The Illustrated Gay bear

Illustrated Gay Bears

by Nicholas Monks

Inbtweeners, the fledgling New Zealand publishing and media company proudly presented their inaugural sharing session, “the illustrated Gay Bear”. The first in a series of participatory culture jams seeking to document hidden talents and untold stories that navigate the in-between or liminal state. Hosted at K Road’s Urge Bar, the event catered to members of the creative community who share an inclination to traverse different creative disciplines, and who wish to connect, network, and share in collaborative projects. The evening showcased the work of Graphic artists Don Chooi and Christophe Jannin, who guided an enthusiastic group through a unique participatory experience aimed at exploring and exchanging alternative ways of doing, thinking, and living.

Here at Inbtweeners it is our contention that the arbitrary labels conferred on people by the media, popular culture, and society at large necessitate from the individual a re-negotiation in the act of defining personal values, and locating identity. The “betwixt and between state” we promote in our sharing sessions works to stimulate creative exploration, and produces a malleable situation where new forms can emerge.

Christophe and Don opened the evening with a vibrant and humorous presentation of their erotic graphic art, leading the audience on a colourful journey through their personal illustrative explorations of gay sexuality and ‘Bear’ identity. Christophe described his artistic practice as a reflexive process “building myself drawing after drawing”, while maintaining a sensitivity to the human condition. Don discussed discrimination against Gay sexuality in his Malaysian homeland that eventually saw him relocate to the more liberal society of New Zealand. This relocation allowed him the freedom of expression to develop his unique voice as a Gay artist. He expressed empathy for those people whose identities fit outside of, or conflict with social norms.

Don and Christophe’s honest and easy rapport with the audience established an open and inclusive environment for the group sharing session. This revolved around the important role that creative relationships can play in the act of locating and defining identity, and was conveyed through the employment of traditional anatomy studies and drawing skills. Don and Christophe based the exercise on a sharing activity they use to investigate points of difference in their illustrative styles. The informal conversational process involves swapping rudimentary illustrations of figurative poses that each artist then develops in isolation, later coming together to compare results.

Accordingly, the Urge Bar illustration jam involved anatomical ‘Gay Bear’ templates being provided to participants. This offered a whimsical departure point for further illustrative musings on the points of difference that make us who we are. Each participant was invited to add overlays of sketching in the development of their ‘identity avatar’. The symbolic, metaphoric, and sometimes hilarious results were then presented by each participant in front of the group.

Attendees represented a diverse milieu, coming from different cultures, age groups, and creative backgrounds. Many were meeting for the first time. And yet, at the conclusion of the session, everybody connected on the same level, recognising that we are all Inbtweeners because we share in the heterogeneous nature of contemporary life.

At Inbtweeners we felt privileged to host such an enthusiastic group of creative types excited to share their talents, to forge new friendships, and who all contributed so generously to a highly rewarding sharing session. We’ll keep you up to date with what the Inbtweeners have in store next.

Spectrum 20: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art

The award winning Spectrum series 20th Anniversary Volume showcases the best fantastic art from the worlds most renowned illustration artists. Leafing through the pages reveals a kaleidoscope of pattern and colour, while the diverse range of imagery forms a compendium of Magic and Myth, of the nether regions of the imagination, where dragons and ghouls work their nefarious ends, and enticing fairies open windows on enchanted childhood Arcadias.

Imaginative reverie is the leitmotif, and in Mathieu Lauffray's illustration 'Treasure Island' I have envisaged the cavern as a totem of the psyche, and Long John Silver as a symbolic gatekeeper of the subconscious realms from whence emerges the raw material of creativity:

Perched atop a rough-hewn alter beneath a mysterious aboriginal idol, Long John Silver slumps languidly in an ornately carved ceremonial throne. His sheathed sword leans against his knee, and his eyes remain concealed behind the down turned brim of his hat. He is inscrutable, and the wonders stories might tell of his dark and treacherous deeds are written in the lines of his weathered face, etched in an expression of deep and troubled contemplation; or maybe he speaks to us from his dreams because they are also our own, dim, half remembered childhood fantasies.

Long John Silver, the mythological archetype, sits encircled by towering vaulted embankments that obscure him within a shadowy golden half-light. The craggy walls leap upwards into the hazy sunlit recesses of this primitive subterranean chamber. An ancient cavern redolent with an archaic and malodorous atmosphere and out of its misty vapour looms half formed shapes, peculiar echoes, and shadowy intimations.

Could he be sleeping, caught unaware while guarding some ancient buried treasure, and might we dare to approach? Aye now I recall, it is we who lie sleeping, the unconscious primal monad of his deeper dream! Beware! He reaches for his sword!


Title: Spectrum 20: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art
Author: Cathy Fenner and Arnie Fenner
ISBN: 9781599290676 (pbk.)
Published: 2013
Publisher: Fairfax, Calif. : Underwood Books


Leibniz's philosophy of mind

Soviet Ghosts by Rebecca Litchfeild

The post-apocalyptic landscape photographs collected in Rebecca Litchfield’s book Soviet Ghosts constitute a hauntingly beautiful ode to death and decay and aroused in me a voyeuristic fascination. Here, desolated and disintegrating buildings, their interiors wreathed in pealing plaster, function as “galleries of cultural memory, exhibiting the social detritus of a recent civilization”. The unnatural absence of people amidst the abundant evidence of their once industrious activity and everyday lives conjures an eerie silence, a vacuum, while the accompanying essays wax lyrical; "The lack of life, the presence of absence in this body of work, creeps across every page" and "It is the recognition of emptiness in these spaces that adds to their power. The more one turns the pages, the more the desolation becomes shockingly apparent, a lack of life that laments the exodus of the living". 

These ruins resonate with a melancholic nostalgia, with poetic sentiment that harks for a turn of phrase; In the gathering dust a child’s doll rests, here a hat perches on the edge of a chair, and broken windows gaze somnolently out on wild urban prairies, on burgeoning forests that crowd in against civilization's intrusion. Everywhere the sublime in nature, and everywhere the entropic passage of time casts its pall in wonderfully textured patterns of corrosion and colour.

The text elucidates expertly on the underlying aesthetic theory "Many of the photographs are what in German would be described as unheimlich, a term derived from Freud’s musing upon aesthetics and translated loosely as ‘uncanny’. It describes a feeling of unease in a familiar setting, or might also suggest a hidden secret that is not known. Far from being just documentary in form, the unheimlich in the aesthetic of decay breathes life into the inanimate, an existence not measured in its lifetime but recognised through its decomposition in death. For it is here and now that it finds its true significance, where the mundane becomes an object of beauty."

For me, the photographs evoke a contemplative intimation of the void, what Daniel Pinchbeck described as, "that vast garbage heap of all that is unknown and forgotten — that empty maw into which all celebrated enterprises eventually follow". Everywhere the fragility and fleetingness of human existence is made visible, while offering an unsettling presentiment about the ideological master narratives that animate our own lives, the closeness is almost suffocating, post-society, post-human, post-life.  In this context Susan Sontag’s famous commentary on photography offers a grave literality "To take a photograph is to participate in another person (or things) mortality, mutability, vulnerability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to times relentless melt".
 
Title: Soviet Ghosts
Author:  Rebecca Litchfield; written by Tristi Brownett, Neill Cockwill, Owen Evans.
Publisher: Great Britain, Carpet Bombing Culture 2014 
ISBN 9781908211163

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the Surveillance State

In ‘No Place to Hide’, Glenn Greenwald documents the complicity of the five eyes partners, of which New Zealand’s GCSB is a member, in the construction of an Orwellian global surveillance network operating in the dark, with negligible oversight, under the alarming institutional aegis “collect it all, sniff it all, partner it all, process it all, know it all, exploit it all.”

The menacing overreach of the NSA, in violation of core constitutional guarantees, and the chilling construction of the architecture of oppression, is placed on trial by this constitutional and civil rights litigator turned journalist. Greenwald incisively prosecutes the NSA’s ambition to indiscriminately invade personal privacy globally without check or possibility of individual protection, as explicitly revealed in the top secret documents leaked by whistle blower Edward Snowden.

Greenwald’s expert analysis is a revelation of fearless investigative reporting in defence of civil liberties and core democratic values. Piercing through the high noise to signal ratio of the mainstream press, Greenwald systematically subjects Government propaganda and subservient media stenography, to a remorseless examination by trail lawyer logic. The resulting dissonance is both fascinating and frightening; on the one hand a reasoned, passionate, and erudite warning against the perils of sweeping state intrusion into our private lives, on the other a mutating political culture shredding hard fought for freedoms like confetti, and aggressively lauded by large factions of the supposedly watchdog media. Greenwald describes the hostility he encountered from members of his profession as “anger and even shame over the truth that adversarial journalism had exposed: reporting that angers the government reveals the real role of so many mainstream journalists, which is to amplify power.”

The final chapter headed “The Fourth Estate” cross-examines the unprecedented and escalating attack on whistle blowers and investigative reporters alike, ironically by the Obama administration that promised to be the most transparent administration in history. Here Greenwald assertively reclaims the core tenet of journalism “The idea of the fourth estate is that those who exercise the greatest power need to be challenged by adversarial pushback and an insistence on transparency; the job of the press is to disprove the falsehoods that power invariably disseminates to protect itself.” From start to finish Greenwald's reporting exemplifies this attitude of moral courage, complemented by Snowden's selfless act of conscience, it makes for a hugely inspiring read.

This book is part spy thriller, part dystopian nightmare, communicating an urgent clarion call to action in defence of our eroding civil liberties, a reminder of why the hard fought for freedoms that define our western democracies should not be abandoned to a sliding decent, an eviscerated mutilation into a society very different from the one we all too often take for granted.

Title: No Place to Hide

Author: Glenn Greenwald

ISBN:9781627790734

Published: 2014

Publisher: Metropolitan Henry Holt

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

A Period of Juvenile Prosperity is a collection of gritty and emotive photographs by Mike Brody, documenting five years of his train-hopping travails across the United States in the company of a ragtag group of bohemian cohorts. The prints are hewn from earthy hues of warm and slightly faded colour, at times luminous in the soft golden light of dawn or dusk, and appear as if distilled from the dirt and grime of months on the road.

Together the body of work forms a brawny narrative, of defiant young outcasts, rough sleeping and hard living vagabonds with an unerring sense of post-punk style, traversing the seamy margins of society, and framed amidst stark, transitory, and anonymous landscapes.

The depictions of free-wheeling camaraderie, and the lonely beauty of the itinerant lifestyle could easily slip into romanticism, but for Brody's candid depictions of the adversity he encounters. Here, weathered youths with drawn and pallid faces make their home amidst the rusted hulks of dirty carriages, scavenging food amidst rail-side detritus, a coal heap for a bed, a battered copy of The Rum Dairy for a pillow.

The emotional tenderness of Brody's work stands as testament to his total emersion in the lifestyle. The images are highly subjective and communicate a powerful authenticity of experience I often find lacking from contemporary art. There is no pretence in Brody's work, for him the journey is the destination, deeply felt and lovingly documented.

Title: A Period of Juvenile Prosperity

Author: Mike Brody

ISBN: 9781936611027

Published: 2012

Publisher: Santa Fe, N.M : Twin Palms.


Essays and articles:

The Cost of Freedom: Mike Brodie’s “A Period of Juvenile Prosperity”

The Philosopher's Stone

A memory of childhood surfaced yesterday while leafing through the pages of a book. I was reading a passage on the true foundation of alchemy “the spiritual transformation from an imperfect, corruptible state towards a perfect, healthy, incorruptible and everlasting state,” and about the philosopher's stone “that represented some mystic key that would make this evolution possible.” Upon reading this, I recalled as a boy keeping a smooth river polished stone that rested pleasingly in the palm of my hand. I noticed when holding this stone, feeling its weight and smoothness, that it exerted a gentle soothing quality on my mind. I imagined the stone had magical qualities and its centre became a place of quiet and meditative stillness in which I sought peace during times of turbulence. I carried the stone in my mind as well as my hand. As I contemplated this memory, I had an almost imperceptible feeling of cool water washing over me, returning me to the mountain stream in which the stone had rested so many years before. As its polished surface solidified in my minds eye, I imagined energizing waves emanating from its centre in joyful rushing torrents. For a brief moment, I was immersed in the vast waters of time that had once caressed it smooth. They flowed blissfully through me, soothing the discordant vibrations within my being.
It was an extraordinary moment of reverie that I snapped out of with a pang of nostalgia, because I realized I have long since lost that stone.Only later it occurred to me that on a subconscious level I had internalized the stones essence. Without my awareness, the stone had bestowed upon me the magical pan psychic healing power of its nature. Moreover, I realized that the quest for the philosopher’s stone is a metaphor for the everyday challenge to consciously activate the magical transformative powers of the Spirit.






The Sacred Art of Alchemy
Excerpt:
Jung makes the important point that "The real nature of matter was unknown to the alchemist. In as much as he tried to explore it he projected the unconscious into the darkness of matter in order to illuminate it. In order to explain the mystery of matter he projected yet another mystery - his own psychic background - into what was to be explained." The alchemists' experiences with matter were revealing to them their own mind. Jung continues, "I am, therefore, inclined to suppose that the real root of alchemy is to be sought less in philosophical doctrines than in the projections of individual investigators.... while working on his chemical experiments the operator had certain psychic experiences which appeared to him as the particular behavior of the chemical process. Since it was a question of projection, he was naturally unconscious of the fact that the experience had nothing to do with matter itself (that is, with matter as we know it today). He experienced his projection as a property of matter, but what he was in reality experiencing was his own unconscious...Such projections repeat themselves whenever man tried to explore an empty darkness and involuntarily fills it with living form." To put it simply, the alchemists had unconsciously stumbled onto and were participating in the divine secret which has now become understood in quantum physics (albeit in different terms), that what we are experiencing right now as matter is inseparable from our own mind.





In exploring their unconscious through the material world, the alchemists were potentially waking themselves up to the dreamlike nature of reality. In becoming lucid in the dream of life, they were realizing how they could transform the world by transforming themselves. We are all potential alchemists-in-training to the extent we are consciously participating in giving creative expression to our experience of the unconscious. When enough of us become accomplished in the sacred art of alchemy, we can connect and "conspire to co-inspire" each other, I imagine, to activate our collective genius and create real magic, changing the world in the process. As the alchemist Gerhard Dorn proclaims, "Transform yourselves into living philosophical stones!"



SACRED STONES
At the most basic level, stone is the fabric of the Earth and as such is a symbol of the everlasting. The anthropomorphic view of the world sees stones and rock as the bones of mother Earth. They are the fundamental structure that supports all other aspects of physical existence and contains traces of earlier earthly life forms. This is the outer reflection of our inner fabric, for the bones inside our bodies determine the human physical form. They are the components of the physical body that endure the longest after the spirit has departed. Within the human psyche stone symbolises the eternal substance of existence, at a level deeper than the ego consciousness. When we touch a stone we commune with this eternal substance, and we feel that the virtues present in the stone are transferred to us. Traditionally stones are receptacles for spirit, which can be attracted if correct procedures are adopted. The ancient philosophers, among them Lamblichus, Porphyry, and Proilus, stated that gods and demons, when attracted to stone images through rituals, take up residence in them, using them as media for their manifestations.
Celtic Sacred Landscapes. Nigel Pennick. P39


Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. Stephan Harding. Pg20

For most non-Western cultures, such experiences of the living qualities of nature are a source of direct, reliable knowledge. For them, nature is truly alive, and every entity within it is endowered with agency, intelligence, and wisdom; qualities which in the West, when they are recognised at all, have commonly been referred to as 'soul'. For traditional cultures, rocks are considered to be the elders of the Earth; they are the keepers of the oldest memories and are sought out for their tranquil, wise council. High mountains are abodes of powerful beings and are climbed only at the risk of gravely offending their more-than-human inhabitants. Forests are living entities, and must be consulted before a hunt by the shamans of the tribe, who have direct, intuitive connection with the great being of the forest. The American philosopher and cultural ecologist David Abram makes the point that many traditional people knew their natural surroundings as so intensely alive and intelligent, as so sensitive to one's presence, that one had to be careful not to offend or insult the very land itself. Thus, most indigenous cultures have known the Earth to be alive - a vast sentient presence honoured as a nuturing and sometimes harsh mother. For such peoples, even the ground underfoot was a repository of devine power and intelligence.
These non-Western peoples espoused an animistic perspective, believing that the whole of nature is, in the profound words of 'geologian' Father Thomas Berry, "a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects". Animism has traditionally been considered backward and lacking in objective validity by western scholars, but today philosophers, psychologist and scientists in our culture are beginning to realize that animistic peoples, far from being 'primitive', have been living a reality which holds many important insights for our own relationships with each other and with the Earth. One such insight is that animistic perception is archetypal, ancient, and primordial; that the human organism is inherantly predisposed to seeing nature as alive and full of soul, and that we repress this fundamental mode of perception at the expense of our health, and that of the natural world.

James Hillman, a close student of Jung and the founder of Archetypal Psychology, suggests that animism is not, as is often believed, a projection of human feelings onto inanimate matter; but that the things of the word project onto us their own 'ideas and demands', that indeed any phenomenon has the capacity to come alive and to deeply inform us through our interaction with it, as long as we are free of an overly objectifying attitude. Hillman points to the danger of identifying interiority with only human subjective experience; a gaping construction site, for example, or a clear-cut mountainside, may communicate the genuine, objective suffering of the Earth, and one's sensing of this is not merely a dream-like symbol of some inner process which relates only to one's own private inner self.