Overview
The advent of Picasso’s 1907 painting titled Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and his collaboration with Georges Braque in the development of Cubism were pivotal events in the scrapping of the traditional Western visual arts canon.
These radical turning points in our recent visual art history coincided with the larger cultural forces on the move over the course of the 20th century. During the 1960s this movement came to be referred to as Postmodernism which said in part that all cultural constructs are subject to interpretation – they need not be accepted as a given.
Since then, everything from the trivial, to the unlovely, to the lofty in our deconstructed inventory of cultural expressions has been accorded equal status in a state of undifferentiated flux. That is to say, not yet realigned into cultural structures that would form the matrix of a new, comprehensive 21st century integral worldview. Following the 20th century collapse of traditional values, our cultural mode of operation has been transitional – toward what end we wonder?
We shade our eyes as we look toward a brightening horizon in anticipation of the next step beyond the postmodern deconstruction of former cultural conventions.
And now, in an innate impulse to assist in a new birth out of the ashes of the old, we arrive at the threshold of an emerging world vision. We begin to see the outline of an integral configuration of body, mind, and spirit that is evolving beyond the confines of our outworn perceptions. From a renewed center on old ground we look to the four cardinal directions and to the above and to the below. We are keen to find our bearings in a new alignment between ourselves and our long history, planet earth, and the cosmos.
In a fundamental transformation, the emerging forces signalling a new synthesis embracing all of us on planet earth have yet to be recognized by most of us. The quest for the symbols of integration going forward can only lead to a review in depth of everything within us that constitutes the potential to formulate answers, appropriate to our time, to the perennial questions: Who am I? Where did I come from? Where am I going?
