I would like to think that eventually fine art could become part of a more sustainable way of living, and that everything I am involved with would be seen as being entangled in some way with everything else. The idea of Organic Acupuncture being yet another signpost along a way that links to a much older tradition, whereby art and other forms of communication and knowledge transfer, are part and parcel of an approach to life that grounds its culture in a sensitivity to the biosphere, or what we now often call Gaia. The name Gaia was revived in 1979 by James Lovelock, when he was advised by William Golding to call his new theory of bio-systems regulation by the name of the old Greek goddess of the Earth, 'Gaia', (the same deity that in Roman times was called Terra). The Gaia hypothesis proposes that living organisms combine with inorganic material to form a dynamic system that is the Earth's biosphere and that this system maintains the Earth as a stable environment for life. The Earth itself is therefore viewed as an organism with self-regulatory functions. Art would in this case be simply part of that self-regulatory process.
There are several types of energy flow, the one we are most implicated in is the flow of energy through living things within an ecosystem. All living organisms can be organised into producers and consumers, and those producers and consumers can further be organised into a food chain, and usually humans are right at the top. But once we remember that over 50% of any one human being is actually composed of bacteria, we perhaps begin to see that the idea of one type of species being on top is actually meaningless. We are all interconnected.
Respiration converts nutrients from the soil into energy and this is happening all the time, but as photosynthesis needs light it only happens in the daytime. Photosynthesis converts light energy to glucose which can then be used for respiration. This process is an example of an energy flow and also an example of how one type of energy can be stored or transformed into another, in this case it becomes an energy we call food. If there is a break in the chain, such as heavy volcanic activity sending out dust clouds to block the sun's rays, then something will go wrong because you will have an obstructed energy flow. One planet wide example of this was when a large asteroid hit the Earth triggering a chain of volcanic eruptions, the resultant long term darkening of the skies leading directly to the extinction of the dinosaurs.
Acupuncture is a way of releasing trapped or obstructed energy flows; and there is a close energy flow connection between any body and the landscape it inhabits.
The good thing about drawing is that virtually everything can be both represented as and converted into visual energy using mark making processes. For example in the drawing above, the paper surface was gessoed, this alters the surface structure of the paper, so that scratched marks could be made to hold more ink and a line could be made to look ragged or broken, so that it could be read as a short rhythm of dots as well as a line. A curve sets up a very different type of rhythmic movement to a straight. The movement of the eyes in looking at a drawing adds another energy flow, the time spent contemplating the drawing being yet another flow of energy, this time out of the system, thus ensuring that another energy system is required to re-energise the whole, which may simply be a sweet cup of tea. The tea and sugar however will originate far from myself in Leeds, and this is where the environmental energy flows become so important, the question then asked is how much energy was wasted in transporting the tea and sugar from one side of the world to another?
The idea of the landscape as a body is another very old one. The traditional relationship of human beings to the land was one of deep reciprocity and continuity, in which it was the human responsibility to reciprocally keep the land 'enchanted' with various ways of communicating an awareness of energy flowing through both land and body, between which there should be a seamless continuum. The mythic link between land and body, might typically be understood within an animist tradition, whereby the relationship between land and body would be renewed and re-sanctified, by ritual and by the basic process of breathing it in over hundreds and thousands of years. It still feels wonderful to stand outside and breathe in and as you do so you feel all the various components of the air enter the body and then as you breathe out you can feel the various gases from the body being released out into the surrounding atmosphere. For the bacteria within you, you are the universe and you yourself are star stuff, a formation that is if only for a brief moment, something that is self aware.
Try to consider the conundrum that the universe can be regarded as a body and yet the body can at the same time be thought of as containing universes. A while ago I put up a post on the macro and the micro. At the time I wrote about making marks as energy fields within a drawing. I stated that "Not only does the mark quality and handling tell a story, but the concept of a mark field being something that comes together as an identifiable entity when you see it from a distance, is itself fascinating." This is the illusion of reality, from certain points of view we see patterns and we fix these patterns with words, but in reality all is always in flux. In the stories we tell ourselves, we steady the illusion of life and build fulcrums for change. However when real life events hit us we need to ensure that they are deeply understood, for instance death can be seen as in integral part of the flux of change and if we can accept this perhaps we can let go of life a little easier. The image immediately below is one of my own attempts to deal with these issues when my mother died. There was a sense of energy leaking away. In contrast the image 'Fluid passages' was a response to the energy exchange between two Phoenix dancers I saw in Leeds, their entwined bodies and contact improvisation techniques eventually dissolving their bodies into each other.
The spaces surrounding Bacon's figures rarely immerse themselves back into the figures which inhabit them. They operate as traps, framing the event, rather than as reciprocal energies. Perhaps his contemporary Frank Auerbach was much more able to represent the integration and flow between the body and its spatial environment.
The sense of flow or change is also I believe related to the importance of 'neuroplasticity', or brain plasticity; the ability of the brain to modify its connections or re-wire itself. (Stiles, 2000, p. 245) Without this ability, any brain, not just the human brain, would be unable to develop from infancy through to adulthood, recover from brain injury or learn new things. Something learnt can I believe also be thought of as a bundle of energy that can be passed on both from a direct experience and from secondary learning, such as reading about something. (Cartlidge, 2010 and Toyabe, Sagawa, Ueda, Muneyuki and Sano, 2010) report on research that is actually about converting information to energy by feedback control, and as an artist I do have an artistic licence to intuitively develop implications from this.
The brain processes sensory and motor signals in parallel and has many neural pathways that can replicate another’s function so that small errors in development or temporary loss of function through damage can be easily corrected by rerouting signals along a different pathway. The brain’s anatomy however ensures that certain areas of the brain have certain functions. This is something that is predetermined by our genes. For example, there is an area of the brain that is devoted to movement of the right arm. Damage to this part of the brain will impair movement of that arm. But since a different part of the brain processes sensation from the arm, you might be still able to feel the arm but unable to move it. This “modular” arrangement means that a region of the brain unrelated to sensation or motor function is not able to take on a new role. In other words, neuroplasticity is not synonymous with the brain being infinitely malleable, i.e. there are certain channels through which change is hosted but the fact that different regions of the brain do different jobs also helps us get a glimpse of somatic experiences and the relationship between interoception and perception.
Merleau-Ponty implies that the body constitutes both the cognitive ground of culture and its existential ontological ground. He argues (1962, p. 303) that we recognise things from the point of view of our bodies. Therefore it could be further argued that perception begins in a body that already knows itself; which is why my current research is focused on interoception and is entangled into the things that the body perceives in relation to itself, as Merleau-Ponty goes on to say, ‘my experience breaks forth into things and transcends itself in them, because it always comes into being within the framework of a certain setting in relation to the world which is the definition of my body’ (Ibid).
