THE REBEL ARTIST MAKES HER CASE
Imagine the times in your life where there have been major crossroads.
The time when you almost got married, but didn't, or did. The time that
someone close to you almost died, or the time that they almost survived.
Imagine at that moment that there was a split, in one direction is the
life that you have reached here today as you read this. In the other
direction was a different life, different experiences and adventures
that you can get closer to with your imagination, but that you can never
really know. An entirely different world really. One that could easily
have come into being, but which did not. It was real, as real and
diverse as this life now, but it never existed.
It is by this means that we come to see that our lives are potentials, uncountably infinite potentials. We ourselves, our relationships, our natures can acquire so many different meanings. And there are more potential meanings in this world than we could ever come to know. Some of these potentials are a result of happenstance. Of being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. They also result from the happenstance of being in the right or wrong mindset at the time when opportunity comes. One can be in the right place at the right time and miss the opportunity, because they are not paying attention, or because they have not cultivated themselves to be ready for the opportunity. But there is more to this meaning making than sheer happenstance.
We also come to define the meaning of our worlds, realize the potential of our lives by choosing to assign meaning. By being bold enough and creative enough to name what we find. Because this is the realm of the world that we can control, this is where we must focus our attention. For the remainder of this essay let us say farewell to happenstance and happy or unhappy accidents. Let's wish one another luck and pray to the fates to be kind and move out into the realm that we are the masters of. The realm in which we assign our own meaning to the world and our relationship to it. The realm in which we realize our potentials on our own terms, without compromise.
There are many ways in which we can approach this task. I wish to concentrate on the way in which we assign our own meaning and value to the world in the form of the arts, broadly speaking, in the forms of literature, visual art, the performing arts. To assign our own meaning to the world, is to invent that meaning, and where do we find the pure invention of meaning, but in the arts? Religion gives us meaning, a meaning that we can choose to explore and discover, but faith is a journey, not a creative invention of our own. The sciences again challenge us to discover meaning, but it is an inherent meaning, not an invented or created one that belongs to us alone. In our relationships with others, friends and family, we are not inventing meanings of our own, we are collaborating with others, and what we build with them has an inherent meaning and value, but it is not subjective. It's nature is to be shared, and though it is created, it is not a meaning invented within our own rules. It is a meaning discovered and nurtured and demonstrated. It is a nature that obeys the rules of reality and objective meaning. In the arts alone do we find the potential, and make the opportunity for pure invention.
How do we assign meaning to the world through invention in the arts? First, we must observe the world as it is. See it, question it, experience it. We must take an active rather than a passive role in the observation of the world and how it works. We must study it with all of our capacities. We must be tuned in to the best of our abilities.
But this is not enough. The artist must do so much more than see and understand the world. That is what separates her from the Philosopher. What is required next is the great leap, the step that will separate the artist from her peers, from the craftsmen who dabble in the arts, from the academicians and from the scientists. The next step is to hunt out within ourselves, to discover and clearly define what it is that we value. What is it that we need to find in the world so that we may agree to live in it? What do we believe in? Truth, of course, but what does our own experience lead us to know as the truth? Beauty, of course, but what does our soul deep within us and uniquely our own see as beauty? What makes us tremble? What makes us sure? These are the questions we much tease out of ourselves. These essential concepts in the world that we value are the only concepts that are worth creating art from. These are the values that our experiences in life have built our identities from. These are the values that make us the individuals that we are, and we must look very deeply into ourselves to discover them. We must live richly to provide the opportunity to discover more of our values. I don't believe that you can invent your values, I think you must discover them in the depths of who you are. And this process is one in which, as an artist you are constantly involved in for the entirety of your career and your life.
When we create, we are making a decision to raise something out of the chaos of the world, breathe life, and so also meaning into it. Claiming it as our own and giving it a name so that we ourselves will not forget it, and so that others will know it. Why do we do this? I believe that we invent out of an act of metaphysical rebellion. By rebellion I am not talking about a Proletarian rebellion, or a revolutionary rebellion. I am not talking about a rebellion that refuses with a vehement, "no," and turns away. I am talking here about a rebellion that claims that there is something I have discovered that has great value, something which I refuse to live without, and I rebel against a world in which this value is disregarded, disrespected, or invisible. It is a rebellion that claims something as being essential, as vital in fact. And so, the artists rebels against the world as it is, and creates out of her defiance her own world, which explicitly includes this value. An example of this is freedom. We live in a world where we are unfree, some of us more than others, but all of us are unfree in one regard or another. The only way to deal with the lack of freedom we find in the world is to rebel against it, and make creations that express our freedom as vehemently, clearly, and profoundly as we understand it. We create freely, and this is an act of rebellion against the laws of the world as it is. Albert Camus writes:
"Revolt stems first of all from the heart, but a time comes when it passes to the spirit, where feeling becomes idea, where spontaneous fervor leads to direct action. This is the moment of rebellion."
This is an important idea. Revolt does begin in our hearts, it goes back to the previous step I addressed, the discovering within ourselves of the things that we value. We rebel against that which offends or denies our values. But for the artist to be successful, that revolt must trace its way from the heart into the mind. The work of art must be inspired by our hearts, but executed with our minds.
The arts exist so that we can re-invent the world, make it as it must be in order that we may agree to live in it. We wrest the keys from God and freely invent another world. An unreal, but solid world. As it should be. We try to invent heaven with our creations. When a question isn't clear, we invent clarity. When the ugliness of suffering is hidden, we bring it into the light. When beauty and dreams are muffled by the laws of physics, we set those laws ablaze, unbind the dreams and the beauty and make them profound and permanent.
This is why artists are more sensitive. More passionate. More inclined to joy and misery in their most intense forms. We must bear witness and understand so much of what fails in the real world, and measure it against the imaginary world of what should be; would be if we were the Gods that we wish we were. We are not looking for justice, with her blind judge of scales, we are the sighted judges. And to see what is and to weigh it against what could be sometimes brings desperation. The only way beyond that desperation, is the elevating act of re-inventing the world in our souls. And this invention is usually done alone, silently, from nothing.
It is by this means that we come to see that our lives are potentials, uncountably infinite potentials. We ourselves, our relationships, our natures can acquire so many different meanings. And there are more potential meanings in this world than we could ever come to know. Some of these potentials are a result of happenstance. Of being in the right or wrong place at the right or wrong time. They also result from the happenstance of being in the right or wrong mindset at the time when opportunity comes. One can be in the right place at the right time and miss the opportunity, because they are not paying attention, or because they have not cultivated themselves to be ready for the opportunity. But there is more to this meaning making than sheer happenstance.
We also come to define the meaning of our worlds, realize the potential of our lives by choosing to assign meaning. By being bold enough and creative enough to name what we find. Because this is the realm of the world that we can control, this is where we must focus our attention. For the remainder of this essay let us say farewell to happenstance and happy or unhappy accidents. Let's wish one another luck and pray to the fates to be kind and move out into the realm that we are the masters of. The realm in which we assign our own meaning to the world and our relationship to it. The realm in which we realize our potentials on our own terms, without compromise.
There are many ways in which we can approach this task. I wish to concentrate on the way in which we assign our own meaning and value to the world in the form of the arts, broadly speaking, in the forms of literature, visual art, the performing arts. To assign our own meaning to the world, is to invent that meaning, and where do we find the pure invention of meaning, but in the arts? Religion gives us meaning, a meaning that we can choose to explore and discover, but faith is a journey, not a creative invention of our own. The sciences again challenge us to discover meaning, but it is an inherent meaning, not an invented or created one that belongs to us alone. In our relationships with others, friends and family, we are not inventing meanings of our own, we are collaborating with others, and what we build with them has an inherent meaning and value, but it is not subjective. It's nature is to be shared, and though it is created, it is not a meaning invented within our own rules. It is a meaning discovered and nurtured and demonstrated. It is a nature that obeys the rules of reality and objective meaning. In the arts alone do we find the potential, and make the opportunity for pure invention.
How do we assign meaning to the world through invention in the arts? First, we must observe the world as it is. See it, question it, experience it. We must take an active rather than a passive role in the observation of the world and how it works. We must study it with all of our capacities. We must be tuned in to the best of our abilities.
But this is not enough. The artist must do so much more than see and understand the world. That is what separates her from the Philosopher. What is required next is the great leap, the step that will separate the artist from her peers, from the craftsmen who dabble in the arts, from the academicians and from the scientists. The next step is to hunt out within ourselves, to discover and clearly define what it is that we value. What is it that we need to find in the world so that we may agree to live in it? What do we believe in? Truth, of course, but what does our own experience lead us to know as the truth? Beauty, of course, but what does our soul deep within us and uniquely our own see as beauty? What makes us tremble? What makes us sure? These are the questions we much tease out of ourselves. These essential concepts in the world that we value are the only concepts that are worth creating art from. These are the values that our experiences in life have built our identities from. These are the values that make us the individuals that we are, and we must look very deeply into ourselves to discover them. We must live richly to provide the opportunity to discover more of our values. I don't believe that you can invent your values, I think you must discover them in the depths of who you are. And this process is one in which, as an artist you are constantly involved in for the entirety of your career and your life.
When we create, we are making a decision to raise something out of the chaos of the world, breathe life, and so also meaning into it. Claiming it as our own and giving it a name so that we ourselves will not forget it, and so that others will know it. Why do we do this? I believe that we invent out of an act of metaphysical rebellion. By rebellion I am not talking about a Proletarian rebellion, or a revolutionary rebellion. I am not talking about a rebellion that refuses with a vehement, "no," and turns away. I am talking here about a rebellion that claims that there is something I have discovered that has great value, something which I refuse to live without, and I rebel against a world in which this value is disregarded, disrespected, or invisible. It is a rebellion that claims something as being essential, as vital in fact. And so, the artists rebels against the world as it is, and creates out of her defiance her own world, which explicitly includes this value. An example of this is freedom. We live in a world where we are unfree, some of us more than others, but all of us are unfree in one regard or another. The only way to deal with the lack of freedom we find in the world is to rebel against it, and make creations that express our freedom as vehemently, clearly, and profoundly as we understand it. We create freely, and this is an act of rebellion against the laws of the world as it is. Albert Camus writes:
"Revolt stems first of all from the heart, but a time comes when it passes to the spirit, where feeling becomes idea, where spontaneous fervor leads to direct action. This is the moment of rebellion."
This is an important idea. Revolt does begin in our hearts, it goes back to the previous step I addressed, the discovering within ourselves of the things that we value. We rebel against that which offends or denies our values. But for the artist to be successful, that revolt must trace its way from the heart into the mind. The work of art must be inspired by our hearts, but executed with our minds.
The arts exist so that we can re-invent the world, make it as it must be in order that we may agree to live in it. We wrest the keys from God and freely invent another world. An unreal, but solid world. As it should be. We try to invent heaven with our creations. When a question isn't clear, we invent clarity. When the ugliness of suffering is hidden, we bring it into the light. When beauty and dreams are muffled by the laws of physics, we set those laws ablaze, unbind the dreams and the beauty and make them profound and permanent.
This is why artists are more sensitive. More passionate. More inclined to joy and misery in their most intense forms. We must bear witness and understand so much of what fails in the real world, and measure it against the imaginary world of what should be; would be if we were the Gods that we wish we were. We are not looking for justice, with her blind judge of scales, we are the sighted judges. And to see what is and to weigh it against what could be sometimes brings desperation. The only way beyond that desperation, is the elevating act of re-inventing the world in our souls. And this invention is usually done alone, silently, from nothing.
ARTIST STATEMENT
I begin my collages with a piece of literature. I spend months gathering photographs and images from old books. I start by drawing one horizontal line across the entire piece and one vertical line. This forms four quadrants which I will subdivide into dozens of smaller quadrants, layering tissue papers and book pages, then imagery and photographs. The aim is to create a work of art in the same manner as I think about any story: by tiling images and words; things that I have found and seen in the world atop things that I imagine. I am following an architectural design in each piece, a geometrical exactness which gives an organizing form to the work. I am literally trying to build an idea from the building blocks of old book paper. I adhere these materials to the wooden panel using clear acrylic paint. I then draw geometrical lines and circles and shade them to produce the illusion of three dimensions. Finally, the work is covered in a polymer acrylic varnish which protects the materials from UV light and preserves them from aging.
Art is a way for me to study the time and world that I live in. It is where I work my ideas into clarity with experimentation, questioning and guesses. The challenge of poetry and collage are the same: elaborate a richness for the soul from a simple form, suppressing everything that is useless.
I come to collage by way of training in mathematics and physics, a passion for music, a friendship with literature, and a commitment to philosophy. These interests have a tendency to pull the imagination into different directions, in collage however, I have found a format in which these fields of interest can work together to speak for me.
For subjects I choose things which are fragile, but also impossible to destroy. Fragile because they are quiet, private moments which are easily missed in our loud, busy lives. Impossible to destroy, because these sublime moments of clarity have existed since the beginning of time.
With art, we seek what moves us. For me, it is things of simplicity and authenticity. Stories that have an effect of dignity and elevation. I seek subjects which are impossible to explain, I hold them close to me, observe them and make art from the atmosphere that they create. Seek what moves you. Between the one who creates a work of art and the one who loves it, there is a shared nature and an intimate, silent understanding. I think it is perhaps the highest form of living, when we can reach it.
People often ask me why I use found imagery; that is photographs that I find in books which were created by other artists. Each of the components have a life of their own, they speak in their own different voices. Some elements will make sense to the viewer, some elements might be a mystery. If I had taken all of the photographs myself, they would all be speaking in my voice, they would have the same style. There would be no conversation, but rather a monologue. There would be no stream of consciousness between the viewer and the materials, there would be only my intention, my view of the world. As a collage artist I think of myself like the conductor of an orchestra of musicians and together we are trying to play at something new and different.
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