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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. Things happen all the time, the world itself is an
evolutionary process, and in this sense everything is an event. But, for us these
changes are external. So a first aspect of realization in relation to the event is to
see how we do not take part in it, even when we experience something “new”
or extraordinary, or ever so “spiritual”. We do not normally change with the
events. In our normal life things are not made new, there are perhaps only new
arrangements of the same old things. To make everything new then means
that we become with the event. It is a rebirth of this world and the things we
already know; its not a different world or separate reality, but a becoming of
the same through the source of universal becoming that now is working also
through me: through the “I AM” which makes everything new. To work towards
such a transformation is the real goal of Ben-Aharon’s work as a whole, and in
the Art and Event seminar we approached art’s contribution and potential for
such realizations. Art can bring us closer to the event (it can bring about an end
of “our” time, as an entry into a more intensive time as living presence), and by
studying this process we can intensify artistic work, release new creative forces
and bring them into consciousness.

Everything, living and inanimate, takes part in an evolutionary stream of
becoming, and has therefore also a potential of creativity, which remains hidden from its external form and expression (the tree, the stone, the air, the next human we meet). This relation between the actual – the created and finished
form – and the overflow of creativity that belongs to it as a potential or potent
force, is the relation between the actualized and material world, on one hand,
and the virtual aspect of the world, on the other. For example a seed actualizes
the virtual potency according to the seed’s evolutionary program. But it can
only actualize this one, isolated, form, and not the whole virtual plant kingdom
or even its own species. Therefore the virtual wholeness of the plant remains
invisible and unnoticed for most people. But for many artists this virtual domain
is strongly felt, and this brings him or her into a need for expression: what the
natural world cannot do by itself, expressing the virtual wholeness in each single
object, the artist does by continuing creation beyond its naturally programmed
limits. (The philosopher Gilles Deleuze regards music as a specific example of
such a continuation of natural creativity, and uses Messiaen as example because
of his explicit use of birdsong as inspiration for melodic form and texture, which
Deleuze interpret not as imitation of bird singing, but as expression of its hidden
potentials.)

Dr. Ben-Aharon explained how this relation to the virtual potential of the
world can be exemplified by the difference between a “normal” person’s and
an “artist’s” perception. When we see a rose, it’s perceptual elements (colour,
odour, texture, form) make impressions upon us. But our cognitive apparatus,
our constitution (i.e. the relation between our faculties – thinking, memory,
sensibility, understanding, imagination) immediately synthesises and produces
our representation of the object: we experience, conceive and name it “a rose”.
This process works instinctively and automatically in us. However, for the
artist, due to his or her naturally given constitution, there remains a fraction of
time where this cognitive synthesis does not occur, is delayed, or, in extreme
cases (like in Virginia Wolf’s case), it is not happening at all. In this “time lapse”,
instead of being converted into a mental representation, the impressions work
directly upon the body as a force or intensity, and the thinking activity, which
normally would be used to comprehend and synthesize it into a representation,
is thereby freed and left in its potential state. Artistic imagination, fantasy,
inspiration, has it source in this thinking’s potentiality. This marks the surplus
of creativity for the artist, which has double effect: on the one side her direct
encounter with the living element of the sensible world (red as pure intensity),
and on the other the unused potential of the liberated, de-actualized, thinking.
This is now is felt as a force, desire or urge to create something new. This de-
actualization and de-personalization of normal cognition is however also
accompanied by the normal cognition, and therefore it remains un-or half-
conscious. It works as the background for the artist’s creative relation to the
world, and brings about his or her need and desire to be creative.

Art is therefore an expression of the event in becoming. It brings the purely
virtual event into expression in the physical world by condensing an essence of
the virtual (de-actualization of thinking opens for creation of new forms) at the
same time as it releases and spiritualizes the forces of nature and matter (the direct encounter with the sensible world as forces and intensities). The relation between the different elements of the event, of nature and of art, can thus be
represented in this ontological scheme:

1. Event in itself, a purely virtual reality;
2. Nature, arrested and limited actualization of the event;
3. Art, which unites both in a double process of expression: a)
condensing the virtual, b) spiritualizing nature/matter

But all these processes can further become united in one, fourth process, which,
according to Ben-Aharon can be said to be the Ur-Kunst, Primal Art, and the
essence of the artistic. This is the meeting with another human being. In this we
have united all three levels above. In the human meeting the physical nature of
the human becomes transparent: for a second, the natural limitations (physical
bodily form and bodily traits) disappear for a second: the soul is expressed
through the body; but then also the soul with all its natural limitations (habits,
instincts, inclination, moods etc) also becomes transparent, and a window opens
through which the creativity (virtual potential of this event) shines forth in
between and through body and soul. This will be the art of the future, and much
artistic work is already striving towards this (some examples from the 20th
century and today might be: Asker Jorn, Joseph Beuys, Christian Wolff, Thino
Sehgal etc…) Art begins to move away from abstract perfection and towards
concrete meetings, or to put it differently, towards actualizing the becoming
process of shared destiny among human beings.

But artistic creation and this search for the new meaning of art as a true meeting
between human beings, is faced with the question of the unconscious.

The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas strongly experienced this moral dilemma
of placing the unconscious in the middle of the meeting with the other. His
whole philosophy is grounded in the, for him, given experience of fundamental
responsibility for the other. For him this was not a question of reflection, but
an immediate given ontological condition. Just because most people have no
consciousness of this meeting, which can take the “twinkling of an eye”, they
think this is a reflective and intellectual category. But for Levinas, in the moment
you see the face of another human being, in the moment you are exposed to
the “nakedness”, mortality and helplessness expressed the face of the other,
you experience full moral responsibility for the other’s existence. It is as strong
and “instinctive” as the relation between mother and child. But precisely because
this is so immediate and all embracing, we shy away from it and deny it. It is
immediately pushed into the unconscious and we continue the lineage from Cain:
I am not my brother’s keeper!

But in our time we see this; we feel that all human beings are our sisters and
brothers at the same time as we suppress this experience, – and this split creates
our present social reality. We cannot stand the direct encounter, so we hide, and
everyone sees that we hide, and everybody hides from the hiding etc. When we
see a human being, he or she is transparent for us, and in this light we also see our self because we experience how we are seen through by the other. But the moral responsibility we experience in this situation is so strong that we suppress
and forget it as fast as possible and continue to treat the other in the same old
way, setting up the same old borders.

Artistic work can therefore approach the event on two levels, both of which
are also the reasons and motivations for approaching the event. To raise the
creative process itself into consciousness entails to use the given constitution as
a point of departure for making the cognitive synthesis and it’s decomposition
a conscious act, and thereby transform consciousness altogether into event.
Art thereby becomes an exercise in an art of living, an art of consciousness and
perception. But then also the encounter with another human can become a fully
conscious meeting. We see therefore that here the cognitive and the moral come
together.

Again we can say that such a need expresses itself in much contemporary artistic
practise, as for example in the shift from focus on the work of art as an object, to
regard it primarily as a process and an encounter. The work of art is no longer
a given object, but becomes a point of departure, almost like a score for the
musician, and the audience become the artist or musician that brings the work
into full realization. All such attempts can be regarded as a move towards the
event.

For art as such to reach the event it needs to understand and utilize consciously
the event, and this process of raising the unconscious creativity into
consciousness amounts to the seven stages of metamorphosis of creativity,
which Ben-Aharon develops in his The Event in Art.

In order to embed artistic practise in this field and infuse it with the real energy
of these problems, and not let them remain external intellectual ideas with no
influence of real artistic work, let us envision how the development of this Art
and Event impulse can take form in a threefold way:

First we will continue to experience and study the lectures and writing of Dr.
Ben-Aharon, which express the essence of the event and the development of
appropriate concepts and methods for transforming ordinary consciousness into
event. This is developed by Ben-Aharon’s work on Art and Event.

Artistic practises can be brought into proximity to this work and also help
exemplify it. In the seminar at Lista we already had improvisations by Sheriffs
of Nothingness (Kari Rønnekleiv and Ole-Henrik Moe) and performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time by the Chamber Chameleons (Kaja Aadne,
Torbjørn Eftestøl, Catherine Leclerc and Kari Rønnekleiv) as examples of this.
In this way we bring two kinds of related practises into proximity; artistic work
that already has an inner relation to the event, and work on the transformation
of consciousness (event) related to art.

A second element is the cognitive-artistic practice that will continue to be
developed as an interactive practice. The installation In-visibility was a seed for this in that it tried to combine the art of thinking and perception (event) embedded in and as an artistic expression (the installation). In the future this
can be transformed into more direct experiences of the stages of transformation
towards the Event, and thus make art and event come more and more together
as stages of transformation of consciousnesses and cognition.

The  third  element will be artistic creation of the event by means of artistic productions and performances. Artists and non-artists will join together in this work, in order to make the event visible by means of art. The emphasis would be on experiencing and studying the spiritual fusion of “art” and “event” as concrete artistic encounter.

On this background, let us repeat the three questions:

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?

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 develop the faculties to grasp it.

Our thinking, feelings and desires recast any new event in terms of past expectations, fulfilments, memories and conventions. But the new is by definition different; it makes a difference; it is an encounter, a shock that paralyzes thinking. Thinking must become different to grasp what makes a difference, but this is altogether outside its usual practice and essence. Thinking always comes too late for the event.

Any simple sense perception is a chance-event, singular, lacking any “meaning”; but our thinking is a violent instrument of capture and conquest: it captures and integrates it as soon as possible into its conceptual structures and schemes; it uses the new to repeat the old. It is a routine nourished by chance, working as an efficient “event destroyer”, killing event and the self in one and the same stroke. This is the first real and positive event of thinking.

Each event carries the new as a natural force; it hits the body in an encounter, but is immediately suppressed and weakened by my habitual reactions. What is expressed when I express the new is precisely not the new, which is filtered out. The shock that started the expression may be new; the result is as old as it is conventional. I can only express my reaction to the new, and my reaction is (at least) as old as my self!

What becoming is realized in and through art? It seems that the artist is capable, quite unconsciously, to “stop the world” at the moment of experience, and instead of falling asleep, as ordinary consciousness does, – instead of vanishing, she is capable to let it flow through the senses and the skin into the body, and let the body become receptive and creative, accepting and answering the in-streaming force, uniting its forces with the world’s forces, producing a new stream of becoming.

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.

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 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