The Metacrisis is Real
3rd Space: I’d like to start by asking you about yourself and your relationship to your own art.
What drives you as an artist? How do you perceive your relationship to it? And how does this align to your relationship with the world in general, and the sense of crisis that the world is currently in?
Larain: I’ve been inspired by Carl Jung and the process of individuation for over 30 years. I’m interested in Daoism and also Alchemy, which is a metaphor for individuation. It’s all about assimilating opposites.
It was my art which first led me to thinking about the metacrisis. I perceived it in my work, in the images that were coming through that indicated to me the archetype of the apocalypse. I realised everything is exponential. It’s a trajectory that we can’t simply step off. It’s overwhelming. And the more I speak to people, not just artists, I think everyone has a sense of it.
Initially I was wary of talking to people about the fact that the metacrisis is real. But I think people are so anxious, they’re relieved to have a name for it. Because there’s a sense of unreality to it, it’s almost surreal, it’s incomprehensible, it’s a hyper object. It’s just beyond our comprehension. That is how I perceive it, and it’s a really anxious, uncomfortable space to be in. There’s no control.
So, I oscillate between thinking, what can I do, to there’s nothing I can do, to trying to find a philosophy that will help me navigate it. And that’s a spiritual exploration for me. It’s about finding a way of feeling okay with the world, because it’s a very difficult place to be at the moment, emotionally and psychologically. And I sense that even if people are not able to define the metacrisis, they are experiencing it. And I think that’s why art is there, to help people engage with it and make sense of how they’re feeling, and be able to process their own trauma through it.
It’s the interrelatedness of it all, and how it’s all so entangled that I think is the biggest issue. It’s the way one thing impacts another. It’s so complex, it feels beyond me. I feel overwhelmed by it, and that’s a really difficult feeling.
The Personal and the Collective
3rd Space: How does that experience relate to your painting, to your artwork?
Larain: it’s a kind of a two-way thing, because on one hand I see art as therapy. As a way of processing things. That’s part of what art is. But also, rather than think about what I’m going to paint and then paint it, I produce a work of art and then analyse it. So, the work is telling me what is happening in the world and what’s happening with me. It’s really interesting how the collective and the personal are so interrelated.
When I first looked at the architype of the apocalypse, I saw it as a breakdown in myself, as an existential crisis. But then I realized everything is mirrored between the personal and the collective. It’s actually global. So, I started working on participatory art, immersive experiences, collaborative work in the community.
But I’ve had to withdraw from that to an extent and focus more on myself. I think you can’t expect others to process things for you, unless you can also process them for yourself. It’s a back and forth. So, there’s a sense of responsibility in it, but also the need to navigate everything myself personally.
3rd Space: Could you elaborate on what comes out in your work and how that might reflect on larger questions?
Larain: I have made an animation of a piece of work, so that people can understand this process. What evolved there was a painting of a black sun and buildings falling down. I hadn’t ever encountered a black sun before. So, I started to explore, what is the black sun? What does it represent? And I discovered it represents the ‘nigrado’ in Alchemy, which is the process of decomposition. I found out that this process is related to what is happening globally, but also to what is happening to me personally.
When I first came across the archetype of the apocalypse in my work, it became a lot about fragmentation of the image. I was fragmenting it digitally and then transposing it into a painting. And I was thinking, what is this fragmentation really about? Then I realised that it was really a fragmentation of reality. Reality is shifting. And I see that in a lot of other artist’s work. Some are more conscious of it than others, but it’s certainly visible.
3rd Space: It’s interesting because fragmentation represents a breakdown, but on another level, something else can come out of it as well. Things fragment and then shift into something else. So, for me, how I see that more globally is in the breakdown of a form of reality, as you say; one we have been reliant on for a very long time, which is now breaking up. Obviously that is a difficult process. Like you said, it can be overwhelming, because the sense is that the ground beneath us is dissolving.
Larain: Yes. I liken it to the dark night the soul, and whether it’s personal or collective, it’s this dark period of great difficulty. I have also related it to Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of de-territorialization and re-territorialization. So, it’s this cyclical, breaking down and rebuilding.
The Virtual World and the Destabilisation of Reality
Larain: I’m particularly focused at the moment on the virtual digital world and AI singularity. As we relate more to the screen than we do to people, it’s changing the way we perceive, which relates to the work of Jean Baudrillard. Because we’re presented with so many copies of reality, it’s hard to know what reality actually is.
The digital world is blurring the edges. Information received through a digital screen doesn’t necessarily relate to the physical world, but is perceived and processed as though it is. Algorithms programmed to maximise engagement are not necessarily related to truth, or physical reality. And what you get on your internet feed is geared specifically towards you. It creates a kind of virtual mirror that reflects a self-reinforcing worldview, which aligns with what we have already engaged with. So, you’re only getting your perception of what reality is.
The destabilisation of reality caused by the digital and virtual realms only amplifies feelings of anxiety and disconnection with the physical world. It creates a sense of dissociation which disrupts the sense of self. In my research, I am exploring this dissociation and how this influences our perception of reality.
As a result, a lot of my work is about worlds within worlds, within worlds. Because we are being fed only by what we like all the time, we aren’t really getting diverse perspectives anymore. So, if we want to have them, we have to search for them ourselves.
Transition Beyond the Merely Subjective
3rd Space: This brings up for me the whole question of subjectivity and how this has developed historically. Subjectivity, or the importance of the internal dimension of the individual has developed enormously since the Romantics, when it really came alive.
And then of course there is psychology, including Jung’s work on individuation, which has been a huge evolution in that process. But I think subjectivity has become something of a double-edged sword in the modern world because it’s led us, partly because of AI technology as you described, and also capitalism, into this hyper individualism where we can’t really see anything beyond ourselves. Or we look at everything through ourselves and so it’s hard to be in touch with something larger.
But I do think that the metacrisis is calling us to something beyond the merely subjective, to that which is larger than ourselves, to the shared experience of what’s actually happening in the world at large. To me, that’s a very significant part of the transition we’re in. On one hand, there is the personal experience of overwhelm and disorientation that you have been speaking about, but there’s also an awakening beyond the subjective because of the growing global crisis.
Perhaps the experience of overwhelm, fragmentation, and existential angst in response to the craziness of what’s happening in the world in so many dimensions, might be the biggest thing that’s getting expressed in the art world as a whole right now? I don’t know, but what I see in other fields, and this is what’s particularly interesting to me, is that these experiences of anxiety and fragmentation are giving birth to something else. A need to return to a very different way of looking at the world, which is not based on profit and extraction but on the recognition that we’re an integral part of the natural world and the whole cosmos.
We’re looking for other ways of relating to the world which have to do with this interconnectivity between everything. But I’m curious, do you see this reflected in the art world?
Larain: I find it difficult to answer for the art world in general, but it makes me think of the work of Olafur Eliasson and Cornelia Parker, who are looking directly at transformation. But perhaps that’s because they are the artists that I’m focusing on, and that’s my reality.
I think there are different things happening in different places, but I think it’s true that the arts are able to express what’s happening collectively before people can do it through verbal language, and it’s seeping through. But this is expressed as a feeling rather than a concept. So, I think art is definitely reflecting the world we’re living in. I don’t think it can do anything else. And it’s one step ahead, because before we’ve thought it, we’ve felt it. We feel it, and then we conceptualise it. So, art represents how we’re feeling, and then we make sense of it. That’s certainly how my own practice works.
Grasping the Indefinable
Larain: Generally, I sense artists are interested in in what’s going on underneath, in trying to grasp this indefinable quality. I put it down to the sublime and the real. I think there’s a huge interest in that.
3rd Space: I think that edge of pushing into something that is new, that is of a different order, is what I’m speaking about. And because language is based on a three-dimensional world, when you’re moving from a three-dimensional world to a four-dimensional world, our language is not designed for that. In this sense art gives us the possibility I think, of articulating something that is on the edge of our understanding.
Larain: That’s what I’m hugely interested in. That’s what I’m really curious about. It relates to the philosophy of the sublime, the real, the uncanny or the surreal. It’s something that’s just tipping you over the edge into the imaginary. It questions reality in a way that resonates with the times we’re living in.
3rd Space: I think I’m right in saying that, really, all the conventions in the art world have been thrown out to an extent at this point. On one hand, that obviously can make it very confusing and difficult. But it opens up great possibilities.
Larain: I think we have to question ourselves all the time. And I don’t think there’s any art that isn’t doing that. What is art? What am I doing here, and what am I trying to achieve? And we are living in a time where everything is indefinable. There used to be a structure which we would follow. But that’s really falling away. It’s a very unsteady place to be. But for me there’s something underneath it, a meaning behind it that I’m trying to discover, that I see as more spiritual, that has real meaning and makes sense. But I just can’t define it.
It’s this that I’m always trying to uncover in my artwork, because I sense that art does touch that in some way. Even in meditation, you can get a sense of the sublime, that moment of enlightenment where there is a sense of something much, much more, much bigger. And I think you can touch that in art whether it’s through practice or engagement. If you see something sublime, it touches your soul and that’s what I think is being uncovered, because we’re having to question ourselves. To question, what is reality?
Trauma, the Apocalypse, and Rebirth
Larain: Trauma can have a positive impact. It gives us a different perspective on things. Instead of it being just a dark night of the soul, I’m trying to look at the positive side of these experiences, so we can navigate the metacrisis without actually being destroyed by it. Because I do sense that people are really losing their way.
3rd Space: You began by talking about the apocalypse. And we think of the apocalypse as the disintegration, the breakdown of everything. And that is the world we’re living in right now. At the same time, I think what you are saying is that within that breakdown, we’re having to look again at a really existential level. It’s forcing us in that direction.
Larain: Yes, I think that’s what I meant by the dark night of the soul. But when I say the apocalypse, it’s cyclical. It’s not just about destruction. It’s about rebirth. It’s a transition. But it’s a painful one.
With many thanks to Larain Briggs for the use of her artwork
