No longer just a strategy for art-making
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I've been caught up with doing some fascinating research on the Human Rights Commissions, which I've been blogging about at Our Changing Landscape for the past several weeks.
This has taken my time away from Camera Lucida, and some themes I have been following recently, one of which is filmmaker Bruce Elder's latest book on modern artists and the occult.
Invariably this led me to W. B. Yeats and the occult. But I found Yeats' use of the occult far less harmful than Elder's. In fact, I think Elder uses his art to describe and pay homage to the occult, rather than use the occult to help him find a strategy to make art, which is how Yeats used it.
I will write more on this later, but I'm getting more and more convinced that much of art these days is a substitute, and even a re-creation, of religion and spirituality, and Elder's work seems to illustrate that.
