Posted By: Thad McKraken NOV 18, 2015
Hearing about the passing of godhead brilliant visionary artist Paul Laffoley the other day made me contemplate just how enormous an impact the man’s work has had on my life and art. I never met Paul (although I did drive from Seattle to Portland to attend one of his lectures), nor do I consider myself an obsessive fanboy, but in hearing of his death I was forced to confront the fact that he influenced me on a such a deeply ingrained level that exposure to his ideas shapes nearly everything I do. Of course, the five minute clip that lead to this shift involves Paul talking about his painting the Thanaton III on Disinfo’s short lived TV show (which if you’ve never seen you should really check out):
For those too lazy to watch the clip, according to Paul, the Thanaton III depicts an extraterrestrial communication from beyond in which he’s shown how to:
1. Link life to death in a continuous experience
2. Utilize the resulting thanatonic energy to travel faster than the speed of light, turn mass into consciousness and then back again, alter evolution at will, and exist simultaneously at every moment in time
3. Move the entire universe into the 5th dimensional realm and say when in history it is possible for this to happen.
He then goes on to state that he received far more information during this download but that much of this info won’t make sense to him and is intended for those more prepared than himself to receive it. Funny, I seem to say that about my channeled writing constantly. He then just casually mentions that this extra-dimensional entity also showed him how to make the piece into a “psychotronic consciousness/mass interactive device”. The idea is that if you put your hands in the appropriate place and stare at the central eye, information can be siphoned into this world from the realms of death.
His idea of art as a “psychoactive device” that can lead to “communication with a higher dimensional realm” is one that immediately resonated in my young mind and forever changed the nature of my own work. It helped me conceptualize more precisely what I had been up to with my sampler driven shamanism project for years. That’s what I was doing, wasn’t I? I was compiling sound patterns to summon the shape shifting daemon lords from within. I was creating technology to facilitate higher level connectivity with the divine. I was developing a sound contraptions that could conjure inner aliens. Not long after I saw that clip I re-named the project Thanaton to embed the idea to the work, and this was years before I started getting into magick or processing the multiverse of consciousness in that manner at all.
Of course this wouldn’t be a post of mine without a layer of delicious synchromysticism afoot. I spent a good portion the day before I found out that Paul had left our realm framing pictures in the transdimensional ritual space/psychoactive art emporium I’m currently living in, which works on a similar premise. Here’s where it gets weird. On August 30th, 2013 I had a vision present itself to me (which I write about in my next book which isn’t out yet, but hey, I do in fact have one out you can download super cheap) which seemed to indicate that I needed to design a sort of sacred chapel space to help amplify sigil projection. Thing is, even though I’d become increasingly proud of my visual art and was making more of it than ever, I had exactly zero interest in pursuing this project and completely dismissed it. Then, less than a year later I found myself working on this precise endeavor by complete accident. No, really, my wife and I looked at normal townhouses in our neighborhood for a month and a half before we stumbled on one that just so happened to have a first floor retail office space with hanging lights and super high white ceilings. Looks exactly like an little art gallery. I’d had even more visions about having my own church-space leading up to that (which are all publicly documented), and the second I saw it I knew. Just so happens that my wife dug the rest of the place better than anything else we’d looked at. We almost didn’t consider the thing precisely because of what ended up being the art space. It’s still a work in progress (although I have performed one inaugural psilocybin ritual at this point), but what the fuck does this have to do with Laffoley?
Well, two days after I received the first vision in regards to the creation of an energy enhancing psi temple, I went to Paul’s first ever west coast gallery showing at the Henry in Seattle. In my magick journal, it goes from contemplating the idea of sigil amplification architecture to talking about a vision inspired by Paul’s work in direct sequential order, which I didn’t realize at all until compiling it. Seeing Paul’s art on the internet and confronting it in person are two different things. You can’t really grasp the immensity of these works solely by looking at jpegs, which doesn’t at all mean you shouldn’t try. The show was fantastic and lead to a ganj-i-tation communique about how sex magick can lead one to becoming very arrogant erotically, which is karmically dangerous. This is a theme that would resonate increasingly in my life and writing over the coming years. As a matter of fact, later that day I watched the Source Family documentary, which might as well embody these precise dangers to a tee. Oh shit, Paul made a piece about sex magick specifically, didn’t he?
Earlier I mentioned that I’ve never seen myself as an over the top Laffoley fanboy (well, I do have a tattoo on my bicep, so I suppose I sort of am):
I mean, he was utterly brilliant, I suppose the problem is that there’s only so much of his stuff you can find on the internet. When I saw his gallery showing I saw a ton of shit I’d never seen before and I didn’t catch a gallery showing of his work until 2013…because again, there hadn’t been one on the west coast up to that point. All my way of saying that I think Paul’s is going to be far more influential ten years from now than he is currently on his passing. Shit is timeless. I saw someone post about his death on FB on Monday, and when I Googled, found nothing (granted, Dangerous Minds did confirm this like an hour later). In searching though, I did immediately stumble on yet another of his works that I’d never seen, from an article in the Huffington Post of all places:
There is so much esoteric knowledge resonating through the dude’s art, it’ll be another hundred years before we even begin to scratch the surface of understanding. This particular image resonated with my particular microverse fairly immediately, mainly because I have another book coming out a ways down the pike that starts with a long chapter about how we live in hell (or the lower realms). It’s what “they” told me to write about. Life is a part of showbiz as it says right at the top of the thing. A theme that also interpenetrates pretty much everything I do. It all comes from within. Thankfully, I’ve heard that a massive book compiling Laffoley’s philosophy and art is currently nearing completion. I think it’s going to open a lot of inner doors for a lot of beautiful weirdos. Lord knows I’ll do everything I can to talk shit about it, and oddly every day I work on my art temple I’ll think of his philosophy and work. An Occluded force behind the scenes is always pulling the strings in regards to these sort of endeavors. Spooky action at a distance. Art as spiritual technology.
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