Just Beneath the Surface
The Boston Globe reviews the work of conceptual artist Cameron Jamie, during a retrospective show at the MIT List Visual Arts Center. Arts critic Ken Johnson, who was once greatly skeptical of Jamie’s vision, now feels he understands the underlying message of his work.
“What you have to realize about all this is that none of it is to be taken at face value as traditional art. It only starts to make sense if you think of Jamie as a sort of amateur anthropologist-philosopher who studies the persistence of myth and ritual in modern society … From Jamie’s perspective, paganism in many different forms continually percolates just below the supposedly rational surface of modern society … If there is a lesson to be drawn from Jamie’s art, it would be that however rational and commonsensical we think we are, we are all subject to the power of archetypal images, irrational fantasies, and mythic narratives, often when we are least aware of it.”
One of Cameron’s works singled out in the article is his collaboration with Mike Kelley for a series of photos called “Gothic”. The photos document young people in the goth subculture, and according to Johnson, they show how ’shared fantasies create alternative worlds’. But then the links between “paganism” and the goth subculture (among others) no longer “percolate” beneath the surface, so much as they harmoniously co-exist alongside it. Our society’s “paganism” has been leaving the realms of the subconscious and entering the literal for decades now. Which if anything makes Jamie perceptive of a growing trend (one that several artists are picking up on) instead of a pioneer of our subconscious desires.
Johnson does bring up an interesting larger theory, that our shared pagan past has never left us, and was always waiting to come back to the surface. I agree with scholars who believe that polytheism is the natural state of human society, no matter how far we run from such a reality. It only stands to reason that artists would be sensitive to this impulse and desire to portray it in their works.
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