CYCLE TEN

1. If art is the divine art form per se because essentially concerned with space, and therefore being, rather than with time (music), volume (literature), or mass (sculpture), it nonetheless can be spatial or spaced, alpha or omega, as well as a compromise between either of the two divine extremes. If spatial, then we are talking of drawing, the 'Clear Light ...' of art. If spaced, however, we are talking rather more of painting, the 'Holy Spirit ...' of art. While compromises between drawing and painting on the one hand, and (between) painting and drawing on the other, the former essentially a heavily-shaded drawing and the latter a sharply-linear mode of painting, would constitute inner and outer forms of the light and the spirit respectively. However that may be, art is most true to the Divine when spaced (as in painting) and least true or, more correctly, most false to it when spatial (as in drawing), though spatial space is inherently of the negative divine anyway, since its Being is through light rather than air.

2. Now if drawing and painting constitute a 'naturalistic' antithesis, as germane to traditional art, then it seems to me that a more 'artificial', or contemporary, antithesis could be adduced between, say, computer graphics on the one hand and air-brush art on the other, the former an artificial mode (using computers) of drawing, and the latter, by contrast, an artificial or, rather, transcendental mode of painting, such that takes spaced space to new conceptual heights. Thus where formerly the principal division in art was between drawing and painting, neither of which properly addressed the media of light and air, contemporary art takes this division beyond the figurative phase to a more literal distinction between modes of 'drawing' and 'painting' which amply reflect the use of light and air in the respective production of computer graphics and air-brush art. Doubtless the former is more credibly of the 'Clear Light ...' than conventional drawing, while the latter would be closer to the 'Holy Spirit ...' than oil paintings, whether of 'the Void' or 'Heaven' depending, in each case, upon the ratio of spatial to spaced, or vice versa. For while drawing and painting usually lean towards their respective extremes, we cannot rule out the possibility of 'painterly drawings' or 'linear paintings', the former of inner light and the latter of outer spirit.

3. Light Art per se, e.g. neons and lasers, is much more of the 'Clear Light ...' than ever computer art could be, since a mode of art or, if you will, anti-art which is less Christian than heathen, given its absolutist standing (in free abstraction) in relation to or, rather, contrast with painterly murals and certain kinds of crude 'air art'. Really, 'superheathen' would be a better definition of the sort of - at any rate until quite recently - strictly contemporary 'art' in question, just as 'superchristian' might well serve to define the kind of artificial drawing we have equated with computer graphics. Yet, whatever the terminology, there can be no question that 'light art' is to modern art what the Clear Light of the Void is to religion, namely a vacuous alpha at the farthest possible ideological remove from the Holy Spirit of Heaven, and therefore a mode of art which could only be 'beneath the pale' from an omega-oriented standpoint - the standpoint of the Superchristic civilization still to arise.

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