ULTIMATE ALCHEMY

ULTIMATE ALcheMY/THE POLITICS of FIRE

Diane Armitage, Visual Arts Coordinator for the exhibion THE POLITICS of FIRE

All things, o priests, are on fire.

The mind is on fire, ideas are on fire

mind consciousness is on fire.

From Buddha's "Fire Sermon"

James Hillman, the noted psychotherapist and former director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, has stated in his book of selected writings, A BLUE FIRE, the differences that he feels exist between our archetypal connection to the mythologies of war, and our 20th Century fascination with the idea of a nuclear apocalypse . There is no question, Hillman believes, that enacting rituals which circulate from the archetype of Mars, the god of war, and sitting in a numb psychic stupor while gazing at abstracted images of nuclear annihilation are two different experiences and should not be entered under the same psychological heading of WAR .

Hillman states :

"The rhetoric of Mars in war journals, poems and recollections speaks of attachment to specific earthly places, comrades, things . The transcendent is in the concrete particular . Hemingway writes that after World War I : "abstract words such as glory, honor, courage . . . were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the name of rivers, the regiments and dates ." How rare for anyone to know the date of Alamogordo (or even where it is), the date of Hiroshima, or the names of people or places or units engaged. Gone in abstraction . . .

Quite different is the transcendent experience of the nuclear fireball . The motion is stupefaction at destruction itself rather than a heightened regard for the destroyed . Nuclear devastation is not merely a deafening cannonade or firebombing carried to a further degree. It is different in kind : archetypally different. It evokes the apocalyptic transformation of the world into fire, earth ascending in a pillar of cloud, an epiphonic fire revealing the inmost spirit of all things . . ." (1).

In this exhibition, PLAYING WITH FIRE, presented by The Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, six New Mexico artists : Michael Cook, Lydia Madrid, Patrick Nagatani, Roger Sweet, Woody Vasulka, and Erika Wanenmacher present work, in a variety of media, which is-an attempt to address some aspects of the impact upon us from our preoccupation with nuclear energy. Included in the various inquiries of these artists is the over riding vision of a potential planetary holocaust . Whether the globe goes up in one final big bang or dies whimpering, slowly cooking itself into a half-life heat-death of radiation poisoning seems like a totally unacceptable trade off in any terms . There is no 'getting well' from radiation poisoning . There is no restructuring of the Earth's infinitely complex inter-dependencies if we blast our one and only ground zero network apart.

These A artists have, in a metaphoric sense, taken on the weight of the world, and they attempt, through the devices of their own personal 'alchemical' procedures, to affect heightened levels of awareness regarding the uses of atomic energy while broadening our perspectives of the nuclear landscape . The artists in PLAYII3G WITH FIRE could be thought of as contemporary Alchemists, heating and mixing and re-canbining the leaden variables of nuclear realities into an amalgamation of visual awareness leading to the gold of insight and intuition. Each artist seems to be working out of some kind of laboratory of layered information which yields in every end product a heart breaking vision of re-combinatory history, even when this vision is bracketed by a deeply intoned helping of black humor such as one might find in Nagatani's luridly gorgeous color photographs .

Woody Vasulka's video tape, THE ART OF MEMORY, has a rather paradoxical place in the exhibition PLAYING WITH FIRE. The five preceding artists mentioned in this essay are consciously and willfully pursuing a line of inquiry that has nuclear politics at the fulcrum of this inquiry . Vasulka however, insists his video is not specifically anti-nuclear or even, for that matter, political . His artist statement says in effect that instead of futuristic concerns that deal primarily with video technology, he "decided to look back, and this is what I saw. . ." .

Vasulka was born in Czechoslovakia and like many other Czech aritsts and intellectuals, he left his country in the sixties to settle ' 141 the United States . The Europe that Vasulka witnessed during his formative years had seen political upheaval of cosmic proportions . THE ART OF MEMORY explores a brief collective history of- Europe and Russia in this century, but at the same time Vasulka kicks th information up to an ambiguous present haunted by a mythological creature wit*ings who hovers over the archetypal beauty of the southwest landscape featured in this video . The creature however is spurned by a contemporary "Everyman"--- a "No-Where Man" lost in his own aimless, supercilious consciousness .

In Vasulka's 20th Century chronicle of the political turbulence that factored into his own life and times, there of course appear references, both visual and verbal, to the Atom Bomb and to Oppenheimer's now famous quotations from the Bhagavad Gita as he witnessed the first blast : If the radiance of a thousand suns were burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One .

Even if Vasulka is right when he says that THE ART OF MEMORY is not a political piece r se, and that he is more interested in the technological suggestion of a three dimensional space ; or the transition between a two dimensional iconic image into the illusion of a three dimensional space, one is haunted neverthe ,less by the various matrices of historical developments within this century as he presents then . This information culminates in an image that hangs over our heads in a fervent if totally and obscenely ironic simulation of divine inspiration.

Vasulka says that THE ART OF MEMORY is an historical meditation without a political assignment, because in effect he sees the events of this century so horrendous and horrible that only metaphysical forces beyond the grasp of human kind could be responsible for such spiritual, psychological, physical, and moral destruction . He says : "They [those metaphysical powers] would have to be guilty forever because mankind can never be responsible for the deeds of this century ." As the 21st Century rapidly appears on an ambiguous horizon, there is the pressing need for each individual to find her or his own place within the nuclear landscape and become acquainted with the variables of survival that hinge, as never before, on the variables of conscious awareness . These six artists in PLAYING WITH FIRE have presented a variety of responses to the uses and abuses of atomic energy,and one fervently hopes that the messages they offer will aid us in our own responsible decisions regarding the politics of fire .

Diane Armitage

Diane Armitage is an artist in Santa Fe, New Mexico, working in digital video. She has a BFA in Ceramics and an MFA in Sculpture from the University of New Mexico. She studied Digital Media at the Santa Fe Community College, where she established the Art History program in 1999. She has taught Art Studio for the University of New Mexico and the History of Film for Santa Fe University of Art and Design. She is featured in 100 Artists of the Southwest (Schiffer Books, 2006). Her video, The Great River, has been touring the US with Water, Water Everywhere: Paean to a Vanishing Resource.

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