Conscious and Subconscious in Saint Clair Cemin’s Psyche

The documentary, Saint Clair Cemin, Psyche is a portrait of the artist at work. Directed by Svetlana Cemin over the course of five years, the film follows Saint Clair Cemin as he creates his work, Psyche. The work itself is a large marble ship and we follow Cemin from his studio in Brooklyn to a marble quarry in China and beyond. The only narration comes from Saint Clair himself, as he speaks about his work with others or, indirectly, to the camera, but here are two main themes that thread their way through the film: the process of creation, both psychologically and physically.

This is a visually stunning film. Getting a glimpse at the various studios Saint Clair works in as well as his process of outlining on paper, creating forms with foam and eventually working with marble is a real treat. We see Saint Clair being concerned with various practical matters than the sculptor must know. He ties knots his workers cannot. He must think like an engineer about the weight of various materials and he must be able to pick the perfect piece of marble from a quarry. Incidentally, Cemin’s travels to China are in themselves fascinating. Not least because over the length of the several years the film was made, we see radical transformations in the Chinese landscape. Cemin’s studio is in fact demolished at a certain point, apparently to make way for new towers of some kind.

Perhaps the link between the physical and psychological elements of the film are the odd musicians who inhabit it. Throughout the film, and without comment or explanation, we see in Cemin’s studio musicians wearing metal animal masks and playing stylized metal instruments. One suspects Cemin has hired these performance artists to keep him inspired. But perhaps they are just physical manifestations of his art that occasionally spring to life in his studio.

But even more interesting than the physical process of creating Psyche is the psychological process Cemin undergoes to create this work. The initial inspiration came from a dream in which Cemin saw a white boat floating on very dark waters. This struck Cemin as a representation of Psyche from the Greek stories about Eros and Psyche. Psyche, which in Greek means soul, but also, something like, ‘breath’ or ‘breath of life,’ is usually represented as a girl or a butterfly. The connection between the girl psyche and the boat may be that they are both classically understood as vessels. But the image of the soul as a white ship making its way on a dark inscrutable ocean is quite powerful. There is a sense here that the ship is adrift with no crew. In this, it may resemble the artist’s mercurial life. It may also be that the ship psyche is only the tip of the iceberg, or the visible part of consciousness, with the dark waters beneath, which are only haunted at in this work, being the real moving force. Psyche is, of course, the root of the English word, psychology – or logos of the psyche, or the study of the soul, or, in modern terms, the mind.

This notion of consciousness versus subconsciousness runs through the film. Early on, Saint Clair describes the operation of the mind while on a walk in the forest. Walking in the forest is usually thought of as a very relaxing activity. And Cemin concurs. But he believes that while the conscious mind is relaxed on such a walk, the subconscious is hard at work watching out for threats and trying to make sense of an essentially unknown and inherently threatening environment. The artist, Cemin maintains, must be relaxed in order for the soul to take over. We this again later in the film after Cemin has spoken to his daughter in college. She is anxious and must perform the difficult task of being creative on demand. According to Saint Clair, the only way to make this work is to find a way to allow the conscious mind to relax and to allow the soul to do its own work. Cemin tells us that he cannot prescribe a method for achieving this state of mind, but that for the artist it is essential.

The finished work, Psyche, is now in a sculpture garden in Cleveland, Ohio. To paraphrase Cemin, the role of the artists is to make you see things in a way you’ve never seen them before. Psyche achieves that goal. This is in unforgettable film that will stick with you, both in consciously and subconsciously.

By: Darida Rose