COVER OCTOBER ISSUE

DONTS

Levi Hawken

As a child I dreamed of becoming an archeologist. I imagined scouring ancient ruins and fragmentary images of life and death inside dark caves where humans lived thousands of years before me. Encountering Levi Hawken's recent wall work located in a secret tunnel in the Leith, armed only with a torch, instilled me with the same sense of awe I might have experienced had I decided to follow this dream. Having only a small shard of light to guide one across the impressive scale of this untitled mural allows the viewer to have an experience which is truly intimate. Consisting of geometric forms in a muted colour palette, with each line intersecting another, each line presents the viewer with a contradiction as there is no fixed point. Geometric forms are an integral part of Hawken's visual vocabulary, evidenced by his recent Willful damage exhibition at None gallery. Using a monochromatic palette it feels as though it has always been apart of the environment, with some water damage and the subsequent growth of plants impinging on the concrete wall.

In creating the work in this kind of environment, Hawke is subverting traditional modes of display. To get to the mural one must go on an adventure, which includes climbing through bush and down an intimidating pile of rocks. There is a remarkable contrast between depth and surface, as it seems to be engrained with a sense of movement, similar to that of a rollarcoaster. It playfully suggests three dimensionality, yet it retains a two dimensional Modernist formalism. This highlights Hawken's active engagement with Modernist conventions and abstraction. As it reflects aspects of German expressionist Franz Mark and a kinetic embodiment of the theories of Kandinsky. The work is innately autonomous and can also be likened to a tomb, with the sharp lines of a hawk acting as a momento mori for both his late Grandfather and close friend who died earlier this year. In this way the lines appear to me to resemble hieroglyphic symbols moving your eye across the wall like an archeologist studying an ancient inscription.

-Hana Aoake

ECOLOGIES OF THE MIND: The game-changing effects of the evolution of consciousness

The modern world can be difficult to understand. Western culture has been so thoroughly steeped in bullshit that it is now well and truly saturated. We can observe and criticise it until we are blue in the face... but this does not change the fact that we are here in this moment and this is it. This is what we've got to work with. This is the game.

But the game is complex. Not only do we need to attend to our physical requirements for day-to-day survival, but we humans, we 'selves', now exist within an incredibly diverse set of more abstracted ecological circumstances as well. These are the self-referential loops of the human mind, reflected in the ever increasingly schizophrenic behaviors of society at large - the 'collective consciousness'.

Sometimes I feel like the pace of human 'progress', the evolution of this social culture, has outstripped our innate animal abilities to instinctively understand and respond to our environment. To some, the whole situation feels 'unnatural'... as though these modern social constructs are so far removed from what has come before, that it no longer fits in the context of our lives as biological entities. Here is the point that I believe deserves a little bit of contemplation. Sure, society may be more detached now than it has been historically. And it is certainly more complex. A computer is more complicated than a birds nest or a spiders web. But this does not make it unnatural.

Let's take a step back here. For quite a long time, as the earth cooled and the elements began to solidify, stuff existed in a pretty simplistic fashion. There were rocks. There was gas. There was shit spinnin' round itself and round other things in space. Somehow, some molecules began replicating. For a really really long time, simple organisms went about their daily grind of replicating into more organisms to go about the daily grind of replicating into more organisms, and so on... They ate. They replicated. They excreted slimes and gasses. This could well have been the golden age of zen on this planet.

So life kept replicating... with each generation the DNA spread and diversified... it evolved into a vast array of complex organisms that we see before us today. And not only individual organisms, each finely tuned to specific niches and habitats, but also the beautiful arrangements of these lifeforms amongst each other... the glorious symphonies of life we know as ecosystems.

So. All was well and good. Rich forests thrived with life. Turtle eggs hatched on the full moon, birds sang intricate choruses in the dawn mists while seed pods unravelled to release the next iteration of the ever unfolding pattern... incredibly diverse, intricate and complex levels of interaction can be found in every nook and cranny the world over. It's total shit-your-pants-amazing kind of stuff, really. And yet amongst this complexity and chaos there exists a sense of calm, a sense of belonging, a sense that each thing has its place within the greater whole. But reflecting upon ourselves, this is not a feeling that many humans have about their own lives within this present context. There is 'nature', and then there is 'us'.

If only we could accept that our situation as humans, although sometimes nonsensical, and certainly more complex than the life of the crane bird pecking shellfish in the estuary on the receding tide, is no less 'natural' than anything else. We are a part of the unfolding of the universe, a process that has been going on since the big bang or before. The only difference with us is that the evolution of consciousness was pretty much a game changer - it allowed for a whole extra set of ecologies - mental ecologies - to develop. These new ecologies are no longer so rigidly bound by physical constraints, and as such they can change and respond much more quickly than anything we've seen before. But it's not unnatural. Nothing is unnatural.

We are as equipped to deal with these abstract ecologies of the mind as the moss is equipped to deal with rocks and mist. We have evolved alongside consciousness and its side effects for millennia. Somewhere along the line it seems that western culture lost its grip on an integrated perspective of the world. Overwhelmed by this new found complexity, we threw instinct out the window in favor of rigid and logical analysis. This is but an illusion. A trick we played on ourselves to make life difficult. Perhaps it is time that we again allowed our creative intuitions to bubble to the surface... That we accept and exist within these uniquely human ecologies of the mind. You are a mental organism. And this is the game.

-Bart Acres