J.F. Martel

This essay explores how, in an age marked by the proliferation of signs, the symbolic nature of art retains its power to reveal otherwise incommunicable truths.

History is a kind of dream. The dead are always with us. The more our culture melts away, the more we cling to a sense of solidity. Art tells us we are at sea.

Has the world already ended? Are we dead? Neither literally nor metaphorically, this essay argues that we have become spectral beings in our image of the world.

Reminiscent of the work William Blake, Max Beckmann, and Hieronymus Bosch—to say nothing of the latter’s medieval predecessors, Antoniou’s images find their singularity in the exploration of the imaginal encounter, the sacred drama.

What can films tell us about reality? In a deep-ranging dialogue drawing on the philosophical ideas of Martin Heidegger and looking at works by Terrence Malick, Wim Wenders, Stanley Kubrick, and other celebrated auteurs, two contemporary aesthetic thinkers reflect on the ways in which cinema brings us into a deeper, stranger relationship with the world, and our being in it.

But the dark truth conveyed in the character of Barb finds its counterbalance in the incredible creative power that Stranger Things attributes to the Cosmic Child, a power which is also present in each of us.

Beneath the conceptual overlay, reality remains what it is: not an orderly network of humanly comestible ideas, but a turbid, ever-changing, symphonic, indefinable process of becoming that is accountable to neither the predilections of reason nor the strictures of logical grammar.

The show remains open, ambiguous to the end, and it is this quality that raises it above the normal run of generic entertainment to make of it something that defies genre, something genuinely weird.

What can art tell us about the nature of consciousness? Or maybe the question is better framed in McLuhanian terms: What is the message of the medium of art with regard to the nature of consciousness?