I Had An Idea:
To stitch and sculpt an art ‘relic’ titled:
‘The pointing finger of transmogrification.’
Because I had begun to ask:
Are objects showing signs of depression?
Does the creation of objects need to go to therapy?
Is there perhaps a buried relic from the mystic ages of art history that can be excavated, to restore potency to my own flaccid skins of canvas and crumpled clay?”
Which leads me to:
Could the confusion of so much analysis, so much introspection, be slumping the forms, hesitating the hands from making objects.
And hindering our ability to solve insights through the making of objects?
Which leads me to:
Are we taking our confusion out on our objects?
Which leads me to:
I am not certain whether we create art using both insight and introspection.
And in that case is it an equal split or does one dominate because one of these methods is more influenced by external factors to dominate.
And therefore it swerves the artwork towards a certain direction?
Which leads me to:
But then again the question could be, do we create work using introspection or insight?
And are the works created using either one or the other manifestly different works?
Which leads me to:
Do works created using introspection currently have more ‘value’ that those that rely on insight to be created?
Which leads me to:
Do the insight works currently have to explain themselves using introspection and analysis, the answers to which then dominate the work so it retreats to the background becoming a victim of analysis?
Which leads me to:
Is this over analysis both before and after the creating of work, exhausting the artist, and therefore manifesting in installations that mimic poverty, paucity, slumped shoulders, lowered eyes, quietness and scarcity?
Are these hobo artworks a reflection of our loss of self-belief reformed into humble, hiding objects with a barely-there, presence.
Which leads me to:
How can it be possible for the blue space of the mind to float in its ether of wonderment and have an insight to answer the puzzle of a creation, amidst an endless critical chatter that leeches into the same space?
Which leads me to:
So many questions an artwork has to answer for.
Which leads me to:
Presently you would think that artists have an unprecedented freedom to make, find, appropriate, destroy, imagine, or physically do, pretty much anything and claim it as art.
But we do this within an economic and academic context that exerts an imperceptible judgmental control over those actions.
In an era where the idea of the idea is given supremacy over the object of an idea, the minds producing the ‘ideas’ would be challenged to say that they had been free of any voice other than their own, during the creation of their work.
Which leads me to:
More than ever the introspection part of our minds is taken up with questions about the audience we are trying to reach, the criticism we are likely to receive, the way we can fit our work into the currently favoured academic zeitgeist.
And whether we should even make an object, let alone how we would make it.
The simplicity of forming an idea and then forming the idea into a form is lost inside an intellectual and overly analytical, psycho-babble.
There are many questions that eat away at our self-confidence and at the personal integrity of our work.
The insight within the work, that you could argue, gives a piece it’s punctum, its arête, its point of difference, is ebbed of its steadfastness and surety.
It is as though the biological punctum in the eye has become physically blocked and a haze covers all that it attempts to scan.
Which leads me to:
We are often as an audience viewing works that metaphorically have their shoulders hunched, their forms melted and installations that are dashed together to illustrate that it doesn’t matter.
My own drawings have become twisted figures battling each other as mirrored twins in a Rorschach drama on paper.
Thin lines on thin paper, now stacked in a box as though it is of no matter.
But it must have mattered, these physical things were still being made or collected, they were chosen to ‘BE’ a participant in an artist’s visualized idea.
Art reflects someone wanting to reflect an idea or value back to someone else.
Made on their behalf (the audience), and also made on their behalf (the artists). The artists existing state of mind is the only available material with which to start the work, and this mind-material works in tandem and with equality, with the concept of ‘why’ they wanted to do the work.
Which leads me to:
I wonder if in order to make these slouched works of art: did magnificence need to die?
It is not an offensive question, it is relevant because one could say magnificence is an ideal of the old order and no longer reflects our understanding of the cosmos that we are such a barely distinguishable part of.
It is possible that such ideals are now confined to history, and instead we must resign ourselves to a reality that reflects our understanding of the disheveled brutality and uncertainty that we now recognize as the chaos of existence.
Not only, are we no longer worshipped by the Heliocentric sun, our uniqueness is further diminished by growing knowledge of how many millions of potential ‘earths’ orbit stars in our universe.
Our physical beings now seem to carry a heaviness that is beyond gravity, as though the warped fields of string theory have fallen from the sky and are pressing on our puny forms with a net of immense weight.
We know ourselves now as insignificant insects in a web of heavy nothingness and this diminished self-importance perhaps restricts our stretching upright into the creatures of backbone that once pulled geometry out of our bone hard skulls.
Which leads me to:
Perhaps unconsciously our bones and therefore our minds are weighted by the grave heaviness of the space known and unknown that surrounds us.
The knowledge overwhelming our physicality and represented in the physical forms we exhibit.
We now have no reason to believe in an external figure of ‘glory’ that sits outside our own egos, and correspondingly we no longer suppress our ego to create treasures for this imagined magnificence.
Which leads me to:
But glory as an ideal still appeals to us, we seek others who have been anointed with it and it would be a positive admission to acknowledge we wish glory for ourselves as through it we confirm our worthiness and give our fragile feeling of self, solace, by confirmation of our existence through the accepting eyes of others.
We wish the same glory to transfer to and from our creations and for them to be held and treasured in the safety and bestowed longevity of, adoration.
All around us the publicity of others challenges us to seek fame for our work and the thing that hinders these aspirations that we unconsciously harbor, is our self.
Not long after beginning a new work, we start to analyse our beliefs and thus begins the slow corrosion of our insight.
Which leads me to:
This rusting analysis starts to corrupt almost instantaneously following the initial big bang that initiates the transforming of a piece of matter into ‘something’ that matters.
Questions come almost unbidden into the pristine vacuum of ‘nothing’ in which we have incubated our idea for a body of work.
We start to evaluate the idea and its worthiness next to work made by others whom we admire or others that someone else admires.
Or we study the current art philosophies and twist ourselves to fit the words of someone else.
We begin to alter our work, transforming it in light of the influences of the market and the voices we have let into our heads.
Which leads me to:
We do this analysis because it is a difficult battle we have inside our heads as we endeavor to reflect by a physical external form, the glory of ourselves transmogrified into our work in order to attain glory for ourselves for our work in order that a form of our work survives and in order that we survive in a form.
Which leads me to:
At its worst this is the psychological death spiral of narcissism.
At its best it is a psychological appreciation of the wonderment of our consciousness of our existence.
It is though we form both, an internal monologue and exhibit an externalized form that mimics the double helix of our DNA.
And within that monologue it is as though we can particulate the strands of our thoughts into a twisting, long spiral with connecting pathways between the two sides of introspection and insight, the pathways allowing updates back and forth as the internal debate queries the worthiness and unworthiness of our ponderings, and of our decisions.
Meanwhile our perception moves endlessly up and down the length, back and forth as if watching a spinning helix in the light of day,
Which leads me to:
It is mentally very difficult to control the forces that have begun the spin of the double helix in your mind.
It requires stillness to quiet the two sides so that we can choose some certainty of direction.
If we have stopped increasing the length of the strand by not adding any more arguments to the rope, and we have found a method to remove any more external voices asking to be ‘liked’, and we have evolved a way to hold the twist steady so it no longer dazzles us by its flashy spiraling, then we can perhaps as artists, regain a balance between introspection and insight into what it is we value to express in our work.
The work can contain glory within itself quietly, made, found, structured, unstructured, perfect, imperfect, just because it exists and was made consciously from within the reality we uniquely inhabit.
The objects themselves could then physically stand and bear the pressing heaviness of the forces that weigh so heavily on the shoulders and suffocate the air from the mere mortal who made them or anointed them as artworks.
Which leads me to:
Breathe in breathe out.
There is something to be gained from making artifacts that celebrate the oxygen in our blood, the rigidity of our skeleton, the blood that circulates our brains and the backbone that holds it erect.
To celebrate the conversions of gases and cosmic dust, the particles, the atoms, the molecules that cluster, the dark matter that hides, the light waves that we can see, the radioactive hiss that we can hear, the endlessness of space now that we know it is with us and we within it.
It is magnificent to be alive for such a brief moment of time and this is a something that we can still hold as valuable, in a reflection returning to us from objects that introspection and insight fought to bring into existence.
Which leads me to:
The skeletons of artists are bearing the weighty science of art. The words are suffocating us, clotting our arteries, entangling lines around our heads.
An inquisition by scholars and economists has pushed mysticism underground to lonely lairs.
And the inquisition that is our own relentless inner monologue of self-justification and self-correction, keeps us in there.
Which leads me to:
Breathe in, breathe out, inhale, and exhale…
I suggest we keep searching for and keep working for the elusive pointing finger of transmogrification.
Severed from some magnificent being in a time of glory, it is rumoured that when held in any mere mortal’s hand its crag skinned withered bone and keratin nail can point and claim beauty to be beheld in any object whatsoever.
Cut off your own blood engorged finger at the knuckle and prepare the torn surface to attach this immortalized detector of beauty and point, point, point at your work.
Glory be, glory be, glory be.
But alas, I fear this marvelous relic is a long buried fossil with its empowering flesh transformed to cold hard stone, and I have found I cannot stitch myself an effective replacement from the lowly materials at hand…
Woe is me, woe is me, woe is me.
Oh well it as only an idea