Chris Bishop 
photo by Chris Bishop 
image by Anne Bean | It was meant to Be (1978) |
|
I have had a fascination with hypnotism since childhood when I saw a family friend hypnotised on stage and act completely out of character. It made me very aware of the fragility of control and the power of manipulation as well question what it is that forms and solidifies character. I have used hypnosis and hypno-regression in several works as an accessing tool (see Anxtions). In 1979 I experimented with hypnotic techniques with the artist Peter Davey for the Hayward Annual 1979. In 1982, I went to a hypno-regressionist and recorded the session on a cassette player. A labyrinthine story emerged beginning with myself as a girl during the First World War wearing a gas mark and feeling suffocated. I played the recording of the session during a performance It was meant to Be at Centre Charles Peguy, whilst I covered my head with latex making it very hard to breath and projected images of my crying face onto the rubber. My suffocated strangled sounds and breath interspersed with the dream-like quality of my voice. I also went to a hypnotherapist to recall a UFO experience. This recording was used in a work at the ICA in 1997, An Angel Called Gravity, in which the entire audience was led from the theatre to St James's Park to re-create the UFO with lit up helium balloons. This interest in hypnosis was one of many paths I investigated in the early 70s in the spirit of adventuring through one’s inner landscape. My own upbringing in Zambia and contact with local people profoundly opened a sense of wonder and potency not found in the desperate post-war Western rationality clung onto in the white community. With the artist Chris Millar, I attended various Eastern meditations and the intense experience of the latihan of the Subud organisation; during the latihan they may be moved to walk about, or dance, to cry, to laugh… One can never predict how a latihan will evolve as the process comes from deep within a person - beyond the ordinary understanding and beyond anything that can be predicted using the heart or mind. We also explored Scientology, Werner Erhard’s seminars and Gurdjieff’s teachings all of which analysed the human predicament to show how we are conditioned from earliest childhood and the ensuing chaotic pattern of contradiction. Gurdjieff calls this the terror of the situation and Erhardt speaks of Zen Buddhism creating space whilst William Burroughs speaks of scientology as considerable emancipation from crippling automatic reactions. With the artist Brian Routh I attended spiritualist churches and discussed Taoism, excited by the the fact that contradictory forces are totally reconcilable as Tao is often considered to be the source of both existence and non-existence and the void or nothingness actually has infinite potential (unask the question). Also in the air at the time was Aleister Crowley’s mystical philosophy known as Thelema, reviving the term magick and stating Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. |
|
|
|
|
|
|