Psychic Art Forms

Ritual Relationships- a psychic art form -by Tim Holmes

My friend Susan, a worldly woman with an Ivy League degree, lives on a ranch outside Fishtail, Montana. One day she had a visitor from the neighboring ranch, a ranch wife with a minimal education who had never been farther than 50 miles from home. Just off the kitchen the woman caught sight of a print hanging on the wall and spontaneously burst into tears. Until Susan told her the story behind the painting the woman had never heard of Guernica, and maybe not even of Picasso or even the Spanish civil war for all I know. The war was history, the artist was dead, and the painting was located clear around the world. So how did Picasso reach across time and space to affect her like that?

Every art experience is a complex drama of perceptions and projections involving the whole of the experience of the artist who created the work and that of the viewer who perceives it. As a sculptor, the bronze I create is nothing but a chunk of metal that could put a hole in your car. It has no meaning until the viewer projects meaning into it. No matter how much meaning I see therein, the work can only be successful if the viewer is also stirred into a lively response.

Over years of studying and manipulating the complex psychological matrices of artistic creation and apprehension I have become fascinated with the possibilities of a kind of ‘psychic’ art form that I’ve been developing for 20 years that I call Ritual Relationships. Here interpersonal relationships, which we normally use as tools to achieve certain productive ends, are renegotiated. Instead of serving to encounter another’s authentic personality with our own– the reasonable way to relate to another– relationships are used as esthetic mirrors to encounter our own unconscious contents. This is a technique that generates powerful images by using the projective mechanism to allow me, the artist, to engage my own unconscious through a creative interaction with the model as the other. The theory of Ritual Relationships is a technique by which I believe other creative individuals could tread a similar path to explore their own unconscious powers.

We are all projecting all the time, of course. That is what allows us to make sense of our world, which would otherwise be an undistinguished mélange of sensory input. But by using Ritual Relationship to explore the other, one can trace the path of numinosity rooted inside one’s own soul. In fact the impact can be so powerful as to effect a profound personal transformation, which is exactly what happened to me in 1994 in an encounter that changed my life and resulted in a major museum exhibit that tracked the process, called Visitation By the Muse.

This is not a new idea to history. Psychoanalysis, psychedelic drugs, and shamanic vision questing are more common ways of deliberately accessing the powers in the unconscious. Ritual Relationships is just another mechanism, but it is one that calls for a specifically artistic response.

The same principles can also be applied to increase the power of the mirror experience: that of the viewer. Veiling the artwork in a controlled environment forces the projective mechanism in the viewer’s experience. Viewing an image under these conditions (or rather the viewer’s apprehending of their own projection thereon), creates the possibility of a numinous artwork, as if the artist had created a work specific to that person. Sometimes there is even another psyche involved, that of the model who embodies the original image. This proves another hall of mirrors that can be used to unleash unconscious powers. When the mechanism can be orchestrated to control the projective process across the spectrum of a number of viewers the technique rises to the level of an art form. (Yes it is a path fraught with dangers and should only be approached with a great deal of foresight, humility, and– this is vital– safety gear!)

The frontiers of art are always moving. I have made forays into this arena in a number of different directions for 20 years. I feel that here is a great unexplored continent that lies before us. It's a land that has been discovered but still needs to be colonized by artists and creators of the future. I can only dream of the endless possibilities stretching off into the future!

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Night Ache by Tim Holmes (and Lonnie Hanzon)

-Tim Holmes cc 2010