PERSONA at the Musee du Quai Branly, Paris, exhibits a wide range of artifacts that are physical displays of what cannot actually be seen.
What is amazing about this exhibition is that it brings up ideas about how, as a people, we have the capacity to reach a higher dimension… and various physical objects on show try to capture, communicate or reach those inner powers and perceptions that we hold, but that most of us do not use or are trapped from using by attachments or limited thinking.
How does the exhibition draw our attention to such powers and potentials?
It begins with Saint Anthony’s trial. The Egyptian monk put himself in a dark cave and yet saw a whole lot of images in the nothingness.
Often he would glance up from his prayers to see Satan hovering before him in the gloom of his abandoned fort. And Satan was hard to recognize; usually he looked like the things Anthony missed most.
The idea was that the more his faith and love grew, the less susceptible he was to attachments flashed at him by the devil.
The exhibition tries to show that human beings have an inner life or an ability to create visual things which illustrate the inner unseen forces.
It shows an experiment where, in 48 hours of total isolation (BBC documentary) 6 people, placed in a cell in total darkness and silence, were deprived of sensuary stimulus.
Their reactions were filmed and observed throughout. Some of them experience hallucinations equal to those happening in deserts or high altitudes, showing that these ‘presences’ appear in solitary situations.
The exhibition, through telling of the artefacts, awakens those universally felt senses.
Then we see the famous experiment carried out in 1944 by two psychologiest, Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel, showing how, when looking at simple geometric figures projected onto a screen and given random movements, onlookers were unable to stop themselves attributing intentions and imagining a story to describe their actions. More broadly we have a spontaneous tendency to attribute feelings and thoughts to barely anthropomorphic faces.
Rare old films remind us of our ability to awaken inner heroic deities through the site of carvings, sculptures and even films. We are reminded of Jack Arnold in ‘The Incredible Shrinking Man’, where, contaminated by a mysterious gas, Scott, the hero of the film, gradually shrinks to the size of several centimetres. At first his family look after him and help him adapt to his new size, but then following the attack of a cat in the house, he finds himself in a cave, smaller than before and lost. After a terrible combat with a spider, he finished by accepting his destiny to be miniscule, thrown into the immensity of the universe.
The exhibition tries to show how artworks are often methods of connecting us with powers and presences beyond our worldly sense. We see Jean-Jacques Lebel ‘Radio Momo’ intended to reach the dead. Lebel had chosen to add two aerials to a real scull, as an altar that is to talk to the dead Antonin Artaud, but brought alive by his own work of art. For Lebel, are is a form of ‘telepathy interposed by work’ (although Artaud never yet has spoken into the instrument)
Many of the objects, like statues, only depict the inhabited deity when you open their eyes, and are only likened to people through very specific animation rituals, and in the context of precise situations, revealing themselves intermittently, and creating effects of presence/absence.
At times the entity becomes materialized, at others it becomes liquefied, or is transformed, by way of incarnations which are never exactly equivalent. The entity thus becomes a potential, uncontrollable presence, which must be tamed and summoned by different methods: words (appeals, challenges, warnings, songs of seduction…) forms of care and offerings, traps (witch bombs, fairy traps…) and other unexpected techniques which make it possible to draw the attention of a presence and establish a relation with it.
It is interesting to understand that inner transformation can be inspired by outer perception.
Mythical symbols, throughout time and space, have urged the inner self to evolve.
On the subject of the physical artefacts awakening the unseen, Joseph Campbell said once:
“The Virgin birth is nothing to do with a biological problem and the promised land has nothing to do with real estate.
The virgin birth symbolises the birth in the heart of a spiritual life.”
This exhibition points out that the symbols of artist works and artefacts can provoke inner changes and transformations.
What is brave about this exhibition is that it tries to point out that there exists a lot that we do not see. A lot of our life we live with ‘no inner life’
Referring to Campbell, “All of the deities are projections of the psychological powers and they are within you and not out there. A transcendent energy consciousness informs the whole world and informs you”
All life has to come to us through aesthetic and logic, time and space: we think within the frame, such as Kant’s ‘Critique of Pure Reason’
How do we transcend that ‘that to which words or thoughts do not reach’?
Campbell believed that “Our religions are religions of exile”
In the Gospel according to Thomas (which was left out of the bible) Thomas said, when asked the question: “When will the kingdom come?”
His answer was: “the kingdom of the father is spread on the earth and people do not see it”
Kristnamurti believed in pure perception that acts. Pure perception, that is not related to time or thought, can break us away the pattern of the brain in which human beings have been caught for millions of years.
This exhibition tries to show some of those artistic methods for doing this very same thing.
Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley has become part and parcel of the discourse within the fields of humanoid robotics engineering, the film industry, culture studies, and philosophy, most notably the philosophy of transhumanism.
Jack Vanarsky Toporgraphie 1998
In this paper, the concept of the Uncanny Valley is discussed in terms of the contemporary Japanese cultural milieu relating to humanoid robot technology, and the on-going roboticization of human culture. For Masahiro Mori, who is also the author of The Buddha in the Robot(1981), the same compassion that we ought to offer to all living beings, and Being itself, we ought to offer to humanoid robots.
The range of strange objects, masks, models, awaken strangeness and thus dissolve those set knowledge’s, experiences and thoughts.
An inner life is awakened.
This exhibition reminds us of the timelessness of creation and how, throughout all lands and via all minds, powers beyond the world perceived by physical senses, there is more.
“When man becomes aware of the movement of his own consciousness he will see the division between the thinker and the thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience” said Kristnamurti, “He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical change in the mind”
“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free” said Michelangelo about his creation. Actors and dancers are said to be sculpturers of snow. The inner life of another enters them.
The exhibition made me think of this brilliant piece of dance by Anna Pavlova, where she is a swan.
Just her pure observation of the swan, and the transformation into it, reveals how well she could awaken her mind to the treasures out there.
Anna Pavlova: Dying Swan
The exhibition carries you through the confusion that exists between human and non-human, and the specific and personalised relationship that connects them, in a wide variety of cultures. You come away feeling denationalised by a feeling of an inner oneness with something beyond your individual self and beyond your preconceived notions that you had on entering the exhibition.
It is a vast anthropological study of what is not seen yet seen, and how in fact the constraints of our physical awareness can be vehicles that make us further aware, perceptive and observant , connecting to our inner life on earth and how this makes us live richer, happier, more peaceful lives.
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