Barry William Hale

Early on in the history of Modernesm a line was drawn that separated secular art from spiritual art. In spite of this division a significant number of artist continue to produce work that is asssociasted with spirituality, mysticism and the metaphysical. Since the 1980’s a number of major exhibitions have acknowledged the importance of this tradition in contemprory art. Bary Hale’s work is not unlike the position that is occupied by “alternative” or “complimentary” practices in medicine and science. Central to Hale’s practice is a will considered and well researched visual epistemology. Hale has pieded together an artistic style that combines a sensual immediacy with and abstract reflection. This approach has been systematised by the artist into a comprehensive and syncretic working method. An important feature of Hale’s art practice is that it doesn’t entirely depend upon orthodoxies or hieracrchies of the accepted cannon of Western art history. In this way Hale has had the courage to take a truly independant path. However, within Hale’s work there are two tangible connections to mainstream art movements of the twentieth century: the first is Surrealism and the second is Pop Ar. Hale’s specific link to Surrealism is throught the paintings and drawings of Andre Masson. Masson developed insights into the relationship between myth, the imagination and differences differences being that Andy Walhol was interested in depicting earthly divinities such as “superstars” while Hale’s subject matter is concerned with the depiction of trancendental divinities such as “gods”. As a result Hale created a new style of art that could be classified as “Afterlife Pop”. From this position it would be fair to suggest that if Andy Warhol is still making art in the afterlife then if would probably resemble Barry Hale’s.
Hale’s other influences are far less traditional for the most part, remain off limits to the conventions and orthodoxies that are to be found with the world of contemporary art. These influences include religious art from China, Tibet, India, medievil European folk, ritualistic art from Mexico and Haiti, south pacific and Melanesian tribal art, as well as Western occult and hermetic traditions from the ninteenth and twentieth century including artists such as Austin Osman Spare. Spare’s influence on Hale is through his series of drawings and paintings known as “atavistic portraits” curiously, the pwerful iconography of these traditions has not been widely appropriated by contemporary artistsand remains largely a feature of popular culture. What Hale shares with many of the designers of popular culture is an interest in the secret iconography of tarot cards, video games, tattoo designs and pop music graphics. When a contemporary artist appropriates an occult image it is usually for sensational rather that scholarly reasons. Rahter that treating these traditions in a superficial way, Hale works from the position of a scholar. A geniune and scholarly commitment to occult traditions is what sets Hale’s work apart from many of his contemporaries.
At present Hale’s work can be divided up into three main areas of investigation. These include paintings, drawings and paper cuts. The most recent paintings on average 1.8 metres in hieght and 1.3 metres in width and are produced using thin layers of brightlycoloured acrylic on stretch canvases. The imagery contained in within these paintings includes depictions of a wide selection of mythical divinities, demons and angels. These images have been selected form the artist’s detailed knowledge of occult lore. The architecture of these paintings form a symmetrical composition that is offset by an infinite variety of assymetrical details. At the centre of these works is a prominent circle wheel that acts as both a metaphor for the cycles of time and changes, and as a formal device from which the disintegrating and collapsing narrratives of the paintings are fixed. The exuberance, intensity and abundance contiained within these paintings generates a picture plane that provides the viewer with an enhanced or suprasensory field of clear vision.
In contrast to the paintings the drawings have a completely different feel. Instead, being constructed as a self-contained Ideological system, they reveal traces of an intimate and fleeting experienc. These works capture the momentary and the contingent and their technique resembles what the Surrealist called “automatic drawings”. The imagery of these drawings reflect the shape or a form trapped within a thin column of smoke, or an anthropomorphic figure captured in a cloud, or a silhouette caught for a split second in a cowboy’s lariat. Hale produces many of these small drawings in a relatively short period of timeand refers to them as “peripheral spectres” of “scribblings in ectoplasm.” These works reveal the musings of a private world and depict the fantasy and eroticism of a daydream that every now and again has the potential to become a nightmare. The third component of Hale’s art practise are the paper cuts. These works are cut out of thin black cardboard and usually depict a single figure or a demon or an angel.
the paper cuts portray Hale’s cosmology at its most pure because the figures that have been cut out of the cardboard exist only in negative space. In these works the void becomes substance. Through his comprehensive working method Hale has been able to bring together all of these apparently disparent techniques of art making to a well developed and well considered visual system that has the power to communicate the experience of a revelation. With the used of a comprehensive and syncretic working method.Hale has produced an extensive body of “iconoclastic icons” that bridge the gap between the metaphysical, the alternative and the postmodern traditions of contemporary art.

An interview for ABC online 2003

Aesthetics of Splendour : Artist Profile
Barry William Hale

In this self-portrait we look at the work of Barry Hale, an artist exploring magical visions that merge Occident and Orient.

Artist Barry Hale

How do you live?
Day by day.

Where do you live?
Newtown, Sydney

How often do you work and for how long?
It’s hard for me not to work. I draw all the time, on scraps of paper, serviettes, anything that’s around. If I visit a friend often later they tell me I’ve drawn on their bills, letters and even in their diaries.

Why do you do it at all?
I don’t do it – something else does; I’m compelled to.

What are you working on now?
I’m busy this month organising upcoming exhibitions for this year and next, in London, Sydney, Melbourne and LA. I’m also working on a book with Jack Sargent.

It’s hard for me not to work. I draw all the time, on scraps of paper, serviettes, anything that’s around.

Do you suffer for your art?
I never suffer for my art; though external factors can be trying. For example some people might think I have made considerable lifestyle sacrifices.

Do you have any money?
No. But I never lack.

Who will you be when you are seventy?
A content, vital, active, artistic old man.

If you love beauty will you suffer less?
This is a philosophical question because it implies there is beauty; and this is an entry into judgement, absolutism. Perhaps you will suffer less if you have less fixed notions of beauty. Though I do question the notion of suffering as an underlying principal of life.

Is your work beautiful?
In my work I like to use aesthetics in which there is splendour but not necessarily classical (cultural) beauty.

Is there such a thing as a truly blank canvas?
No, only a vibrant potential.

What do you dream about?
The other night I dreamt I was in a mansion where the stairways and rooms were continually changing. The walls were scarlet with gold trimmings. I was bit lost. I said to myself I needed a guide, at which point a small well dressed man appeared and he asked me, telepathically, do you want to meet your angel. I was unsure about whether I did, but I said maybe. He took me into a dark room, and I was aware there was a person there I couldn’t see. Then I went to another part of the house where there was a food market with plenty of exotic food, and I ate lots of yummy food.

What is the point?
I think it’s a kind of transmission. For me personally, I have an idea, I articulate it, it comes to some resolution and then I let it go. Letting it go, for example in an exhibition, creates a new vacuum into which new ideas flood. It’s a continuum.

Will you make a difference?
I personally believe the death of the imagination occurred with the Reformation. I suppose I aim to revivify imagination in my own way.

What is the best thing about being an artist?
It’s fun; it’s exciting; it’s inspiring.

What is the worst?
Your obsession eclipses everything else.

Are you a pretentious buffoon?
Is this a trick question?

Further Information:

http://www.barrywilliamhale.com/

You’ll need the Flash 6 plugin to view this site.

Barry William Hale

EXTENDED BY POPULAR DEMAND UNTIL SATURDAY MARCH 27TH
The Chamber Of Pop Culture and Jack Sargeant presents

Barry William Hale
Heralding The Apocalypse

Exhibition
March 15th – March 20th 2004
Mon – Sat 12 – 6
Horse Hospital London

“Hale’s work invests the magikal and the occult with the spirit of the carny and sideshow. Excitement and wild hucksterism inform his work as much as the more recognisable elements of occult art. Here the high and low meet, and nothing is as it once was.�

Barry Hale: Spruiker of the Apocalypse.

By

Jack Sargeant

Barry Hale has been described as an occult artist, while a superficially germane term; on closer inspection it radiates a self-consciously unwelcome specificity. Too redolent of those early twentieth century outsider artists whose work depended on visionary states, specific knowledge of ancient mysteries, or some other Qabalistic obscurity. Hale, it should be noted, has certainly done nothing to dissuade such labels, mischievously luxuriating in such terms when fitting. It is apparent from his biography that he is, for example, an outspoken member of an OTO. But such groups encourage individual exploration, undoubtedly an attraction to Hale whose very genealogy radiates the outlaw.

Hale was born to hardcore hippy parents, who lived on one of the first Australian communes, according to the artist his biological father was allegedly involved in distributing LSD to a grateful Australian hippie community. Hale was raised by an adoptive family of staunch trade unionists, but maintains contact with his expanded family.

Barry is a student of – to the west – a relatively obscure form of Chinese martial art. If what has emerged as the cliché of the western mystic artist is true he should be interested in the hermeneutics of high ritual magic, but instead he gravitates to sorcery, to Haitian voudon, to Congolese palo mayombe, to folk forms of religious expression and ecstatic explorations that owe more to the oral traditions of the disenfranchised slave communities than to arcane studies in dusty libraries. This is not to suggest that Hale is not a scholar of the western esoteric tradition, but rather that he has explored and worked with other forms.

But folk magic emerging from the Mexican barrio and the New Orleans ghetto makes sense when considering Hale’s work, with its material emphasis on what is condescendingly referred to as ‘craft’ and that which many ethnographers would still in their arrogance label as ‘primitive culture’. From his experiences in Haiti and New Orleans, Hale has produced a series of voodoo bourbon bottles, their labels painted with the signs and images of Loa. A tribute to the culture and to the artist’s experiences both autobiographical and magical. Other works involve cutting paper silhouettes, a form of expression common in the magical rituals of the Mexican Limpas, but Hale’s paper-cuts depict the pantheon of plague demons of the Middle Ages.

Barry Hale’s influences are, however, far more than just variations on indigenous forms. This is not glib orientalism, smug tourism or hip voyeurism. Looking at his work it is unsurprising to discover Hale trained to be a tattooist, the bold graphic style echoing the classic flash-sheets of the old school skin-and-ink artist. And there is more at play here, sideshow art, underground comic books, fifties men’s magazines, industrial logos, and Tijuana Bibles are all evident in his iconographic reservoir. His predecessors are underground comic book artists such as Robert Williams and the Coop, as well classic occult artists such as Austin Spare and Rosaline Norton. Barry Hale immerses himself in popular art even while creating images that are bewildering in the occult complexity of their significance. Thus a design he produced for the Oceanic Lodge of an OTO depicts the delicious curves of a voluptuous naked pomba-gira, the delicate petals of indigenous Australian flower the warratta, the dove, and the radiating light of knowledge. This juxtaposition of images both sacred and profane formed the design for a t-shirt, a medium and form more often associated with the biker-gang or punk band than that with a magical order.

This embrace of outlaw pop-culture extends into the dissemination of Hale’s work. During his one-man exhibition in Sydney’s Front Room Gallery, at which Hale exhibited some seven hundred automatic drawings, which looked like a bastard cross between Austin Spare and Savage Pencil, Hale employed a Carney-style barker. The barker’s role was to cajole and rile the audience at the gallery, while swigging rum and hollering his-own version of the apocalypse to the surprise and entertainment of the assembled crowd.

The works collected in this volume were produced by the artist throughout the Antipodean winter of 2002. Ostensibly each image is the representation of a herald of the apocalypse, every picture a trumpeter blasting the subsonic mayhem of the last trump, a sound that heralds mayhem, chaos, finality, and oblivion. This is the end. But each of these figures represents something else, a combination of the traditions and beliefs that fascinate Hale. The demons and gods depicted here are deeply syncretic, fusing together various metaphysical forms and beliefs, creating a unique apocalyptic pantheon.

Stylistically these works play with the thematic of repetition, each form a variant of the predecessor, each form doubled and divided, mirrored, and distorted. Such doubling echoes playing cards, or some eclectic bastardisation of the tarot card. This repetition also recalls the advertisements in sixties underground comics for Ed ‘Big Daddy’ Roth t-shirts, depicting row after row of heavy black line images of drooling beasties driving hot-rods and low-riders.

If the apocalypse depicted here is imminent, it is also infinitely deferred. While Christianity embraces teleology, other beliefs do not share such end-time-certainties, and Hale’s angels and demons, with their iconographic nods to Confusionism, Buddhism, Hinduism, et al, belong to numerous traditions, or rather, to a juxtaposition of traditions and beliefs. In this work the artist is neither recognising nor advocating a universal Armageddon, instead these pictures must be interpreted as a celebratory final trump, played not for the end of the world, but for the end of Christianity, for Hale the apocalypse is specific, gleeful, and graphic.

Waratah 2: Oceanic Currents

It was in the late seventies, if I recall correctly. I’d travel by train to London to visit Atlantis Bookshop in Museum Street and Watkins off the Charing Cross Road, clutching a few pounds, in search of Crowleyana.

With a steadily-growing book collection and little available cash, I paid most attention to the so-called “occult journals”: The New Equinox, Black Pearl, The Lamp Of Thoth and Aquarian Arrow. These “fanzines” provided a link to what appeared to be a thriving Thelemic community, loose-knit but enthusiastic. They reprinted otherwise unavailable material by Crowley, reviews of books from America that I could only dream of owning.

These journals tended to be very cheaply produced with poor production quality: “homely”, as the book lists indicate nowadays. Every now and again something stood out, both for the high quality of its contents and its attractiveness. Sothis, for example, and, later, Starfire.

Waratah 2: Oceanic Currents reminds me of those days. It reminds me of the occasional discovery of a real gem amongst the dross.

Why Waratah? Take a look in The Book Of Lies for an explanation.

Waratah is produced by the Oceania Lodge of OTO Australia and was edited in March 2004 by Oliva Dimitrije Mitevski. Perfect bound and a beautiful production, this impressive 220-page page book is limited to just 200 copies: it therefore represents quite an investment for the serious collector.

It’s superbly illustrated and shows all the signs of some serious proof-reading.

So what of it’s contents? About a third of the book is given over to a visual feast, a veritable grimoire and ritual group-diary: Barry Hale’s The Babalon Pomba – Gira Working. Hours of study have pursuaded me that this is a significant publication, which will resonate for many years to come.

Barry Hale’s The Hand And The Pen compares and contrasts Thelema’s fascination with the power of words and letters with that of Islam. A timely and interesting article. Dreams and In-Betweenness states get similar treatment in the same author’s Nightmares, Bad Sleeps & Things That Go Bump In The Night.

The hardcore qabalist will find much that is fascinating in Scott Burley’s Thoughts Of A Wandering Fool, The Synagogue Of Satan and LoGoS: Subfigura CMLI. Hale’s The Way To Succeed is an interesting observation on some tantric techniques.

My personal favourite is a brief article, again by Barry Hale: Preliminary Study Towards A Sigillic Exegesis Of Liber 231. Gloriously illustrated, this study of the sigils in the Thelemic Holy Book, Liber CCXXXI, is most impressive and I await his further researches with great interest.

There’s a lot more to Waratah Two. The drawings and design are exceptional throughout, its well-bound and printed on very high quality 130gsm A4 paper.

Although Crowley is quoted frequently, it’s always as the background to further research and as such successfully implements the often-sought concept of “Thelema Beyond Crowley”.

What more can I say? This journal takes me back to those heady days of Starfire et al and I cannot recommend it too highly to the committed Thelemite. For details on how to order a copy, visit http://house418.otoaustralia.org.au. It’s certainly remarkable value for just US$50.

Now, where’s that train ticket? I must pay another visit to the Atlantis Bookshop…

Added: Monday, November 29, 2004

a publication that Barry William Hale made substantial contributions both in art and text
includes reviews and a description of contents from ‘house 418′

“…a real gem amongst the dross…. drawings and design are exceptional throughout. … Although Crowley is quoted frequently, it’s always as the background to further research and as such successfully implements the often-sought concept of “Thelema Beyond Crowley.â€?
What more can I say? … I cannot recommend it too highly to the committed Thelemite.�
- lashtal.com

“… a substantive effort on all planes.�
- Hymenaeus Beta

Waratah 2: Oceanic Currents – ‘The hand and the pen’ was launched in Sydney , Australia on April 10, 2004 e.v. as a limited edition of 200 copies. Published under the ‘house 418’ imprint, these quickly sold out, and as of March 2005 e.v. this edition was no longer available from ‘house 418.’

As of July 3rd, 2005 e.v. a strictly limited Collectors Edition of 11 copies has been made available. Those who already own or have seen a copy of Waratah 2 would have noticed a number of intentionally blank pages throughout the volume – a perfect canvas for ‘the hand and pen’ of Waratah 2’s major contributor, artist Barry William Hale
[www.barrywilliamhale.com].

Each of the 11 copies of the Waratah 2 Collectors Edition includes a series of new and individually inscribed drawings by Hale, raising the impact and power of an already visually stunning publication.

Waratah 2 includes:

a comprehensive comparison and contrast of the sigils of Liber 231
a 56 page art and text presentation of the complete 49 day Babalon / Pomba-Gira Working
all original material; 16 diverse articles and over 80 pages of art-work
Waratah 2 Collectors Edition
210+ pages
oversized A4 (275×215mm)
130gsm matt Art paper, perfect bound, with individually inscribed drawings by Barry William Hale.

Each copy of the Collectors Edition comes with a personalised certificate of authenticity issued by the Australian O.T.O. and signed by the National Archivist, stating the name of the purchaser, date of purchase, what number in the release has been purchased, and on what pages new drawings by Barry Hale appear.