Art of Individuation/ Stephen Farah

Art of Individuation: Art is the quintessential expression of the psyche and its desire for being. Through the artistic process the artist explores the questions of meaning, expression, and being. Art symbolises and through such symbolisation, represents the unconscious to reveal what was previously hidden from view. Art is a creative and generative act giving birth to something new, whilst, simultaneously, refining and reifying the psyche, continually seeking more congruent expression. Individuation arises out of a similar creative impulse. Individuation is an ongoing attempt by the subject to find ever more congruent, refined, and reified symbolic expressions of her unconscious psyche. The artist brings being into existence and into the world through her art. The individuating subject expresses her artistic impulse through her being in the world. Both are vehicles and modes of giving expression to the unconscious psyche through the creative imagination, and thereby facilitating the realisation of the Jungian “Self” or Blake’s “Regenerated Man”.

International movements, local art and personal agency: Art in the formation of identity/ Sinazo Chiya

This discussion will observe how the principles underlying mainstream art movements established in the Europe and North America such as Post Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism – with their political and aesthetic complexities – are applied, subverted and transcended by South African artists Moshekwa Langa, Mawande Ka Zenzile and Thenjiwe Niki Nkosi. In their interaction with these ideas, these mentioned artists underscore new forms of belief, individuated forms of knowledge production and a reconfiguring of victimhood narratives around the black African experience. Focalised further through a personal lens, this discussion looks at how art in general and this symbolic material in particular provided an inspiring, motivating and galvanising influence to the construction of my identify. Looking closely at the lessons offered by visual harmony, the catalyst for analytical thinking offered by images functioning as metonym, and the existentially restorative potential of images centring of indigenous practices, I look how art has been a key tool in my personal formation of a critical, post-colonial subjectivity.

Art as a path of inner schooling: The influence of Rudolf Steiner and his artistic impulse on early Modernism/ Cyril Coetzee

Early Modernist art and the spiritual crisis in western culture resulting from scientific progressivism and analytical reductionism. The search for a new basis on which to spiritualise Modern art. The birth of Abstract Art and the quest for the ‘Fourth dimension’. The widespread influence of Theosophy on Kandinsky and many other pioneers of Abstract painting such as Münther, Malevich, Mondrian, Kupka and Klint. Kandinsky’s key ideas, including that of the ‘epoch of the great spiritual’ were sourced in the ‘Rosicrucian alchemical’ Theosophy (later called Anthroposophy) of Rudolf Steiner, apparent both in Kandinsky’s writings and in his notion of four progressive steps leading to complete spiritual abstraction. These steps echo Steiner’s interpretation of the principle four alchemical ‘stages of higher knowledge’. Goethe’s alchemical studies, his ‘Fairy tale of the green snake…’ and ‘Theory of colours’ were primary sources for Steiner’s art impulse, as manifest in his two ‘Goetheanum buildings, intended to be modern ‘Mystery Temples’ .The related ideal of the ‘total art work’( Gesamptkunstwerk) in the context of Steiner’s Theosophical conception of the 7 ‘bodies’ as constitutive of the complete human being as presented in Steiner’s lecture series: ‘Art in the light of Mystery Wisdom’ and ‘‘The arts and their mission’. Steiner’s little known painting pupils: Werefkin, Linde, Geck and Rosencrantz and their pioneering initiative to meditatively deepen painting as a ‘path of inner schooling’. The various characteristics of this new impulse in painting and how it was intended to lead consciousness across the ‘threshold of the spiritual world’. Practical painting exercises given by Steiner and how we can practice them.

The Portable Metaphysic of Art: Eros and the Feminine in the Transdisciplinary Quest for Meaning and Being/ Susan Rowland, PhD

Building on Stephen Farah’s framework and focusing on the hyper-modern pst 1995 era, my talk will explore the emergence of what could be termed an Eros or feminine metaphysic (from Jung and transdisciplinarity) into a new multicultural, multi-religious, diverse and sacred practice. I will draw on my recent book, Jungian Arts-Based Research and the Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico. This material will directly address the role of nuclear weapons in the dissolution of metaphysical logocentrism.

The Artist and their Objects/ Peter Merritt Dobey

Art making for an authentic artist is inseparable from their life, and though it can be taken away, it probably shouldn’t be. More than an activity, it is a mode of lived expression impossible to separate from the authentic artist, of problem solving and puzzle making, and crucially, as an internalized object that becomes externalized. Artistic expression then is not just a matter of representation or of “getting it out” but an act that quite literally allows one to exist. Through examples from my clinical practice with artists, and taking a look at Lacan’s treatment of the art making process of James Joyce and the Lacanian concept of “Le Sinthome”, I will argue for the importance of leaving an artist’s symptoms intact, but allowing them to be utilized. Along the way I will explore historical considerations of art making as being symptomatic, if such phenomena are to be “treated”, and will illustrate through clinical vignettes how the symptomatic artmaking process should be thought of as a model for everyone to make use of, and not remedy, one’s symptoms.

Mummy where do we begin and end/ Jane McAdam Freud

My focus is on Art and identity or more precisely understanding identity through making art.I will look at how this worked for me. I offer what I gleaned for your interest, although I must emphasise that I am not talking about art therapy, which may have the same outcome but is a very different journey having more to do with catharsis than the job of making art. The authentic intention is different.As artists we identify our preference i.e. our choice of materials and processes, the scale, the titles etc. The acknowledgement and later research into these defined choices can reveal hidden truths surrounding our fundamental formative relationships.I will be unpicking and sharing primary and personal experience about that first mother/child bond, that first love affair with all its ambivalence.Showing images of works I made for ‘Mother Mould’ my solo show exhibited in 2015, I invite the audience to contribute anything that might come up ‘for them’ through association; also, appropriate questions that may arise.

My Fifty Some Year Journey with the Work of Blake and Jung/ Prof. Joseph Phillip Natoli

I propose to talk about William Blake and Carl Jung within four contexts. Both saw a path to fulfilment, Jung’s individuation leading to The Self and Blake’s Regenerated Man, through a never ending dynamic or dialectic of opposites or what Blake called in the Marriage of Heaven and Hell, contraries.I begin again: The Blakean notion that the reality we now live in was first imagined spurred my interest in a phenomenological psychotherapy acknowledging the different existences fashioned by not only those in therapy but those who describe those differences to the analysand.A third context: The hyper and hyped consciousness of the postmodern world in which hyper- refers to the self-reflexivity of consciousness, a jumping back on our own reality making ways, while hyped- refers to the impact of spin, spectacle, and commodification on consciousness.Post-truth context: Blake and Jung within the context of a post-truth world, a kind of debasement of postmodern views, itself a Fall into a demotic cyberspace chaos in which the lens of perception is that of a selfie. A look inward that goes no deeper than a toothy smile.To begin the last time: On December 5th, 2020, wife died. This is the pre- eminent context of all my thinking now. I am intrigued by the notion that archetypes bear within them traces of every life lived, a kind of Platonic metempsychosis in which all souls are reborn within each new soul born.

Expressionism in Contemporary Art/ Prof. John Rapko

In this lecture we’ll consider some aspects of and difficulties in talking about expression in contemporary art. We’ll start with a consideration of the standard conception of artistic expression around 1960 as given in Harold Rosenberg’s book The Tradition of the New. Then we’ll consider the work of two artists who were prominent at the foundation of contemporary art, and whose work seems to offer a challenge to or rejection of this conception: the video, performance, and installation Korean artist Nam June Paik, and the Anglo- Guyanese painter Frank Bowling. Intriguingly, Bowling has repeatedly stated his indebtedness to the work of the philosopher Richard Wollheim on expression, and so we’ll consider Wollheim’s account, one that is intended to be broadly consistent with psychoanalytic thought. Finally we’ll briefly consider the character of expression in recent art with a viewing of one of the brief studies of facial expression by the Brazilian theatre and dance artist Carol Trindade.

World Worlding/ Mark Rautenbach

Artist Mark Rautenbach lives and works from Cape Town, South Africa. Art for him is a method by which he is able to dialogue with the Shadow. He defines the Shadow as the-me-he-cannot-see. For him art-making becomes The Work, in an alchemical sense, as the life work, the development, purification and integration of the various aspects of the Self. Rautenbach uses art as a scrying method to divine the Shadow. Through art-making the Shadow, the not-visible, unsee-able, invisible, becomes visible. By engaging with material (art-making), the matter is witnessed, figuratively and literally. Symbols and narratives, meanings of material, are as tangible for him as the actual stuff the material is made of. He is drawn to material which is discarded or problematic. Stuff like encyclopedias, compact discs, collected papers which hold sentimental and nostalgic attachments (greeting cards, love letters, certificates), stuff which cannot be recycled or composted, education documents. The often labor intensive craft type techniques (which he calls menditations) facilitate meditative sitting-with the matter, as in what’s-the-matter?; witnessing. The resulting work produced is somewhat calming, meditative and uplifting.