Ralph Ortiz: A New Philosophy of Art

Our early life is determined primarily, if not entirely, by internal factors, by an inner aesthetic. Our human condition soon forces us to repress and give up our unique inner aesthetic in all areas. It is within this general framework that our consciousness and unconsciousness develops. It is as a result of this humanizing process, that the unconscious begins to accumulate the residues of conflict. The conflict results from the need to compromise what the subjective self wants to do for that which the society wants the self to do.

Society has not been able to adequately deal with or, for that matter, recognize our unconscious conflicts. They are left to find inefficient expression in our everyday activities. Objects and events in our lives are tinged more and more with unconscious value. This leaves our functional relationship to our environment open to manipulation by the unconscious as it strives to resolve its internal conflict.

The artist who comes to terms with this problem. who struggles to resolve this dilemma, is always in search of a means to give play to his unconscious. The artist is an artist because he is aware that our everyday activities cannot in any sense allow for the necessary symbolic resolutions of our unconscious.

The dream is the finest example of man's ability to achieve essential symbolic resolutions. The dream is a transformative process during which distortions, displacement and condensations occur. Its most essential aspect is its sense of reality. In the dream we acquire the ability to act out our deep emotional life; there is a flowing out of the unconscious, an unmaking of the mind. But it is not enough simply to remember the dream if a conscious integration is to occur. Our dreams must be realized in terms of our possible conflicts and their possible solutions.

If art is to be as essential an experience as the dream, if it is to be more than a superficial activity, it must utilize processes comparable to those of the dream.

Recent sensory deprivation experiments have shown that when we are deprived of our logical relationship to our environment, process regressions occur that dominate our behaviour, leaving us finally in a state of insanity. These experiments imply that our logical systems are a result of a structuring of our original more open, illogical life systems. When the logical activities which support and reinforce our logical systems are at a minimum, our original, less rational processes take over. The mind, unencumbered by determinism, creates relationships which are across all time and all space. One can see the awesome spectacle which awaits the artist today. One can even sympathize with the artist who seeks to create distance from the chaotic machinations of his unconscious. His art seeks to purify and control. It becomes the logical means by which to resist his inner life.

The dream has recently achieved scientific status as an essential process which contributes to and maintains man’s sanity. In The Science of Dreams, Edwin Diamond explains how recent experiments with the electroencephalograph have led to the distinguishing of separate dream and sleep cycles, a discovery which has made possible fantastic deprivation experiments. In one such series of experiments the subjects were awakened whenever the cycle they were to be deprived of occurred. In this way, the subjects could either be deprived of dreams or sleep. Subjects deprived of their dreams for a prolonged period of time found themselves unable to adjust to the ordinary behavioral demands of the awake state. Their responses tended to be erratic and regressive. Those subjects deprived of sleep without any interference with their dream cycle suffered no ill effects. When the dream deprived subjects were finally allowed to go to sleep and dream without disturbance, the electroencephalograph recorded an abnormal increase in dreams over the number which ordinarily occur during an un-deprived normal sleep period. The dream deprived subjects seemed to be striving to catch up on their dreaming in order to achieve some essential equilibrium, an equilibrium obviously dependent on the resolutions inherent in the dream.

By not coming to terms with processes that awaken his deep emotional life, an artist deprives himself of resolutions inherent in "The Art” resolutions which, like those inherent in the dream, allow the artist to achieve an essential equilibrium.

There is no doubt that much art in history has and will continue to be resistant. The resistant artist becomes like the insomniac who avoids sleep for fear he will lose control and dream the awesome, forbidden dream. The insomniac and the resistant artist are unable to realize a distinction between the goals of the dream and those of reality. Only when the artist has a clear understanding between the dynamics inherent in the dream, and can distinguish them from those of reality will he achieve an economical and meaningful use of either or both these processes.

For the artist art becomes like sleep. It is the way to the dream. An art that deprives the artist of his dream is not an art at all; it is instead an authoritarian exercise designed to repress.

The making and constructive processes which the artist merely imitates and idealizes are the positive processes all civilized mankind is conditioned to. These positive processes have dominated “The Art”and the great majority of artists since the time that primitive man became somewhat civilized. Repressed primitive man could no longer throw spears at his cave sculpture or paintings of the totemic animals; being more civilized he could now only depict the process. This presents the problem of art being merely a symptomatic phenomenon, rather than a conscious commitment. It is essential that art acquire a value beyond the symptomatic, beyond that of simply being another behavioral phenomenon. The artist must grapple with that which makes art a transcendent possibility for man.

Art has been dissipated for much too long by the inhibitory nature of the logic inherent in the making and constructive process. They reinforce obstacles that make it nearly impossible to bring to fruition the deeper unconscious life of the artist. In order for an artist to release himself from the limitations of tradition, he must realize the limitations of the traditional process. Progress in art can only result from a commitment on the part of the artist to consciously work to unmake any and all process systems that inhibit “The Art”.

The transformation and transcendence of physical and emotional life energies is the distinctive process in art. It is this process that I have distinguished as “The Art”. By applying to man, who, after all, is an extension of nature, the scientific premise which attempts to define the fundamental process in nature, a premise which states that energy as such can neither be created or destroyed but can only be transformed, we can perhaps arrive at a fundamental law of art. This I pursue throughout this paper. The essential point here is that the awesome accomplishments of science, whether they be a fission reaction, a fusion reaction, or the creating of life in the laboratory, they are all a result of the deep understandings gained by science into the transformative processes at work in nature. If the artist is ever to make as profound an advance in his art, he must put to use deep understandings of the transformative processes at work in,him, in his nature.

Artists are first and above all else people, and like all people artists are imitators. An artist imitates and utilizes processes he is familiar with, processes he has lived through. It is by the deciphering and evaluating of the lived through processes that an artist is able to uncover and exploit the underlying process progressions and regressions which characterize his behavior. Man has always destroyed nature to construct his life. For food he kills animals and tears roots from the ground. For shelter stones are dug up and trees cut down.

Process progressions and regressions are common occurences in nature and the life of man and take place in sequence and combination. Let us assume I have decided to make a basket and choose to begin by uprooting shrubs destroying their plant life. In a further destruction, I would separate its parts; this series of process regressions would be followed by a sequence of process progressions. The separate parts of the shrub would be combined by a weaving or other constructive process. The final result of this particular process sequence and combination would be a basket.

I wish to state specifically that inherent in a process progression is a dynamics of formation, a dynamics of construction, while inherent in a process regression is a dynamics of deformation, a dynamics of destruction.

The domination of process progressions over process regressions, as precarious as this domination may seem to be today, has undoubtedly enabled man to achieve, sustain and evolve civilization. But when process regressions dominate, destructions occur which serve no purpose other than that of destruction. Murders, suicides and doomsday machines are all its dreaded manifestations -- madness prevails. ln nature a process regression would initiate drought, storms, floods, famine, earthquakes, locusts, disease and death, all the dreaded natural phenomena that have plagued man since time immemorial. There is no doubt that mankind’s plight, like that of the mythical Sisyphus, is the never-ending uphill struggle, a struggle shared by all that have the education and the courage to achieve and maintain a sense of life over that of death, a sense of activity over that of inactivity, a sense of progression over that of regression. Very few artists throughout history have been willing to incorporate this struggle into their art.

Artists today see no destruction, hear no destruction, speak no destruction and do no destruction, depriving themselves of revelations which can only come from a process regressive art, revelations which are necessary to the continued evolution of the constructive forces in man and mankind.

Freud in his Civilization and Its Discontent, defined the problems of art simply and concisely. Freud stated that civilization was an impossibility without repression, that the problem is not repression as such, but rather the agony which results from surplus repression.

Surplus repression creates the conflict, the residues of which accumulate in the unconscious. It is these conflicts which accumulate in the unconscious that art is to reckon with, just as our dreams do. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud as much as revealed that surplus repression is the vehicle upon which the the “death wish” accelerates.

The questions I have attempted to deal with in this paper are by all means not completely worked through, but the conclusions are clear. I propose an art that will help slow down and reverse our acceleration towards death, an art that will allow for the releasing of life energies in terms of the possibilities inherent in the life processes themselves. I speak here of an art that will deal with that which only “The Art" can adequately deal with, since it is the only waking activity capable of a dynamics comparable to that of the dream.

I speak here of an art that reveals, an art that heals, an art that bridges the gap between that which we must do and that which we must not do, for it is with the resolution of this paradox from art work to art work that the artist will be better able to be in civilization an evolving progressive force.

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