Perception in art, society and native belief (Mar 24, 2006)
By Tim Hazell 


"Be indulgent when you compare us To those who were ordered perfection We who seek adventure in all places" 
-Guillaume Apollinaire

Some researchers in the West have stated that in order to understand terra and environmental relationships we must see, identify and comprehend internal phenomena. Taoist sages spoke of the inner eye as a seat of primary energy and its flow as being the antecedent to the nervous system in the developing fetus.

Looking within to find essence, source and heart are traditional Eastern techniques for creative understanding and self-becoming. Concepts of elements in balance link vision, birth and the releasing of life-force to the realities of space. Primary energy flow is also referred to as the Small Heavenly Cycle and Microcosmic Circulation.

Origins of cognition and the impact of visualization on settlements and cultures have deep roots, concurrent with the evolution of the first woodland hunter-gatherers. Early hominids struggled and survived on Africa's harsh savannas alongside powerful carnivore-predators. Developments of expanded social and foraging intelligence led to interpretations of seeing through primitive symbolic behavior. A growing vocabulary of mime, dance, and mimetic rituals in primary communities coincided with modulated vocalization that might have provided the basis for myths, legends and a nascent religious system. Visualizations of spirit power were produced as radiating strokes, arcs and crosshatchings on materials such as vertebrae, ivory and quartzite, and as petroglyphs, drawn with mineral pigments on rock facings of sacred caves and gathering places.

Arrangements of motifs such as profiles of shamans and hunted carnivores and herbivores may have constituted the first human sign systems. With these powerful codes for conveying social, economic and moral information, speakers for their communities were capable of expressing the transition between worlds and beliefs in supernatural beings. Visions of spirit power, the female figure as giver and potential taker of life, as well as life after death, formed the basis for shamanic mortuary rites, healing and ritual. In ancient America's spoken and written literature of magic and occultism, nature's kingdoms and our relationships with the earth as one living ecosystem were defined through metaphors of sight and imaging. 

Representations of the female figure as progenitor, giver and possible taker of life have appeared at major sites of human habitation in the Americas, Kenya, Israel, the Near East and Europe. Their function was encoded in sophisticated meaning systems. Flint implements from ancient Mexico reflect an awareness of aesthetics, mirror symmetry and balance.

Flake arrowheads and tools discovered in great numbers at settlement locations and-plus tone implements used for butchery, woodworking and hide preparation-were found in close proximity to others that showed no signs of wear at all. The latter may have formed part of a symbolic artifact system for cults centering on renewal and regeneration.

References to vision in native societies are often complex and difficult to interpret, being inseparable from ritual and symbolic behavior. These beliefs are still fundamental to understanding animism and totemism among Indian nations of widely disparate traditions today. In other societies as different as alien worlds, parallel references to vision and things unseen surface in unity with native concepts of harmony and balance. 

This plea by surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire touches our most primal sentiments through descriptions of shimmering landscapes, seen from the vantage point of his urbane, sometimes irreverent Paris perspective, art movement and philosophy:



We wish to give you vast and strange domains

Where the mystery of flowers offers itself to all those who wish to pluck it

In those places are new fires, in colors not yet seen

Flames and colors we must make real



French Fauve and decorative painter Henri Matisse wrote about his internalized process of seeing, part of an ongoing body of literature connected with the psyche and perception's role in art and society. Many artists, particularly in movements such as abstraction and expressionism, work away from nature, projecting form onto their retinas. Pure, nonobjective painting involves composing patterns with no references to images as they appear in space. Parallels can be drawn between ways of seeing that are expressive, seeing as a process, and its relationship to the plastic arts. Just as all nuances and grains of spirit are eloquent to some degree, vision and the rendering of line and form with pencil and paint can run the gamut from flurries of action to strong intellectual processes of analysis. 

Flights of imagination, represented by intensity of feeling, can't simply be defined as accident and urgency without direction. When we think of spontaneous abstractions in limitless space, Jackson Pollock can be cited as an artist whose commitment was to explain linear inventiveness and liberate sight from rigid conventions. Freedom from the necessity to interpret realities of nature gave way to innovation and new perceptual experiences, new challenges for vision and imaging without compromise.

Physiological references in cultures of the past and in our own with its technological and industrial base often have religious overtones. When speaking of therapy and human relationships, the word "sacred" still applies. In modern native societies, rhythms of planting and harvest and the reparation and manufacture of ritual objects, tools and musical instruments belong to a world of transient things. Hidden within the complex symbolism of sculpture and painting, invisible forces of rejuvenation abide in an abstract realm of spirit power. 


Tim Hazell is a multidisciplinary artist in the areas of painting, music, theater, education, writing and research, specializing in Latin America. He may be contacted at hazel@unisono.net.mx or at his website, www.timhazell.com