Subject: What is art? (2)
| Posted By: laodan
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| Posted On: 9/27/2004 10:48 AM
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1 Reply
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Knowledge acts as a springboard for creativity, it projects a little further into reality and could redefine the artists and other free thinkers of the 21st century as the potential wisemen who first experience a global consciousness as a result of their integration of philosophical inquiries with scientific methodologies and data. But will artists size upon this opportunity? It is not a given fact, it requires indeed much humility, time and perseverance to reflect upon oneself and to study the mysteries of the sky, the earth and the self.
Notwithstanding those uncertainties, let's remember that art is something as the production of an expression or if you prefer an impression of the inner feelings and ideas of the artist. So we understand that an artist's productions are intimately related to his knowledge. The better his knowledge base, the better we can expect his production to be. Not advertisement of an ideology but expression of an idea, of a feeling through the use of a technique. In other words, content, the artist's personalized content will find central stage in artistic creation and beauty or ugliness will more and more relate to the content of a work!
It makes indeed no sense anymore in the twenty-first century to continue to photo-paint landscapes, people or whatever when we can simply use a camera, shoot a perfectly realist image and manipulate its pixels through a photo imaging software. It makes also no sense anymore to continue to illustrate the ideological trappings of religious or political half baked truths as it makes no more sense to plunge ourselves into the different distortions of reality as described by the twentieth century observers of the technological alterings of our visions of reality.
Those kind of works can't be considered visual art works any further. They reflect a past worldview and as such they are products for interior design, merchandises for interior decoration.
Artists and free thinkers of the 21st century have to place the bar somewhat higher than that. Let's remember that those of us who are watching the image of the global village in the cosmic mirror are plunged into a whole new world vision that gives us in some way the means to cross the divide between our present day land of folly and the promised land of consciousness that sits across this bridge leading to the future. We artists have to cross this bridge, we have to go in the future but we should permanently remember that the parapets on the bridge are what is protecting us from falling into the absurd and we should remember that those parapets are made of solid knowledge...
About form.
I do not believe one instant that technical skills or mastery in one technique are automatically conferring artistic qualities. Saying that technical mastery confers automatically artistic qualities to a work would be like saying that physical beauty in a person is what makes a person beautiful. We all know that a beautiful person has a lot more to offer than her physical beauty. But let us not fall in the absurd, it is also clear that the absence of technical mastery will never allow a work to become a work of art on the merit of its content alone. We all know that an interesting person does not necessarily render a person beautiful but we all also know that an interesting person that is physically beautiful is undoubtedly a beautiful person. In other words, an artist has to possess some mastery in his technique in order to express himself with ease. How could one without technical mastery be able indeed to express himself unhindered? Mastery I believe has to be understood as the result of practice not necessarily of schooling because schooling without practice will never procure mastery. I furthermore think that mastery is the result of a process combining work, experience and personal internal maturation. From my personal experience, I deduct that content and technique have to be blend into art form. What I mean here is that whatever technique is being used to express whatever content, the resulting work must be harmonious. Harmony is indeed the general state of our universe, of our cosmos and as particles of dust that we are in our universe we can't but make do at the image of the whole that contains us. A work of art should thus reflect this harmony, this is not to say that a work of art must be beautiful, many things in our universe are not beautiful but they are always harmonious.
Here we reach the point of style. How to keep up with the harmony of our universe?
I discovered that "will", I mean this desire from the brain to reach something, is rigidifying. In other words, "will" is a reflection of our greed, of our desires. Greed and desires create disharmony thus reflecting them in our works implies creating visual disharmony.
The only way I know of to keep harmonious lines, forms and colors is to let go all will, to accept what comes in full humility. Meditation greatly helps.
Here is the text that accompanies my painting "Meditation".
Meditation is accomplished in a context of retreat deep inside oneself, far from the noise of the world. It requires total relaxation of the body and absence of the mind.
The physical relaxation is the easy part. Stopping all thinking and forgetting about all accumulated knowledge and social bonds needs real humility and much patience.
After reaching total absence of the mind you are plunged back in the age of babyhood this is when you reach total innocence.
Total innocence frees the links between yourself and the whole of our universe. You are now in contact with the ONE, you are part of it and everything shines with clarity.
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