“The myth is a surviving fragment of the psychic life of the infancy of the race whilst the dream is the myth of the individual.”
— Karl Abraham
Abraham said that we create myths as a collective dream, a way to understand our desires, needs, darkest capabilities and greatest heroics, these myths make meaning and help us to understand the environment in which we live – with special importance given to our origin, where we come from and how we reconcile our being.
The myth is a collective story that morphs as it is retold. The gods are fragments of our own personalities, pieces of us, hyped up. In marketing, we use these ‘personas’ to uncover the type of messaging to make for a particular group of people.
In pop culture, songs are written from an individual and through the mass media machine, the individual becomes the collective. The songs are re-sung, played by in bedrooms and in tribute bands in pubs or on karaoke machines. They are sung out loud on backs of buses on the way to an event, or on the steps of a bus station at night by a group of stragglers. These days they are remixed on TikTok.
We have always and will always take the big hit, the mass story, last night’s episode of something or the new Barbie movie, and retell it to our tribe as soon as we can. This is what story is for, what it achieves, it spreads the myth, and the teller spins it through their own voice and experiences to their tribe – making it more local, more digestible and more part of the ‘infantile soul’.
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I am showing a video called Myth in @goreyartschool MATTERS OF TABLE with peripheries:POST – opening this Friday evening August 4th. Check https://periphery.space/exhibitions/2023/2/12/peripherypost-matters-of-table-2023 for details.
From Periphery.Space
EXHIBITION RUNS FROM THE 4 AUGUST – 12 AUGUST 2022
MONDAY TO SATURDAY
11AM – 3PM
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peripheriesPOST has become an experimental and communitarian project that brings together artists who feel lost in the POST of art school, or isolated artists who just want to connect with other artists. We see this new project — POST all the things that have happened in the last few years — as an opportunity to facilitate a space where artists can come together and feel supported in what they are questioning and developing in their work.
peripheriesPOST is supported by Wexford Arts Office.