From the Gallery Director

A Conversation with RL Johnson

Forrest: How do you reconcile the Animatic Vision of Universal Oneness with the business of selling art objects?

RL: I see Universal Oneness as the underlying basis of all experiential reality. Awareness of this results in a concern for those aspects of your being, which would include all beings on this planet, which are in pain or suffering. Capitalism in its raw form, as an economic survival-of-the-fittest model and as a philosophy of virulent competition is of course repugnant to me.

I believe the Millennium Art Gallery is part of an emerging economic model, which might be described as Collective Capitalism. In this model buying and selling and profit-making still occurs but surplus capital is consciously directed into cultural processes and community enhancement.

The buying and selling of things, be they computers, food or art is just one of the ways we exchange energy with each other. Ultimately, I believe that the commodification of artifact has little or nothing to do with the process of creating art or the cathartic potential that art objects hold for the viewer.

Our goal is to create positive change on a global scale and to do this we will need the support of many creative people and a great amount of capital resources. Where are these resources to come from? How will we reach out and convince concerned people that our process is sound, that our mission is worthy and that we have the resources, fortitude and courage to follow through with our vision?

One of the primary objectives of the Animatic Art Movement is to help illuminate and manifest what I call the "Age of Creativity". In this coming age individual creativity will become the new coin of the realm. It will be a compassionate economy, not based on scarce resources and the exploitation of each other and nature, but on creativity, the one truly renewable, universal and heretofore unrecognized resource, which makes wealthy all individuals that discover it within themselves.

Forrest: How do you personally deal with this incongruity?

RL: I do not experience any incongruity. When I am making art I am in the creative flow, I experience connection to universal consciousness. When I return to ordinary reality I offer the artifacts created for public viewing and sale. I believe that the images created are important, will contribute to the health and well-being of my community and that my responsibility lies in ensuring that the images are made available for viewing by the greatest number of people possible. My understanding is that reproductions are valid carriers of the artifact's message and that through reproduction the community at large is able to participate and benefit from the artifact's manifestation.

Forrest: This is not to disparage running an art gallery. I think it is nice to be able to support yourself by bringing things of beauty into peoples' lives. Indeed, I wish you success!

RL: Why thank you, Forrest. And I thank you for contributing your support and creativity to our collective purpose. We are living in an age of despair and alienation and we need to get a new message out to the people, through our art. That message is basically, "wake up, you've been having a bad dream; the time has come to open your eyes to the magnificence of your collective being and to join us as we work to enable the Age of Creativity".

Forrest: I believe Hakim Bey put it well in his essay 'Immediatism':

"All experience is mediated - by the mechanisms of sense perception, mentation, language, etc. - and certainly all art consists of some further mediation of experience."

RL: Indeed all sensory experience is old news by the time it reaches your sense organs. And then there is the matter of cognition and the time it takes to register sensory data with the symbols-analysis department in your brain. And, after all this mediation, what do you have but a totally subjective and biased interpretation based on past experience.

It's difficult to see beyond the wall of self, what William Blake referred to as the "mental cage", and join this unified field of consciousness as co-creator of manifest reality, but not impossible. Art objects and processes have the capacity to open a perceptual channel, allowing an individual direct experience of our universal oneness.

(Hakim Bey): "For art, the intervention of Capital always signals a further degree of mediation. To say that art is commodified is to say that a mediation, or standing-in-between, has occurred, and that this between-ness amounts to a split, and this split amounts to alienation."

RL: Art's highest function is to act as mediator, offering a doorway back and a cathartic stimulant between the abstracted identity/viewer and their pre-intellectual cognition. Art objects at their best initiate an end-run around a viewer's reality template and in so doing offer the prospect of epiphany and, at least momentarily, a reconnection to this unified field of consciousness.

I agree that the assigning of monetary value to a work of art can be distracting to both the artist and the viewer, but I do not believe it plays any significant role in enhancing or neutralizing the dynamic interchange or impact of the artifact. The true value of any work of art is in its ability to initiate change and growth in a viewer's spiritual topography and this has nothing to do with its market value.

Return to Columns Index

Return to "What's Inside?"