It Was Magic

Greetings, 

Free-thinking, free-conscienced, beautiful people.

Let us look through the mirror of art;

What shall we see?

John Berger, in his book "Ways of Seeing," said: "Your image is your way of seeing."

Is what you see your eyes, your hands, or your creative consciousness?

 Is it your concepts, your desires, or your fears?....

Or is it your image, as Berger wrote?

Which one?

One of them, two of them, 

Or all of them?

Or perhaps a great void?

Or perhaps the artists who were considered magicians at the dawn of history and their magic?

Were those considered the creative subjects in the adventure of thinking about art, designing art, and creating art—stretching from tens of thousands of years ago to the present day—primitive tribal magicians?

 Were they the magicians who draped their own surreal, constructed perceptions of reality over our imaginations like a garment?

Now you might ask, where did this magic and sorcery business come from, and what does it have to do with art?

It has a lot to do with it,

A little patience.

Magic is a construct, just like art.

Picasso, considered the greatest artist in history, said: "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth." In other words, he means that art is a constructed reality.

Close your eyes for a few minutes,

Have paintings, sculptures, ceramics, novels, poems, plays, and films born from creative geniuses never enchanted you? 

Did your souls, as if enchanted, not escape gravity? Did your feet not leave the ground? Did it not liberate you from time and space?

Throughout all historical eras, across all geographies of the earth, the practical examples that emerged as primitive and are considered the first instances of all artistic activity in today's world are actually based on humans' interactions with nature and their desire to intervene in these interactions in their own favor.

 Primitive communities wanted to bring the nature and universe they were born into, lived in, and died in—as well as themselves as the perceiving subject, and in total, all of it—into a meaningful unity and wholeness with their limited experiential knowledge, and they found the solution to this in their imaginations.

These primitive human communities, clinging tightly to their imaginations, attributed the factual reality between events—for instance, natural phenomena that occur according to their own objective laws, such as rain—to an active cause (a supernatural cause) and defined reality within the ways of seeing (interpreting and understanding) of their own belief and cultural basins, that is, in their imaginations.

One of the most beautiful examples of the efforts of human communities considered primitive to interpret, understand, and control the process in their favor (i.e., to enchant) by interacting with everything that happens is the cave wall painting below.

This hunting scene, visualized on one of the walls of the Lascaux cave located in the southwestern region of France, dates back 17,000 years.  

There is a general consensus that this hunting scene, a product of a simple schematic visualization skill dating back thousands of years, was initially produced by talented hands considered to be magicians. If those who made these cave wall paintings were magician-artists, it means there were belief images in their imaginations that motivated them to create such visualizations. Because, as can be seen from the wall painting above, they had no intention of reflecting photographic reality, such as detailed descriptions in human or animal figures or tonal modeling to create a three-dimensional effect. 

It is thought that this hunting scene taking place on the cave wall was intended to create a ritualistic magic effect, with the desire for it to be realized in real life as well. In other words, there is a common belief that the magic created by the hunt on the wall painting would find a response in real life and that the hunters believed they could easily carry out their hunt.

Just like sticking needles into a simple rag doll assumed to represent a person one wishes to harm through magic.

Was the origin of art magic? 

Were our ancestors magicians?

What do you see now in the mirror of art?

The eyes of our magician ancestors?

Then,

For the love of art,

 Continue to enchant and be enchanted....

Until we meet again, goodbye for now; now and always, breathe with art, stay with art.