Buddhist philosophy, Zen meditations, New Age mantras: these things don't work for an artist. The artist thrives on conflict. Not as an end in itself toward drama, but as a catalyst for the newness, novelty, originality that comes from the mixing pot of change.
Philosophy does not work for artists. Art is something other than philosophy. It is more vibrant, alive, because it is a thing alive. It is not static, except insofar as a painting is static. The life of art comes from its lack of stability, it's action as a cipher or funnel. All that moves through it - thought, feeling, memory - speeds up, slows down, shifts, swirls, ceases to know itself within the chaotic realm. Chaos is the wrong word. It is life itself, in its need and propensity to move and change. It is life in its vibrancy. Within art, things shift and change, lose their definition, and become associative, malleable, and connected. They become based on their ability to associate, rather than their ability to differentiate.
Art is the tendency to take two things, profess them as opposite, and then try to bring them as nearly as possible to on another, let them grace each other, pass by one another, to appear briefly as one and the same, without breaking the veil of illusion.
Art is an illusion. There is always an artifice to art. Art is alive in its Nothingness. It thrives in it lack of being. It is a ghost, a slight of hand, a suggestion of authenticity without the credibility. It seeks to be real while professing to be false. A truth within a lie. It cannot speak its truth without its falsity. If it were spoken truly, it would be offensive, or worse.
No comments:
Post a Comment