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Jan 14 2009
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art, painters, society, change
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What now in painting?
in Crucial Talk by myself
After a century of avant-gardism we artists are faced with the same questions that arose with the emergence of the avant-garde:
- what to represent or what meaning to give to the content of the work of art.
- what form to best dress the substance of our content.
- what technique to best represent, in our time, our content and its form.
The level of confusion in artists' minds is assuredly deafening but this does not eliminate the necessity to find answers to those questions that were first expressed nearly a century ago.
What now in painting?
My take on visual arts is twofold:
- content of the work = the illustration of the worldview of the men of knowledge of the day for all to share. (vision is our most powerful biological sensor)
- form = beauty... (see the last post on my blog)
The trouble is that visual artists have been stuck since at least one century in the deepest of intellectual fogs. The link between visual artists and men of knowledge has indeed disappeared... or to be more accurate the link has not disappeared it is the men of knowledge that have lost their societal recognition. Our modern mass-production societies (or mass consumption depending from where one looks at it) have indeed abandoned the time-honored practice of "sanctifying" their men of knowledge who, as a consequence, have been left to fend for themselves on the "level playing field of the market" for ideas where they found themselves competing with all kinds of charlatans for people's attention and as a result nobody knows any longer for certain who is a man of knowledge today. But what has not been eliminated is the human need to share a common understanding with others... and as a consequence Western societies are now engulfed by a multitude of belief groups competing among themselves for "customers" in need of the warmth of a sharing community and in the process our societies have lost even the necessary societal cohesion to reproduce themselves. It seems to me that to sort out or grow out of our present societal predicament our societies will be obliged to recourse to more and more force to coerce their citizens to follow a common societal road of reproduction....
In the midst of this cultural, economic and societal quagmire we artists are left with no other alternative but to build up our own knowledge base in order to grow a coherent worldview (view or understanding of reality). I firmly believe that those artists who will impact our societies in the future are those who will have successfully affirmed a coherent worldview representative of today's "reality", a worldview which visual signs can be shared by others... So to succeed to produce such shareable visual signs I believe the artist has to equip himself with knowledge. My friendfeed site is witness of the actionable knowledge I find along my daily surfs on the web.
The experience of an emergent coherent worldview representative of today's "conditions" is the background of my visual signs. Will those signs ever be shared by others? I have no clue about that but what I know for a fact is that they surely can't be shared largely today. The realities founding those visual signs will only manifest themselves as evidence to all well later in time. So a large sharing by others of my visual signs can only be a thing of the future and there is no guarantee that such a sharing will happen at all. I could as well be totally wrong in my present vision but that is the price the artist has to pay isn't it? The condition of the artist, it seems to me, is to be the post-modern shaman and if this does not work out, well, we'll have nothing else but to accepting the qualification of non-normality.. ha, ha. Well I don't know if this is funny at all but what is reassuring is the certainty that we'll be gone by that time.
