There are so many words that can be used and fail even as we take our understandings of meaning for granted. Perhaps there are as many images or more to fill the cracks words severed, but the relationship between art and words goes both ways. This long relationship between disciplines is nothing new, but seems to disquiet those who are playing the reductive programming act. The pursuit of closure or the finitive itself seems to make messes out of life’s processes which are continually opening and evolving. That is to say, there are people who try to drive other people’s lives. This is such a commonplace activity it is often regarded as good citizenry. There are distinctions to be made within the ways of help, as the saying goes, give someone a fish and they have a meal, show them how to fish and they can have a livelihood. Well that helps if the person can eat fish now doesn’t it. I’ve already tossed a lot of ingredients into this cookie, so I’ll try not to dive into the ethics and politics of philanthropy but steer back into the possible wholes, pieces of art aim to join or fill.
Art has the ability to keep us sane in times of conflict. And that form of confrontation that both opens up, solidifies, and continues to grow. My own mental process is wrestled by memories of Microsoft Word telling me my ‘voice’ was passive and in turn my making attempts to be more definitive, to then being definitive and being called bossy in real life. This business of ‘the right way to be’ is something I have also misused much energy for. Misused energy tends to suck the vitality and joy from life, and a social policy of ignoring that could create a pretty drone like culture. Properly used energy tends to balance and harmonize, much as different voices of a choir. There are books and books on flow for this reason, which is a state that might be much easier to create than chase after really.
Presented now with new technological choices, I would continue to wrestle with thoughts than have a machine or person tell me not the commonplace: what to do, no,, but rather the things I cannot do. Now if art became a crime, telling someone they cannot do what they are already doing, and working on developing, we would live in an even more perverse world. So I find it not art that is dangerous but rather the recent witness of accepted criminality. Alas human behavior, the way the landscapes make our physiology, these are the kinds of things I care about that end up in art. Because of the discomfort I find so readily in human behavior, art is not merely therapy but a form of exorcising pain and creating relational connections for a jouissance that requires no drugs or copulation at all.
Yet we know our eyes and minds are hungry when culture fails to nourish us and instead fosters regression and condescension, when sophistry becomes revered instead of mutual support to expand and learn, express and do. This is not to say inhale life only or to hold exhales out but that the range of human capacity has some direct relationships to the landscapes in which we are held. Earth, in the elemental impermanence depicted in Undulation, invites acceptance to loss and grief, and aims to not radicalize culture but offer an open door to spaciousness with the feelings civilization pathologizes, and in the archway of acceptance bio (real) diversity occurs.
Poetry and art comfort me in times people do not. Rilke’s call to live with the questions helps me sleep at night. There is sufficient evidence written in memory to show the answers reveal themselves through synchronicities.
Even after decades of study, work, practice, and inquiry, I can find new links between ideas and reality. The image above was titled Undulation around 2014. The diptych consists of 2 analogue film exposures (a redundant statement, I know). However these variations of the whole, was first shown outside of my personal studio in L.A. during Variations of a Whole at Bolsky Gallery. As reality is not black and white, nor linear as we falsely believe of time, the futility of making art has revealed itself useful by holding opposing views and becoming comfortable (not fearful) of difference. So while I was contending with notions of the Visceral, a decade later I realized I was fixated on understanding notions of the Parietal; that is by the definition of the word, relating to, attached to, or denoting the wall of the body or of a body cavity or hollow structure. This is where Platonic allegory comes in; the cave, which Freud flattened with his underdeveloped notions of sexuality, where Jung offered individuation through dream landscape, and where Lacan offered relational comedy through both tragedy and self-responsibility.
Making art isn’t often a feel good activity, though it offers a channel for understanding and allowing feelings to come and go, as meditation. The notion of professionalism: doing when even you do not feel like it. To show up for what you love regardless of feelings of discomfort, to work with it, to see where it evolves instead of ignoring it, made me realize new work isn’t always the solution. Sometimes reexamining ‘done’ work changes it as well. In this way the virtue of art offers more than most of my advanced gadgets, and fits more like a favourite sweater or piece of jewellery.
I often fantasize that other professions have it easier, but I know that is a lie…meaning a myth, easily falsifiable. Everyone I have met is facing someone’s voice who is trying to reduce their effort, value, or life. The cruelty humans put onto to each other seems to stem from projection, transference, and putting blame onto those so we can try to lessen our own burden. The image above does not suggest rugged individualism as a solve; instead it shows the hollow areas are contingent upon each other to form a whole; even though they are made of the same material. As uncomfortable as it may feel, most of us have more in common with each other than we want to acknowledge; and at least as many differences we have more to gain by accepting as well.
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