Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Book in excellent unread/unused condition. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> In his groundbreaking ethnographic study ‘Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilisation’ (1985) Hans Peter Duerr argues that civilisation involves a renunciation of the natural world a world from which civilised people are separated by only a narrow fence. He examines different cultures from medieval witch cults to modern shamanist tribes for whom knowing who we really are involves experiencing and crossing over these boundaries. This might be achieved through initiation rites mind-altering drugs or story-telling. Thus he believed ‘we ourselves should turn wild so as not to surrender to our own wildness but rather to acquire in that way a consciousness of ourselves as tamed as cultural beings’. Self-knowledge therefore awaits the one who returns from the wilderness. In modern life with its ingrained empiricist assumptions we have largely neutralised these explorations of man’s limits by relegating them to the realm of folklore and fairytale. While we may no longer actually believe that people can become werewolves or cross into the underworld artists are free to explore these natural boundaries almost like modern shamen to point up the precariousness of our own existence. In this exhibition three artists examine the liminal territory between man’s domain and the natural world. All are united in their awkward juxtaposition of protagonist and setting: yet the protagonists themselves be they human or animal are never ill at ease in their environments. It is only the viewers’ comprehension or misapprehension which instils in these works any sense of alienation or misplacement. (LL)