Mimetic Desire

Late 1980s Russia saw the curious rise of several charismatic television personalities that touted to address the ailments of society via televised weekly episodes of faith healing; some such programmes were presented to the public under the moniker of "psychiatric séances". This phenomenon unfolded at a time of understandable social upheaval as both the country's economy, and, more importantly, its ideological unity was on the brink of collapse. The late Soviet citizen (as well as the early-90s New Russian, for that matter) would suffer from an acute fragmentation of the self, brought upon by ever multiplying narratives of reality and drastic changes in what it meant to lead a life in a society. By the late 1980s, any semblance of faith in the Soviet system had utterly eroded and for many what came to provide if but a minor reprieve from the ensuing chaos were the reassuring magic powers of the psychic; nothing made sense anymore and therefore what was previously absurd had suddenly become plausible. The most preeminent of these personalities was Anatoly Kashpirovsky, who held the rather prestigious access to a weekly prime-time television slot on one of only six publicly available TV channels at the time. Millions tuned in, ready and willing to be entranced and lulled away by the power of the hypnotist. I was five years old - this was shortly before my family left Russia - and I remember my grandmother setting a jar of water by the TV in the evening to be "psychically charged" by Kashpirovsky.

In his 1961 Deceit Desire and the Novel, the literary critic Rene Girard notes the structure of desire in multiple works of western literature to be of a "triangular" nature. Meaning, the desiring Subject can only desire an Object through a Mediating Other. One needs the suggestion of a desiring Other in order to desire for oneself. In a captivated crowd this effect is multiplied a thousand-fold, as one is surrounded by a thousand mediators, immensely increasing the power of suggestion working upon the individual subject. Girard goes on to say that "everything is false, theatrical and artificial in desire except an immense hunger for the sacred." This sacred, many 19th century novelists have observed, is now acutely missing from modern life. These principals hold true to the individuals that flocked to Kashpirovsky's "séances". Beguiled by the magnetic power of the crowd, the individual could attain a temporary unity of self by way of merging with "the hive". This illusion of unity acted like a kind of drug to remedy the sense of fragmentation otherwise experienced by the self in the outside world. The microcosm of the self was temporarily allowed to be subsumed by the macrocosm of the crowd.

The late 19th century sociologist Gustave Le Bon writes in his seminal work on crowd psychology (The Crowd, 1895) that "crowds [by nature] are credulous and readily influenced by suggestion... The individual is no longer himself but an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his own free will." Both Le Bon and Girard speak of a process they call contagion. Girard points out the contagious nature of metaphysical desire, while Le Bon speaks of the hypnotic contagion through which a crowd is lulled by an "operator" (speaker). When you are in a crowd, Girard tells us, you become literally possessed by that crowd.

The present body work is deeply indebted to Rene Girard's theory of mimetic desire. The West today might not be at quite as dire a breaking point as the Soviet Union was in its final days, but the speed with which competing narratives of "truth" disseminate through social media, proliferating via an endless barrage of internet memes, give birth to a reality not far removed from the days when my grandmother would set a jug of water by the TV to be "charged" by Kashpirovsky for "healing" purposes. The modern era in general, and the contemporary moment in particular, are marked by an ever-increasing fragmentation of the self with its multiplying views of truth, which grow exponentially more fractured. This is how we get fringe movements like QAnon, driven by the mass hysteria of the terminally-online, to lead a certain fraction of the population into a frenzied uprising on the US Capitol. The events of Jan 2021 in the US had all the hallmarks of Le Bon's frenzied mob, with its "hypnotist" in charge, and Girard's mimetic desire multiplying, misdirected (as it always is) towards a fake sort of sublime.

This, in turn, is what germinated the present group of paintings. Initially, the events at the Capitol led me back to thinking about Kashpirovsky's séance sessions and I started painting from various video stills - both old and new (surprisingly, Kashpirovsky still makes public appearances and quite a few of his newer "performances" can be easily found online.) But the subject matter soon extended to other configurations of crowds, unrelated to the Soviet Union, such as dancers at a gay club in Toronto, a political rally, and American space launch attendees - all transfixed by an external object of meditation (outside the picture frame) to which they a assign spiritual significance. As Girard observed, desire is a process of transfiguration. The object of desire here might interchangeably be a political leader, a faith healer, or a rocket to the stars, but it is always a placeholder for a greater spiritual yearning, a fleeting remedy for our ontological ailment and an attempt to unify the fragmented self by way of a self-negation. Importantly, the work was not borne out of a political critique, but rather a genuine fascination with how such instances arise. For as Le Bon points out "a crowd is as easily heroic as it is criminal." In these images I'm trying to tap into moments of fleeting metaphysical yearning to erase the self in service of temporal unity with a crowd. These paintings wish to speak of pseudo-religious ecstasies and the self's unquenchable desire for wholeness.

Girard, Rene, Deceit, Desire and the Novel, Self and Other in Literary Structure, John Hopkins University Press, 1961.

Le Bon, Gustave, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Dover Publications INC, 2001.