People of prominence and their manner of transcendental hunting

   At the beginning of this short but no less educative article we would just like to point out that is has little to do with the martyrdom of the Polish Hunting Association, which of course is a fascinating story in itself but diametrically opposed to the alternative hunting approach that is of interest to us here. Alternative transcendental hunting is a continuation of the noble art of Great Classical Hunting and is derived from the intuitive needs of the spirit and the deepest instincts of the individual human persona.

   Classical values return to contemporary culture through heroes active on the borders of this culture, in the broadly defined sphere of alternative...ity. The Classical hunt has become the transcendentalhunt is currently classified as an alternative field in art. What we are to consider in this story is the art of hunting and the role of instinct in humans throughout the centuries. Let us concentrate on the instinctive approach to the important events in the primordial skill of hunting.

Siberian shaman

   The very idea itself derives from ancient cultures. Down through the centuries a multiplicity of these ideas was brought to the fore. These ideas, however, differed from the classical prototype and were often in a way unacceptable by the practitioners of the Great Hunting tradition.

   To some extent in opposition consumer hunting was born; this being a mass culling and holocaust of forest animals - a horde of howling dogs, and sitting in their saddles trophy hunters who have lost their instincts, their sensitivity and the feeling of harmony with Nature and wildlife. The great tradition of the art of hunting, so universal within different cultures and ethnic groups, as is the Moon, the Sun, Water and Earth, was lost. And so it came to pass that the classical traditon moved underground to be forgotten, or perhaps to be hidden beneath that materialistic layer placed there by the hands of our modern, authoritative establishment. The curtain has fallen over the Great Hunting Essence.

   Post World War II times brought negative aspects into the development and peception of the very idea of hunting. The peak of mass hunting in the Polish cultural arena was the era of Edward Gierek the Great. Here we find forty year old youngsters, fans of the concrete industry, striving to accomplish something through rites de passage and transform their social-spiritual condition. Unfortunately, the lack of `fathers` able to initiate real hunters and perform this rite rsulted through time in the growth of a certain decadence and a decline in the art of hunting.

   The very candidates for initiation also left much to be desired [with a few exceptions, of course]. Those who did hunt finally were those with immeasurable hunger and emotional deficiency. When the entire nation struggled using passive and active resistance [the black panthers of the shipyard industry], a clique of well-dressed barons compensated their own deficiencies with new kinds of sporting and leisure activities, as they saw hunting. Both retired and active servicemen would hunt, along with the top brass of the governing machine, i.e. the party establishment – the cogs of the totalitarian machinery, tchose scraps of human personalities. The folklore element included vodka, the pulpit, and shooting at boars and rabbits and at quickly replaced the spiritualism of Great Hunting.

   A feeling for the game [that which is being hunted], the hunter`s instinct, was eliminated and reduced to naught.

   The loss of these values and skills commenced in the 18^th century, when Man, the subject, became transformed into a movable entity. The human machine is born in a mechanical incubator along with its political anatomy. Foucault describes the process as follows: „The human body was entering the machinery of power which explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it.” A new breed is born: the mechanism of power, which according to Foucault describes the ways of influencing the bodies of others, not only to make them do what is expected but also to make them work as it is expected, using predefined techniques with a prescribed pace and efficiency. Methods typical of monasteries moved into secular life. Monastery - factory - Barracks. Barracks - factory – Monastery. Barracks became one of the first elements of human uniformity on a large scale.

   The army, perceived by many as a continuation of the hunting ideal, in reality differs from classical hunting radically.

   Before the soldier was born, there was the warrior. Before the hobby huntsman there was the implicated hunter, who preceded the warrior. The hunter would hunt with his entire spirit, instinctively and intuitively becoming one with Nature. In spite of the different perceptions of the world around us, at a certain level wild life and human life could be considered as one – a non-material microcosm, encompassing the common macrocosm. There is one flow in life, oppositions complement each other providing unity - Adam and Eve, Yin and Yang, the good and the bad, life and death. However, linear time has moved us away from the traditional ways of perceiving reality spiritually. A century of steel and steam, an 8-hour workday, „uniformal” education and the cult of a desensitized brain has achieved this.

Lascaux - "Hunters"

   We have lost our ability, it has been forgotten in fact, of how to fish in harmony with Nature, to live instinctively and follow our hearts. „I think I am”, Buddhists declare ironically on the condition of contemporary man.

   The modern era provides us with many H. Bosch like images in everyday news reports flashed up on giant LCD altar-screens: the heavy guns of warring nations blasting holes in the map of Europe, fire bombed Dresden, safari in Afghanistan, Russia trekking into Grozny [Chechen Republic], Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is a difference of cosmic proportions between the fictional heroism of Andrzej Kmicic in „The Deluge” or Mel Gibson in „Braveheart”, and a uniformed Hannibal Lecter holding high rank setting off for another „peacemaking” mission.

   So how do we learn to hunt and where do we learn this noble skill? The righteous art of determining your life and its course and hunting which is connected to it should be learnt from noble people, the transcendentalists, in particular, Henry David Thoreau, the author of „Walden. Living in the Forest” and „Civil Disobedience”. The Sage of Concord, who inspired Gandhi, Martin Luther King and social activists ranging from Amnesty International to English radicals, from the Labour Party to the greens of Greenpeace.

   Living in the forest in 1845, Thoreau carried out a cultural experiment [as much as a spiritual one], lasting 2 years, 2 months and 2 days. One hundred twenty years before the hippy movement, he created an independent center for the free man.

Henry David Thoreau

   His house became a shrine of the free spirit, an everyday shrine, not just a once in a blue moon one. He lived in harmony with the deepest of human instincts, satisfying and developing what was humanitarian and spiritual - nature and culture. He consciously combined it in himself. „Walden” is one of the leading guides of ethical and spiritual survival, on how to live in order to be. „Time is but a stream I fish in” says Thoreau. Deep humanitarianism and a profound recognition of human nature made him speculate about hunting also. He agrees that the young should be taught how to hunt and that it should be one of the pillars of the educational system. He claims it was one of he finest parts of his education. `Make them hunters and fishermen of men`. He remarks on Algonquian philosophy: „There is a period in the history of the individual, as in the race, when the hunters are the best men” and continues:

   „We cannot but pity the boy who has never fired a gun; he is no more humane, while his education has been sadly neglected”.

   „No human being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will want to murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does. The hare in its extremity cries like a child. Such is oftenest the young man`s introduction to the forest, and the most original part of himself. He goes thither at first as a hunter and fisher, until at last, if he has the seeds of a better life in him, he distinguishes his proper objects, as a poet or naturalist it may be, and leaves the gun and fish-pole behind”. Halina Czaplińska, Thoreau`s philosophy researcher, claims he saw himself as a poet in everyday life more than in his creative activity.

   As with many other transcendentalists, Thoreau was convinced of the superiority of the spirit over that of matter. According to a researcher of this philosophy, O. B. Fronthingham, the transcendentalists agreed on the dignity of the human entity and took the viewpoint that human nature and instinct have a supernatural and divine level. Instinct-nature and culture teach us how to survive, how to live and how to be.

   We are still active hunters, and it does matter how and what we hunt. In ancient cultures the hunter respected the creatures he hunted. Killing an animal is not a personal act, according to religious studies scholar Joseph Campbell. To a hunter, an animal was an embodiment of his own ancestors, and God for that matter. The act of hunting was both a sacrifice and a form of transcendence at the same time.

David Lynch

   One hundred and fifty years after the death of the great hunter Thoreau, David Lynch, in his book „Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness and Creativity” advises us how to fish on our trip along the lost highway of everyday life. The great hunter of contemporary film-making, who plans to expand his fishing into the Polish city of Lodz, describes the process of hunting as follows: „Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish you stay in the shallow water but if you want to catch the big fish you have to go deeper. Down deep the fish are more powerful and more pure. They`re huge and abstract and they are very beautiful. I look for a certain kind of fish that is important to me, one that can translate into cinema. But there are all kinds of fish swimming down there. There are fish for business, fish for sports. There are fish for everything. Everything, anything that is a „thing”, comes up from the deepest level. Modern physics call that level the Unified Field. The more your consciousness, your awareness is expanded, the deeper you go toward this source, and the bigger the fish you can catch.”

   The desire to set off hunting is crucial. Lynch claims that the desire to invent is like a bait – when you fish, you have to wait patiently. The desire is the bait that attracts fish – our ideas. He calls it beautiful that once you succeed catching even the smallest fish, a piece of the bigger idea, it will attract others and they will all come to the same hook. The question yet to be answered is where to fish and how to find the perfect fishing spot. Lynch points out that smaller fish swim in shallow water, while the bigger ones can only be found in deeper waters. His advice on catching the big fish is to expand the fishing style, providing an allegory of consciousness.

   The technique used by the film-maker to fill his pantry with fish is Transcendental Meditation. „Here is how it works: inside every human being is an ocean of pure, vibrant consciousness. When you transcend in Transcendental Meditation, you dive down into this ocean of pure consciousness. You splash into it. And it`s bliss. You can vibrate with this bliss. Experiencing pure consciousness enlivens it, expands it. It starts to unfold and grow.”

   Our awareness and life in general is conditioned by our consciousness. Lynch states that you can fish ideas at deeper levels, where there is nothing to limit your creativity and live can be great fun.

   Both Lynch and Thoreau fish in peace with Nature and the tradition of Great Hunting, in the manner of Upanishads, the Indian sages, Aeschylus and the Greek classics.

   Let us set off to hunt as often as possible in harmony with intuition. Following our instincts let us establish hunting circles or enter those already in existence. Let us be the transcendental hunters of our own times. During the Great Hunting the company is marvelous and there are many from whom we can learn. Just look around you and then set out for the hunt.

Gregory Colbert - "Ashes and snow"

From Take Me nr 5 june / july 2010
www.take-me.pl

original version: here

Bibliography:

Henry David Thoreau,Walden, czyli życie w lesie ["Walden or Life in the Woods"]

David Lynch, W pogoni za wielką Rybą. Medytacja ,Świadomość i Tworzenie ["Catching the Big Fish"]

Michel Foucault, Nadzorować i karać. Narodziny więzienia ["Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison"]

Narconauts - the social right to a fix

   If we could find a place from which we would have a good view on our everyday culture we would see society with a general population who reside in the gigantic margins of contemporary culture. Addicted people, who travel between worlds, in which the function of licensed travel agencies is played by all kinds of psychoactive substances and the return from this forced emigration is handled by specialist detox agencies which perform the function of SPAs for the poorer social masses. This is the perspective from which we can look at addicts. Those addicted to another, deeper form of Being in this our overwhelmingly grey-coloured everyday life. People diving into the underwater depths of their own imaginations and fantasies, where the motivation for travel is the desire to realize their subliminal needs pushed out into atomised families. 

   This growing suppression causes frustration and the need to reanimate one`s individual cultural life leads future cultural tourists to undertake journeys whose destinations are the live-giving zones of Big Blue or Paradise Garden.

   The term „Narconauts” was introduced to Polish psychology by Jerzy Siczek when he published, in the Santorski&Co a editorial house for extreme psychology, his book „Narconauts – from addiction to the good life” [„Narkonauci – od uzależnienia do dobrego życia”]. The book is about the initiation of people who have been in Monar for a year or two. Unfortunately, after their birth they were deprived of the comfort of motherly arms and were thrown out into the cold, rocky shores of our reality. And what a shoreline awaits these newly arrived Argonauts stepping out into the island. We all know, because we walk it every day. Statistic show quite clearly that mortality among newly born neophytes is higher than among children in the countries of the third and fourth world. The newly arrived Monar-people are threatened every step by mythical monsters asking questions and trials worthy of our ancient mythological heroes. In our opinion the term „Narconauts” itself has become a neologism with its source in two historical events. The first of them is Greek mythology and the story of the journey of Jason and his fifty companions, these mythical figures, Heracles, Orpheus, Castor and Thesus and others. The goal and destination of the ship Argo was to find the land of the „Golden Fleece” [from the beginning of time, gold and notoriety have motivated „boys” to take risk which means – as is widely known – that there are more females around]. The voyage of the Argonauts was long and troublesome and our protagonists encountered numerous obstacles on their way and they really had to make great efforts to overcome them. They showed true heroism when fleeing Lemnos Island where the beautiful women of the island to dissuade them from travelling further held them in their beautiful arms.

Argonauts

   The second proposition which leads us to the term „Argonaut” is a book which has to be read by every researcher in the domain of culture [we can count psychologists among them]. This term was introduced to cultural anthropology with something like the power of a waterfall by no less a Pole, the precursor of the intense in-field research method: Bronisław Malinowski. One of the first researchers in that nascent queen of all sciences, that is anthropology  ;), who, following the steps of Herodotus left his office to carry out research in the field among the native peoples of the Pacific islands. Bronisław stayed with the Triobrand natives for several years writing volumes of descriptions about the islanders`lives. „Argonauts of the Western Pacific” and „The sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia”, are the anthropology tenets of the reading list, the cherry on the top of the cake, you might say. Without it anthropology and sociology would be in nappies today and we would be trapped behind the tightly closed borders of our „mono-centrism”, without the possibility of savouring the wealth of cultures from the four corners of the globe.

Malinowski and Triobrands in 1918

   No one describes culture as well as a sensitive field researcher and his description is complimented by his friends, and enemies. We know nothing about Bronisław`s enemies but as far as his friend go, we can say clearly: they were in the first league of spiritual desperados of those times. His closest friend was Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz or Witkacy, a personage recently inccreasingly exploited by the pop culture – more or less skilfully.

Witkacy "Visit to Rajah"

    Stanisław was not only a professional painter but he really painted and when painting he travelled with his whole entourage in the images he painted of his drug-induced visions. As Marco Polo had once done, Witkacy travelling in his ship [of mescaline] discoreved worlds which were to be revealed later by sailors like Morrison and Hendrix.

Jim Morrison

  Times changed and the winding roads of travel were trodden by prominent pop culture ladies from Janis Joplin to Amy Winehouse. These women were, are, particularly predisposed to transoceanic trips, clasping the steering wheel of single handed boats, blazing unknown paths for travellers to come so tourists of both genders could find their way using these prepared maps and avoid cultural whirlpools. A detailed map and a good crew is half way to success.

   Amateur experiences from the last decades show clearly that if every now and then the chips fall on a rocky reef or get stuck in cultural shoals, this is a clear sign that the way has been lost and you need to look for a new, safer route to India. 

   The need to escape from the world through a sacred or profane. Fix depending on the developed stage of the user, is often the only way to run from this reality and Be, with a capital creative B [B as in Brahman, B is in Bieluń, B is in Bohater - `Hero` in Polish], on the Bergamut Islands [fictional islands from a Polish kiddie poem]. The intention behind this article is not to prepare the accoutrements and trails necessary for the journey, but to illustrate how many people set out and return [or not] from trips to the other side of the mirror.

Ken Kesey and  Merry Pranksters

    Perhaps the time has come to realize how difficult these routes can be and how different addictions are, and it is up to us to choose the best path for ourselves and our loved ones, so these Dorothy`s can return safe and sound from their touristic excursions [in the Land of Oz]. How serious the problem of addiction is in culture can be realized by stepping out of the traditional frame of our childhood mirror. This had reflected our reality and shown us precisely what we wanted to see; because we see only what we are ready to accept.

   We think that after this short introduction we will be ready to step out of the frame and look at reality from another perspective. So let us look at the Polish Flower Power movement, a movement for which life on the Fix is almost an everyday issue. In Poland taking a Fix or escaping that overwhelming reality of life has a long and rich tradition. How long? Long! Longer than Jarocin [Polish punkrock festival], „Dżem” dope for Rysiek Riedel, longer than the amphetamine marathoners of Kora and the bohemia of Kraków. [`Dżem` a Polish blues group, means `Jam`].

Maki

  The first Fix Share community was established in 1897 in Grudziądz under the name worthy of the Kesey commune - „Sun Baths”. The movement, because this is how people associated it in the Polish Share Association [Polski Związek Działkowców] describes itself as over 110 years old. So how can hippies or the hardcore element of society even compare themselves with the old school fix scene? What is the force behind the boys and girls of the Polski Związek Działkowców? Here let us give you two significant statistics:

5200 Polish share gardens exist in Poland now

44000 hectares on land is shared [a nation within a nation]

   How many people set out from blocks of flats to Live, to Be, how many take a fix every day together with their partner[s], how many of them Fix with their children, how many invited yet unaware friends enter into that persistent hunger for an experience of this type?

   Many, a lot...

   In a not very distant time, when the eye of Sauron looked at the Polish Hobbiton and the Solidarity team of the Ring was dispersed, that is in gloomy 1981, the number of those applying for the right to a legal Fix reached 700.000! Danish Christiania and the power of its social influence is cultural minimalism compared to the Polish Fix / Share movement and is considered with quiet derision here.

   Who are these Polish Narconauts or maybe Fix Shareonauts? Because they – contrary to those reborn Monar-people – do not want to return to reality, quite the contrary: they want to flee from it to the green autonomus enclaves of their brand new, better life.

   Who runs? Everyone who can!

    Plots in Polish shared gardens are used by all social and professional groups. Workers and clerks, retired people and disabled, as well as the recently unemployed, share. In terms of professions sharing is popular among those employed in heavy industry but those is light industry i.e. Textile in Łódź also value it. Teachers, military, health workers, clerks, employees of small institutions and factories scattered around Poland share.

   Students and high school pupils join this sharing sometimes not quite legally, with the agreement of their parents and other caretakers of these gardens to discover, in silence, new worlds accessible usually only to the better-off adult members of society. Ouite soon all social and cultural groups will want the right to Share. Theoretically everyone has the right to Share but the problem lies in the fact that we have different financial and cultural conditions and these limit us in the choice of the Share most sitable for us.

   As statistics show: there are 4 milion declared Share-takers – this is how many people have moved to an alternative reality in the last few years. And how many people have not been diagnosed? How many are thinking to start and how and with whom to Share? Where to buy, where to get a loan, where to mortgage the mortgage on their house, car, apartment, to have something to Share. 

Natural Mystic

    Not to be stuck in their everyday lives, to escape to live according to their biological rhythm just for a while. To see the sky, moon, feel the ground beneath their feet. To be in touch with plants, watch how a baby crawls across the grass, to have space for themselves, to have a hammock and put up a wigwam... What is happening in the peripheries of our culture, how does life go on Sharing? It`s enough to leave your house and travel a few kilometres in any of the four directions of the compass to come across a hidden safe haven behind a fence full of people who have chosen another form of life for a short weekend. The images we see are not of interrelated architecture. No designer junk as proposed in magazines such as `Cztery Kąty` or `Murator`. Here there are forms looking as if they have come from Salvador Dali`s paintings, accidental items joined together to form a nice entirety, steel, inanimate earlier, bowls turned into toadstools, mini gates adjusted for dwarfs through which grown-ups enter, houses and buildings in the shape of palaces and castles worthy of our contemporary Radziwiłł family, drawbridges and rock gardens. Adults move about within this surrealistic frame. Living without uniforms and corporate distinctions, in shorts nad white bras as if from the times of our Peoples Republic of Poland, basically People of the Fairytale. People discovering who they really are, able to actually create their own microcosm, from scratch, in harmony with nature and the inner culture. This beautiful view brings to mind the following programme necessary to re:animate Polish and European culture: why not have cheap legal lots available for all people so they can live, create and travel on routes as yet unknown to us, in an accessible and secure way. Green tourism without the necessity of hospitalizing urban tourists.

Home, sweet home

Translator: Zygmunt Nowak - Soliński
Take Me nr 6 august/october 2010

www.take-me.pl

 original version: here

Bibliography:
R. Sulima, Antropologia codzienności, Wyd.UJ, Kraków 2000

J. Hopkins, D. Sugerman, Nikt nie wyjdzie stąd żywy, In rock Music Press, Poznań 1997 ["No one comes out alive. The biography of Jim Morrison"]

B. Malinowski, Argonauci Zachodniego Pacyfiku, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, 2005 ["Argonauts of the Western Pacific"]

J. Siczek, Narkonauci - od uzależnienia do dobrego życia, Jacek Santorski & Co, Warszawa 1994

The Jim Henson Company Fraggle Rock  odc. 1-12, prod. USA, Anglia, 1983

Holy can, Holy Grail or the mythology of the aerosol can

   I`ve been asking myself this question lately: What are the similarities between the Holy Grail and a can of aerosol, a can of spray? Quite a provocative question: how can an aluminium can be similar to the Holy Grail? What human demand do they both meet? For the apostles of advertisiment agencies [creative directors] the answer is simple, and for me – in a moment – all will be revealed.

   I think of the place of objects in culture and human existence. According to Karl Marx there is a biological demand for material objects, which lies at the bottom of the processes of production, consumption and exchange. The biology of our organism forces us to need these objects, but we are not only biology, we are also spirit, and our spiritual lives need symbols and myths. The matter is spiritualized, the spirit materializes. How, when, what for?

   I`ve been asking myself this question lately: What are the similarities between the Holy Grail and a can of aerosol, a can of spray? Quite a provocative question: how can an aluminium can be similar to the Holy Grail? What human demand do they both meet? For the apostles of advertisiment agencies [creative directors] the answer is simple, and for me – in a moment – all will be revealed.

I think of the place of objects in culture and human existence. According to Karl Marx there is a biological demand for material objects, which lies at the bottom of the processes of production, consumption and exchange. The biology of our organism forces us to need these objects, but we are not only biology, we are also spirit, and our spiritual lives need symbols and myths. The matter is spiritualized, the spirit materializes. How, when, what for?

   Let me first talk about the can, one of the most important cans in our modern culture, meaning more than just a simple container. The Campbell`s Tomato Soup can. The first one in art, with a capital A, was introduced to us by Andy Warhol and consumed by the establishment like fresh Russian caviar. It became very important for people in the United States because it was something more than just a can of soup; it was a can of a home-made soup!

Andy Warhol "Four coloured Campbell`s soup can"

   Yes – it`s hard to believe, but Campbell`s soup is to Native Americans and emigrants what Warhol associated with home, with ssomething tasty and familiar. Warhol, when choosing Campbell`s soup, was guided by his memories from childhood, common to all people of his generation. Home, family, food – important matters, and art, even pop art is part of these important matters. This object – a tin can – as picked by Warhol from a whole range of objects, and by depicting it, the can, he created from this image an icon of pop art, an important part of mass culture, and one of the holy bearers of art as a valued part of modern culture.

   The Campbell`s soup can graphic is the sign we are looking for – the sacrum. But it is not the Grail. We can`t talk of the conversion of someone who communes with it.

   It is an important object – but not a symbolic one, it stimulates the senses, the memories and it nourishes American society physically but doesn`t unfortunately change its spiritual condition. I think that when consuming Campbell`s soup a man will not experience a conversion of any kind, he won`t evolve from Homo Sapiens into „Homo Religious”. I look for a can that is not only important; I look for a can that is symbolic, a can that is part of a myth, a living myth. A myth that permits changes in the human condition.

Dante Rosetti "Holy Grail"

   A Romanian religious studies scholar, Mircea Eliade, a mythology, yoga and shamanism researcher, described everyday human live this way: „A complete human being besides his historical condition knows other situations also: for instance the states of dreams, night dreams, melancholy and the spiritual absence, aesthetic admiration, escape from reality, etc. - and all these states are not at all historical.” As people we experience rhythms or forms of patterns in our lives many times, not only time in the historical term but beyond our historical present. All it takes is to listen to some good music, fall in love or pray to be able to set out beyond the historical present and reach „the eternal now of love and religion”. In our lives we experience momentsof a departure beyond the structure of linear time. Occasionally we have an opportunity to enter the cosmic, the circle, the eternal, in an imaginary time. We arrive at the beginning; we experience what was experienced by the heroes from our culture, gods and our ancestors. Myths and symbols enliven us again, and we face something Great.

   What is the history of the aerosol can? It all began in 1927 when the Norwegian, Erik Rotheim, in Oslo, created the first aerosol. The term „aerosol” is a combination of two words: Greek aer – air, and Latin solutio – solution. In 1941 it was used by American troops as an insecticide, and then in the 50s and 60s it won the hearts of American women who were subjecting their hair to chemical treatment and asthmatics who had been cut off from treatment with the cannabis after this had been procribed by law and these useful and therapeutic plants could not be used [a law forced through by the DuPont corporation].

   Cans are not the same and not every cup is the Holy Grail so that not every can of aerosol has the power of actualizing the Arthurian myth. The material and spiritual content of objects may differ. It`s the same with a bottle [or lamp, in a different version] in which the Genie waits: it`s obvious that the Genie does not live in every bottle. Therefore it`s not about the bottle but about its content and design that make us reach for another one, and go to another Open`er Festival. In the case of the spray can, the situation is similar. The model that interests me is classic 400 ml [with the perfect European, almost Hellenistic proportions]. A can, „object”, becomes the can, „subject”, because it has the power to convert the life of a person who communes with it. The mechanisms used to make the can and the materials of these 400 ml cans are the same in every can of aerosol, which means: tin container, a short fine stem [a fine pipe], liquid under pressure, and a „female” valve to push down.

New York street art

The character in this story – Can – has enough power and influence to become one of the basic symbols of the Aerosol Culture. It has oodles of faces, names and colours.



   Present day hierophants, the wise men of the Aerosol Culture, are coping with the design and modernization of the Grail. Is this a world of people locked away living only through the culture of a can of spray? Definitely not. Our Culture, with a capital C, contains hundreds of thousands of different cultures, whose participants travel around the world. They enrich each other. We have the Can2 designs for Adidas, Seak as a face of Es Pack, Loomit which promotes the campaign of Sony Ericsson and so on. All of them refer to what is important in this story, to an object that has the power to convert – the can.

   It was well depicted in the newly released album, „400 ml”, with 400 visions of 400 artists. The numbers of forms were a result of the number of multi-continental groups of artists of the Aerosol Culture who took on the subject like any modern iconoclasts. Is this all about the number of cans in our world? No – we can still choose among the hundreds of colours, thousands of original designs from artists designing for the artistic market and for the commercial market, and the hundreds of people living this myth in metropolises and small towns. A can functions is everyday life in different contexts, and that also proves its power: it appears as a normal objects – a tool which is functional and effective, working with precision of an ophthalmic laser, or like a shotgun, changing the image of a city during its nocturnal voyages. It`s also a sign, a determinant of identity and a symbol of the conversion of Homo Sapiens into Homo Religious, or, if you prefer Homo Aerosolus. Because, whether we like it or not, we all live in our mythologies, most of them trivialized and secularized, but with their roots in some distant past.

    It`s the equivalent to the myths of King Arthur and the Holy Grail. The Grail according to some researchers is a cup. In another, older version, it is a plate. King Arthur lived in the fifth/sixth century and the Arthurian myth was created by Cisterian monks.

Knights of the Round Table and the Holy Grail. Painting of the fifteenth century

   This was not just the result of the imagination of these righteous and religious men, the story overlapped with many older myths – Celtic myths. Andrzej Sapkowski, Polish fantasy writer and researcher into Arthurian myth, describes the Grail as: „a cauldron of the Irish God, Dagd, a wonderful cauldron called by the Irish Undry, where everyone found what they were worthy of. Another God, Pwyll, the ruler of the land Annwvyn, possessed a cauldron which not only cooked food – it was embellished with pearls, it was a cauldron of inspiration and poetry.”

   So the Aerosol Can, like the Grail, gives you as much, as much of the talent you have, and courage, a will to leave earthly matters and carry on, like the Knights around the round table, your own Quest, in search of what is important for you.

   And King Arthur, the central personage and perfect model of Christian chivalry, is as Sapkowski puts it: God Gwydon, born in the process of change from god into hero, charakteristic of Celtic mythology.

   Here my story ends. But the question remains: Can a can be a Grail? It still sounds strange, but I see it on the Montana Gold company advertising: a golden can [a 400 ml can has a much better aspect than a plate or a cup] emerging from the dark depths of emtiness. Before, there was Nothing, Now, there is She, shining, golden, ready to convert – a modern Grail? For some it is, for some not so. The important thing is to follow your own path, even if you follow someone else`s footsteps. As Andy Warhol said: „In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes”. So it`s worth walking.

Translations: Urszula Skowrońska, Zofia Ziólkowska

Take Me nr 4 april / may 2010

www.take-me.pl

Bibliography:

Mircea Eliade, Obrazy i symbole, Wydawnictwo KR, Warszawa 1998  ["Images and symbols"]

Andrzej Sapkowski, Świat Króla Artura. Maladie, Supernowa, Warszawa 1998

Kitchen93, 400 ml. Collection

Ultra Violet, 15 minut sławy. Moje lata z Andy Warholem,  86 Press, 1986     ["Famous for 15 Minutes. My Years With Andy Warhol."]

   original version: here