Oracles of Austin Osman Spare

'Alas!' he writes, 'I am morbid,
And have put a purple colour about my brow.
All men scent sating and drinking the
"Joy of the Round Feast," while I am
Melancholy and silent, as though in a
Gloomy wood, astray.
Strange images of myself did I create,
As I gazed into the seeming pit of others,
Losing myself in the thoughtfulness
Of my unreal self, as humanity saw me.
But alas ! on entering to the consciousness
Of my real being to find fostering
ÒThe all-prevailing woman,"
And I strayed with her, into the path direct.
"Hail! the Jewel in the Lotus,"

Austin Osman Spare -age 17

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For, as he himself has said, "Art is that beauty which may be born of anything; but not by a formula of balance and proportion, beauty itself"; and again, "Ugliness is that which the formula does not allow: hence there is never beauty without this ugliness which becomes transmitted by its super-abundance." This is nearer the realisation of the aesthetic values of the "harmony of opposites" or the "union of contrarities," which is the "free belief" of art and conditions of "vital allegory."

Yet again as someone has put it, "every artist who carries furthest his own innermost feelings, and poignantly reveals the intimate impulses of mankind, shocks us as manifest revelations of ourselves." We are affright, as confronted with the scalpel exposed to our disease. For truly are we ever governed by the "complexes" of morality and move continually toward a dream world wherein the ideal balance of mind and matter is stamped with the nature of our evasions. We look to art for mere moments of beauty, modes of escape from reality, achieved by sense of annihilation, which implies too vividly the need for stimulant or sedatives - as Nietzsche puts it, "to make life possible." Yet art has no necessary concern with medicine and morals, though art can be employed in anything, in what are called unholy as more holy means invested with the grace of art - that consumer of antipathies. The "initiate" in this case is he who can accept his grace seasoned with salt. For has not Emerson, in describing the sceptic, acknowledged him, the mystic, who, unafraid to tread the vestibule of the temple, discovers in the Mount of Vision the beautitude is partial and deformed! With such an eye of inward vision did that other philosopher lament:

"I see and have seen worse things; divers things so hideous that I should neither speak of all matters nor even to keep silent about some of them, namely, men who lack everything excepting they have too much of one thing; men who are nothing more than a big eye, a big mouth; or something else big. Reversed cripples I call such men."

"We are such stuff as dreams are made of."
Inadequate expression, conglomeration of half-realised experiences - monsters and mutilated fragments. Mediaeval times more picturesque less squeamish, combined the head of dog and serpent's tail, angels and devils interchange confidence in that grotesquely unsophisticated intermixture of objectivity and subjectivity. Yet whatever the symbols, the function of art remains, the expression of an eternal verity, which, as in the art of Austin Spare, records a disinterested state of mind as the setting free of a disembodied function of the spirit.

Symbology in Aesthetics in Relation to the Art of Austin O. Spare
-Grace Rogers


EARTH: INFERNO

-By Producto Desecho
We are pleased to announce the launch of the long-awaited short film EARTH: INFERNO by Producto Desecho. This is the first film made based upon a work by Spare and we are delighted to make it available in DVD format. With a total running time of 11 minutes, in full colour, the film evokes the strange theatre and sexuality of Spare's first short book. Due to the nudity and sexual references this film has been given a 15 certificate by the British Board of Film Censors.

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