S. A. von Hell: A New Day (c. 1985-87)
Someone very kindly emailed to say how intriguing and strangely affecting they found my solar-phallic landscape painted sometime in the mid-1980s and featured on a recent post [click here]. They also requested that I provide some background to the work which, as they rightly assume, wasn't merely imaginative ...
Primarily, the picture has its origins in the work of the writer and artist D. H. Lawrence, who once confessed in a letter to a friend:
"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."
This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.
Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.
The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below.
Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...
"I put a phallus [...] in each one of my pictures somewhere. And I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social spirituality. I do this out of positive belief that the phallus is a great sacred image: it represents a deep, deep life which has been denied in us, and is still denied."
This brief remark encapsulated my philosophical aesthetic at the time and provided a kind of mini-manifesto.
Secondly, the picture was very much influenced by my love of Killing Joke, particularly during the period beginning with Fire Dances and ending with Brighter Than a Thousand Suns. I bought the three albums released before this period - and the first two albums that followed - but my beautiful obsession with the band was at its most intense and uncompromising between 1983-87, i.e., the pagan years, when I subscribed to an eco-apocalyptic model of Romantic primitivism tinged with Nazi occultism.
The oak tree foliage at the side of the picture was an idea I took from the cover to the Killing Joke single from which I also lifted the title, A New Day (1984) - see image below.
Finally, the painting was born also of my reading of Jung's writings on the solar phallus and the collective unconscious; in other words, it was meant to be an image with archetypal significance. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, let me try to briefly explain ...
One of Jung's favourite stories concerned a paranoid-schizophrenic patient with suicidal tendencies named Emile Schwyzer, who had spent most of his life in and out of mental institutions; a man who believed that stars were composed of dead souls and that the Earth was flat and surrounded by infinite seas.
One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.
One day, Schwyzer reported a particularly striking hallucination, in which the sun seemed to possess an erect penis that moved back and forth and caused the wind to blow. This vision stayed with Jung, although he was unable to fathom its meaning until he became aware of a similar solar-phallic image within the ancient Roman mystery religion centred on the god Mithras. Then, it all made perfect sense and everything clicked into place; here was a compelling piece of evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious.
At the time - i.e., in the mid-1980s, when I thought Jung was a genius rather than a crank - I was happy to buy into all this, despite numerous problems with the actual details of the story and with Jung's celebrated theory (a theory that has more holes in it than a piece of Swiss cheese, as James Hillman acknowledges).
What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.
What Jung is essentially doing, is extending Kant's categories of reason to the production of fantasy; archetypes are conceived as categories of the imagination and analytic psychology is thereby revealed as a form of transcendental idealism with mytho-hermeneutic knobs on. Not my cup of tea at all; certainly not now, when the last thing I would paint - if I were to ever pick up a brush again - would be a solar-phallic landscape.
Notes
The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.
The letter by D. H. Lawrence to Earl Brewster (27 Feb 1927) can be found in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, vol. V, ed. James T. Boulton and Lindeth Vasey, (Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 648-49.
(E. G. Records, 1984)
This is a selective/reductive reading of Jung, we think, which needs a lot of unpacking and critical revisiting.
ReplyDeleteIn particular, the uncritical duality of 'genius' OR 'crank' (why can't one be both?) is a distinction that we might want to see being dissolved, or at least curdled, to purge its dubiously sharp edges and what reads as judgmental over-confidence. We're also wondering what 'evidence' decisively drove the writer's version of Jung from one image into another, and how subjective or objective (or brilliant/cranky) such an (itself classically) archetypal flipping might itself have been. We think here of Nietzsche's flipped love of Wagner into bitter antipathy, which are really just two sides of the same coin (or two forms of idealism).
Could the Hillman reference also be kindly supplied?
While it's true that Jung readily admitted he was steeped in Kant, his 'Kantiansm', such as it was, was massively freighted by the darkening mediation/complication of both Schelling and Nietzsche, on whom Jung wrote extensively, so this 'transcendental' version of Jung needs heavily qualifying. Jung himself was at pains to depict himself as kind of radical empiricist, albeit one whose empiricism certainly shades off into metaphysics and mysticism - which is what makes him both brilliant and dark. Hillman's effective relocation of archetypal thinking to focus on images rather than an underlying transpersonal/noumenal underlay may or may not be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it does a superb job of repositioning Jung as a primarily imaginal/poetic psychologist.
Even Jung found the mystery of the psychoid origination of archetypal images to be just that - an imponderable mystery. Who knows where images come from in the end, how they arise. Ergo, poetry - to attest to the 'meta', or imaginal domain on which all reality depends (and which it extends).
By the gods, though if Jung is/was a crank, we need more cranks - but of course he was a genius too, and genius is rare and uncanny.
I thought we had already established in an earlier dialogue that, just as all quotes are out of context, so all readings of an author are selective/reductive in character.
DeleteIt was a general reference to Hillman and his revisionary project, rather than to a specific text.
Whilst Hillman probably didn't, in fact, discuss Jung's work in relation to Swiss cheesemaking, he certainly made an "effective relocation" of Jung's thinking, as you note; one that abandoned all notions of the archetype as a thing in itself (that noumenal/transpersonal underlay) leaving us simply with images.
You're being a little disingenuous re: the 'psychoid origination of archetypal images' in this particular case. Anyone who knows the details, knows how Jung enhanced the story of the Solar Phallus Man over the years.
Not sure we 'established' anything in this domain, Stephen. (We have difficulty enough agreeing with ourselves from day to day, let alone anyone else.)
ReplyDeleteGiven the response, the Hillman reference seems itself disingenuous to say the least. Glad we concur at least re the revisionary project developed by Hillman, which is really a form of radicalised Jungianism, 'back to the source' (as Hillman himself admitted). I think Lacan did something similar with Freud.
All brilliant thinkers embellish and exaggerate their metaphors and images in service of their visions, of course.
For us, however, the fascinating case of Emile Schwyzer concerns the hermeneutic alignment (or otherwise) of 'schizophrenic truth' in the domain of archetypal un/consciousness.