Art and Event – a review

Download the review of Art and Event – Lista 2011 as pdf here

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How do you imagine the becoming process of the future event of the 21st Century?

How are you going to change your thinking and creativity in order to prepare for it?

What and how are you going to do this in the coming days, months and year until the next Art and Event?

These were the three questions with which Dr. Ben-Aharon rounded off the
seminar Art and Event. During the three days it lasted he talked about his concept,understanding and experience of the Event on the one side, and of how this relates to art and creativity on the other.

A guiding thread, not fully developed but presented as a picture and a riddle
to which one could continue to work oneself, was the Chassidic story of The
Seven Beggars by Rabi Nachman from Breslau. In this we could see reflected, according to Ben-Aharon, seven stages of transformation of creativity and consciousness. (These seven stages are
being worked out more conceptually and in detail in Ben-Aharon’s forthcoming
book, The Event in Science, Philosophy, History and Art)

What is the event? The event is what makes everything into event; it is what
makes everything new.

Notes about art and event by Ben-Aharon

What is a work of art? how is it created? which transformations is the artist going through in the creative process? and how is it related to the spiritual event of our time?

To begin with, it seems, the creative forces in the modern artist is an “orphan child” (to use legends’ language), lost in the “wood” or “desert” of modern intellectualism and materialism; Rabi Nachman from Breslau’s legend The Seven Beggars (representing seven stages of creative becoming) begins, appropriately, with two orphan children lost in the wood, saved and nourished by the baggers until they come of age…

The event can be experienced and expressed in many ways, through art, science, philosophy and history (social life). But what makes the event so difficult to grasp is the fact that we cannot recognize it with our common understanding, knowledge, and cultural-social habits. They have been formed before the event, and the event disrupts and displaces them. And only through the event itself may we

Dr. Ben-Aharon

Dr. Ben-Aharon has worked for over 30 years in Israel, Europe and North America in various venues related to his central focus of research, namely what he calls ”the Event”. This  name refers to the source of the forces of transformation, growth and becoming, expressed through our present creative individual, society and cultural life. He is now writing a book on the event and its expression in the sciences, philosophy, arts, and history.

During the 1980’s he founded the kibbutz Harduf in Israel, which now lives and thrives with a life of it’s own. It has many social institution, including homes for adult and children in need of special care and sustainable organic agriculture. At the end of the 90’s, as part of the upsurge of global civil society, he founded the Activists for Israeli Civil Society, and co-founded with Nicanor Perlas the Global Network for Social Threefolding. These organizations were influential in the end of the 90’s and beginning of the new millennium, trying to introduce new ideas and practices to the relation between civil society, the state and the market. In 1998 Ben-Aharon received his PH.D in Philosophy from Haifa University for a dissertation on “the Concept of the “I” in Edmund Husserl’s Phenomenology”. His research fields include Goetheanism, Spiritual Science and postmodern thinking and art.

During these years Ben-Aharon is researching and teaching on issues related to individual and social transformations, which he regards as the true soil from which any kind of true improvement of society can come. Central to his research work is the method of cognitive yoga which he developed from the work of Rudolf Steiner, St.Paul, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou and others. This yoga practice frees sense perceptions and thinking from their dependence on the habitual functions of the brain, and integrates them with the supersensible forces of the human being and the world.  Such transformation of thinking and perception forms the basis for a new self- and world experience and knowledge, that Ben-Aharon believes can become the ground for more creative social life.

The end of time

Sunday July the 3rd at 15.00 the Quartet for the end of time by Olivier Messiaen will be performed at The Lista Ligthouse Gallery. This piece, which has a special place in the 20th Century music history will resonate strongly with the place and the event in which it is embedded. The concert will be the closing of the Art and Event seminar with Dr. Ben-Aharon, and perhaps it can serve as an example of an artistic expression of the event of metamophosis.

Messiaen wrote this piece while a prisoner in Germany during the second World War and it has a saying from the Apocalypse as a motto. However, I believe this “end of time” can be understood not as the “end of the world” but as a process whereby time is transformed and reaches towards a point of pure “eternal” present from where the unfolding of time can be experienced in a different intensity. Messiaen’s original use of rythm, the extremely slow tempi in some movements, and the rich harmonic textures based on his experience of correspondence between sound and colours all help bring about a meditative state of mind in the listener.

Messiaen was living in the same time and place as the philosophers of the Event (Deleuze, Foucault, Badiou) which Ben-Aharon utilizes in his work, and Deleuze himself refers to Messiaen at several places (A Thousand Plateaus, What is Philosophy?). For Deleuze Messiaen serves as primary example for the singular creativity of Being as he makes audible the continuity between natural and human creativity expressed through his use of birdsong. Birdsong was among the major inspirations for Messiaen in his composing, and that is also obvious in this piece which was the first in which he employed it. (The immensly beautiful solo clarinet piece is even called the “Abyss of the birds”). With Lista being a place for migration birds to stop for a concert of their own, we also have a possible transversal communication between nature and culture!

Art and Event – Lista 2011

Welcome to

Art and the Event

Seminar with Dr. Ben-Aharon, Concert and Installation

 Lista Lighthouse Gallery, Vest-Agder, Norway, July 1^st to 3^rd 2011

Seminar: Art and Event.

July 1st to 3rd the seminar Art and Event will take place at Lista Lighthouse Gallery.  Dr. Ben-Aharon will present his work on art as a path to the transformation of consciousness.

Concert: Quartet for the end of time.

Sunday 3^rd of July at 15.00 in Lista Lighthouse Gallery Quartet for the end of time by Olivier Messiaen will be performed by the Chamber Chameleons (Kaja Aadne, Torbjørn Eftestøl, Catherine Leclerc and Kari Rønnekleiv.)

Installation: In-visibility.

From the 1^st of July. An installation in which your attention is becoming the material of the artwork; it will consist of a “path” in and around the Gallery, made by Koan and Alfred Vaagsvold.

About the seminar Art and Event

“What Event, what law do they obey, these mutations that suddenly decide that things are no longer perceived, described, expressed, characterized, classified, and known in the same way… but Beings radically different from them?”

(Foucault)

What is the event, and how is it connected to art? And what is art and how is it connected to the event? A conscious mutual relation between art and event can be created through a series of stages of metamorphosis, that lead both the artist and his work into the event, make them part of the event, and allow the event to express itself through both. The purpose of the workshop is to introduce these stages and help lift them to higher states of consciousness.

For example, Virginia Wolf testified often in her diaries to such  “mutations”, which transformed her situation from health to illness and from illness to creative process and inspiration. She describes how her brain stops to function for short periods. It stops reacting to external impressions. “It closes up; it becomes like a chrysalis”. And then she feels a strange “flipping of wings” in her head and she lies down wholly paralyzed and numb. But at certain occasions, something “springs up” through her and she is “flooded by ideas”. And she notes that this event may occur before she can regain control of her brain or seize her pen. Can artistic work find a healthy way through which the artist can become “worthy of the event” (as Deleuze and Guattari put it)? Can the artist find a conscious way to produce such radical mutations, or metamorphosis, so often described to great artists?

In the seminar Dr. Ben-Aharon will introduce the stages of metamorphoses that demonstrate the connection between art and event.

Gallery Lista Lighthouse: http://www.gallerilistafyr.com/

The project is supported by Vest-Agder Fylkeskommune, Kultur

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