Ivan Illich‘s work turns on two related concepts. One is of our need to dwell, to inhabit a home, to have a place. The other is our need for conviviality. We cannot exist in isolation. We are vulnerable and part of everything as everything is part of us.
Avant Garde. We all know what that means! We learned it in school!
There was always something of a cognitive dissonance, sitting in a slide-show survey class and taking notes to regurgitate on a test about how the modern avant garde was – and therefore supposedly still is – so transgressive! The old story about how it was a rebellion against the bad old Academy,
“Repeat after me! The Avant Garde rebelled against the Academy!”
I’m involved in a few conversations on the needfulness of art. This fragment of a quotation from Carl Jung seems an appropriate place to begin.
In a time when the hot-house strains of art criticism that have so long been the “High-brow” approach to questions of art join most other expert-led monopolies on thought in a growing irrelevancy, it’s important to begin again at the foundation of questions of art and its place. Andrew Taggart’s essay linked to above, and the thread it is a part of, is a good introduction to these questions and to how the current status quo has failed.
My own intuition has always led me to mutter under my breath that art exists in relationship to Truth. No matter how hopelessly unfashionable this has been, I’ve never let it go.
This piece, a cross-post from Horizons of Significance, has grown during the writing, pushed ahead by the ambition of its title, only slightly modified by the insertion of the word “Notes…” I’m resisting the urge to break it up into my customary 1,500 words. I need to break that habit as much as we all need not to get too comfortable with the bite-sized nature of blog posts in general, a “rule” I’ve already stretched with my “average” post!
I’ve had this gestating inside me for a long time. Somehow it has surfaced now, with the catalyst of a post by Achille Mbembe, at the height of the “Dog Days” when we’re all distracted and feeling a bit lazy… So be it! I hope you’ll give it a look, and perhaps save it for later when crisper air brings renewed appetite. This may be as close to a “Manifesto” on Art as I come! So with some trepidation, here are,
You may have noticed that images of some paintings have morphed over the months. I began adding new paintings at the first point at which they seemed to be “completed,” or at least when work was suspended on them. As time goes on, I’ve returned to my habit of pushing paintings along when a fresh look at them shows some lack. This is part of the work process. It’s part of that healing and knitting that goes on as a painting weathers in.
