Archetypal Images in Art
The Peter-Coreth-Collection
Kate Reynolds
The name Museum Humanum suggests the approach Peter Coreth has taken in presenting his collection to the public. He has here displayed objects from many ages and many cultures. He invites visitors to speculate on the meaning of these artefacts by seeing them in a context that reveals the commonality of human experience. In his written statement, describing the mission of the museum, he says he believes in the old maxim that the fight for survival (for the human race) must be fought by intellectual means rather than by violent acts.
Peter uses the phrase “variegated expressions of human orientation” in describing his collection. The orientation of which he speaks is grounded simultaneously in the external world of temporal events and the subjective realm of experience. The link between these two dimensions is referred to by St. Paul when he claimed, “as above, so below” and was rephrased by Goethe when he said, “as within, so without”.
The assumption that the inner and outer landscapes are one is reflected in Taoism and all major Eastern and Western philosophic systems, though they may be stated differently. Art and myth are vehicles by which both inner and outer realms can be understood as reflections of each other. Within an art collection this diverse, we can again discover a common voice and feel again the centre around which all cultures constellate. This centre is the mythos out of which all science, art, and human speculation arise, the axis mundi of all ritual, the place where the biological is joined to the Eternal, the senses to Imagination.
The most convincing evidence that these polarities are so linked is that they manifest from a common source and can be synthesized in works of art.
There is no clearer evidence of a disorientation from this centre than our current existential crisis. Our world lacks its own image because we have lost an understanding of the coordinates that join these polarities. We no longer agree upon what is true and what is real. These agreements are provisional truths, but they underlie all high cultures. In this collection we can see the evidence of these provisional truths, which are mythological. This is the reason why the collection has so much to teach us.
At present, the customary approach to study arts and cultural objects are similar to those of science. Science draws comparisons between things in horizontal lines, like those in the categories of Linnaeus: one tree parallel to another, mammals more similar to each other than to molluscs. For scholars, art is studied by period, style, and within a specific culture.
Contrary to the modern paradigm, the methodological mind makes vertical correspondences that liken an animal to constellation, a planet to colour, or a musical note.
A schematic presentation of this theory could be pictured as a helix. It is a representation of the manifest universe. Time and space are round, seasons spinning and planets turning. All phenomena are serial, limited, and cyclic; each plane is existence reflected in the level above and below. The bridges between one thing and another do not have obvious links but come out of a tradition on sunk deep in human consciousness; one that informs our individual and collective dreams (myth) is called the Theory of Correspondence by Hermetic philosophers.
Here entities on one plane of existence correspond to the plane above through common rhythms, which is to say through a common modality or essential expression. The snake, whose sinuous movements correspond to a helix, the most seminal symbol for the life force in time, correspond to a dragon on the plane above. The dragon is a hybred between biological and spiritual forces. It changes to an eagle on the plane above. The logic behind these links belong to a tradition long abandoned in the West, but still visible in all natural cultures. In megalithic and astrobiological cultures the mystic imagination forged links between animals and planets, musical instruments and implements of work, parts of the body and landscapes, cardinal directions and seasons. The nature of myth and these symbols are as inexplicable as consciousness itself.
It was for this reason that the orientation of the organic world of life and death was counterposed to the realm of the heavens for ancient men. In all the works of his imagination he looked for the blueprint of these archetypes, for the form of the Sacred. The making of Art was not an existential exercise, but an attempt to find that which is unvarying and unchanging.
That has certainly been the quest of modern science. It is important to explain that an archetypal meaning does not violate any specific, historical meaning, but serves to enrich the significance of an object by putting it within a larger context. Many interpretations of an object can exist at the same time without negating each other. I would like to suggest that it may be more prudent to look to art for unvarying truth, as has been done by Peter Coreth in his collection. For it is the intermediate zone between the inner and outer worlds that one can find what is constant to both. The language of this common field is art and myth. People need to orientate themselves in the world in more than physical space. To acquaint oneself with Peter Coreths collection is to know where we are.
Kate Reynolds, born in 1945, is an American art educator specialising in mythology and symbolic language. She studied education at the University of Idaho (graduating in 1972), after which she taught for around 40 years in places including San Francisco, Prague, Baku, Florence and Vienna. Her work engages with the writings of C.G. Jung, Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade. She has collaborated with Terence McKenna on the subject of alchemy. Kate Reynolds has also made a name for herself as a painter and folk singer with the group Dochas, with whom she has recorded several CDs and toured extensively.
Press Reviews
Along the Austrian Thaya
The first part of the Grasel Trail goes from Slavonice to the hamlet of Fratres. The fascinating private Museum Humanum is located here in a Baroque manor. The Empress Maria Theresia used to stay in this manor overnight on her travels between Prague and Vienna. Grasel robbed this manor as well.
Museum Humanum is essentially the lifetime collection of one man, Peter Coreth. His purpose is to contribute to an anthropological understanding of art. As he says „its aim is not to teach but rather to seduce the visitor to see and reflect for him (or indeed her) self“. The, quite literally, thousands of very different exhibits are from all over the world representing many centuries and probably hundreds of cultures. The eclectic mix of objects is displayed in groups, or arcades, reflecting the physical structure of the museum, to cover the subjects of Survival, the Mythic Matrix, Transfer of Meaning, Pretension to Power and, finally, Anthropocentrism. Sounds daunting. But somehow it is not. The exhibits, while each very different, gave me the feeling of commonality, illustrating the links between ages and peoples, the parallel symbols that appear in so many different cultures at so many different points in time. The same symbols may feature in an ancient carving from Africa, a temple piece from China or a woodcut from Europe. It is fascinating. The museum really is just over the border; look hard or blink and you will miss it.
THE BRIDGE (Jennifer Potter)
Art exhibition / culture
The MUSEUM HUMANUM seeks to give new expression to the ancient conviction that the fight for survival must be waged by intellectual means. The „Cultural Bridge Fratres-Slavonice“ addresses this philosophy with a programmatic approach, which can bee seen as a basis for serious questioning of old and new artistic codes. The concept of the permanent exhibition is supported by the architecture of the pillared hall, in which each arcade is dedicated to a certain subject. The motiv of this collection is the cycle „pictures of animals – pictures of deities – pictures of man“ emphasizing the comprehensive evolutionary movement of anthropomorphizing processes in the different languages of the forms of each culture. (...) The principle of the presentation is the synopsis, not the fathoming of individual features, although the invitation to risk profound analysisis included at certain points: the visitor can use the concept as an open model for further discussion and adapt it to suit his personal needs.
PRAGUE
Fratres
This rather ordinary village lies directly on the Czech-Austrian border. Perhaps you would not expect a culture centre renowned in Central Europe to be found in a local old farm. It has been organizing concerts, exhibitions, theatres and summer schools of all types for ten years now. The centre is the meeting point of famous Czech and Austrian artists, ambassadors, cardinals as well as ordinary art enthusiasts from various European regions. The owner of the farm, a philosopher Peter Coreth, will show you around a permanent exposition of his life-long collections – the Museum Humanum. It allows you to see a unique collection of hundred of small sculptures, cult items, insignia, amulets and very old working tools from the five continents. „Image of Animal – Image of God – Image of Man“ is the motto of the permanent exhibition, which will take you through thirty thousends years of the human development. You will pass from the magical imagination world of the Stone Age hunters and still existing natural tribes, through periods marked by myths and religion until you reach the art of our rational age.
TOPOGRAPHY / Slavonice
The Mythic Matrix – A very unusual Museum
If you are in the south of the country, close to Slavonice it is worth popping over the border to Austria to a very unusual museum. It is called Kultur Fratres and Museum Humanum. The two names reflecting the two elements of the museum that are housed in the remaining buildings of an old country estate in Fratres where the Empress Marie Theresa is said to have stayed…
THE BRIDGE