Justified and the Ancient: The War Against Sleep
The Struggle of the Magicians project deals with various
issues concerning the ideas, personality, environment and audience that
surround the mystical thinker and orator, G.I. Gurdjieff (1877-1949). This project
is not neccessarily an indictment or a celebration of Gurdjieff, but moreover a
view into the dynamics of the cult of personality, the plausability of esoteric
knowledge, notions of orientalism, East meets West sensibilities, charismatic
icons, diagrams and mysticism. Gurdjieff can be looked at as a point of
departure in understanding these concepts.
The work uses Gurdjieff as a symbol or an indicator for the
incedence of new age gurus and the search for truth and reality vis-a-vis
Eastern knowledge in early Twentieth Century Europe. Other concerns are the
relationships between mystic teacher and student, the drive for psychic reality
and the making of meaning. Through various formal techniques, mediums, and art
practices, the work seeks to analyze the milieu of Mr. Gurdjieff, the complex
concept of mystical identity, patterning as reference point and metaphor,
spiritual groups and revisionist cultural history as well as notions of
orientalism and the way that is processed in the wesern mind. Pulling from
sundry strands of references, new associations are created either linked or
wholly inconsequential to the subject matter. Either way, the work seeks to be
evocative of a certain era or feeling.
Interview
with Timothy Marvel Hull in Tokion Magazine Fall 2006
institute for the harmonious
development of man, fontainbleu, 1923, graphite on paper
Click Here for Secrets of the
Esoteric
Click
Here for Miraculous Drawings of the Fourth Way
Click Here for The Blue Line
Drawings of the Masks They Wore
Click Here for War Against
Sleep Collages
Click Here for The Esoteric
Tree of Knowledge and Fourth Way History
Click Here for Interview about
This Project