Art and the other: concealing and revealing the ineffable

Despite the somewhat clichéd image, of the suffering, solitary artist, isolated from society, the creative act does not occur independently: it requires the Other. Art is entangled with mediation and communication, and by extension, with community and communion. The artist is often seen as a facilitator of creative synergies, producing new combinations of thought and practice by deconstructing, transforming (or subverting) and reconstructing existing materials through their own unique filter, and through the creation’s unique expression. Creativity, in this sense, is collaborative and interdependent. However, even if the artist is truly hermetically detached from the socio-cultural interplay of their external world, their creativity is still dependent on experiences of, or encounters with, otherness in their interior landscape. Whether such encounters and experiences involve actual entities or dissociated fragments of the psyche, the processes remain the same; such experiences provide a mechanism through which “consciousness not yet become culture” can be made manifest. This paper considers how just such a culturally relative phenomenological experience of ineffable otherness is a point of convergence for both the artist and the mystic