Intuition II
by
Gianni Caravaggio
December 2000

"O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a King of infinite space."
(Hamlet, II,2)

I come my way through the mountains.
Ah! How marvellous!
A violet!
(Bashò)

If intuition as psychic dynamic of the idea is the seed of reality identified in the art-work how can we immagine the nature of its form? Or would it be better to speak about the nature of its organism?

The organism that this seed developes could not be defined in the way reality is seen as a composition of fragments. It negates the cumulative vision of the whole in which partial informations are forming a "teatro mundi": From this point of view it is possible to look at it as a whole but it is impossible to fix somthing particular as essential. In this case the parts, as accumulated informations, has a static and fragmentary presence. These characters are particulary evident in the installations of Jonathan Meese, Thomas Hirschorn and Jason Roads. From the point of veiw of information, that means of accumulation, there is no continuity between the whole and the part.

The vision of intuition defines the part as peculiar and thus as stimulus and origine of the whole and that continuously recreates the whole. Such quality arises from psychic energy of intuition extending itself from the particular to the whole and from the whole back to the particular without iterruption of continuity. Psychic energy throws new light to the image that Jung defined as "collective image" - a "cosmic" character, "that is so to say, the relation between the oniric and fantastic images with cosmic qualities such as: spatial and temporal infinity, enormous rapidity and scope of movement, 'astrological' connections, geological, lunar and solar analogies, substancial changes in the proportion of the body" (1). To the definition of Jung I would add the microbiological/genetic dimension that today becomes part of the extenion of the "collective image" which has become a natural part of the play of our immagination.

So, what kind of nature has this form witout interruption of continuity?
I would compare the form of the art-work to a battery: an organism of memory, a memory of energy. The energy that the art-work memorizes is the creative process that, in difference to the battery, defines its form.
The energy of the art-work developes itself gradually in the creative process of the artist as well as the one of the viewer. The viewer just like the artist sees gradually the flow of her/his immagination in front of her/him.

At this point it is possible to think that the form of the art-work acts the creative process. This action contains itself as form but as movement it has wether a biginning nor an end, it is not dynamic but energetic:

The art-work contains the whole play of the creative process as an energetic form.

(1) Carl G. Jung, Die Beziehung zwischen dem Ich und dem Unbewussten, Rascher, Zuerich, 1928