“I ran and ran, feeling the earth beneath my hooves, the wind in my mane, and the sun on my back. In that moment, I was more than a horse. I was a force of nature, a living, breathing testament to the beauty and power of the wild.”

— Spirit, from the 2002 film Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron

Imagine a majestic locomotive that rushes through the skyrocketing landscape, black smoke coming from its pipes, the rumbling sound, as an earthquake. That black smoke, just like a ghost that haunts the present. Like a bewildered aura looking for a new body.

Spiritual World is a remix of Alfred Stieglitz’s 1923 piece “Spiritual America,” a photograph depicting a close-up view of a castrated horse. The stallion – a metaphor for the domestication of the natural world and strapped in reins as the machine it has become. Full of wild (and sexual) power, constrained by settlers and a symbol of the natives and their spiritual freedom. Now, castrated and without reproductive power, bound to the fence as a car in a parking lot.

Like a greasy camera lens or a misted shower stall, the vague figuration and blurred representation at play demand our earnest and dearest registration. One should feel touchy, playful and open. One might crave a world of rationality and logic, where even ignorance is simulated and where the unknowns are known and ridiculed. Unlike a jester, we shouldn’t act stupid, but become stupid.

In other words, to enter a museum, to stare and squint at an artwork, abstract or figurative, ephemeral or representational, will always demand sensible skills. Skills, that have been taught wrongfully to a broad public, a public demanding logic, rules and a clear image. One should fill the museum with fog, walk around blinded and tear apart the press release.

The study of self and a deity outside of one’s corpus, like a separation from the environment, as if, that’s even possible. As if spirituality exists within certain categorial settings, within secluded situations and around a particular group of individuals. Spirituality castrated (as an H&M Ramones t-shirt) commodified and encapsulated like a domesticated being. Spiritually, like a multifaceted metaphor, many-sided, a prism with no central outpost, only imagination. Not just a lake, a mirror. Not just a car, a vehicle.

Now, within the scene, within the city. Spirituality has only a few initial roads that lead to bliss. Either you reject modernity or you embrace tradition. But within this leap, between before and now, a place must exist for one to embrace spirituality as a realm of thought and rest. In this new world, this spiritually castrated society suggests a reconfiguration of spirituality and how it might exist beyond (and between) conservative revolted reactionary religious ideals and ultra-liberal new-age paganism.

Perhaps we should log on, embrace the cringe (obliviousness) and engage with spirituality, not as a set of tangible rules that often function as moral codes and jurisdiction imposed by any imperial state, but as a state of experience and sensation through which we perceive our surroundings—not analytically and conceptually, but as simple and sensible beings, like a child, a dog or a freed and eruptive stallion.

Text by Theodor Nymark