Modern Art as Paranormal Experience
I was struck by something John Tenney said in a recent episode of What's Up, Weirdo – that the prefix para means beside or next to. So, the paranormal is just that: what is "next to" normal.
I had also just finished Tobias Wayland's Strange Tales of the Impossible, and one of the themes running through the book was how we don't know how to interface with or interpret the paranormal.
“Normal” is mainly a function of the degree of exposure to something. Of course, for most people, UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts, and more mysterious phenomena like the Mothman are not common – not normal.
While many people believe in these things, the average person doesn't encounter them often, certainly not in daily life. The para-normal becomes such because it's not familiar to us in the way our local weather and wildlife are, for example.
Having given these thoughts a chance to percolate in my head, I realized that viewing modern and contemporary art is essentially a paranormal experience for most people.
The baseline of art and experience
The "normal" – or common – conception of art is that it depicts recognizable things that conform to our shared understanding and do so with a degree of realism. When art doesn't conform to a recognizable approach, the audience must attempt to interpret it, applying the lexicon of commonly used symbols to make sense of what they're seeing.
The same thing applies to paranormal experiences. When witnesses report sightings of phenomena such as ghosts and UFOs, they use the framework of normality to define the encounter.
Limitations of modern investigative tools
In my time reading about the paranormal (and this is a bit of everything – UFOs, ghosts, bigfoot, etc.) the field investigator’s capabilities very quickly plateau.
We have evidence like EVPs, EMF readings, tree knocks, and mysterious structures in the woods – but we're limited to documenting them.
The investigators are typically operating from clear starting points:
They know exactly what's happening and are documenting it to prove the hypothesis.
They don’t know what’s happening, but through documenting it will eventually uncover an answer or prove the existence of the phenomenon in question through the weight of evidence.
I also think we're frequently investigating tools whose function we don't understand whether that be an EMF meter or our own minds.
Unfortunately, we're not advancing our knowledge or understanding much through these activities. There's a fundamental stasis to paranormal investigation. Very little that comes from these widely accepted practices advances our understanding.
Using surreal and abstract art to view the phenomena
Using the lens of art to view the paranormal, I hope for two possible outcomes:
By confronting the unknown in art, we put ourselves in a position where insight and intuition lead to creative breakthroughs and/or a greater understanding.
We develop an emotional, intuitive relationship of our own with these phenomena and our encounters with them can be catalysts for ultimately positive personal transformation.
In this context, we'll focus on surrealism and abstract art.
Surrealism
For most viewers modern art is para-art. It exists “next to” the commonly accepted concept of art.
Surrealism, as a movement, hoped to unite the reality of our rational minds and the perception of reality within the world of dreams into a super-reality.
I liken paranormal experience specifically to surrealism (originally termed supernaturalism1) because it doesn't conform to the logic of the conscious world – even though it intrudes into it – but rather to the logic of dreams.
Can we discover a better way to interface with and understand the paranormal using the surrealist framework of synthesis between the rational and irrational? Synthesis of the rational and irrational does offer possibilities.
Abstract art
Abstraction is not a storytelling device.
Its use in art is to promote involvement with the work through imagination and emotion. Abstract art provides an emotional and intangible experience to the viewer – one that is unique to their perspective.
Cases of high strangeness approach abstraction. Can we gain greater insight into looking at these experiences as an individual, emotional experiences?
For example, if we consider the primary psi hypothesis of Dr. Scott Rogo, interpreting phenomena in this manner seems useful and relevant.
Modern art and the phenomena
By framing modern art as a lens to view the paranormal, we can develop a relationship with the tools of processing, feeling, and understanding the unknown, how we interpret everything from visual input to our emotions, and hopefully change our relationship with the unknown itself.
When we confront high strangeness, the supernatural, and the paranormal, reality is not behaving as we know it. Our understanding of it becomes limited or dead ends because we're confronting it with the tools of rationality, which may not fit.
However, we can train ourselves by looking at surreal and abstract art. It's non-logical, non-rational, and based on emotion, intuition, and imagination.
The key to understanding art is looking with intentionality – moving past knowing through perception alone and to knowing as an act of consciousness. The key to understanding surrealism and abstraction lies in understanding how the subjective part of our emotional and imaginative experience leads us to the objective meaning of the "logic" of non-rational states like dreams.
This is where I hope the analogy to the paranormal experience is clear and we can use our newfound perspective as a lens for viewing and hopefully understanding the paranormal experience.
I generally don't feel like much progress gets made or that we learn things of any real value that advance our understanding of what we're investigating. I think things can make leaps forward, but these quickly become the new conventional model which explains everything and that becomes the norm until the next jolt forward. We very quickly seem to reach our limits, even while the phenomena persist in occurring.
1 The word 'surrealism' was first coined in March 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire. He wrote in a letter to Paul Dermée: "All things considered, I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism, which I first used"
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