CONNOR ADDISON


 
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Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian — a banana, duct tape, and a $120,000 punchline. The pinacale of art history





Secular Souls
Need Symbols Too

by Connor Addison

7 September 2025
BARCELONA, SPAIN




In 1984, the art philosopher Arthur Danto famously declared “The End of Art” had arrived. Art’s historical evolution was partly about understanding what art is. Once philosophy was able to explain what art is, through his example of Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (a set of precise copies of commercial packaging), the historical need for further stylistic revolution disappeared.


Through a succession of questions like:

“Is a urinal art?” (Duchamp)
 “Is this can of soup art?” (Warhol)
 “How about form with no content?” (Judd)
 “Surely not this blank canvas!?” (Ryman)
 “ok, ok… how about this…a banana!!?” (Cattelan)


We arrived at a point where every object in the universe can be ascribed as art. This art historical movement has certainly been a gift, creating pluralism in artistic expression, but once art becomes pure self-reference, art about art, it has “nowhere further to go.”
What I find sad about this is that art, in including everything as a medium of expression, has in many senses excluded the viewer. If art is about art, then it is not about us. It has however been a relief to see in the last years a general movement into figuration and narrative, a welcome return to the anthropocentric role of art since time immemorial.

Narrative allegory has, for example, been a vehicle of expression in Christianity for thousands of years, used to make invisible forces visible: good and evil, moral teaching and explanations on the metaphysical origins of the universe. I do not ascribe to the truth value of its teachings but it serves a public function, not investigating what it means to make art, but what it means to be human, an attempt to create a schematic towards a good life.




Secularism and the
Crisis of Meaning



by Connor Addison

17 July 2025
BARCELONA, SPAIN




Yet in a more secular world, which has resulted in the post-modern atomisation of the Neo-liberal rational individual, (what a mouthful) we have supposedly been liberated by materialism, worldly success and moral freedom. Grand stories of transcendent meaning have less relevance, they can seem anti-rational, dogmatic, oppressive, spiritual, out of date and based in emotion.

Yet without some substrate of transcendent awareness there seems to be a deep creeping nihilism and anxiety that cascades from the soul. Just being rational, hedonistic, seeking likes and buying nice things doesn’t cut it. Filling yourself with this, paradoxically, makes you empty.

This secular emptiness and its anxieties manifests in strange ways. For example, the Marvel Universe, not unlike Greek mythology, is a form of pop-polytheism where superheroes take us on a hero’s journey, expressing the values of perseverance, faith and a grand battle against evil. It is a horrifically blunt cultural tool, but clearly a necessary one—a stand-in for deeper narratives of the human condition. Its unintelligible popularity is testament to this.

It seems that in our attempt to remove the prescriptive, non-scientific demands of God or gods (depending on religion) we have flattened human experience, reducing art, ethics, and meaning to mechanistic terms. But what is clear is that we need stories. We need symbols. And we need greater narratives, the right ones, otherwise they will be hijacked by narratives of otherness and fear. The ‘Old Gods’ of WWII, Populism and Ethno-Nationalism, will fill the transcendent need in humans. Something I fear is already in full swing.



The louder the shine, the emptier the core?
Koons’ Hulk




The Snake
Beneath the Surface



by Connor Addison

17 July 2025
Not having interest in religion myself, I found it strange that I was seeking to make allegorical works, just like religion does: visual reminders of a deeper meaning in myself, others and existence. But it was something that my secular, materialist and rational upbringing was sceptical of.

This resistance to allegory was strong as I am suspicious of organised religion, largely because I wanted to make my own rules. But that changed when I started reading the psychoanalysis of C.G. Jung. He showed how the pictorial world of religious art is not an invention of religion, but something that taps into a much older source in the human spirit: The Collective Unconscious. The collective unconscious refers to a layer of the unconscious mind that is shared among all human beings, regardless of culture or individual experience. It contains universal psychological structures that Jung called archetypes, such as the Mother Image.
A visual map of the Jungian psyche







This idea, that we share archetypal imagery, is deeply compelling. It sits beneath all religious systems. It demands integration into our postmodern lives, especially for artists who wish to engage meaningfully with human experience.






Tao, Evolution, and the Collective Unconscious


by Connor Addison

17 July 2025
BARCELONA, SPAIN




Although Jung doesn’t posit an evolutionary origin directly, my guess is that this has emerged from the repetition of ancestral experiences in deep time. So that symbols and their meanings have been etched into the mind as hardware at birth. For example, we have evolved a natural fear of snakes for reasons of physical survival but it extends, symbolically, to much more: In the snake’s venom, we find learning and thus transformation and wisdom. In the snake’s hiding, we find our unconscious and thus the “Shadow” within us. Even if evolution is not literally encoding: “Snake = Hidden growth through pain,” we still have the evolutionary faculty of metaphor to get there.

I find it to be no coincidence that the story of Adam and Eve extracts symbolic significance from our evolutionary home as apes (the tree) with our evolutionary predator (the snake) and features our evolutionary food (fruit). What’s more is that these three symbols are found in almost every system of spiritual thought, irrespective of cross-cultural exchange. These images and their meanings do not belong to any creed, they are borrowed.✹


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Although Jung doesn’t posit an evolutionary origin directly, my guess is that this has emerged from the repetition of ancestral experiences in deep time. So that symbols and their meanings have been etched into the mind as hardware at birth. For example, we have evolved a natural fear of snakes for reasons of physical survival but it extends, symbolically, to much more: In the snake’s venom, we find learning and thus transformation and wisdom. In the snake’s hiding, we find our unconscious and thus the “Shadow” within us. Even if evolution is not literally encoding: “Snake = Hidden growth through pain,” we still have the evolutionary faculty of metaphor to get there.

I find it to be no coincidence that the story of Adam and Eve extracts symbolic significance from our evolutionary home as apes (the tree) with our evolutionary predator (the snake) and features our evolutionary food (fruit). What’s more is that these three symbols are found in almost every system of spiritual thought, irrespective of cross-cultural exchange. These images and their meanings do not belong to any creed, they are borrowed.✹


Our ancestral home? 
Adam and Eve by Lucas Cranach the Younger  (1532)


But, for those sceptics, I would also posit that the collective unconscious has also emerged out of the objective nature of things in the world. As an artist it has been amazing to discover the undeniable and inescapable meaning inherent in shapes. The circle, for example, is inescapably an expression of wholeness and infinity, yet is also the void and formlessness. To follow its line is an infinate cycle. Its curve offers no heiarchy, a spacial point of differentiation from which to define other points, making it empty. This true nature of the circle is something picked up upon in Taoist philosophy: the circle is both full and empty, suggesting reality is the marriage of opposites and so non-dualistic (Yin-Yang/Taijitu) or that in the circle’s void we find the Dao, the ineffable, unnameable origin of all things: Wu (無) or undifferentiated potential.✹✹
This early version of the iconic yin-yang diagram visualizes Taoist cosmology—depicting the eternal interplay of opposites: light and dark, activity and rest, being and non-being. More than balance, it illustrates the generative tension of duality, each force holding the seed of its opposite.

Lai Zhide’s Xuanguan Taiji Tu Shuo (玄关太极图说), ca. 1600 CE.



In short, the world offers universal meanings encoded in its objective structure, recognisable across cultures. These meanings are real. They’re not just cultural.

Whether the collective unconscious arises from evolution or the symbolic nature of the world, I propose that systems dealing with the mystical, moral, and irrational—Christianity, Buddhism, Islam—are built upon a secular substrate. They extract universal truths from observed reality (above) and evolutionary human patterns (below). Religion has simply occupied these truths.


Footnotes
✹ : We even see the role of emergent self-consciousness from a state of naked bliss to shame, probably a real gradual event during our evolutionary leap from ape to Homo sapiens. It’s amazing that this was intuited by the ancient Hebrew/Mesopotamians

✹✹ : I find this emergence of the world from a void of undifferentiated potential particularly interesting for its similarity to Quantum Field Theory. The Taoists really know how to intuit deep truths that science has only begun to verify.




Postmodern Artists
Can Inherit the Sacred



by Connor Addison

17 July 2025
On this note I want to return to my original point critiquing the artistic pursuit of expanding “what art can be” for “art historical” breakthroughs. I’d like to see this abandoned in favour of secular allegory, that is, using archetypal imagery to convey conceptual meaning that resonates with the personal lives of those outside the art world.

But this can only be possible if artists, who today are mostly non-religious, liberal post-modernists, realise this goal. The religious function of encoding universal patterns: suffering, morality, and asking questions about our place in the world, how it came to be, and what to do about it, can be deeply secular and post-modernist. We are already over-consuming Marvel films, aren’t we!? Why not find better forms of seeing to counter our spiritual nihilism?

Tapping into the substrate of the collective unconscious to create artistic allegory, in a space without religious dogma or clichés, we can find connection to the sublime, that is, something beyond the immediate confines of the ego, populism and materialism.

Because without something transcendent, we are empty.






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