On Painting

Robert Frost was once asked in what direction he saw the future going, and he answered -"to absolute materialism". I imagine that he said it after a heavy sigh, lamenting a more primitive time where mysticism and the fear of the unknown fueled the need for his art. I don't want to focus on poetry in this, but I do find this relevant to this issue.

In centuries past visual art served multiple functions. To my mind the most profound of these was to glue the community together through a narrative. Since literacy was limited, the mythos of a culture passed from one generation to the next, belief systems became engrained, and everyone within the community had a visual point of reference to digest its values and identity. Through its historical implications or otherwise, this was the primary function of all art up to modernism.

At the beginning of the 20th century, when technology had dramatically advanced to the point where the narrative could be told in many different kinds of medium, the visual arts reacted by becoming more subjective and personal. What became represented is not an objective reality, but more of a focus on perception. (The main problem with this is that any sort of profundity assumes the viewer is actively engaged in taking something from it, which more so discards the need for a narrative.) The last communal narrative through painting in the art world was killed by Freuds psychoanalysis.

The 20th century gave birth to a extreme focus on individual identity, the expressionists, Dadaists, and surrealists being the labor pains of this phenomenon. The concept of time within the art movement became more condensed. As a result the modernists magnified it. A spectre in the background of any painting, time and its significance was always present. (Time is the most minimal of all subject matter, as it requires the least thought. In fact, it requires no thought at all!)

There is no difference between what a person perceives and what a person essentially is. And since ones identity is reflexive of his generation and time, the perceptions he experiences are relative to the boundaries of his culture. In the west, as a result of technology, which empowers identities under the microscope of reinforcement, the culture has put more and more weight onto individual expression, not realizing that each artist is actually an agent of his generations collective body. No one is a revolutionary. All are reactionaries.

So what are todays art and artists reacting to?

As Robert Frost predicted, absolute materialism (and its mother, relativism.).

Snuggled quite comfortably in the luxury of no longer having the need to say anything real and true, as it hides behind relativism, art has been free to explore what the psyche ultimately leads to, its own mortality. The ego is a construct, and fears death as it has no physical body which could die, yet aware that it must. It protects itself from the fear of death by illusions of relevance. Its physical manifestation is the vomit on the canvas. It builds a material body. Since a narrative can be told more effectively in other mediums, high art has resorted to mummifying moments, ideas, mental images, skills, and it preserves them to adorn the individual egos glory proof of once existing.

It was Krishnamurti who introduced the idea of the egos deathless substance. Basically, his point was that we surround ourselves with inanimate objects, things, and we are addicted to having more, because these things will never die. They are not organic, objects are immortal as their material will never decompose (in a lifetime). The mind relates, the ego mimics.

The photograph implies nothing. It captures action in time. But what captures the mind in time?

There is no aim of modern art outside of an intimate expression of a specific idea. There is no mission except to exist and to be recognized as existing. The idea is taken as it is, worshiped as tangible, but justified as it is not. It's communal function, to affect others, and to influence their ideas and general philosophy. Through provocation or by cleverly appealing to the intellect, the methods used are no longer the seasoning of the idea, they ARE the idea. Thus, modern art has turned one-dimensional, almost forsaking the need for interpretation. Whether this is a good or bad thing is not important, it is. Even if the original aim of the artist is to illustrate transience, through a temporary or self-effacing model, or by more topical methods, the “idea” is the child of an ego which seeks to live forever by its impression. The real message behind any contemporary painting is not the idea itself but the flexing of the egos muscle. It exists as it can be seen.

A painting is the minds material stamp on existence and by magnifying the moment and condensing time to an instant, a declaration of immortality. Materialism and true selfishness can not evolve to anything else.

(The materialist philosophy eats itself and makes itself redundant, as it elevates individual expression to a height that vaporizes all of its context. That is why most people consider high art to be ridiculous. It is justified. And as absurd as this is, there is a need for it, as this is symptomatic of our generations philosophy.)

So, to end, because of the rapid evolution of technology and the advent of the materialist/relativist world-view, high art has found itself stuck on the only theme it has left, a theme which the creative narcissist will never exhaust......death in time. The artist is a tool of an ego which challenges death by inflating its importance and materializing itself on the canvas through an idea.

Minimal in the truest sense of the word.