Thabiso Mhlaba Automatist #7 + 8

Interestingly enough the four people arranged the first set of images into a face. As I was passing papers along I was noticing that a lot of the things drawn were very similar to the images that i saw in my mind but that there were also a number that seemed totally strange to me. This made me think that possibly the psychological cues that we all respond to are different based on how we live. Something that would reaffirm this notion of cults that we have discussed in class. The cults that we each might belong to unknowingly decide how we will respond to certain objects. However the fact that four people are artists might not fit in so well with the cult idea, or perhaps we are a cult with no predetermined cues. Artists by nature think outside what would be the obvious for most people. So we all respond to cues differently from each other which is what would explain the parts that don't make sense to me. Its the same reason why some people would've thought one drawing was a table instead of a clamp. Or why something was a star or an intersection. But as such we also will adapt this extraordinary ideas to existing ones. Which is why the focus of the first panel moved away from being seperate drawings of individual objects into the creation of one object with multiple elements.
Inclusion into a cult is not optional. It is something that is decided by your environment. The only people who exist outside of the consumerist cults that Lasn mentions are those who have lived in exclusion from urban society or rather 1st world society. Its difficult to put a date on the cults that Lasn speaks of because human beings have always been existing in communities. We are social by nature and as such form groups with people with similar personalities and ideals. All that consumerism does is market to these specific groups and attempt to define the beliefs of those groups. However I would argue that those beliefs existed before the markets for them. I don't believe that the images shown in the exercise are any real indication of consumerism because we have been studying the topic and are more aware of the forces at work to manipulate peoples behavior we have become a bit more resistant to those forces.
Such would be in agreement with DaDa principles. We do not wish to be categorized and lumped in with the rest of the consumers in the world. So we purposely ignore the first image that may come to our mind hoping to fight the jolts and subliminal messaging. I myself found myself viewing the exercise as simply a chance to draw more and I wasn't really worried about the relation that what I drew had with the words on the board. Maybe that was a programmed reaction of my Artist cult its difficult to know. But it leaves me with the question that if these cults really do exist how does one define them and determine which one they are in? Because surely human beings are diverse enough that we all have multiple feelings on multiple issues and very rarely share ALL the same views that someone else has. Even with in the group of artists we argue over the most basic topic there is "What is art?"
Maybe cults don't really exist we just think they do because we subconciously aim to belong to one.