https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=YvlmDhltTAU
So hello everybody, I am here with J.F. Martel. J.F. Martel is a thinker, he’s a filmmaker, just a cultural theorist. He’s written a book called Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and also hosts a podcast called Weird Studies. The strange thing about J.F. is that several years ago someone pointed me to him and said that we were like doppelgängers, that we really look like each other. Even my wife when she saw a picture of him thought, wow this guy really looks like you. And what’s interesting is that a lot of his ideas start from similar positions his mind talks about the world, his story, about how you know reality is is built out of story and he comes to conclusions that are slightly different from me. So I think this is going to be a very interesting discussion. This is Jonathan Pageau, welcome to the Symbolic World. I’m looking forward to it. And my wife said the same thing. That’s hilarious. Yeah yeah like brothers. Yeah exactly and we’re also both French Canadian which is just strange. So we should be doing this in French. Yeah it’s a little awkward but we’ll get the hang of it, we’re both used to it. The thing is that yeah I guess it goes to show that we come we come from a society that was until very recently very homogeneous that we could look so similar and not have the same name, last name. Exactly you probably have some bloodlines crossing at some point in the past. Oh for sure. In fact I think you’re only like a few hundred you’re in the eastern townships. Yeah is that where you? Yeah well I grew up in the eastern township so. Oh so I’m in Ottawa so we’re pretty close. Anyways yeah. So you wrote a book called Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice and I’ve heard you talk on several podcasts about a certain approach to reality, about reality being made of stories. So maybe you can lay out you know the basics of your idea and then we can start to explore the kind of the similarities and differences with the things I’m talking about. Sure sure so Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice is the book I wrote a few years ago now and the the goal of the book was to I had been working in the media industry for some time at that point and I’d become frustrated with the types of questions that my fellow artists and I were getting from the people who were basically the gatekeepers of the industry. The types of things that we were asked to do. This is not new. Every artist knows this who’s working in a big industry is that you start off with this vision, this idea of what you’d like to do and then of course it’s almost like you’re holding a candle and the industry’s a maze and the goal is to somehow make it across to the other end with these howling winds through the tunnels with the candles still lit at the other end. So I thought well that’s and this is I think is a something that a lot of artists have felt. So I was just thinking about that and instead of going the usual route which is to say well that’s just the egocentric artist wanting to control you know that not answering to the demands of culture but trying to get their own personal opinion across or their own personal vision but really the market knows what kind of art should be made and one should just kind of bow to that. Instead of going that route I decided to go the other route and I drew on the artists that I love. People like Oscar Wilde, people like Albert Camus, Flannery O’Connor, you know I remember the the artists that I was into at the time Stanley Kubrick you know and just going to see what what did they say about the process and I found that often what they said resonated with what my artist friends and I were feeling and they had just been the people who’d been able to make it across the maze with the candle still lit and so then I thought well what is it that we’re doing as artists? So I became interested in the question of art and to be honest this is a question that’s preoccupied me for a long time since I was a teenager. I think that it’s one probably one of the archetypal dialogues you’ll hear in a high school or Cégep right it’s the what is art the conversation oh that’s art that’s not art that sort of thing. Well I decided to take that question seriously as a thought exercise at first as a thought experiment and then finally ended up because I was writing for a magazine at the time called Reality Sandwich I ended up getting an opportunity to write a book about that and so I did and so the book basically argues that art is a means by which the human being is able to capture, touch, express the real with a capital R so what is real what is really real and that art is innately spiritual and that we have simply forgotten that and there’s something basically fundamentally subversive about art in the sense that it shows us things outside of the usual frames of reference that we know them in so it will take for example you know the example I use in the book a few on a few occasions is you’ll have someone take a vase with sunflowers in it and transform it into a weird menagerie of alien monsters right to transform them into something where the sunflower which seems so known so familiar to us suddenly becomes strange again restored to its original strangeness because the theory is that we tend to project our concepts on things and then we reduce those things to those concepts and art is a way of getting through that interface that kind of overlay of conceptual apprehension to get back to something like the original reality of creation right and I’m not saying that there’s a kind of gnosis in art but I’m saying that at least it shows us our unknowing so it’s like an antinosis it removes the idea that we can know things with certainty it restores us to what in the book I call radical mystery that’s what art does and that’s how you can kind of distinguish something like Guernica or the Sistine Chapel or an icon from something like a car commercial or a horrible milk commercial I’m sure you remember in Canada with where they took Beethoven’s Ninth and turned it into it was just the word milk being repeated over and over again when we were kids so like that sort of thing that type of propagandistic type of art that tells you how to feel and think which I in the book I call artifice so it was an exercise in rehabilitating and weaponizing an adolescent an adolescent feeling yes and so one of the things that I’ve heard you say is is really this return to the phenomenological which is something that I’ve been helping trying to get people to get back to which is that the reality we have access to the reality of these things that present themselves to us in terms of you know the hot cold inside outside these categories of experience they’re actually the first category right they’re the categories the world is made out of the other categories like the scientific categories are real but they’re secondary let’s say to these first kind of impression the this world of phenomena that we deal with yeah and so maybe because you talk about the vase I remember listening to you talk about the the vase in in this interview and you mentioned how by framing it let’s say by putting it into an image and then having you having it called to your attention so asking people to attend to it then you’re you’re you’re making forcing the person to ask themselves what what is this like why is the vase there like in I think you remember in in this podcast I listened to you’re talking about a movie where the person focuses on the vase for too long like lingers on the vase with the camera and so you’re forced to ask yourself like why and therefore ask yourself well what is a vase like what is that what what what categories are kind of coming to us in terms of the vase the vessel right exactly so it’s like yeah it’s something that holds something else it’s something that that is uh and and therefore it becomes analogous to other vessels right you can think of a mother you can think of a of a house of anything that holds something yeah so there are all these different things that kind of flood in these analogies that flood in uh which can kind of help you understand why a vase is important and also why it has why we even have a category of vase it basically the image um turns the vase the I say vase I had the same I’ll just say vase just because it’s nicer it’s French it’s vase yeah it turns the vase just I’ll say vase let’s just let’s read let’s let’s let’s uh okay so the vase is uh transmuted and almost in an alchemical way into a symbol so in the book I talk a lot about signs and symbols and that we usually live in a for a city of signs um a town with neon signs everywhere telling us what things are whether we’re in the forest or in the on a mountain doesn’t matter we we live in sign city uh everything has its attributed meaning everything has a label attached to it but then uh sometimes in life for a moment usually there’s a kind of satori moment or a moment of clarity where oh my god the strangeness of things comes back comes to you uh and that’s that’s comes through what I in the book I in art it occurs through framing you frame out something which normally would just be part of the decor of ordinary life but once framed it starts to um emit what Thomas Aquinas called radiance claritas and that radiance does two things formally speaking just by the by virtue of being framed it calls you back to the original mystery of all things it reminds you that we don’t really know what anything is we’re kind of living in this mystery mystery secondly the specificity of the object in the frame in this case the vase calls you to interpret to ask about this object this thing that you’re looking at that you don’t know anymore and that’s what occasions the um some the process of symbolic thinking of thinking in terms of analogy and so you start to think about associations and and some some are some associations have become classic for example the vessel the mother the ocean right the night you know the things that contain the things that um and those associations have become quite standard but but my my gambit is that modern art and it’s at its best allows for new associations uh and and so so that that there’s never uh there’s never a simple dictionary that’s complete right that this is always in the process of being discovered and and uh okay so yeah yeah so this is this is really for me it’s very fascinating to hear you speak because what i hear when i listen to is i hear kind of two things going on and and for me at least the way that i’ve tried to present it has really been two things and so this notion of the mystery or this kind of entering into the mystery if you think of an ancient temple or you know a church you have the space of mystery which is the altar let’s say and that’s where the the magical event happened the the event that binds us together as a community the event that connects us to something higher and and so it is beyond description although you can describe it you know that it’s also containing something which is leading beyond it right so higher up okay um and so usually those the analogies that go with that are kind of this moment of clarity that you talk about or the moment of light this idea of a beam of light or a vision or uh so there are all these unveiling you know all these types of imagery um right and then there’s another space right which is the space of the margin and that’s usually where the strange happens and so that’s where like for example in medieval manuscripts you had uh monsters right you would have the the marginalia where you have all these mixed creatures you have surprising you have inversions you have uh you know rabbits fighting men and and all this strange stuff that happened in the margins and you see it also in the in the shape of the church we have the same you have the gargoyles on the on the outside of the church and so the gargoyles are this this surprising hybrid uh strange right the weird this is that’s where the weird kind of occurs um and so so to me there’s like there’s an interesting thing because you you kind of join those together and i know that there’s a way in which that’s not completely off because the guardian like the the monster guardian like a Cerberus or some other creature is usually represented it’s like if you’re going into the holy place right so if you’re going into the mystery you’ll encounter a monster because he’s protecting the holy place and so you see the cherub on the veil of the temple you know the sphinx the the these these these uh these kind of bull winged bull creatures that you see in mesopotamian temples they’re guarding they’re guarding the mystery um but then when you go beyond when you you have to kind of pass them they’re like a veil and then beyond that there’s the illumination you would say and then you then you can grasp let’s say the vase in it’s in a way that is beyond all its particulars so it’s like you grasp you get this thing it’s like you this this and and you said gnosis i’m totally fine with that term like you get this insight which will then be it’s beyond word then it’s beyond the particular and you get it uh but what’s fascinating to me is that for it seems like for you those two things are kind of the same yeah yeah that’s really yeah go for it no that’s really interesting that you bring that up actually um there’s a uh protestant theologian rudolf auto i don’t know if you’re familiar with his work but he uh he came up with a concept in his work which he calls mysterious the uh calls it in latin mysterious fascinans et tremendum the fascinating and terrible mystery and he’s he this is uh this is in a work that explores uh that tries to capture the nature of the sacred and what auto argues is that the sacred is always a two-prong thing the sacred reveals itself as fascinating in the in the positive sense not in the sense of casting a magic spell but in the sense the sense of that Aquinas means by illuminating it draws you in it it it is um it is a type of gnosis it confirms something that you could only dream and hope was true and shows it to you in a way that’s beyond words at the same time strangely mysteriously it is also terrible because the sacrifice it asks of you is uh is is terrible it’s like abram and isaac isaac material right um and so it’s both and um i tend to be um this is super interesting that you brought you kind of put your finger right on it there i think between when it comes to to the two of us and the way we approach these things i think you’re right i tend to be more manichaean uh or i’ll which means more dualistic about this thing because i am uncertain as to whether the real capital r the ultimate is something that would be that is um is something that would bring one joy or absolute horror i don’t know i don’t know that i believe that it’s good that’s why i’m a practicing catholic but i don’t know it i don’t feel it i feel like there’s a chance that the illumination if if it were complete would be like what the germans experienced at the end of raiders of the lost ark right yeah well for sure there’s that threat in scripture and that threat in right in uh in the idea of the of god or or this idea of the the revelation uh of vishnu right in in where he removes his mask and then you know this thing that that that is seen by nagarjuna is like this i think that’s the name is like this this insane thing uh and you get the sense of that in scripture as well where god you know when someone asks to see god’s face god says you can’t if you see my face it’s going to destroy you uh right and it seems like at least in christianity that all of that gets resolved or resolved it’s not it’s resolved in the sense that it’s brought together in the cross which is that moment where death and glory are joined together in that moment where the horror and the highest thing are kind of joined together in one image um and so i think i agree with you in that sense that that there is something and there’s also this idea of the the the relationship between the divine darkness and the the divine light and you see that i talk about that quite a bit because i carve icons and so i actually make opaque images people always talk about icons as windows to heaven and i’m like why make carvings and so it’s more it has more to do with this in in the old testament there’s a there are certain places where when god’s glory comes it’s like a darkness it’s like this darkness which comes in and sometimes it’s both like in the transfiguration of christ it says they were they were overshadowed by light but it’s like a cloud of light and so it’s both a dark and light like something which shadows you which stops you from seeing the light but also you see the light so it’s like that’s i i see what you’re talking about in terms of the duality of the of the revelation let’s say right right well i’m glad yeah i’m just um and you you say that christianity resolves it i think that you’re right i think the christianity resolves it but i guess i’m just not um quite sure that that uh christianity is right christianity is right in in what sense do you mean i just i i’m just much more ambiguous with well like again i’ll say i’m i am a christian but i’m a christian i mean dostoevsky said that uh he says my hosannas were forged in the immense furnace of doubt so i guess i’m still in the immense furnace of doubt yeah and uh and so i but what i what i love about and also i wouldn’t want it any other way in the sense that i think that um it is important that we that the exp the spirit of exploration that characterizes the human um is given is vindicated and allowed to go the whole way some of my favorite christian writers most of them became christians after they at the end of their careers are the decadent writers of the late 19th century people like jk miss man uh yeah right uh and uh and also like obri beardsley and uh people who realized at the height really of that moment where the modern kicks into full gear right the end of the 19th century these guys realized that in order to affirm meaning again we would have to affirm the the most awful meaning we would have to affirm sin and darkness and evil in order for the axis of good and evil to even exist we have to go down there and i think that they i don’t know how conscious of it they were but when you look at the work you look at russmann’s series of novels from arable to the late works where he was basically a i think not an avid but yeah oh yeah like a lay monk um yeah he uh there’s a there’s a movement there that’s very important and i think that the way for a modern to re-enter uh to rediscover what there is to discover in those old religious traditions i think that that path the left hand path as they call it in magic is is a super risky but um some sometimes may be necessary one and so i i’m kind of that’s why i’m like i’ll emphasize the unseeable face of god and point out that that face is unseeable because it’s monstrous and i i emphasize that side that doesn’t mean i disagree with you at least i agree with you 100 yeah well we it’s like i always try to remind people that we do eat the blood and body of christ that’s the highest sacrament it’s like it is you can say that it doesn’t refer to cannibalism at all but that would be actually missing the point of how christ unites the extremes in his person and in and in his sacraments ultimately right um right but the thing that i’m worried about mostly is that there is this image of especially in exploring the darker aspects like there is this image of of losing yourself you know because that’s the imagery of the demonic or these these hybrid creatures that appear you see in these images of hell of like early renaissance or late medieval images of hell these kind of monstrous hybrids and all of this exploration interestingly enough before they were actually almost more positive these monsters because they were just in the margins of the doc of the document like they were not just that in hell in the sense of the this in just in terms of negative they were just ontologically on the edge and so they just right created a border for for the peripheral yeah this peripheral kind of of weirdness that appeared on the edge uh and so it’s the highest version of that i think is i don’t know if you’ve seen heard me talk about saint christopher which is something that i’ve been trying to talk about quite a bit so saint christopher is a a giant in some traditions but he’s also a dog-headed man in other traditions and so he is this kind of monstrous dog-headed creature who uh in in the legend he works he’s looking for the strongest king and he ends up like actually working for satan and then finally he’s looking to work for the strongest king but he ends up submitting to the baby by crossing this child across the river and then and and there are versions of it where he’s a giant other that he’s a like the giant dog-headed monster so the idea is that the monstrous or the the the hybrid its best possibility is a bridge because it’s on the edge and so it can actually carry the logos or the light or the divine revelation further out into the world but it also guards you it also is like a it’s like a a guard against improper improper uh you’d say defamation or like you know desacralization something like that right well it’s kind of like reminds me of mcclellan was saying about artists that that are marshall mcclellan the canadian media theorist right whom you’ve discussed on your show and i really enjoyed the interview you did with what was the name of the scholar kisya why yeah kisya right yeah kisya would be someone you would really like to talk to by the way because he’s he’s uh he’s very interested in in similar subject in the same subject as you yeah fantastic um the the mcclellan described the artist as a probe um or as an was it um uh i can’t remember the term he used like something long distance early warning system or something like that’s what he described art right um and uh and so the but the the probe um goes out into the chaos into the margins into the areas that we don’t know and incurs a risk by doing that um there is a risk i i ultimately think that if you’re going to turn a sign and again for your listeners who aren’t familiar like a sign is just basically the way we conceptualize a particular object in the world like this lamp i’m looking at here or the screen it’s all very clear to me there’s i see it and i see the label screen right i don’t need to think about it i can just go about my day and use it um but in order for to take a sign let’s say let’s go back to the vase of sunflowers and transform it into a symbol the process by which that happens i’ve discovered right is that the sign needs to move through a zone of indeterminacy the song the sign can’t go from sign to symbol like a light switch it has to first become monstrous it has to go into a place where you don’t recognize it anymore and i think any artist will recognize that moment where they look at their work and they don’t know what they’re looking at anymore like none of it makes sense like everything looks off and that’s the in a way that’s kind of a sign that you’re moving towards the something new right there needs to be a place where you don’t a moment where you don’t know anymore what you’re looking at yeah and and i think that that process of of sending things that are familiar into the depths where they’re become unfamiliar is dangerous and i don’t think it’s a coincidence that mental illness is is prevalent is related to artists related to artists because there’s that risk and so kind of you have to become a kind of dog-headed monster a little bit and and that’s that’s that’s okay but there is a risk and the risk is real and i don’t want to try to say like that the risk is uh yeah i don’t i wouldn’t want to try to imply that the risk isn’t real because it is and a way like a way to to say it that might surprise you is the idea of baptizing something because that’s what baptism is right you don’t see the symbolism as much in catholic baptism but let’s say in orthodox baptism baptism is a descent into the waters right you right you go down into the waters and there are these you know they’re these little river gods that are there uh you see in the icon of christ you see these little kind of ancient roman river gods that are kind of down there and so when and there’s prayers like at the beginning of baptism where you chase out the dragon from the waters before the person goes down and so the idea is that when you go down when you bring something down to reform it like you said there’s a danger in that in that moment that moment of unformedness we usually tend to focus just on the coming out and this kind of this re coming back into light and then having this insight or having this higher insight about the thing but we you’re right even myself i don’t tend to talk about the the unformed part you know if i carve an icon at you know then that piece of of stone is is quite pristine right before i start and in between the piece of stone and the final thing there’s a lot of messiness that happens in that in that moment right right and and and there are the process asks of you something that i’ve been talking with an australian artist named andrew antonio he’s very talented surreal surrealist kind of painter um and he uh yeah he was talking to me yesterday about the the confrontations the the paths you find that you know that if you follow that path too far it might lead to something that you’re not ready for right there’s a whole interior world and i think there’s something else that art tells us whether it’s liturgical art or wonderful secular right i don’t i actually don’t think there’s a difference i think art i think i don’t i don’t think there’s any such thing as profane art my personal theory is that art is inherently sacred if it’s real art you know um but then you have to get into the the the unpleasant game of defining that but whatever um but he was uh where was i going i totally lost my train of your your australian friend who talked about the danger of going in a certain direction the danger right that there are um that there’s a that artist calls us to um develop and explore our our interiority which is probably the biggest problem we have today is that we there’s a full-on assault going on on interiority in our culture uh we are being called to think of ourselves as um purely external creatures like completely oriented to what’s outside um there’s very little in our culture especially now with the advent of ubiquitous digital culture there’s very little opportunity for people to go in at and art requires you if you’re going to do it properly to go in and going in is there’s a reason we don’t want to do it it’s not pleasant uh it can lead to all kinds of um strange and unpleasant discoveries and but the but the the theory is or the gamble is that it’s worse not to do it than to do it as bad as it is to go inside uh it would be worse not to because then of course all your horrors will manifest externally yeah well it’s it’s it’s fascinating because i i i kind of i found my own kind of solution to that which we probably probably won’t agree with me but for me that the the the solution that i came to in terms of art first of all in terms of the problem of art and artifice is right my the discovery of more traditional art or liturgical art for example actually breaks down that barrier right in terms of the difference between let’s say an object of consumption the way that we think of it you know like a how now we have objects of consumption and then we also have uh our things that are there to give you a message then we also have the high art let’s say that is supposed to be more exploratory in the surgical art that kind of joins together because the object you make is going to be used it doesn’t just it’s not just looked at right it’s not just like uh it’s like not just like an object of contemplation but it’s going to be used in the prayer it’s going to be used in the liturgy and so it it kind of binds the different aspects of of art together in yes objects yes and i think that’s fine i think that’s that’s an important point and i think that’s good uh i just think that we’ve lost our way of discussing that part of the liturgical art that isn’t artifice yeah the the claritas part the the art part is what we’ve lost the words or signs to to determine but that’s what i’m trying to recover i perfectly agree with you that a work of art can be also a work of artifice in the sense that it can have an instructive or functional role to play in a particular context nevertheless there’s a difference between a good icon and a bad icon oh yeah for sure and how do we talk about that right and new evolve i mean most people look at orthodox icons and they just see the same thing right but as i’m sure that as an icon what am i i’m certain that as an icon artist yourself as someone who is a carver in the orthodox tradition you’re very much aware of the subtle differences that makes i don’t know like an andrey rublev different from someone else’s icon um it’s not it’s definitely no there’s definitely there’s definitely something that makes that makes uh there’s definitely a a difference between a very bad icon and a good icon the the strangeness is that it seems that seems that in terms of uh like it’s a in terms of miracles it doesn’t matter and so no like so some of the really worth icons become like these centers of pilgrimage people like have these and then it’s like it becomes this center of a whole community and you think wow that’s wonderful and then but you’re something in your mind telling yourself still a bad icon yeah exactly even if like i recognize this is amazing and all these people loving each other and kind of surrounding this thing it’s it’s great but still it’s a it’s a bad icon yeah that’s a great point though because it goes to show that yeah yeah that’s that they’re nonetheless and their way like their reason why we recognize certain artists as being like rubel for example is a great example uh he was the joining he kind of joined everything together because he was really recognized as a holy person early on and he actually was canonized now he’s a he’s a saint like you can get an icon of rubel of him like not just his icon but of of his portrait uh but he also was recognized as someone to copy and so but his work is very different from what came before so he’s actually there’s quite a lot of innovation in his work but he was rapidly recognized as something that was setting a new path that that those that aren’t so good need to follow it’s like right here is something that’s really kind of showing itself brightly and then telling all these other artists that are mediocre to say okay just look at rubel like follow rubel these are like church councils saying that like church uh mosco council saying look at rubel copy rubel because a lot of you guys are just off the off the rails in terms of icons well that gives the lie to the popular idea that icon art has never changed uh because it does innovate in ways but it innovates through uh i guess you call it through a kind of grace uh it’s not it’s not it’s not about individual self-expression it’s not like rubel’s like i’m gonna do things my way no it’s more like he had he he encountered a problem uh and he found he he he received a solution right yeah and that’s how art evolves and i i think that’s more common in secular art than we think is what i think because and i totally think i i think i completely understand why you found because i know you started in contemporary art and then you’ve discovered traditional art um and went into that world and i i can see uh why one would do that because they’re the these ideas that we’re talking about aren’t that foreign there there’s that’s kind of like yeah art doesn’t come from individual human beings it comes from beyond um in the secular culture we have no language to discuss this nevertheless we have things like garnica you know picasso’s garnica or um uh moby dick you know or hamlet i don’t know like or an emily dickinson poem it’s like yeah eight lines these things they they too reveal things to us and so we have to be able to to to to figure out what it is that’s going on in secular art that it’s so unsecular yeah um it just can’t be secular um it has to call us back to the mystery yeah and to the sacred and i think you’re right and there there are artists that are doing that now i think one of the difficulties of the modern time is first of all it was this race towards genius and this race towards the personal and so you know this idea of especially you see you see it in abstract expression is especially in the most where they they have all these artists that have this like one characteristic style and then you recognize their paintings and then they it’s like it’s as if their whole person gets embodied in this style and and then it becomes a marketing ploy it becomes an easy way to market them as well and sell their paintings for millions of dollars but you see that already in the early 20th century with a lot of the the early modernist but there are some things that i think even in liturgical art that they discovered or that they brought forth it can be recuperated and so i know some um i know some icon painters that are using Rothko in terms of you know Rothko’s ideas of push and pull and and this notion of how space and color interact with each other and so but now more subtly to the service of something which they think is more communal and is more kind of bringing people together um and i think the same thing happens with cubism and with the early the early kind of formal developments that happen in modernism my own like take on it was that especially arriving in the in the like early 2000s or like late 90s i felt like there was just nothing else happening yeah that like people were regurgitating marcel du champ in one way or another and the painters were all regurgitating the early modernist in one way or the other and so i thought so how did this happen like what happened because there was this race at the beginning of the 20th century towards this radical innovation and this uh and then it actually it seems like it actually kind of petered out even before world war ii and then after world war ii then it’s just like because any everything warhol did was already in data like that’s fine is what would no i agree you know and yeah yeah i don’t know how do you especially because you’re not necessarily visual artists but like in terms of visual art to me it seemed like even in terms of visual innovation they they it’s like they’re like they’re like in terms of visual innovation they they it’s like it was like this quick burning uh you know thing that they lit and it went and then it was over and now people were being traditionalists about breaking tradition it was it was like this strange this strange way of thinking i think that uh i mean in fact that’s a that’s a huge question that we could discuss for hours but i think that one quick answer that i’d like to give like the venture uh a theory i guess is that i tend to think that changes in art happen in poetry first so um and or at least that’s where they become more noticeable in this case i would think that if you look at paris in the mid 19th century uh in london a little later and germany of course um you’ll find the i’ll go back to the whole idea of decadence right um of these decadent literature decadent poetry what is the archetypal figure of decadent poetry it is the anemic uh last in line aristocrat the last of his house who is so bored with life with modernity that all that’s left for him is sensual pleasure and so like rissmann’s character is the ultimate he locks himself up in a palace of strange curiosities bizarre grotesque plants and like turtles and laid with gold and all kinds of quick and he just luxuriates in this pleasure of the senses until finally he can just die because there’s nothing left of the world there’s nothing left except surfaces um acedia right this is the way the monks the monks who suffered from this condition in the middle ages were these the old that they suffered from them called acedia the disease of our age pretty much yes and then what you see in afterwards and this you know what you see is like dada is the kind of codification of that decadent feeling affect that was new when when baudelaire and rissmann and poe were talking about it all of a sudden it’s codified it’s instrumentalized and it happens to serve uh a commodity culture very well um a culture that’s completely uh in fact you know the whole dada dream of a world of obliterating the line between art and life we’ve accomplished that we live in the utopia of the datas and the situationists in a way uh we live in a world where there’s no more boundary between art and life um between uh uh yeah so so so so i think that that acedia which the those those decadent poets poets explored first then just became a generalized social phenomenon and you and you see it play out and all these crazy uh theatrical weird theatrical events like uh like the nazi rallies or like that ridiculous shit we saw in washington a few weeks ago this type of like pretending to care about pretending to be part of of history like fabricating events trying to get us to feel something again um i think that we’re just apathetic as a culture and we need to wake up um and uh and that’s that’s my my take on your final word that we need to wake up i agree i totally agree uh yeah i tend to see and that maybe brings me to also to the one of the aspects that i’ve been trying to develop which is art as participation yeah you know one of the things that i’ve been trying to point people towards is the difference between the modern notion of art as a kind of aesthetic experience or an exterior aesthetic experience you know going to the opera going to the concert looking at a movie watching a movie all of this is different from the participative art that ancient cultures had or you know that the idea of a dance or you know or singing folk songs together or sitting around a fire and participate and and celebrating our stories right you know even the ilyad was sung right people didn’t read it they would have bars that would come and would sing it to them because it was their story and they would kind of have this participation and i think that like you said one of the difficulties of something like the the fascist tendency is in noticing the vacuousness of let’s say pleasure this kind of exterior pleasure this surface pleasure and the entertainment culture that we right embodied is this desire to participate and they’re looking for places to enter into the story yes the political sphere is an easy and scary place to enter into the story where you take a side you have a bad guy you have an enemy you know you you you can even make them really really evil like in terms of the q type people and then you know where you are and who you’re fighting and what you’re doing and so it makes you feel alive in a way that uh that i can i can sympathize with but also is extremely dangerous because it’s very limited it’s limited and it’s it’s fundamentally it gets it gets everything exactly half right and exactly half wrong exactly right so so being half right is not a good thing in life it’s like the worst it’s better to be completely wrong than being half right that’s hilarious um so is there corruption at the top on both sides of the aisle politically of course there is um uh and and and so but there’s that’s where subtlety becomes very important you know and looking at yourself becomes very important and not also the holier than thou feeling that the the fascist sentiment encourages that we are the pure and they are the impure and all of a sudden all of the stuff that we can’t acknowledge about ourselves gets projected onto the other not a good thing not a good path yeah yeah that’s why like for example when i talk about the church building let’s say and i tried to get people to kind of experience it because it’s not i talk about it but it’s also experiencing it is that the the church building let’s say the way it’s built like when you enter into it it has three parts it has the altar it has the nave and then as the narthex that’s the those are the main parts and the narthex is that place of relationship with the outside where the monsters appear you know the gargoyles and all of this stuff and so there’s a hierarchy of being but it’s not a it’s not a simple in out identity right it’s not a simple us them because it’s it’s actually a hierarchy which moves out into the outside and into the indifferentiated possibilities which lay outside of my identity and so it’s a healthier way to encounter identity and some people will will um will object because there is to a certain extent a recognition of the monstrosity of the strange like and when i encounter something that i don’t recognize like a stranger there is something monstrous of that but if i know that that monstrosity is also is also part of how it like i recognize it right it’s structural it’s just structural it’s there and so i see the stranger and i recognize oh that’s weird and then it’s like okay well now move on like it’s it’s i don’t have to get over it i don’t have to necessarily like throw a lance at it right it’s just part of like just part of how the world lays itself out and the idea of having like a saint like saint christopher or a certain other you know say moses the the ethiopian certain moses with the horns to the old testament moses the yeah moses who came down with horns there yeah exactly that’s a fascinating story but so to me it’s more like trying to get people to go back into a proper story like not that not the weird nationalistic story but a story which has this this space for the strange but it also looks towards the altar right that it’s not completely fascinated with the snake either because like i need to my my opinion that can be very dangerous because it because those monsters can also eat you like they really don’t know yeah absolutely absolutely that’s the great hope is that that uh you’re right about all this it’s like my hope is that it’s our great hope uh like i agree with you and i think that it’s speaking to the the importance of participation which i think is really important i think i saw you talk about this in a talk sometime uh how traditional art is participatory so it invites i think that’s that’s key um i think that good uh secular i don’t like to use that word secular but let’s say non-traditional art or um i even think that that’s wrong i think there’s a tradition even in secular art anyways like yeah uh in all art there’s a participatory call there’s a call to participate um i wouldn’t want somebody to read me moby dick because it would take a week but i love to be able to sit down and read it i don’t think the technology of the novel although it’s not an oral technology still there’s some participation yeah of that yeah there’s something about that so and and something’s going on in that books of all books i think that it’s the closest i’ve read to a kind of prof not profane but secular scripture in a weird way and it’s not there is something there is even in terms of like uh the idea of the monstrous like the idea that the monsters were in the ornaments in medieval manuscripts like there was a relationship between ornamentation and the monstrous there’s also something inevitable about the secular uh like there’s something about how gauguin used to say he was a decorator and and and i actually think that’s a really interesting idea it’s like he said there’s a role for ornamentation and and it’s kind of i wouldn’t call it vain beauty but a kind of a recognition of the sensual aspect of reality but it’s also a decorative it’s also decorative like it’s it’s something you do after at the end of the day right it’s like it’s like the the rest of the house you need the house before you can decorate it so the house has to stand you need exactly you need that house that’s a good yeah they can’t be built on sand right uh so but uh about the participation thing that there’s a difference between there are different types of participation uh in sociology they have a term communitas right which uh um means uh you know when you go into a place and you feel like you’re together with everybody everybody’s on the same page on the same wavelength there’s this feeling of community that develops that suddenly spontaneously appears it can go it can be there are different types and the type of communitas that i’ve experienced in in religion um in my own religious practice which is catholic but it’s obviously available in orthodoxy but also in i would argue in buddhism and hinduism what what uh is that it gives you community it’s a community of aloneness um as opposed to a dionysiac fury minad like wild community of the of the of the pack of the herd um you know the the greeks talked about the the minads which the women who follow dionysus and who go into we go into this this nocturnal frenzy and like rampage through the woods and tear men to pieces if they found them or animals like just yeah right so so that’s communitas too that’s a type of community um but uh and the greeks were willing to recognize that that existed but of course there was always the how do we try to contain this a bit of a danger there yeah so so so the uh that but the type of communitas i’ve felt in religion is very different it’s not so much that i’m with everybody here we’re all one tribe it’s more like we’re together to the extent that at this moment we realize that we’re all kind of alone facing this thing and the call is being made to each individual and personally and i try to argue in my book that art is similar to that that mo Herman Melville didn’t write Moby Dick despite what he thought didn’t write Moby Dick for a mass of people he i think he sold like a couple of thousand copies in his lifetime and died very poor he wrote it for one person and i think that the proper way to approach a work of art is to assume because your guess is as good as anybody else assume that that person was you approach the book as though it was written for you that’s it was with that attitude when i read the bible that i was finally able to understand what my religion had been trying to tell me all along it’s not about judging other people it’s about you right and you’re alone and in in the moment of community tasks in a proper i would argue in a proper art context community tasks brings us back to our aloneness and it’s our aloneness that we share not this kind of tribal nationalistic togetherness that that that absolves us of responsibilities individuals yeah well i would say that the the christian idea of love it does in fact try to balance out the the this the two extremes like the the the idea of a solipsism or this kind of just single a radical loneliness and the the fusion this tribal fusion that you talk about you know in the yeah i think i’m sort of trying to get at it right and so yeah the trinity so in the trinity that seems to be what is expressed at the highest level it’s like a radical radical union with radical separation right so it’s like there’s no confusion between the persons but they are completely one and that seems to be what we’re called to do as christians and the way that it reveals itself to us or the way that supposed to be lived is actually through self-sacrifice like the way that i’m not alone is the way that i love others so it’s no it’s not so much the what i get from others that makes me not alone it’s what i give and and how i’m willing to to kind of open and give myself to to those around me that is what connects me to them and so it’s a it’s a weird it’s like an inversion of the passionate party like of the you know of this of the rave where everybody is all fused in the beat but they’re all there to kind of get as much pleasure as they can in that moment you know right right no that’s that’s a very good point and i fully agree with that yeah yeah um look i think we’ve been going for quite a while this has been a very interesting discussion i’m happy that i finally talked to my to my doppelganger and uh and i it’s funny because i didn’t know that you were a catholic like i didn’t even know that you were uh that you were a practicing catholic i just saw i just saw your your your talk about weird stuff and i and i guess it makes sense then that you would be on the makers and mystic podcast because i guess it’s mostly a kind of a like a christian podcast but um yes but i mean weird studies is uh i co-host weird studies with phil ford who is a musicologist um at indiana university bloomington and he is uh he’s a buddhist so um we uh we like to explore the the in-betweens of things right the strangeness of things the strangeness of things that’s what that’s what gets me off it’s weirdness what can i say so so uh tell people where they can find your stuff like do you have a website do you have a yeah i have a website that i haven’t updated in forever called reclaiming art the address is reclaimingart.com reclaiming art.com and uh weird studies weird studies.com it’s probably the best way to find me these days um uh that’s our podcast that i co-host with phil ford and and aside from that yeah if you just yeah i’ve written a few things you could probably track down some articles and essays if you’re interested and of course my book reclaiming art in the age of artifice is available at all virtual bookstore it’s literally available in no single physical bookstore exactly unless you pick them up outside and we’re going to and we’re both actually going to be part of the mystic makers and mystics event that they’re doing in march so people could stay tuned to that there’ll probably be some some social media posting about it and jf and i will both be speaking at that event and with questions of your question periods and stuff too bad they were not in the same place it would have been nice to meet you in person and right to shake your hand well we’re almost neighbors so once this all ends this ridiculousness then we’ll be able to meet that would be great that would be great so thanks for your time i appreciate it thank you so much hope you enjoyed my discussion with jf martel you might have noticed the most recent opening of my youtube channels which was made by jack william jack william runs a youtube very successful youtube channel called the disrupt youtube channel where he does some gaming and some vr stuff and so he he made this for me which i find it very interesting and so i’d like to hear your comments about it below in the comment section and as you know everything we do in the symbolic world is due to your support so go check out the symbolic world dot com slash support if you want to help out this project got a lot of things on the line in the future including more french content translation of the website more involvement as well in terms of all the other stuff that that has been around the symbolic world so thanks again and i will talk to you very soon