The
Rune Series
From the years 1992 and 1993
(Rune
< >)
The
nine paintings in this series represent the marriage of THE ANCIENT RUNIC
ALPHABET with THE PAINTED HUMAN FIGURE:
In
1991, I had a dream of an angel descending from the skies to meet a man on
his knees. I made a sketch of this dream, and discovered six months later
the exact same image in a William Blake etching from 1817 (The reunion of
the Soul and the Body). Because my dream sketch was exactly the same image
as Blake’s etching made 175 years earlier, I decided to make the sketch into
a painting.When
I had nearly finished the painting I discovered, while doing research on the
Runic alphabet, that the allusions, which occurred to me about my painting,
were the same allusions that I received from one of the symbols of the Runic
alphabet. I decided then to do a series of paintings reversing the process—first
by researching the runic symbol, and then reflecting on the symbols and expressing
them in the pure human figure, where the figure takes the actual “form” of
the symbol, and then tries to express the meaning of the symbol in gesture
and appearance.In
the history of Surrealist painting, the painters had tried to unite letters
and words (poetry) with the medium of painting. But the Surrealist painters, I believe,
never explored the morphology of what a word or letter is. They never tried
to transform words or letter into bio-morphic forms (pictograms). (As the
history of writing and letters originates in part by transforming ideas and
concepts into graphic symbols or signs—which express these ideas.) This is
what I intended to do: To incarnate a symbol (Rune/Letter) in a biomorphic
form. Because, originally, letters and words arose from a biomorphic “idea”,
and then were turned into a graphic sign...The
Runes themselves are a very mysterious alphabet. They have no function as
letters or sounds, and we do not know how they were originally used. Were
they once a language? An original written alphabet (before 200B.C?) Their
meanings frustrated me by not speaking. They were both “dead and “dumb”. In
researching the runes I had to turn to sources from magic, sorcery, and mythology
to try and understand them. I
had to use visualization and free (dream) associations to try to find their
content. And it was then that I began to understand the history of writing
from hieroglyphics and ancient Aztec images—which are actually letter in more
biomorphic forms, and that writing itself originates in part from this “artistic”
idea-graph, just as much as it comes from learning a linear sign-language.
After being dead for centuries, I could bring the runes back “to life”.
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The
question continually arises as to ask...
"WHAT
IS THE FUNCTION OF AN ARTIST?"
What separates the artist from simple
"image-makers" and "imitators" and what is the framework in which the true artist
works? Can one call a conceptualist an artist if s/he only creates ideas? Can
a performance or happening be a work of art? Or is an artist only one who paints
or sculpts?Even the idea of "the artist" has had very narrow definitions
until the time of Romanticism; when the artist-virtue of becoming a "new man",
a "life-creator", or a "discoverer of the world of mysteries" arose from the
antique definition of artist-as-craftsman. Before our modern times the artist
was defined as the craftsman for hierarchical images. Socrates himself
describes the art as "a craft" (techne) far below his ideal of one who reaches
for the higher Ideal forms. There were no dramatic changes during the middle
ages, except that the artist began to form themselves into workers unions (Guilds).During
the Renaissance the artist managed to arise to a position of gentleman. That
is to say, he was an artist, a craftsman, and also an acceptable member of gentle
society, but he was not expected to be more than that.The appearance
of Bourgeois values and the expansion of the sellable works of portraiture,
landscape, seascape, still-life (especially in the Northern countries of Holland,
Flanders, and England) did not change this image of the artist as Gentleman/Craftsman,
except to open a new market and create freedom during a time when "Church and
State" art was on a decline during the reformation and Calvinistic Iconoclasm
- so the market filled its empty "religious space" with the Bourgeois demands
(still existing today).With the creation of Art Academies in the
17th century (the Roman Academy of St. Luke, Academic royale de peinture et
de sculpture) artists began to form themselves as, shall we say, Gentlemen/Craftsmen/Intellectuals.
Within the academies the artists began to direct their own rules for aesthetic
values. In these academies, the decisions were made as to what values (classical
Greek/Roman) and methods (color vs. form) were aesthetically and hence intellectually
valuable. The artists, through the academies, could be accepted as intellectuals,
philosophers-of-sorts and as educated people. Raised to this level
(Gentlemen/Craftsman/Intellectual) the artist could now function in society
as a prospering, well-respected citizen. But when did it happen that in our
time, the image of artists change to the mystic searcher of unknown (or forgotten)
values?For the definition of the Modern Artist we must first accept
the great cultural changes of the 1700s. Democratic revolutions (France 1789,
and USA 1976) and their coinciding changes in Social-Political thought, the
industrial revolution in the 1800's, the decay of belief in the churches and
their doctrines, all this and more left the artist of the 1800's in a state
of confusion towards what he believed and what he will create from his beliefs.New
advances in research (ancient and "savage" cultures) was assisting the intellectuals
of this time to question what was really ancient Greek and roman society (Winckelmann,
after 1760), and the birth of objective Art History, archeology, science, etc...
The only ideal that the artist was left with was genius he could create in his
own mind. (Of course, there did exist at that time the traditional Academic
artistic traditions of David, Ingres, Delacroix, for example, but we are talking
about a distinct change in the temperament from that represented by David and
company-- unique at that time and different from the world of art and thought
that the traditional schools stood for.) With the "Caprices" of Goya (works
done by Goya outside of his official works for the court of King Carlos 5th
1799) where Goya creates from a need to express his own visions and anxieties,
we see this modernity of artistic expression coming forth.Gustav
Courbet (1818-1877) was hated by the art world because he dared to paint vulgar
pictures (what Courbet called Realism, and a love for painting life as he saw
it-- beggars, thieves, whores, naked women).Artists began the "Romantic
search for their own experiences (Gaugain, Van Gogh), and often joined spiritual
brotherhoods and mystical societies (Rosicrucian, for example) and-- exceptionally
important for our own times-- joined together in groups of other creative people
that we would call "Bohemian" or "creative radicals" (Surrealists/Dadaists).This
is where the history leaves us in the art world of the twentieth century, and
this is where I take my starting point in understanding how artists differ now
from those from the past, which we follow.Artists
in the 20th century now carry an image of themselves as mysterious, restless
souls-- "in touch" with the spiritual world and freer in their duties, freer
in how they may function in society. They have replaced the priests as surrogates
to spiritual enlightenment. They are required now to go beyond production and
Image-making to express the deeper movements of the human spirit in a society
that has lost contact with its own foundations. Artists are different than those
of the past, and they must live with the problems of our times and give solutions
to modern spiritual needs...
WHAT
IS THE FIRST "LAW" OF ART?
"Being" is not Art. As a state of existence,
Being cannot be defined. Being is that which "IS", that which happens. Being
cannot be stopped. It cannot truly be understood or known. Being is always
experienced but never conceivable. It cannot be "real" (in the definition
of the word Real as meaning - pertaining to things.) Although Being is and
contains all that is real, all that is of things.
The
word "ART" does not help us to define itself, because the word has little meaning
to the way in which we apply it. ART – a word of Latin origin (ARS) can mean,
"arm", "army", "weapons", "a skill or handcraft", or "to join".
Even historically the word has never had a concrete meaning.The
Alchemists called their practice "The Art" as if it were a very special skill,
but what kind of skill was this, exactly?I
prefer to use the definition of the word ART as meaning, "to join" or "a joining".
But then one must explain what one is joining together. Art is the act of joining
(together). If one is free to choose what shall be joined, the question will
be,” what will one choose to join together?" If
we truly believe in the value of Art at all, then we must believe that we are
joining together things of essential value. And what can be more essential than
"BEING"- the all-inclusive existence of everything?In
essence, we as human-beings experience "being" through an unnamable sensibility--
the human sensibility-- which animals do not have (and evidently do not need)
and which allows us to think, feel, sense, know, and to be human. And this gift,
this curse, this mode of sensing is that which is and creates language, love,
society, memory, intuition, all in the same sense. We as humans can no more
destroy knowledge, or language, or feeling than we could even create them. These
things are we, and they are our fate.But
all in all, these things human are Objectives. They are object in the meaning
of the word-- extensions of our senses. Things that we place "out there" (separate
from out of our minds, out from our feelings, out of our Selves) that we let
float in an ethereal space we call Reality. What animal could ever call an idea
"real", a feeling "real", an image of God "real"? For human beings the way in
which we experience our existence is through the objectivity of our senses.
The making-an-object of things purely human.Art
is the act of making the "making-of-an-object" an object. Not the banal creation
of things, which is what properly should be called "production" or "handcrafts".
This "human sense" I mentioned functions, somehow, by retarding (short-circuiting)
the life-process and sending it through a filter – the mind, psyche, soul, or
memory -- a filter of sensation. So functions the art-process: by stopping this
process once more (object-throwing: symbols) and making it objective.Art
is the second step of objective being. The first step being objective-being
(human sense), and the origin of objective-being is Being itself: Being, human-being
(objectivity), and Art (making an object of objectivity of being from true Being).
Not that we could even imagine "Being" without using the first process of thought
(objectifying) in the first place.This
being human is both a curse, and a gift. It is the essence of words and feelings.
For example: "wonder", "awe", "fear", "anxiety", the word "why", "love", "heartbreak", and a thousand others. Existential
words and thoughts and feelings that make us happy, and bring us the deepest
depressions and fears. The
role of the artist, the goal of the true artist-- whether unconsciously or deliberately--
is to objectify these experiences, images, and human experiences. Why? Not to
simply make us "feel" something or understand (we do this on our own dozens
of times a day), but to give us the sense of this "sense of being humans"--
good, bad, or indifferent; to give us back the vibration (of our objectivity)
and allow us to sense this essential being. To give us the continuity that we
have inherently lost (the human sense is a retardation of life) and show us
that in our retardation/objectivity there is this essential continuity of being.To
sense our own sense-of-being as a part of true Being. To put us in accord with
Being again. And any act-- accidental, conscious, theatrical musical, painterly,
sculpturally, an idea expressed, a gesture, a novel, a poem-- any act can be
a work of art which objectifies our objectivity (human sense) and brings us
back to the essential sensation of sensing our being. And
how do we define this Field-of-understanding in which an artist should work?
I prefer saying that the artist should consider him/herself as a philosopher
of metaphysics in the realm of symbols.Metaphysics:
The philosophy (love of knowing) dealing with the first principles of being
and knowledge.Symbol:
a word of Greek origin meaning, "a throwing together"
1- reread everything over again. |
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