The same argument the works carry — set down with precision, for readers who want the scaffolding shown.
The theoretical ground beneath the exhibition: Matte Blanco's bi-logic applied to Jung's Red Book cosmology, and extended in the direction Matte Blanco indicated but left unelaborated — the correspondence between the strata of the psyche and Cantor's hierarchy of infinities. From there the paper gives a structural account of what Jung meant by symbol in the strict sense: a finite image recognised as adequate to a region of the symmetric ground that no list of interpretations can complete. The quaternio, the Seven Sermons and the Systema Mundi Totius are read through this frame, alongside the clinical work and all four bodies of the art practice.
Text on requestThe talk that walks the whole argument at a contemplative pace: beginning with a piece of paper and a sequence of straight lines at the Slade, arriving at Matte Blanco, Cantor and Jung's pleroma, and returning to the works — the smoke, the fold, the mandala — as the argument conducted in a different register. Written to be delivered in or beside the exhibition, accessible to a non-specialist audience.
Enquire about the talkThe same ideas, without the scaffolding — four short essays in plain language.
The Ideas