Art History 205
Instructor: Jill Bain
Landon Sealey
107070705
Nov 7,2000
Rock Video:
"Thief" by
Our Lady Peace
A Synergistic Analysis*
My intention is to tell
of bodies changed
to different forms.
The heavens and all below them,
Earth and her creatures,
All change,
And we, part of creation,
Also must suffer change.
OVID - "Metamorphoses"
Man has no body distinct from his Soul: for that called Body is a portion of Soul discern'd by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
William Blake
We must assume our existence as broadly as we in any way can; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible in it. This is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us: to have courage for the most strange, the most inexplicable.
Rainer Maria Rilke
*Synergistic refers to a form of structural analysis which treats literature(every form of dialogue)
as a complete system of information and communication similar, in process, to all systems of
information and communication or culture(the sharing & preserving of knowledge) as outlined
by Todd Siler in Breaking the Mind Barrier: the New ArtScience of Neurocosmology. To wit, the
science/art (or mythology) of structure or, let's face it, Tele-Vision - the modern and silent art of
self-reflective consciousness, the art of soul, of culture, of life and myth itself - the common. In
the end, this paper is about "making toast in the morning" or "doing the laundry".
What if we are Water? What if the world is made of flesh and blood? What if all is language? Then there is a musical band called Our Lady Peace. There is a style of music called rock n' roll. And there is a rock video called "Thief" playing on a television station referred to as MuchMusic. There is a University (a school dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge about the universe and all of its inhabitants) that boasts a class on popular culture in which said rock video is presented, and a student is asked to write about he experience of watching this video in terms of "art".
I see the words, "art" and "propriety" as equal, along with words such as "body" and "myth". Human beings need sex, money, love, home, and security. However, propriety (esp. Of Myth) encompasses all of these - is the process by which we each may attain and maintain the satisfaction of these basic and healthy desires in a capitalist democracy.
We are not inviolate beings, and often our only real control over our environment is directly related to how we or someone we trust (eg. A Parent or god or idol or totem) is able to dialogue with the "world". And in this modern age this "person we trust" is less a particular individual and
more our body and our selves or our family - all of which are caught up in socioarchetypal
structures which may or may not be kindred to our most sacred desires. Hence, the only creative
authority we may claim over this seeming chaos of life (our primary realities) is through the
Spirit of Romance. This is to say, our bodies/our souls belong to the processes of earth and sun.
And only if, within the cyclic processes of creation and dissolution there is a pre-existent
fulfilment of the Romantic impulse can one truly be a moral/sentimental being ie value aspects of
life. In other words, the human body (the mythic body or Freudian id/Jungian Unconscious) must
imitate in structure the Romantic fabric of space and time, of light and dimension, the Tao of the
Digital Revolution:
We must conclude that technology and media have had as much or more influence upon modern
man and woman as did the world embodied by the goddess/woman of ancient neolithic.
Therefore, we must treat tech/media with the same regard/disregard as one would treat any man
or woman. Technology is sexy - it effects every aspect of our being and, therefore, in structure,
conveys more information as a psychosexual (and even biological/ecological) phenomena than
does the totality of its content. Therefore, the only way to make use of tech and preserve our
modern sanity/freedom is to alter the way we respond to media and even our perception of it.
This, of course, is the same as saying that we must reinvent the individual.
Midwife, matchmaker,
our grandmother, our grandfather,
Xpiyacoc, Xmucane,
let there be planting, let there be the dawning
of our invocation, our sustenance, our recognition
by the human work, the human design,
the human figure, the human mass.
-The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life
(The one small leaf of divine will the fire didn't find)
Thank you...
This is a psychotropic response or even a psychedelic response as technology's effects reach right
down to our sexuality, making the 21st century body and enjoyment of it as ritualistic and sacred
an art as cave art was to ancient peoples, especially since psychosexual response to
modern/primitive times or the lack thereof has a direct influence on the fate, destiny, morality,
sexuality, and mortality of the planetary culture which worldwide communication/entertainment
makes possible.
-"The Spontaneous Creation of Cultural Artifact",
www.geocities.com/landonsealey
Salman Rushdie, in The Ground Beneath Her Feet, posits (albeit fictionally, yet with uncanny truthfulness) that all myths (Orpheus and Christ specifically) converge on Apollo or the Sun. This would suggest that body and consciousness are metaphorically equal and that we owe all sense of separation to the Spirit of Romance, the Spirit of Tree, the Spirit of Beauty (and esp. Of Humanity). Bruce Springsteen sings that we are "born in the USA". Within this aesthetic paradigm, another way to put it would be to say that we are born in the spirit of Romance and remain forever free to create a dialogue with self and world - our physical and sociopolitical inventions, as created by the archetypal Body, would then remain in the province of this Romantic Spirit and are thus precluded from inhibiting freedom. The only tension between society and self would then be the creative desire to expand our sense of self, and particularly the value of the body in order to create a more conscious dialogue with the world. This, for me, is also the Spirit of Rock n' Roll, lending as always a greater to sense of propriety to one and all even as we resonate more and more with a global culture (collective body or soul).
The use of tragedy in the video, "Thief", can be likened to all literary tragedy in the sense that it connects us to the ground state, the androgynous gender or the archetypal Feminine archetype, the very roots (sexual and spiritual) of personhood - Venus, thus expanding our sense of now across time and space; it engages the viewer in the creative blueprint (the genome) of civilization. This is further enhanced by the slow-motion video and lip sync which slows the visual cognition of rain while maintain a sense of real-time audio.
To conclude, "Thief", through original subject matter (the death of a living soul) as well as innovative editing, expresses the power of all media, from architecture to music, to engage the audience in the most fundamental processes of being - the sacred dialogue between the conscious and the unconscious, where image, body, feeling and metaphor become intermingled. Hence, we associate rain with feeling and perhaps even a city with feeling - we become perhaps the city even as such a conclusion paradoxically enhances individuality without the usual disassociation common to existential leaps of the imagination. The imagination and the world become one. Establishing such a dialogue is what all learning and art is about, the art of ritual. And based on these observations, one may also conclude that both the technology and the content in this case and many others is operating, like the human body itself, as a polity. This is not so unheard of. Greek tragedy, and in particular, Sophocles, operated with much the same structural/aesthetic intelligence. The spirit of Beauty is certainly myriad. And Humanity is certainly infinitely and mysteriously beautiful.