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MANIFESTO OF VISIONARY ART
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(brought on by exhaustion, deprivation, or the rhythmic repitition of prayer or song), hypnotic states, illness, near-death experiences, shamanic vision-quests, meditation (whether with eyes closed or focused upon a sacred image), madness (be it temporarily - due to life's traumas - or permanent), day-dreaming, fantasy, the imagination, inspiration, visitation, revelation, spontaneous visions, psychedelics, reading, and - let us not forget - the metanoic experiences brought on by Visionary art itself.
Since time immemorial, madness has been linked with vision. In the earliest times, the Shaman on his vision-quest had to not only endure privation and isolation, but willingly submit himself to temporary insanity - envisioning his flesh burned away, his bones scattered and buried. Re-emerging once more from this ordeal, he became one of the 'twice-born', now seeing all things 'anew'. Only from this descent into madness came, for him, the acquisition of Vision.
Unfortunately, those touched by madness have been, for most of our history, hunted down like witches, burned like heretics, or more mercifully, locked away in asylums. Only in the 20th century was madness investigated, and subsequently appreciated for its strange image-language. By comparing madness to dreams, Freud found unexpected similarities between the two, particularly in the structure of their imagery. And, by extending this analysis further, Jung found a deeper structural similarity with the images of sacred art and myth.
And it followed, if the myriad imagery of the insane could plunge their minds into madness, could not the parallel imagery of sacred art and myth raise
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them up again to new-found states of clarity? Jung explored this very path in his 'confrontation with the unconscious', finding that the images which
BOSCH: HELL (Detail)
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