James Khazar's Artist Statement

To see a world in a grain of sand And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand And eternity in an hour. —WILLIAM BLAKE, AUGURIES OF INNOCENCE. 1789

James Khazar’s Artist Statement

According to Thomas G. West, in his book “In The Mind’s Eye,” creativity can be seen as the ability to provisionally affirm several apparently incompatible assertions,1 and “one of the essential characteristics of creativity is a ‘childlike’ view of the world, full of freshness and flexibility”. This ability to juggle the ambivalent and create new ideas from the dissonance between the two (or more) assertions strikes me as fundamental to the development of my work. It is placing oneself at the center of a process that is child-like in the sense that it dismisses the learned limitations of thought and structured conceptualizing and generates new constructs from unexpected associations. This “mind’s eye”—the inner eye that visualizes the creative—is where I look for my ideas as an artist. The 2000 American Heritage Dictionary defines a symbol as “Something that represents something else by association, resemblance, or convention, especially a material object used to represent something invisible.” A subset of this broad definition of symbols, and the one which I use for symbols in my practice, is the sympathetic magic 2 notion of symbols. Any object placed in the context of a work generated by my creative artistic practice carries meaning and is a symbol for something, and like sympathetic magic, that meaning contains a kind of action or energy between the symbol and the symbolized. A paper envelope in the middle of one of my pieces is more than a paper envelope, but a symbol which points to an event and contains an action relative to that event, such as generating a catharsis about the original event or instilling a sense of drama within the viewer. The use of sheet-lead to wrap an object symbolizes an alchemical base-ness to the thing enclosed and perhaps the need to keep the “radiation” within the object from doing harm to the observer. It is this study of the relationships of symbols to the symbolized and symbols to one another that interest me most, and which is most useful as an aesthetic system in my practice. Is not art—the output of the creative mind’s eye—deeply involved in the way things relate to each other? Is not the role of the artist to create transformative works that use these relationships as a common cultural language? At least as I see it, it is. And doesn’t the examination of these relationships reveal truths which need to be revealed? Truths about the commonality of humanity; whether through common symbols of a collective unconscious or the ordinary narratives of ordinary lives.

THEMES & METHODS My practice exploits symbols and themes from of Early Christianity, mythology, folklore, alchemistry, and my dreams. This constellation of influences is largely based in western tradition because I am inculcated with that tradition. Calling up my inner eye, that eye has been focused with western cultural lenses.

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THEMES AUTOBIOGRAPHY It is sometimes advised to writers that they should write what they know about. I take this advice as valuable, at least to me, since fictional narrative is not an area in which I feel I have any talent. Therefore, looking inward (part of a process of the examined life) is the one reliable method I can use to find a source for the most emotionally true and energetic content I am capable of creating. Autobiographical narrative as a source for my practice is in some ways therapeutic to explore my narrative, even cathartic, but therapeutic implies a working-through of issues, or a resolution of issues or a comingto-terms with issues which is not what my practice is about. I can work through etc. quite well apart from my practice. When working for my practice, I use autobiographical narrative as a foundation for discovering emotional truth, and take that truth as the raw core ingredient on which to layer other meanings, narratives and emotional truths for my audience. ALCHEMY Alchemy is the precursor of modern science. It has existed in one form or another for at least 2500 years until the advent of modern science in the 19th century. Alchemy was a philosophical method of attempting to understand nature and how it works, largely through the associations of things and their affects on each other. To express these relationships alchemy used “elaborate extended allegories as a means of communicating key philosophical points.3” Often these were visually codified in engravings such as the one above—a remarkable image on almost all levels of interpretation. Sadly, much of what is seen now in popular culture around alchemy verges into the trendy and “new age”. I have little interest in this approach to alchemy as a “spiritual” discipline and prefer to examine it for its roots as an historical system of thought that was profoundly intellectual in its time, while also incorporating the possibility of unseen forces in its view of the universe. THE EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH, AGNOSTICISM, & GNOSTICISM A major issue and struggle in my life is the question of the existence of god. I identify myself as an agnostic, and reluctantly so. This struggle within myself finds expression in inquiries into the historical view of god, particularly the one in which I was raised, the Catholic Church. So it is interesting to me that I find myself fascinated with the history

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of the Church, particularly the early church from the period when the apostles were roaming the Roman Empire converting the people to a new, but widely divergent, form of worship. Agnosticism and Gnosticism are theoretically unrelated, yet I find the surrender to the former brings a desire for the latter. Gnosticism is a form of spirituality that contends that god is within us and can only be discovered through personal quest, and not through a centrally organized church. It is this personal quest for spiritual knowledge that intrigues me, and I believe that my practice is a part of this quest. It is, in essence, a kind of Gnostic quest for spiritual knowledge in the face of profound agnostic doubt. Since my creative mind thinks and solves problems in images, I try to carry out this quest in visible forms and map personal narrative onto these forms as a part of that quest. This re-mapping makes sense to me since my life as examined by me and reiterated by me to an audience is deeply personal, and following a course of revelation like the gnostic, it stands to reason that others might be pointed on their own quest by the indications of my quest without the imposition of my revelations. MYTH We all share from a common set of primary symbols which has been variously called by Carl Jung the “Collective Unconscious,” by Timothy Leary the “Neurogenetic Circuit” and by Robert Anton Wilson the “Morphogenetic Circuit.” The great scholar of comparative mythology and religion, Joseph Campbell , called them “Elementary Ideas.” There is a large, marvelous and complex constellation of symbols which represent commonalities of humanity that are ripe for drawing on as symbols to be used in my art practice. Any symbol in this set has a breadth of meaning which is much larger than its apparent surface. Early Christianity is one facet of this symbolic system which I have used with particular attention as stated above, since it plays such a direct role in my own personal mythology, but other sets of symbols can be equally useful to carry meaning in my practice. Indeed, I contend that everyone has their own personal set of mythologies and mythological systems that they can draw on to interpret their reality. DREAMS It is my belief that we manufacture our own mythologies in a number of different ways, through personal non-fictional narrative and fictional, and through self-examination. But one of the most profound ways of creating personal mythologies is through dreams. I have been tracking, journaling and actively analyzing my dreams since 1984, and have built up a deep, complex, and rich set of personal mythologies and symbols. In some ways they share a “collective unconscious” commonality with the rest of humanity, often perceived when associating the symbols within a dream to the world at large (“The ocean is like the source of life, the water was warm and took away my fear of it.”). But in

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many ways they do not share a commonality (“Yellow school buses in the desert reminds me of the time X___ revealed the depth of her betrayal to me.”) and are intensely personal and part of the Gnostic process of my own life and its examination. Since these are very personal mythologies by and large, I find I can use them as a way of expressing my differences from others while at the same time expressing my commonality with humanity. And just the existence of a dream based symbol, even a personal one, has a resonance and a likelihood of indexicality to other’s symbologies/mythologies. The themes of my practice have certain methodologies that lend themselves to and enhance the expression of those themes. I am still discovering them, and they will continue to grow and modify themselves into other methods, but there are a few core methods that I find myself coming back to over and over again. In fact, before I took my practice into the realm of personal narrative, alchemy, early Christianity and the search for god, myth and dreams my work was constantly employing these methods. It was in examining the meaning of my practice and the use of these methods that I was lead to my themes in the first place. Here, then, they are:

METHODS LAYERING/TRANSPARENCY — OBFISCATION/SECRECY The use of layers of material—sometimes unseen layers, sometimes exposed—is a method of directly correlating to the layers of meaning within my narratives and themes. By placing on thing on top or over another, there is an accumulated energy that is greater than the sum of the parts. Unseen layers can also express a kind of deliberate secrecy, the outer layer obscures the one beneath and may at what lies beneath. Layers seen from the side cut through to reveal the layers and emergent patterns that cannot be perceived except by the cutting through. I used this technique for this purpose in my Cartonnage piece, where layers of wax impregnated computer printouts of images from the internet are cut through to create an opening into the interior of the sculpture. Transparency is a subset of layering, in that in order to perceive transparency it is necessary to have a layer of some material which is transparent between the viewer and the object perceived. This kind of layering brings with it a special case of layered meaning. Where opaque layers render up their meanings in a kind of geologic way—revealing through excavation—transparent layers allow for the possibility of revelation through direct observation, but revelation mitigated by the transparent material. This is a

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method to control the degree of revelation and create a kind of secrecy through obfuscation, and a controlled letting-in of the viewer. By controlling the degree of revelation I am exploring the notion of secrecy. My paternal origins are a secret that may or may not be deliberately withheld from me by my birthmother. When I was growing up, unbeknownst to me, my adopted mother kept in close contact with my birth-mother’s family through the aunt she stayed with for her lying-in period. I was even taken to the circus as a young child by my birth-grandmother along with some birth-cousins, all without my knowledge. This complicity and secrecy deeply shocked me when it was revealed in my 30’s. Taussig’s concept of the public secret resonates strongly with me, and I find that manipulating the availability of narrative through layering of meaning, and particularly through creating a controlled “window” into my narrative space is a good method of approaching this personal but public secret of my own life. The use of transparency provides a “template” that allows me control over access. SCULPTURE — INSIDE/OUTSIDE When I started making art at the age of 10, I was a 2D artist. I maintained this trajectory throughout undergraduate art school and for several years after. Ultimately, however, I found that two dimensional forms were insufficient to express the kinds of themes I wanted to explore in my practice. To achieve the sense of layering I was looking for it became clear that it would be necessary to expand my surface to three dimensions through sculptural forms. I first did this with some sculptures that made extensive use of open mesh wire grids and clear vinyl with applied paint. However, without the themes from above, this practice seemed insufficient as a means of expression. It wasn’t until they all came together in pieces like Cartonnage that my practice gave me a sense of having found something that could express a connection to humanity and a method of presenting a valuable statement to the world. Working with three-dimensional forms also allows me to exploit the notion of inside and outside, placing the observer in a controlled experiential space. With the use of transparency and windowing I am able to contain and control an interior space which sets up a tension in the viewer’s experience of the piece by allowing observation to the level that I wish, and which resonates with the concept of access to secrecy and knowledge, playing off the ideas of the alchemical alembic,4 the crucible, and the Gnostic quest for secret knowledge. This separation of interior from exterior sets up a dialecti-

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cally dynamic model of the knowable tissue of signs that an observer brings to the sculpture and the unknowable public secret contained and controlled within the sculpture. MATHEMATICS Most all of my practice incorporates in one way or another mathematic principles and aesthetics. Mathematics has a beauty all its own that is expressed through geometric forms, such as the Platonic solids,5 and numerical harmonies such as the Fibonacci sequence6 and the number Phi.7 By building these harmonies into the dimensions of my pieces wherever possible—in relative scales, in distances, in temporal relationships like timing, in shape formats—I am calling on natural patterns to evoke a sense of beauty into my objects through a biologically predisposed attraction that we have towards these shapes and harmonies 8. For example, one of the most exciting buildings I have ever visited is the Pantheon in Rome. It is essentially a cylinder with a half sphere dome on top and repeating patterns of squares and Golden Rectangles 9 everywhere. The more I looked the more harmonic/rhythmic associations I could find. It made my heart race with excitement. I believe these harmonics present those in their presence with an enhanced sense of cohesiveness and naturalness , whether they are aware of it or not. By adapting these pleasing but non-representational forms I am able to attach my own layers of meaning more easily, and am freed from the necessity of a representational object in order to evoke a pleasurable response in the viewer. TIME-BASED MEDIA/SOUND Along with going past the self-perceived limitations of two-dimensional expression, I find the addition of time-based media such as animation and sound add another dimension to the three I’ve settled on as my format for expression. Traditionally, sculpture has not directly encompassed time as an element its presentation, but by adding this element to my sculptures, they will lend themselves more easily to the imposition of narrative. Sound adds another layer of complexity and ability to create a space for narrative.

Summation In the creation of objects I am casting a Blakean grain of sand, filled with a universe of meanings. A friend of mine, Dr. Danny Sheie, found a pamphlet near the Berlin Wall before it was torn down in 1989 that said: “Kunst ist so notwendig wie das kunstliche Brot.” Art is as necessary as daily bread. Sounds good to me…

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Endnotes

1

West, Thomas G. In The Minds Eye: Visual Thinkers, Gifted People with Dyslexia and Other Learning Difficulties, Computer Images and the Ironies of Creativity. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 1997, p. 189

2

Sir James George Frasier in his epic 1922 work “The Golden Bough” describes a type of ritual object that commonly occurs in pre-industrial societies as possessing sympathetic magic. This magic is “things (that) act on each other at a distance through a secret sympathy, the impulse being transmitted from one to the other by means of what we may conceive as a kind of invisible ether, not unlike that which is postulated by modern science for a precisely similar purpose, namely, to explain how things can physically affect each other through a space which appears to be empty.” In other words, sympathetic magic is a notion which gives some objects special “powers” from having been associated with other objects of significant cultural importance. For example, the bones of a saint known for healing the sick during his lifetime could be said to contain sympathetic magic for their relationship to the life of that saint, and thus contain a kind of power to recreate those healing powers.

3

Levy, Dan. Alchemy Web Site. http://www.levity.com/alchemy/allegory.html. May 28th, 2006.

4

An alembic was a device used to purify or alter a material, causing it to change form from liquid to gas to liquid again in a distillation process. The creation of Homunculi are often associated with the use of an alembic.

5

Platonic solids are convex polyhedrons where all faces are the same kind of polygon, such as a square or triangle. They are the tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron.

6

The Fibonacci sequence is the sequence of numbers where each successive number is created by the sum of the two previous numbers: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,56…

7

Phi, pronounced “fee,” is approximately 1.618 and is the number associated with the classical Golden Rectangle. It is an irrational number, and like Pi, has an infinite number of nonrepeating numerals after the decimal point. It is requently found in natural formations such as sea shell spirals and sunflower seed patterns. Discovered by the Pythagoreans, followers of the mathematician Pythagoras, in the 5th century BC. Their discovery was so disturbing to their sense of an ordered universe that it was rumored that the first Pythagorean to discover their existence met with an unfortunate boating "accident."

8

While this topic remains controversial—recent experiments have tended to discount the human preference for Golden Ratio rectangles—I can sense their beauty instinctually, and my experience in the Pantheon strikes me as sufficient proof to add the aesthetic principle to my practice. See Gyorgy Doczi’s The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture. Boston: Shambala. 1994

9

The Golden Rectangle is a rectangle whose sides have the proportion of 1:1.618… or 1:phi.

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