So I've been studying Marina Abramovic lately and I find her incredibly interesting in different ways but at the same time I can't digest lots of her work at once. I am skeptical of certain celebrity endorsement of her but it seems more like a lot of pop stars want to make her like a kind of Serbian female Warhol, which she's not.
Anyway, some other artists I love include the filmmaker Stan Brakhage (who's work you may find is like a precursor to elements of Kubrick and Lynch, except he's way more abstract and more direct within avant garde tradition).
I also love the playwrite and director Richard Foreman, whom I discovered through John Zorn. Foreman I see relating to many elements of the intense, primal spiritual art that I have mentioned in relation to Iannis Xenakis, Aleister Crowley, Stravinsky's Le Sacre, Antonin Artaud, Austin Spare, Jani Christou etc.
I think in relating to that 'primalness', that 'true' art is an awakening experience that awakens the subject experiencing it to the reality of existence. Not in a pretentious pseudo-gnostic sense but in a truly primal, unfiltered manner. That there is something lurking behind the daily experience of reality and both what produced it (birth) and where it ends up (the graveyard).
Sure the Macabre has one relevance but I'm not speaking of basic gothic horror stuff or even Lovecraftian horror, because it is a lot more extreme than either and yet not as dressed-up either, it is completely unfiltered and completely self-aware.
Out of this comes an archetypally transcendent impulse rooted in the ground of one's being, the impulse towards God/Allah/YHWH/Brahman (not speaking religion-specific in this sense), the thing that both 'causes' but which also frees us from this initial realization, the thing which is both the peace and the suprapeace, a pure kind of transcendent pleasure (Paradise in Islamic terms).
I do think that I see Islam relating deeply to this, as with the Prophet prior to the significantly great Prophet Muhammad, such as Prophet Abraham and Prophet Moses.
On some level it is like the apes in Kubrick's 2001, they pick up the bone and smash it, they discover tools, they discover the intellect ('Aql), they also understand the greater calling of humanity.
But the rest of humanity needs the basic safety, so they rest on the animal instead of the intellect and therefore (in conjunction with modernity) must therefore deny God and remove metaphysics from their collective societal worldview.
So every throughout history in the Abrahamic scheme, a great Prophet is chosen, who stands up against the apes and calls them to the intellect ('Aql).
The apes, in reaction, choose a parody of the intellect (materialist-empiricism) as a further assertion away from the primal truth.
(I'm just using analogies from Kubrick's 2001 here).
