show details | 2 Mar (3 days ago) |
"Religion is all about the image. It isn't the case that religions use images to great effect; it's more exact to say that they're all about the image. The original and continuing power of religions is their appeal to the same inexplicable part of the human psyche that responds to images. That's why a six-armed female god of death, creation as the break-up of an eggshell, the tree of life or a crucified saviour became so successful in launching and sustaining religions. They are primal and indelible images, and their caretakers - the scholars, the priests, the missionaries - did not invent them to summarise, encapsulate or popularise their tenets, but the tenets developed in response to the images. Religions are simply cultural processes of trying to figure out what certain images that capture us and hold us with inexplicable power actually mean, and how they operate. From druids to the Maya Kiche the same founding images are found not because of cultural interaction, but because they're images that cannot be rid of; and so they are cherished. Abstract painters are the true priests of the godless, secularised era that began in the West barely a hundred years ago. Their preselection criterion is the same as the priests': the inexplicable draw and power of an image. The process of exploration and continuation, opening up and re-hiding of the meaning of the image (the esoteric-exoteric cycle, the sacred re-enactment through original but self-aware creation) is also identical in religion and abstract painting. Abstract painters interact with their audience the same way that priests do: appearing occasionally to preach, mingle and drink wine, they generally stay aloof and scatter a steady stream of cryptic messages that can be read in a thousand ways, yet gets as close to expressing the ineffable in the image as human language allows." (written by Mark) |
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