On April 21, Peter Lamborn Wilson gave a talk at the School for Visual Arts on hermetic alchemy, hieroglyphics, and the power associated with such signs as crests and emblems.

First half
Second half

One of the most interesting part of his lecture was the very end, where he tied together the art (images, emblems) and politics. Loosely quoted:

What has become of the emblem in the modern world? It's sometimes terrifying to consider. Propaganda, spin doctoring, advertising, television. Everywhere you go there's an onslaught of images trying to persuade you of something--to buy something, to vote for somebody. Whatever it is, they're all after your value and they don't want to give you anything back for it. We live in a 'hell' realm of emblems, where all the emblems are turned against us and are designed to steal our productive labor and taking away our money and our control over our own lives... It's one which passes almost invisibly or without comment except to people like us who are interested in art and the relationship between image and consciousness.

We at least might be able to understand something about what's going on here. And do what? At least we could save ourselves from the hell realm of the negative imagination. Maybe through art history or art criticism or art itself we could... Share our plight with others to the extent where we might hope to wake them up. We might hope to engage in a mutual waking up away from the chains of the imagination and image magic(k?) and into the ability to make our own magic to have a response to this world of commercial media and negative archetypes that arises from our own hearts, our own souls, our own imaginations, and is a kind of magical projection and protection at the same time... Perhaps we can even learn to speak in hieroglyphics and project that magic onto the world in a revolutionary way. That would be the goal of the modern hermetic artists. That was certainly Josef Beuys' goal. It's a utopian ideal which is not yet moribund and decayed.

The audio portion of Peter's talk was recorded by members of the August Sound Coalition.