a shared vision of the art  (posted 12/15/06)

            Art comes from the hara, the center of power. That is, the act of art is an act of power. And power is always pure ego, in some sense.
            The reason we cannot approach the artist in the moment of his act is because his ego is so overwhelming at that point. We can only approach him through the work itself. Because the core of the work is not the power center, but the heart.
            So we have this paradox. What is most ego in the moment of its act – the moment of its creation – is the most compassionate act, the most all-comprehending moment of shared vision, in its consequences.
            If Vincent had not asserted Vincent absolutely in the momentary act of his art, we could never have seen the pure evangelical light of his understanding manifested in his work.

             This is the paradox of the ego, brought to its ultimate fruition by the western prophetic tradition arriving at its final revelation, the essential nature of objectivity. The paradox of objectivity is the paradox of science itself: only experience can validate ‘objective truth’; but experience, by definition, is purely subjective. The validation of objectivity itself – which actually came to rest in the paradoxes of the Special Theory of Relativity a century ago – is therefore also the ultimate validation of the individual self, the experiencer in the moment of his or her experience, the validation of the essential and unique truth of the items of experience in the moment of experience.
            The artist is the man or woman who can vivify this moment of objective / subjective truth through any of the traditionary media, since the traditionary media are just what the name implies, the shared contexts by which we can express these truths.

a brief excursus  (posted 12/17/06)


            As much as the Renaissance studied the elements of ‘realism’ in terms of technique, the constructive force of ‘the real’ remained intuitive and essentially unanalyzed. What has happened in the last two centuries is that we have entered a psychological arena in which the understanding of how ‘the real’ is assembled in consciousness can be accessed more or less directly. In terms of a given sense, of sight or hearing, for example, the relationships still necessarily depend on intuitive responses, so presumably art will always have its place.
            Philosophically,two centuries ago, we began to disassemble the nature of self-awareness, the nature of reflective consciousness. For the moment, we have lost touch with that history. But culturally, the revelation has continued and continued to develop, on the one side, producing Romanticism and the historical anomaly of the modern sense of self, and on the other, the deepening knowledge of science which eventuates in relativity and quantum physics, in which the mutual dependency of consciousness and ‘matter’ (read : ‘the real’) are certified. Both self and world have been ‘objectified’ and validated. Now it’s time to return to the central understanding that produced these two ‘events’ and delve more deeply.
            Most of the20^th century overshoots the mark culturally. Abstraction, as such, is an arbitrary conceptualization of the process, although it appears to have been a necessary cultural phenomenon, a necessary ‘deconstruction’ historically of the traditionary errors of art in contemporary terms. The recognition that ‘the real’ is inherently an abstraction, in the sense that perception is a reflexive construct, means that we can learn to stand on the borders of this construct and face either way, both deconstructing and reconstructing ‘reality’ in terms of the actualities of the processes of the reflex.
            But since we have overshot the mark, to recover this thread means that we will have to turn back and open the door to work that at first may appear atavistic.