Alex Grey 2009 Wall Calendar
Every once in a great while an artist emerges who does more than simply reflect the social trends of the time. These artists are able to transcend established thinking and help us redefine ourselves and our world. Today, a growing number of art critics, philosophers and spiritual seekers believe they have found that vision in the art of Alex Grey. Alex's paintings take the viewer on a graphic, visionary journey through the physical, metaphysical and spiritual anatomy of the self. Grey's portrayals of human beings blend scientific exactitude with depictions of universal life energy, leading us on the soul's journey from material world encasement to recovery of our divinely illuminated core. The Chapel of Sacred Mirrors, a sanctuary showcasing Mr. Grey's unique contemporary sacred art, opened in New York City in 2004. The works in this exhibit dramatically reveal the miracle of life's evolutionary complexity, the unity of human experience across all racial, class and gender divides, and the astonishing vistas of possibility inherent in human consciousness. Alex Grey is the author of Transfigurations, Sacred Mirrors and The Mission of Art. His work has graced the album covers of TOOL, Nirvana and the Beastie Boys, and has been exhibited around the world.Product Details
Customer Reviews
The swine before the pearls! 
Ludwig Wittgenstein used to say that thoughts die the moment they are embodied by words ...This is even more true when we try to describe the experiences brought on by magic mushrooms and ayahuasca . Unless you possess the writing ability of Plato; coupled with a Shakespearean power of imagery, then the experiences you want to describe can turn into gobbledygook!!
Thus psychedelic experiences are easily ridiculed when downloaded into language. And downloaded into tasteless language they should be ridiculed. In this age of gurus and seers you run the risk of your ideas being bracketed in the new-age section alongside UFOs, Crystal Gazing and Scientology!
Unfortunately the author cannot avoid this pitfall.
Its claimed that the psychedelic experience is not another weird cult. Its real!
Drink a strong enough brew and visionary scenarios will come bounding out of the speakers. Not mere colours and pretty patterns, but the Big Other of scripture! You will be greeted by three dimensional elf machines of syntactical information that are extraordinary complex, architectonicly connected and ordered.
Thus ayahuasca is a doorway to another modality that exists independent of our thoughts and feelings about it. More like shifting fantasy land than good old positivist rock n roll.
These ideas may seem alien to our world of television and consumer capitalism, but why not? Why should 500 years of scientific materialism have all the fun?
But there is a paradox between the language and thought of the psychedelic experience. The paradox is that you cannot see what another person is trying to described! No matter how hard they try to convince you; words will always remain symbols for the relations of things to one another and to us; nowhere do they touch upon the truth that is swimming around in that persons head!
This is not at first obvious.
So if a person is raving on about psychedelic elf machines from the fractal void, we only have his or her word for it. Even if he is the most articulate person or best writer imaginable; the word is never the thing. It amazes me how naive we are about the limits of language. This applies especially when describing drug induced trips.
So how do we get to the meat of this mystery? How do we demonstrate the validity of these phenomena to those who will never step outside the culturally sanctioned playpen?
How about computer technology? With powerful computers it should be possible to create artwork of psychedelic intensity to convince the sceptics.
The bench test will be to design software that can model virtual worlds. A multifaceted simulation of a psychedelic flash. Computer generated vistas of psychedelic space-time. The pictures in this book give a glimpse of what can be done with a mouse and little imagination.
Alas, I wasn't converted. The pictures included in this book look lovely, but they didn't mirror alien imaginations to me. Glossy sci-fi scenarios will not convince the sceptics. They only give a glimpse of a future technological art paradigm. They are the swine before the pearls!
Psychedelics are supposed to be catalysts for the imagination. So its sad that the psychedelic artwork in this book (and all over the Internet) boils down to weird reptilian humanoids, fractal volcanic fire balls and spaceships orbiting planets etc. The artwork is glossy and pretty. But art created by experienced psychonauts should posses boundary dissolving properties that 'normal' artists cannot possibly match.
This is why, to my mind, psychedelic artwork doesn't come close to say, a Hieronymus Bosch or a Salvador Dali in imagination and weirdness. Bosch and Dali had something boundary dissolving about their creations. They resembled mad men with access to places only they could see.
I doubt whether Hieronymus Bosch or Salvador Dali had access to magic mushrooms of ayahuasca. So whats going on? This is just my personal bias though. What do others think?
P.S. Try downloading audio lectures by Terence Mckenna or 'YouTube' the man instead. Mckenna was famous for his oratory skills so he's a good place to start if you want clues to the experiences described in this book.
Greatness
If you love Alex Grey's paintings you will absolutely love this calender. Very good pictures with excellent descriptions about them.
He has no peer
I have experienced - over the last 40 years - many of the states so eloquently portrayed and described by Mr Grey. These are states that go beyond the verbal consensual validations we use to describe things in our everyday speech. These are exceptionally prescient glimpses into a land beyond our 3-dimensional atomic structure, and what is so wonderful is that these universal truths are not limited by religion. It is not necessary to "be" a Buddhist, a Hindu, etc. My "Collective Vision," so similar in its representation of a spiritual 'collective unconscious,' is in no way dimmed because I hold the resurrected Messiah in my heart. These are precious truths, and we are fortunate to behold this art.
My own journey out of schizophrenia holds many of these images as signposts ([...])
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