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How does one express the un-expressible? As it is said in the Tao, "To speak of the Tao is not the Tao." When I look back at what has informed my art, I see that it has been a very interesting journey. Sometimes a clear influence is my work as a trainer leading men's workshops on emotional intelligence, within the framework of what Joesph Campbell would call the Hero's Journey. Other times, I'm surely influenced by my previous work with the Monroe Institute, a research facility devoted to the better understanding of consciousness and its nature. My Zen practice quiets my mind and makes this human experience a conduit, a hollow bone for these visual experiences to manifest through me. I also experience the "awareness of the Witness" through the process of creating these expressions of art. Most importantly, I am aware of the integration of all of these experiences and thus, how the art seems to resonate on different planes or levels of consciousness. It occurs to me that the greatest value is the process itself, and how it presents to me a vehicle to BE fully in the present with it. Ever since I read the book Siddhartha at the age of 17, I have had a thirst for cracking this Cosmic Egg, understanding non-ordinary states of consciousness and broadening my identity beyond EGO attachment. My art is part of that awakening for me and the shift into a broader way of BEING. "I offer the art as a window into both the natural and mystical world, inspiring the viewer to the possibilities of the seen and unseen realm of consciousness. The diversity of my work reflects the beauty of life from which I draw inspiration."
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Tony Schanuel - Virtually So
In 1967 French avant-garde artist Guy DeBord published The Society of the Spectacle, a book that has been widely influential as a critique of late capitalism and its shaping of everyday life. His theoretical view, in integral terms, is that the economic system and its technologies (LR) condition unconscious forms and textures of perception and thought (UL). Life is said to have become "spectacular." Experiences parade by like a series of images devoid of depths, sliding surfaces that nonetheless glisten and shine, crystallized in ubiquitous cultural products and activities as the pervasive aesthetic of our time. This surface sheen, alluring and entrancing, is beauty gone sick—beauty so dissociated from the true and the good that glossy surfaces signify not much more than their own seductiveness. Corey deVos, editor in chief of this website, has written a series of blogs on mass culture1 that can be said to show how this postmodern aesthetic is not a curse but an opportunity, serving as the vehicle home to the True Self. Sick Beauty, in its feverous intensity, becomes the way of Great Health. Tony Schanuel's digital art enacts such a way. Reflecting surfaces, digital-mechanical repetitions and symmetries, sheens and glows—all features proper to the postmodern look—are constellated well beyond the spectacular aesthetic, offering compelling integral visions of perspective complexity, expansive states, and diverse worlds, retrieving and casting anew our sense of wonderment, awe, and mystery. This is an art that reworks the spectacle's idiom with such brilliance that beauty comes again to clarify what is (True), while pointing to the inherent value of it All (Goodness)—a digital art redemptive of the contemporary shallows. Michael Schwartz
1 Corey deVos—An Ode to Pop: Mysticism Wrapped in Cellophane |
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