The Untapped Power of Imagination

Changing consciousness through social processes – this is how one could sum up the approach of social sculpture, as Shelley Sacks does in her “Connecting Practices”. In her work, she asks for a new form of perception, which opens up the entirety of the world to us in a living way.

evolve: In your connective aesthetics and social sculpture practice, art reveals its power in relationship to society and culture. Would you say that art is where the future shows up, where we start to see something that otherwise would stay invisible?

Shelley Sacks:  It’s an interesting question. In all art that goes into the unknown, the invisible, there’s this potential for ‘the future to show up’.  But not all art does this. So it is important to distinguish between art as a process of discovery and art that confirms viewpoints, perspectives and worldviews that reinforce the status quo. In a painting of trees that comforts the viewer with a fixed and idealized preconception of reality, the future is unlikely to show up! Even in social art projects dealing with radical questions – if certain forms and styles predetermine the outcome in particular ways, then there is obviously also little space for the future to show up!  Both the idealized image of the trees and the social art project that has readymade solutions to problems, are comforting if you want to stay with what you already know. On the other hand, art that takes one into the unknown has the power to disrupt our normal view and open up something new. We could say this lets the future show up in us. But this is also misleading. The future doesn't simply show up, especially in social art processes where more than one person is involved. It requires a process of actively entering and inhabiting the unknown, individually and together, so that what is there and waiting to emerge… the ‘not yet’, can show up.

To support this process of emergence, I’ve developed “instruments of consciousness”, not tools.  These instruments of consciousness not only intervene and disrupt, but also take one into another mode of perception described by Joseph Beuys, Paul Klee and archetypal psychologist, James Hillman, as ‘imaginal thinking’. They consist of different elements - objects, processes and guiding persons - that enable individuals and groups to inhabit a question or context in an imaginal mode, to perceive the unfolding potential, and to work together to discover and develop connective responses.

Instruments of Consciousness

‍e: In your answer, you make a particular distinction between a tool and an instrument. When I hear you say “instrument” that sounds more like, for example, a musical instrument. Tools fit more into a scientific framework. Instruments of consciousness, as you describe them, open us up.

ShS: Yes, in the field of social sculpture and connective practice this distinction is very important. Most people are looking for tools. We rightly expect a tool to do a job. Tools are connected to envisaged outcomes. A good tool does what you expect. A good instrument of consciousness allows the unexpected to emerge and evolve. A field of possibilities reveals itself. And everyone involved can participate in this unfolding.

There has been a huge movement for the last 20 to 30 years that is looking for tools! What I’ve called ‘instruments of consciousness’ are arenas and frameworks for enabling for new vision. Their aesthetic, mobilizing strategies enhance the conditions for transformation, including a different mode of perceiving and thinking together, and an open relationship with oneself, each other and the world. Most tools don’t do this. In contrast to tools, instruments of consciousness have a more expanded transformative purpose.  

But there is still always the danger of instrumentalizing the poetic dimension for a pre-envisaged aim and reducing the potential for emergent and enlivened understandings.  Especially, if our interest is in transformative consciousness work, we need to go beyond employing packs of tools. So I create instruments of consciousness where the inner necessity of the future can be perceived. You can probably imagine what happens if people have a set idea of what art is, or of desired outcomes. Participating in connective aesthetic practices – in a process of going into the unknown, of discovery, of deep listening, of disruption - can then be irritating and challenging.

Once an artist-in-residence in a forest, where I’d been invited to develop a connective practice - a forester asked me when I would make some art.  I invited him to use an instrument of consciousness I was developing - a specially designed ‘sling’ to enable an encounter with a tree. He was open, tried it out and was amazed by his experience. Then I pointed to a clump of trees where I was using minimal physical means - tree bands - to make visible a ‘university of the trees’ in which he had just gained new experiential knowledge about his relationship to this forest. “People like me have planted these trees. And cut them down.  We decide”, he said. “But we can walk away from them and our decisions. They cannot”. We talked about how the small tree bands functioned to make him aware of the ‘university of the trees’ that exists for all time, everywhere on the planet. He was intrigued. “I love the forest”, I said. “It is already an artwork and a university. The oldest one there is.  By simple means, we can make this visible, and create workplaces for transformation. I don’t want to add lumps of ego and other stuff. So, I make instruments of consciousness, not ‘objects of attention’.”  Because ‘instruments of consciousness’ take you into the unknown, they put you into a receptive mode. But it is not passive. It is an active receptive mode, in which a new way of perceiving, thinking and responding becomes possible.

In a poetic posture

e: Imagination seems to be the center point of how you work with transformative social processes. Imagination is, of course, very related to a poetic perception of reality. What is the role of the poetic, imaginal perspective in transforming social processes?

ShS: Imagination plays a fundamental role. It is also being distorted and lost in the world. It is easily swamped and sidelined by busyness, tasks, information, everyday pragmatic behavior and many kinds of calculative thinking. For me, imagination is central in the work towards a living future, but not just because we need to imagine a new narrative. It’s a fundamentally different way of thinking and of being in the world. Imagination enables reciprocity through a lived experience of interdependence. In the poetic mode, we can also get down to the habit level. Taken-for-granted positions can be experienced and let go of. This makes space for lived insights into the reciprocity between all life forms and opens up pathways to ecological citizenship.

James Hillman talks about literalness and the poetic mode, and why this poetic mode is so fundamental to living more connected lives on every level, outer and inner. Even in how we make sense of our own experience. If experience is not taken in and relived in our inner space, it just dissipates. No ‘gold’ is made from the raw material of our experience. If we don't take into ourselves what we see, hear, experience, we stay outside of it. Cut off from the world, even though we’re in it. Even our own experience becomes disconnected ‘information’ if we don't inhabit it.

e: Using Hillman’s distinction between the literal and imaginal, I would say that you see different things with a literal and an imaginal mode. There's something that does not show up if you look at things literally. There's something that shows up if you look imaginally. Art and aesthetics show us something that literal perception can't grasp. What is that? What shows up there?

THERE IS STILL ALWAYS THE DANGER OF INSTRUMENTALIZING THE POETIC DIMENSION FOR A PRE-ENVISAGED AIM.

ShS: The imaginal has to do with ‘encountering’. And ‘encountering’ in the contemplative, imaginal mode helps us to come closer to the ‘being’ of things, whether it is a plant, a person, a question, or a complex social or political situation. Because we inhabit it, we can experience something of the spirit of the situation. In the imaginal mode, we're in a different part of our brain. It's really a different modality: a different mode of consciousness that can more easily see interconnections.

New Organs of Perception

e: You also talk about developing new organs of perception. What do you mean by that?

ShS: There's a beautiful sentence by Goethe: “Every object truly seen opens up a new organ of perception in us.” “Truly seen” is not standing outside but going into what we perceive. My ‘Connective Practice Approach’ is inspired by Goethe’s understanding of anschauendes Urteilskraft (intuitive judgement). We take something in, so we can inhabit it, and go back out into the world with new insights. This takes place in the imaginal mode. In the literal mode, we think about things. When we live into what we perceive, there is an intimacy, a familiarity, and closeness, as well as an enlivening experience that can move us, activate something in us.

Developing new organs of perception also has to do with going beyond our recognized five senses. Rudolf Steiner and Joseph Beuys both emphasized 12 senses. These include our internal life senses and our social senses, which are often overlooked, underdeveloped and even damaged by how we think and live. The five senses that we normally focus on ignore the ‘I-Sense’, for example, and its significance as a social sense.  I can only meet the being of another person or life form and respect its integrity if I can experience and meet myself. This gives rise to a new organ of perception: a new capacity for seeing the integrity of the situation, the spirit in a situation. I stand in my self-aware self and meet the world.

Working with the Invisible Materials

e: This social sense was also an interest and approach of your teacher Joseph Beuys. What did you learn from Beuys in this?

ShS: I learned that the outer revolution begins within, in dialogue with oneself and everything around one: that the inner and outer fields are in fact one field.  The way Beuys worked with “the invisible materials of speech, discussion and thought” - and his conviction that “Denken ist bereits Plastik” (“thinking is already plastic”), helped me to understand how the work in the inner field and the shaping of ourselves as individual, self-aware instruments, co-exists with and is integral to becoming conscious co-creators in the social field. Being with him I had a strong experience that he was an organ of perception, and, by implication, that every human being can and should become an organ of perception.  I learned to work with my will, my values, my questions and my thoughts as invisible materials, and to understand why these invisible materials are significant in an expanded social practice. In Beuys works and ideas, I could experience that the common binary oppositions between the inner and outer field, the individual and the social, between thinking and the imaginal were overcome.

But I also was frustrated because I couldn't uncover the principles, strategies and methods that bring people into an imaginal mode that can coexist with the literal. Interestingly this was something Beuys could not explain, although his work embodied it so clearly. Encouraged by him to look for answers through doing, I did just this, until I had developed strategies for sharing this connective practice through teaching and arenas for public engagement where these two modes coexisted.

e: One of Joseph Beuys’s most well-known installations was the “Honey Pump” at the documenta 6 in 1977.  This living art installation lasted for 100 days and you were there for 90 of these hundred days. How was this an important experience for you?

ShS: The Honey Pump was a space where people could come in and out all day long. On entering the space they were confronted by a huge roll of plastic tubing high up on the wall through which honey flowed all day long.  Beuys was there, writing on blackboards and talking, surrounded by people, sometimes huge groups, sitting informally in a half circle.  Visitors would come: listen, watch, interject. There was also a daily program of speakers, grassroots organizations and artist groups from many parts of the world. Some invited, like the Prague Spring. Some like Rudi Dutschke, just appeared. Somebody would present something and Beuys and others would respond. Some of the time, Beuys shared his vision of social sculpture, of unconditional basic income, and of a society beyond state and private capitalism in which the honey of human creativity needed to flow.

Sometimes the physical honey would get stuck in the tubes. Beuys would then leave the middle space of exchanges where the physical and non-physical honey coincided, and go down to lower levels of the space – which was like the engine room of a ship - from which the physical honey was pumped. Even in this space, there was an integration of the imaginal and the literal: three empty pots filled with spiritual substance alongside the machine that pumped the honey. And all day long, every day, Beuys engaged with everyone. Visitors realized this was not only the Honey Pump, but also the Free International University: another instance in which the literal and the poetic were intertwined.  

What took place in Beuys ‘Honey Pump’ highlighted for me how easy it was to slip into argumentation and debate, and how difficult it was to develop dialogue and space for new awareness. When Beuys was speaking and drawing, even if it was about economic processes, he did this in such a way that brought people into the space of the imagination. When Beuys was speaking and drawing, the exchanges were very much like the normal debating and discussion process, which Beuys often got caught up in too.  This aspect of the Honey Pump was disappointing and frustrating.

e: What was the different process that you started from there?

ShS: I started to develop dialogue processes that were rooted in individual experience, in each person’s feelings, questions and perceptions, as well as the concrete issues. By getting people to reenter and inhabit their experience, individually and then together, I saw how it was possible to be in both the information and awareness mode simultaneously, and that more respectful and co-creative dialogue could emerge. It was the beginning of a long journey to lift the aesthetic out of its confines in the world of art and return it to our lives. It took a few decades to develop forms and processes that inspire and enable connective thinking and imaginal practice.

Imagination is a fundamental

e: Now, in this Beuys Year, you will make many connective practice and enquiries labs possible in Kassel. You will create there what you call “the Survival Room” as a way to enable this mode of inquiry.

ShS: Yes, the “Survival Room” is one aspect of the Kassel21/Social Sculpture Lab I’m curating for the documenta archive, the Neue Galerie and the City of Kassel for the Beuys Jubilee. It is near Beuys’ installation “Das Rudel,” which is also about survival.

For 100 days, alongside several online global exchanges about developing ‘New Eyes for the World’ and three Connective Practices taking place throughout the city  - Earth Forum to enable Stadtgestaltung with young people; the evolution of a “Willensfeld” or Feld der Begegnung, in which Kassel citizens create Orte der Begegnung in partnership with a tree; and FRAMETALKS, the process with the deerskin on wheels for exploring the 5 Realities… Nature, Human Being, Love, Freedom and Future - the Survival Room will be like an alchemical lab for working with questions in the imaginal mode: for considering our Menschenbild in relation to Artificial Intelligence, for exploring “Worldviews for One Planet” and above all for thinking together about the future we want.  The Survival Room is also the arena for a special action entitled A Gift for Joseph Beuys: The Substance in the 3 Pots in which people are invited to peer into Beuys’ three materially empty pots and say what ‘substance’ they think Beuys left us that is valuable for the future. This action is “A Gift for Joseph Beuys” because we work to bring our thoughts, perceptions and imaginings into form.

Despite the different themes and actions taking place in and around the Survival Room, they share common questions inspired by Beuys’ statements: “Denken ist Bereits Plastik” and “It is the human soul that needs saving”. They also share an understanding of the aesthetic as everything that enlivens our being, in contrast to the ‘anaesthetic’ or numbness. With this reclaiming of aesthetic, we begin to understand the connection between the aesthetic and responsibility, and responsibility and freedom. Instead of responsibility as a duty or a moral imperative, it arises as an enlivened, emergent response. Reimagined in this way, responsibility is an ability to respond. It is central to the connective practice approach that enables everyone to become an imaginative agent of change.

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