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8 posts tagged Art
“People ask what are my intentions with my films— my aims. It is a difficult and dangerous question, and I usually give an evasive answer: I try to tell the truth about the human condition, the truth as I see it. This answer seems to satisfy everyone, but it is not quite correct. I prefer to describe what I would like my aim to be. There is an old story of how the cathedral of Chartres was struck by lightning and burned to the ground. Then thousands of people came from all points of the compass, like a giant procession of ants, and together they began to rebuild the cathedral on its old site. They worked until the building was completed— master builders, artists, labourers, clowns, noblemen, priests, burghers. But they all remained anonymous, and no one knows to this day who built the cathedral of Chartres. Regardless of my own beliefs and my own doubts, which are unimportant in this connection, it is my opinion that art lost its basic creative drive the moment it was separated from worship. It severed an umbilical cord and now lives its own sterile life, generating and degenerating itself. In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. He lived and died without being more or less important than other artisans; ‘eternal values,’ ‘immortality’ and ‘masterpiece’ were terms not applicable in his case. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other’s eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. We walk in circles, so limited by our own anxieties that we can no longer distinguish between true and false, between the gangster’s whim and the purest ideal. Thus if I am asked what I would like the general purpose of my films to be, I would reply that I want to be one of the artists in the cathedral on the great plain. I want to make a dragon’s head, an angel, a devil— or perhaps a saint— out of stone. It does not matter which; it is the sense of satisfaction that counts. Regardless of whether I believe or not, whether I am a Christian or not, I would play my part in the collective building of the cathedral.”
Source en.wikiquote.org
The Economics of Conversation and Art
While watching George Carlin the other day, I came across this part where he makes fun of the various seemingly pointless conversations we experience in life:
Why do we engage in such seemingly pointless exchanges? What underpins Carlin’s frustration? Let’s start with a principle.
The Principle of Reciprocity
The principle of reciprocity underpins much of human moral psychology. A simple way of describing it would be:
- When we give someone something, we tend to expect something back
- When we receive something we tend to feel like giving something back
I won’t go into circumstances under which it doesn’t hold as they are beyond the scope of this enquiry. It will suffice to point out that this principle runs deep within us and is even observed in other primates that share our evolutionary lineage (see “Everyone’s Monkey: Primate Moral Roots” by Peter Verbeek in the Handbook of Moral Development and “Reciprocity: The Foundation Stone of Morality” by Douglas Fry in the same volume).
I think the reason behind Carlin’s rage lies in a prolonged violation of the principle of reciprocity. He felt like he was giving his interlocutor something, his time and attention, but wasn’t getting anything of equal value back. His interlocutor on the other hand, probably felt he was giving something valuable back. What was going on?
The Objects of Conversation
People converse for many different reasons. What’s fascinating is that many times the content of a conversation serves merely to achieve a purpose that may be implicit or even unconscious. For example, someone may converse to distract their minds from a painful recent experience. Another because they’re lonely. Many just to pass the time. In such cases the content is not important - any content that achieves the object would do. When there is alignment in the objects of conversation between the interlocutors, the conversation is pleasing to both, because what gives value to the conversation is shared thus ensuring equal exchange rates. However, when there is misalignment of objects, the exchange rates are not equal and thus conversational transactions indebt the interlocutors at different rates. Hence, Carlin’s frustration.
Hidden Objectives and Art
If conversations aim at something, then there are better and worse ways of getting to it. But you can’t improve your aiming, if you don’t know what you’re aiming at. To make matters worse, if you fail to aim correctly, others will think you’re aiming somewhere else and might get annoyed, lose or gain interest mistakenly. For example, I think a lot of conversations would acquire a completely different dimension if their source and object became transparent. But it is precisely that transparency that we fear. We think: “You won’t keep talking to me if you know that the reasons I am conversing with you is because I am lonely and would enjoy some company!” and in our efforts to make opaque the constitution of our souls we sabotage our chances for real connections and make a travesty of ourselves. We do not give one another what we need because we keep pretending we don’t need it or need something else. We hide our needs. From others; from ourselves. Then we forget them.
Great art is an aesthetic recollection of what we really need; a voice, a sound, an image of our hidden demands; it is the beacon that guides us back and beyond ourselves, and when truly great, towards one another.
“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
The ethical dialectic
First you care for yourself.
Then you care for others.
Then you care neither for yourself nor others.
The first is selfishness, The second altruism. The third? Selflessness.
Selflessness is when you do things for the things themselves irrespective of reference to selves.
Great creators create not so that they please themselves or others but because they follow some inexorable law of what needs to be born.
The Dancers of Thought
My mind works aphoristically. It comes up with insights about a variety of particular things effortlessly, but it takes me a lot of effort to put those insights together into a coherent system. When I try to put them together, they seem to lose their life. It is the difference between an orderly military march and an improvised dance solo. Though the dancer’s movements are not following the movements of any other dancers, they seem to have an organic harmony of their own; they are spontaneous but not chaotic; they are like the music a master piano player creates while improvising. You cannot necessarily predict the next move by the previous, but the harmony is there. It is not accidental but rather flows from a mysterious creative necessity. It is unclear whether the master follows something or something follows him. It is not the mere novelty that fascinates us, but the leaps of improvement from one pattern to the next. Improvement usually presupposes fixed standards, but the dizziness that comes when reading the mental dances of great thinkers is not solely caused by the speed with which they move within those standards but by those extra steps that transcend them without transgressing them. The great thinkers embody the spirit of the standards; the footprints they leave after their dance make up their letters and their writings.
No one ever danced philosophy like Friedrich Nietzsche. Many philosophers, accustomed to military marches, give up on him and blame him for being contradictory, confused, crazy. But anyone who was fascinated by the dance, and kept trying to learn it like they used to teach music in the old days – by ear and imitation – slowly realized it’s intrinsic order and profundity. We are now living in the tertiary generation of Nietzsche scholarship, and after the clearing of many gross misinterpretations, his importance is now secured in the annals of intellectual history. Even in hard-nosed Anglo-American analytic universities, at least his Genealogy of Morality
Never had a philosopher stimulated my mind in such diverse ways as Nietzsche. His writings tried to reflect the spirit of the dance of philosophy, not its letter. When I was being tortured by the likes of Heidegger and Hegel on the one side, and Davidson and Wiggins on the other, I used to open a book of The Gay Science
I am still plagued by doubts as to whether I should dance or come up with a military formation. I’m trying my feet at both, always experimenting, like my mentor. In the end, they don’t send dancers to the front. Soldiers win the wars – but only dancers know how to celebrate victory.
Philosophy is not just about winning the good life, but celebrating it after you’ve won it. It is not only about dissecting problems, it is also about living the solutions. A philosopher who has remained in the dissecting room is only half a philosopher. He may know the steps, but he doesn’t know how to dance. I’ve been in and out of the dissecting room, but I always felt the difference. The ultimate gift of philosophy is a flourishing life. A life geared towards actualizing the conditions, both inner and outer, for your maturity and the subsequent natural inclination to share its fruits. This is what I’ve been living from the end of 2002. I don’t know exactly how it occurred, but I’ve been trying to find out – it’s not much fun dancing alone, though it’s damn better than not dancing at all.
I belong to those musicians of thought who learned by listening and imitating, till they learned the spirit behind the music, and started to dance to their own, novel music. But many people want to dance to their own music before they know how to play. They want to follow their own drummer before knowing how to follow. They believe learning from another constrains their own creativity. They are fools. They will never become great artists. Because Art requires humility and no child ever lost its creativity by learning a language it did not create.
Experiential Art
Introduction:
On February 2003, I came up with a novel form of art where the artwork is an experience facilitated by the artist; I named it experiential art. The artist gathers relevant information about the subject of experience (an individual or group) and then uses this information the same way a poet uses words to compose a poem of experience. I present two experiential artworks below.
Les Fleurs du Mal, created on January 22nd, 2005.
Subject of Experience:
A girlfriend I had at the time.
Background:
People come together because there is chemistry between their personalities and because of the experiences they go through. Sometimes those experiences are so powerful that they create bonds between people that are wildly incompatible. If a person saves my life that experience creates a bond between us regardless of what personality he or she might have.
I was tired of living through the pre-fabricated experiences they offer us every day. Cinema, restaurants, bars, clubs, concerts, were too passive for me. They reminded me of Russell’s remark that what passes as entertainment in the West these days is the passive viewing of other people’s skilled activities. I didn’t want to be a spectator. I wanted to be an actor and create experiences that had meaning between us. That is why I started taking notes about my girlfriend, and noting pieces of what she considered important. I wanted to create experiences that would bring us closer and create a connection different from the one that you acquire by the passive ingestion of food at restaurants or the cloned plots they feed us at the cinema. Thus, I decided to create a unique experience for her, about her.
Relevant Information:
1. Her favourite color: Orange [1]
2. She had made an artwork with burnt branches
3. She had given me a painting with a black flower on colored backgrounds.
4. She had dark tastes in poetry: Charles Baudelaire.
Setup:
We gave a date at a familiar cafe. When she entered the car I blindfolded her. I tried to avoid answering her questions so as to keep the suspense high. I just told her we’re going somewhere and that she had to trust me.
The drive to the place took around 40 minutes. By now she didn’t know where she could be. I took her out of the car. I led her to the spot I had chosen without taking the blindfold off. I reassured her it was all right and positioned her correctly. I had calculated the position of the sun to hit a specific spot. Then I gave her the following directions:
1. To count to 10 (enough time for me to run off and hide so she would be alone)
2. Then press “Play” on the mp3 player I had given her (I had already put the headphones on her ears).
3. To take the blindfold off and stare straight ahead for 30 seconds.
4. Finally, to turn her gaze slowly to the left.
I created the video below to virtually recreate a taste of her experience (best viewed in full screen mode):
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Thessik, created on November 2004.
Subject of Experience:
A girlfriend I had at the time.
Background:
I was madly in love with the girlfriend I had at the time. She used to tease me by telling me that I’m “losing control” by my excessive desire for her. What she couldn’t understand at the time is that love is surrender. It is not hiding behind a mask; holding back who you really are. Surrendering out of love does not mean that the person to whom you’re surrendering ought to unconditionally accept the true self you are surrendering. I never had that childish expectation. Surrendering means being authentic, without defenses; vulnerable but real; standing naked in front of the beloved, and saying: “This is who I am.” It is the only ground from which meaningful relationships can occur. So that was a dynamic that was going on between us that gave me material for the experience I created for her.
She happened to be enjoying perfect health and for some funny reason she missed the experience of being examined by a doctor. Even though it sounded a bit weird, I decided to make it part of the experience I created for her.
Setup:
We setup a date at a familiar cafe. When she arrived I blindfolded her and told her we were going some place interesting that I wanted to keep as a surprise and that she shouldn’t be afraid. So on I drove for about 20 minutes. I parked, took her out of the car and led her to a building, all the time reassuring her she didn’t look that silly with a blindfold on. So we went up the building, and we entered a room. I told her we had to wait for a while but everything would be fine. She was nervously laughing asking whether there were other people around. Luckily, there weren’t.
It was time. I took her by the hand and led her a couple of meters ahead, and took her blindfold off. The first thing she saw was a smiling man with white overalls: “Hello there, my name is Dr. P. and I’ll be examining you today.” She laughed and entered into the doctor’s office.
I had made an agreement with the doctor and given him a role to play. Even though he was to give her a full physical, when he was taking her cardiograph (measuring her heartbeat) I told him to tell her: “You seem to be losing control, but that’s not necessarily bad.” Then when he finished the check-up, he made some excuse to write her a prescription. It read: “Thessik by the pharmaceutical company Rodin, to be taken strictly at least twice daily.”
So we left the doctor’s office, and we went to the pharmacist across the street. We entered the drug store and she gave the prescription to the pharmacist. The lady pharmacist looked at the prescription and handed her a small note. My girlfriend, surprised, opened the note. It read: “Kiss him.” She laughed and just as she reached over to kiss me the pharmacist took out a photo camera and started taking pictures of us kissing.
It was all planned. A couple of hours ago I went to the pharmacist, who fortunately was a woman in her thirties, and told her: “I’m in love, you have to help me.” So I gave her the camera and directions on what to do. I chose black and white film on purpose because drug stores have all these colored products and I didn’t want my background to look like a circus. I didn’t want any distractions. I wanted the emphasis to be on the kiss. The “drug”, Thessik, that the doctor prescribed was an anagram for “The Kiss”, a sculpture.
The “company” that supposedly made was named after the sculptor who made it, Auguste Rodin. And the directions to be “strictly taken at least twice daily” were given by none other than a man, in love – beyond control.
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Individuals and organisations who are interested in commissioning experiential artworks can submit their proposals through the contact link found in the bottom left hand side on my main website.
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Notes:
[1] For some reason, the paint ended up looking more like yellow than orange even though it was orange
The Gladiators of Music
A couple of months ago I went to the grand opening of Yoshi’s in San Francisco to see Roy Haynes playing with Ravi Coltrane, Gary Burton, Nicholas Payton, Kenny Garrett, John Patitucci & David Kikoski. It didn’t take long to notice they were exceptionally skilled musicians. But after the initial bedazzlement, the lack of any emotional investment in the display of their virtuosity became deafening. I started to exchange notes with the friend who was accompanying me, to see whether I was alone in sensing this. He had similar thoughts. He reminded me of the difference between art and entertainment, and it was then that I realized I was tired of being entertained. I wanted to feel.
I am not saying the particular artists mentioned above are incapable of expressing emotion in their music. I’m sure they are. But that day, they didn’t. You see the kind of musical performance I am looking for is not something that can be reproduced like a commercial product. Because it requires certain psychological presuppositions that cannot simply be summoned by will. In Kierkegaard’s Diapsalmata we read:
What is a poet? An unhappy man who conceals profound anguish in his heart, but whose lips are so fashioned that when sighs and groans pass over them they sound like beautiful music. His fate resembles that of the unhappy men who were slowly roasted by a gentle fire in the tyrant Phalaris’ bull—their shrieks could not reach his ear to terrify him, to him they sounded like sweet music. And people flock about the poet and say to him: do sing again; Which means, would that new sufferings tormented your soul, and: would that your lips stayed fashioned as before, for your cries would only terrify us, but your music is delightful.
It is not possible to reproduce anguish in one’s heart a couple of minutes before every performance. It does not surprise me when I see the second or third album, of a band who had a successful first album, be a complete disappointment, exactly because the conditions (both material & psychological) under which they created the first have subsequently changed exactly because of that original success.
The gap between entertainment and art is that between the display of skill and the expression of emotion. A skilled performance without any emotional expression resembles art as much as an unskilled expression of emotion does – not much. A machine playing with technical perfection a musical piece on a piano is not artistic nor is a crying child an artist.
At Yoshi’s I witnessed once more, gladiators of music, and yet people clapped unfailingly despite the butchering of art. I was wondering what would it take to witness art? Perhaps eavesdrop on a lover singing to his beloved a song he written for her?
The minutes passed at Yoshi’s and yet I was still thinking of the subtle difference between entertainment and art. What were these people moving arms and legs on wood and string, inhaling and exhaling their breaths in brass doing?
Then I remembered the Greeks. When Pheidippides ran his marathon, he did it to inform the Athenian populace that their army had won the Persians at Marathon. He ran to deliver a message of victory and freedom. And legend has it that he died on the spot after delivering the news. What message do modern marathon runners deliver? Perhaps the same message that musical entertainers do…none. Would they die for it? Hardly; even if they did people wouldn’t find the sacrifice admirable because of the absence of the message. We might admire marathon runners for their stamina and disciplined training, but they do not carry a message, except perhaps from their sponsors…and it just seems to me that in order for the gladiators of music to be doing something other than just entertaining us they would require a noble message [1], expressed either through the lyrics, or if there are none, through the music by delicate interpretation.
Perhaps two examples might illustrate what it means to make the leap from entertainment to art. The first demonstrates how a song, even though not written by the performer, can be sung from the heart. “I Want You”, was written by Elvis Costello, but here it’s sung by Fiona Apple (with Costello on the guitar). Notice her expression at 6:53-6:58…
The second is Ne Me Quitte Pas written and sung by Jacques Brel. The emotional expression is undeniable. No surprising given the story behind the song. To view it click here (unfortunately video embedding was not allowed).
Here’s an English translation of the lyrics by Aurore:
Do not leave me
We have to forget
Everything is forgettable
It is already fading away
Forgetting the time
Of misunderstandings
And the time, lost
Trying to know how
To forget these hours
That killed sometimes
With their whys
The heart of happiness
Do not leave me
I will give to you
Beads of raindrops
Coming from countries
Where the rain never comes
I will dig the earth
Until and after I’m dead
To cover your body
With gold and light
I will create a place
Where love will be king
Where love will be you
Where you will be queen
Do not leave me
Do not leave me
I will invent for you
Words with no sense
That you’ll understand
I will tell you
About these lovers
Whose heart have burnt twice
I’ll tell you
The story of this king
Dead for not having had
The opportunity to meet you
Do not leave me
It has been reported
That often fire returns
to former volcanoes
That were thought to be too old
It is said that somewhere
Burnt grounds produce more corn
That the best springtime season ever known
And when the night comes
In order for the sky to blaze
Red and Black
Marry each other
Do not leave me
Do not leave me
I won’t cry anymore
I won’t talk anymore
I will hide there
Looking at you
Dancing and smiling
And listening to you
Singing, and laughing
Let me become
The shadow of your shadow
The shadow of your hand
The shadow of your dog
Do not leave me
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Now, that is art.
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Notes:
[1] Which explains why certain rap songs, even though their beat and words might be well crafted, do not feel like art because their lyrics express nothing more than petty vanities.
