Oracle at Sea Level
Future perfect ☲ 離
Sigismund's Chapel or Kaplica Zygmuntowska. The Royal Chapel of the Wawel Cathedral in Kraków. A funerary chapel for the last members of the Jagiellonian Dynasty. Personal Collection.
Atropos, of the Three Fates in Greek mythology, cutting the thread of life
Hannah Stewart, The Atropos Key. Hermann Park, Houston, 1972
I use this site to develop ideas and work in public. An essay I’m putting together concerns the prophetic device in art, and the larger fixation on futures or futurist branding. This, obviously, is distinct from the futurism art movement, which is an ideological no-no. These are my notes.
Updated Here is a preview. Feel free to add comments to it directly!
The future, or futures, is the current elixir of gravitas the art world craves. Thats fine enough but any audience can develop an immunity to this if the actual thought behind the thing is hollow, or if the elixir is slurried by the near identical future forward branding and marketing used by corporations. The overlap neutralizes the rarity that the capital A art world I think needs to preserve for valuation.
Interpreting art world fashions is not my interest. Cosmology, or a cosmic sense of being, is the genealogy that might be worth looking at here. Cosmology is many things, and I’m no expert, but I do appreciate civilizations-long attempts to locate humanity in the universal system.
To be generous toward these themes I thought about personal encounters with the oracular in culture and architecture. Surprisingly I have a lot to draw on, starting with visits to sacred spaces in India and Sri Lanka.
Visiting Konark Sun Temple, the 13th-century temple near Puri, India, dedicated to the Hindu Sun God Surya comes to mind; the wheel of time or time as a flat circle is the popular Western caricature of some of the iconography and reliefs.
The name Konark derives from the combination of the Sanskrit words koṇa (corner or angle) and arka (sun) which maybe most interesting to astrologers.
It certainly was interesting to me, being a kid in India, as the name Kendra similarly refers to the angles of the twelve houses in Vedic astrology. (Kendra means center and relates to Vishnu. The number of planets in the Kendra houses determines how fortunate your fate will be, the more the merrier.)
More on the grip of astrology in a minute.
Comparisons of cultural concepts of time are a separate, and immense, topic. But Konark is a decent prompt to thinking about time as cycles of emergence and destruction, or the contrast between fate and free-will.
Like philosophy generally, this sort of knowledge is useless, until you know how to apply it. The images I’m collecting are material expressions —applications if you will. Form is the vessel, the idea contained within, and all that.
The temple, or worship and ritual space, where one worships one's ancestors can be taken as the perfect gestalt of The Future if the future is eternity, as well as all human work toward perfection.
Sculpture, more than a perceptual or spacial art, might be a vector or even substitute for the altar and sacred space. Sculpture aspires to be totem.
The temple exists outside of time, and works as a karmic repository of all previous incarnations and incantations; both completed and in progress.
James DeKorne writing about the I Ching points out that the “the family temple was regarded in China as symbolic of an ideal standard of perfection.”
Diplomatic negotiations were carried on in the ancestral temple, in the veritable presence, it was believed, of the ancestors; diplomatic banquets were given there, also. Even a proposal of marriage was received by the father of the prospective bride in his ancestral temple, in the presence of the spirits ... The world of Confucius, we must remember, was one in which there was a nearly complete breakdown of moral standards ... Only in the performance of religious ceremonies could there still be found, consistently, a type of conduct regulated by a socially accepted norm of behavior, in which men's actions were motivated by a pattern of cooperative action, rather than swayed by the greed and passions of the moment.
—H.G. Creel in Confucius and the Chinese WayThe I Ching or Yijing (易經) usually translated as Book of Changes is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest in the world. The basic unit of the predictive oracle is the hexagram (卦 guà), a figure composed of six stacked horizontal lines. Each line is either broken or unbroken. After a divination ritual using what was traditionally a turtle shell, the resulting lines would contain one of 64 possible hexagrams, corresponding to a statement about future change.
I’ve long noticed what I think is an I Ching hexagram on one of my drawings thought to be H.G. Glyde, which would make the most sense if it was jotted by one of his students in the 1960s or 1970s, when the beats and hippies rediscovered the I Ching.
More recently I noticed the trigram for Li 離 (☲) in a Hannah Stewart print in a private residence. Li means "to cling to something," and also "brightness”; Li stands for nature in its radiance and as an image, it is fire.
The glyphs were Stewart's personal visual language, said Sally Reynolds, a Houston art consultant who often shared tea and cookies with the artist. They talked about her art but never discussed the symbols. They meant something specific to her, but she left that up to the viewer to interpret.
—Link(The symbols weren’t discussed between the art consultant and the artist… and I believe in the interpretive veil necessary for artistry, but I wonder, did anyone ever ask?)
An esoteric scribble makes sense for Hannah Stewart, creator of The Atropos Key sculpture in Hermann Park, Houston, erected in 1972. Atropos is one of the Three Fates in Greek mythology, or the personifications of destiny. Three sisters were Clotho (the spinner), Lachesis (the allotter), and Atropos (the inevitable, a metaphor for death). I’ve heard it said Atropos could never go backward.
The harsh sisters ply their tasks; yet they do not split backwards the threads of life.
–SenecaHow to interpret these decorations? What do they say in the art, or what do they say about the artists themselves?
Agnes Pelton, Ascent (aka Liberation), 1946. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery and Ballroom Marfa. Photo © Fredrik Nilsen.
Detail showing what I think is an I Ching hexagram on a drawing thought to be by Henry George (H.G.) Glyde. Personal Collection.
'The Three Fates', engraving published by Deshayes in Paris, France, about 1700
In 2016 I travelled from El Paso to Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York to organize borrowing paintings by modernist painter Agnes Pelton, called a Desert Transcendentalist by the Whitney Museum, for After Effect at Ballroom Marfa. The exhibition looked at historical paintings and film from the 1930s and 1940s, alongside contemporary artists, and was, I felt, sublime.
Pelton was very into astrology.
Transcendental and cosmic interpretations (of spacetime and fate) can be exactly that. Higher octaves of beauty and love and God. It could be that these artists were attempting entry or to “catch wind.”
Less generously, the idea of fortune telling emerges.
Pelton, I would learn, relied on astrology to predict her fate engaging in the most mundane things and daily decision making. Along those lines we can look at Stewart consulting the I Ching as particularly deep, cosmically courageous, and drawing from heaven. Or, more naively, collaging symbols that just looked cool using references that were hip in the moment.
Reliance on astrology and I Ching admit resignation to a pre-determined fate or at least an admission that there could even be an accurate foreshadowing of the outcome of a juncture (scenario). Quite different from foresight techniques where you might model what future is possible, plausible, projected, preposterous, and so forth. Astrology, as Sri Lankan writer Yudhanjaya Wijeratne jokes is a budget surveillance system.
Magic oracles
Returning to the corporate marketing of future prediction and verity that I mentioned above. It’s obvious we are engaging with these topics daily.
OpenAI just launched o1 (codenamed Strawberry) described by CEO Sam Altman as flawed but promising it would deliver more accurate results when performing the kinds of activities where there is a definitive right answer.
This is revealing —either man or machine would have to predetermine if the question can have a right answer.
When presented with a question, o1 breaks it down into individual steps that would lead to a correct answer, hopefully, in a process called Chain of Thought. It’s not hard to notice how this high-tech stepped process gels with the archaic stepped process of layering an I Ching hexagram. Sure I am skating on fine information technology ice, but if you were to draw o1’s logic on a napkin it wouldn’t look unlike assembling line upon line.
The gentler point is that humans have wanted a question and answer relationship with divination and forecasting tools for as long as we’ve been around.
Revisions in the coming days. I work out ideas by writing.
I'll leave it with this for now: all of the systems I just described, whether subscribing to fate or simulation or neither, ancient or modern, temple or drawing, are human inventions.
