Art that involves simplification and/or rearrangement of natural objects to meet the needs of Artistic expression.
The sad
truth about descriptive categories like “visionary art” is that they are both
useful and lame. Especially in the art world, the language of genres and styles
often has more to do with galleries and critics than with making and enjoying
art. But reflecting about categories can also be fruitful, because it shapes
the context of our seeing—and more importantly, the way we share and talk about
our seeing. So here is my seed crystal: visionary art is art that resonates
with visionary experiences, those undeniably powerful eruptions of numinous and
multidimensional perception that suggest other orders of reality. Certain
individuals have a predilection for visionary experiences, but these luminous
glimpses bless us all at some point in our lives—sometimes through
intentionally induced trance states or psychoactive raptures, and sometimes
through the gratuitous grace of deep dreams or the demented funhouse of a
quasi-schizophrenic break. But we also understand and experience visionary
experience through visionary culture, those artifacts of human culture with its
eyes agog.
From the
perspective of the mainstream art system, however, visionary art could be seen
as an attempt to broaden and extend the notion of the outsider artist—those
creative madmen, religious eccentrics, and poor folk considered to be outside
the boundaries of conventional art history. The American Visionary Art Museum
in Baltimore, for example, describes its collection as “art produced by
self-taught individuals, usually without formal training, whose works arise from
an innate personal vision that revels foremost in the creative act itself.”
That’s all fine and well, and the museum is cool, but this definition is pretty
lacking. By insisting that visionary artists are self-taught, the AVAM implies
that visionary art is not found inside the schools, movements, or lineages that
compose the dominant flows of art history. It becomes a purely idiosyncratic
affair, reduced to the solitary, obsessive individual, a Simon Rodia or a
Howard Finster. But many visionary artists—by my definition—are and have been
formally educated. More importantly, many visionary artists self-consciously
locate their work within a lineage of inspired image-makers that stretches back
through generations of Surrealist dreamers, mystic minimalists, and medieval
icon painters. Abstract art, the most exalted and intellectualized gesture of
the modernist avant-garde, actually emerged from a lotus pond of theosophy,
spiritualism, and occult meditation practices.
The
historical lineage of visionary artists masks a deeper and more commanding
claim that sets the genre apart from the marvelous idiosyncrasies of outsider
art. The claim is that the visionary artist gives personal expression to a trans personal dimension, a cosmic plane that uncovers the nature that lies
beyond naturalism, and that reveals, not an individual imagination, but an imaginably world, a mundus imaginably is. Far from being outside, this world lies
within. Henry Corbin, the brilliant twentieth century scholar of Sufism, coined
the term mundus imaginalis to describe the 'alam al-mithal, the visionary realm
where prophetic experience is said to literally take place. It is a realm of
the imagination, but a true imagination that has a claim on reality because it
mediates between the sensual world and the higher abstract realms of angelic or 
cosmic intelligence The mundus imaginary is a place of encounter and
transformation. “Is it possible to see without being in the place where one
sees?” asks Corbin, throwing down the gambit of visionary experience.
“Theophanic visions, mental visions, ecstatic visions in a state or dream or of
waking are in themselves penetrations into the world they see.”
From the
perspective of planetary culture, we might broaden Corbin’s definition to
include the visionary domains that are associated with cultural traditions and
holy paths throughout (and perhaps beyond) human history. The worlds visited by
the shaman, the seer, the sibyl, and the prophet are all outposts of the mundus imaginary But this imaginable world is also produced through the labor of
traditional sacred artists, who have incarnated these visions in the mythic
maps, sacred geometries, and iconography of tribes and cultures the world
over. When contemporary visionary artists appropriate and sample aspects of
these different cultural traditions, these different domains begin to appear,
for all their differences, as a single space of the trans personal imagination,
an immense vibrating network of sacred zones and forms. That’s how the mundus imaginaries
grow truly global.
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