomes, by this illuminism
or ecstatic power, a functional activity expressing in a symbolic language
the desire towards joy."
In terms of the exact copy's importance to our electronic era's conception
of information as simulation, Spare's claim to meta-individuality in his
production seems prophetic. If a substanceless collectively reverberates
internally in each of us, if in each of our computers a Superego beyond
propensity and will exists and dominates us, than an inner magical detoxification
of authority indeed seems futile. We can only act with what authority has
passed down to us. But if the search is more simply directed towards not
repeating what has been taught, and if what we have learned can be cracked
open and drained and transfigured through disinterested trance, then novel
panoramas and multiple personalities do have room to emerge. What happens,
for example, when our fast paced dumbness and reactionary media codes are
problematized by a shift in speed - a slowing down - a halting? Would a
new phase in consciousness come when all our previous attachments to speed
have been obliterated? What about light? For example, Spare would first
exhaust himself before beginning to draw in a somber candle lite room and
in a slight trance with no particular idea in mind, thereby reaching deeper
and more remote layers of memory, while all the time continuously abhorring
the accepted values and maudlin conceits of his day.
The fact that Spare was an occultist and quite possibly a Satanist should
not misdirect our appreciation of his endeavor. The logic of the postmodernism
internet and of the entire electronic media society is satiated with a parallel
overindulgence and counter fusion. One must go all the way through the information
society and emerge from out the dark rim of telepresence. It has been said
that the hyper-overproduction of simulated perversion is the only site of
contestation left today; the only virtual space from which to launch a theoretical
attack on the reification of consciousness. I tend to agree. Spare is a
metaphor for a viral attack on the whole system. He is the big bang which
sucks the virtual economy into the throbbing digital black-hole which awaits
to unite and compress and explode.
The ineffable spell of Spare's semiautomatic drawings, with their multifarious
and allusive search for something antithetical to the established norm,
and with their morbid deviation and subversion of the concept of individuality
and authorship, play well upon today's desire to egregiously delimit signification
through art and magic. Their form enmeshes and contravenes, alters and disrupts
the mundanity of communications in an inexorable, unrecognizable and chimerical
way. Like all modes of decadent artistic practice (i.e. Hellenistic, High
Gothic, Mannerist, Rococo, Fin de Siècle, Postmoderism) they oppose
a dogmatically imposed paradigm with a hyper-logic. Today it is in the endlessly
duplicable digital image where we can probe, much as Spare did, for a private
occult expression. With Spare the abolition of time was made possible and
the barriers between the deceased and living abolished through trance. The
extremity of the internet is non-time, is non-death, is repetition, is trance.
A.O. Spare tended to reject what is given him in the world in favor of magick,
metaphysics and mise en scene. In his own fashion he created a sphere where
deep-memory threatens the common order and questions originality and supplied
social codes. His artfulness subverts the Modernistic conception of production-
with its emphasis on origin, author and finality - but without merely accepting
the artificial, the copy, the simulation, the model. His conjunction of
these elements lives with the abstraction of our technomediacratic society
but deploys the effects of trance to transcend its limitations. He does
not allow the reproductive technology to defeat or negate his arts spiritual
significance because he has abandoned the Enlightenment baggage of authorizing
categories. Spare explicitly eschewed categorization and instead sought
to problemmatize the authority of the category. He sought to compel us to
take notice of the various ways artistic conventions have molded our responses
and regulated discursive meaning. The possibilities of a complex entangled
erotic configuration springing forth from the Id, in opposition to the judging
Superego, made up of mercurial symbols and concepts in opposition to recycled
representations - provides an interesting insight into the way Spare's art
(with its convoluted compositions made up of vague confiscations) directs
us towards the conception of the transformative possibilities of techno-magic.
The hope that Austin Spare's art will show us a way to resist computer software
reification is a fragile hope indeed in our electronically-homogenized cyberage.
Such a hope may be less than we deserve, but it also may be more than we
usually allow ourselves to envision. Computer-networked storage makes up
a massive electronic subconscious mind, this epitome, this subtle and infinite
compendium of all cultural memories which through the use of autism holds
the potential of penetrating reification to the level of automatic instinct
where "..the I becomes atmospheric". When belief detaches itself
from the accessories of convention, desire stands revealed as the ecstasis
of the self, ungoverned by its simulated forms. "For I am all sex.
What I am not is moral thought, simulating and separating." (Spare)
To not dismiss A. O. Spare (and his concept of the tranced collective self
which for us can be reconceived as techno-magical thought) as dilettante
folly is to become aware of the fact that underlying everything is the web
of connections upon which we can exert more manipulative pressure than we
are normally led to believe by the computer-media society of the spectacle.
***
Books by Austin Osman Spare
EARTH INFERO
1905
A BOOK OF SATYRS
1907
THE BOOK OF PLEASURES (SELF LOVE):
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF ECSTASY
1913
THE FOCUS OF LIFE: THE MUTTERINGS OF AAOS
1921
HYPOCRITES
1927
A BOOK OF AUTOMATIC DRAWINGS
1925
(Posthumously published by the Catalpa Press, London
1972
°
Thanxs to T.O.P.Y. for making available
information on
A.O. Spare
°
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