My Art within a Postmodern Context
An Essay by aagabriel
I wrote this essay over twenty years ago, as a student at Fine Arts College. Was I brilliant or insane back then?
Original version scanned and uploaded here.
"When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when everyone knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not" (pg 17)
-- John Storey: Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 1999, 2nd Edition
Introduction
I do not know what I am talking about and I doubt that I ever will. I have been labelled as avoiding the issue of categorization which, although an unjust label, I do not attempt to denounce as false. It is important for me to not divert from the chaos I represent with weighty ideologies and simplifications. Like a panoramic photograph which tries to capture the whole scope of vision and evoke that same feeling of monumentality of what it depicts, I try to encapsulate the zeitgeist of the age. By giving no area, subject, object or text any precedence; by collapsing the natural hierarchies of categorizations, by deconstructing the binaries that we so assiduously take and use at face value, I exemplify true democracy.
My work is a dialectical struggle to come to terms with this "true democracy;" an ideal which due to its nympholeptic nature in the current global society as well as in my artwork causes much confusion and noise. Like those in power, rhetoric can be used to subdue the ceaseless noise but I don't use it because I am not a sophist.
Needless to say, stability is a figment, implemented and controlled by whoever rules, and I find it even more non-existential and unattainable once the philosophies of such persons as Lacan, Derrida and Sartre have infected your perception. The tarnished facades of order are exposed and I try to elucidate that with my creations.
My art is a libation to these three men and the countless others that have opened my senses to the enormity of possibility, which is everything.
Bricoteur
It could be said to be a detailed panorama of the vast vicissitude that is a culture of perpetual instability, always poised on the brink of something. Culture is in perpetual flux, a stationary principle can become obsolete a second after conception or implementation. So, in the face of this uncertainty, what can one create which belies the contrary and transient nature of one's environment? Any creation is abbreviation of what I am trying to say: thus you can see the futility and frustration of trying to make/create/justify.
So how can a historically-minded artist such as myself overcome this problem, of making an object which proposes a dialogue or an ideology that has gone relatively undiscovered or unexplored until that object's conception? Since I exemplify the atypical and contrary, even arbitrary nature of my age, the process of bricolage, a process that places the brinkmanship that is artistic practice within its socio-political point of construction and inception, is considered the most practicable strategy for object-making.
bricolage - n. pl. same 1. construction or creation from what is immediately available for use 2. an assemblage of haphazard or incongruous elements [ORIGIN: French, from bricoler 'do odd jobs' + AGE.]
-- taken from the Australian Oxford Dictionary, 1999, The Ultimate Guide to Australian English
Bricolage as a strategy results in a limiting process and in a way, it must be a limiting process, since it can only serve to illustrate the cultural and artistic environs from whence it came. Using whatever materials I have at hand, with whatever knowledge I stumble across, I embody an existential artist, one who makes choices and creates debates directly from the present state of being. Bricolage is in my opinion, the best strategy to do this since it can also serve to illustrate the indoctrinated precepts of post-structural thought. The haphazard mess belies its origins, in one way or another, through psychoanalysis or anthropology; it tells an awkward narrative that only it can tell.
I am condemned to bricolage really because I cannot begin to try to imply or create a structure; keeping my preference over ideas, processes and actions as non-structural as possible, so that the presupposed elevation or declination of the "Good," is blurred and confused, as it should be. The voices of both polarizing counterparts are allowed to bestow their accumulated grievances upon the world and engage in a tautological dialogue within itself, as well as all over the place.
Chaos Ensues?
What are the ramifications of this way of seeing or being or creating? To the non-personal eye, chaos is constantly encroaching upon a threshold: the threshold of how much the human mind can handle. It is a war between sensibility and chaos: sensicalamity if you will. And it is a derangement of polarities; order and non-judgment rammed by bricolage into parity as paradox. The senses are bludgeoned with a creation that constantly collapses in on itself, an inquisition arises; is it the human subconscious trying either successfully or in vain to attempt representing itself against the raging nauseaic network that is delineated post-structuralist thinking? Or has that network already usurped the position of the author and consumed any and all identities into its nascent bedlam?
This is a question that is not answered, for it continues to argue forever different things, as different things arise. As its concomitance to this or its incongruity to that continues to tell itself to those who approach with an (in)formed mind. One can only approach this object that exemplifies meta-destruction with an existential ideology, since such an ideology quells (to an extent) the epistemological overlay on all matter of man; whether made in a factory, retaining a latent perception, or firmly indentured to manacles of the past. These questions still exist; as to the object's history and its validity, but are superseded by the experiences (personal) of that which views it.
Idio-Syncretism
idiom - n. 1. a group of words established by usage and having a meaning not deducible from those of the individual words (as in over the moon, see the light). 2. a form of expression peculiar to a language, person, or group of people. 3a. the language of a people or country. b. the specific character of this. 4. a characteristic mode of expression in music, art, etc. [ORIGIN: French idiome or Late Latin idioma from Greek idioma -matos 'private property', from idios 'own, private'.]
-- taken from the Australian Oxford Dictionary, 1999, The Ultimate Guide to Australian English
Experience, as vast as it is unquantifiable, opens up a text (object) to be read in an entirely different light by each new set of eyes and memories approaching it. This can be attributed mainly to the postmodern disability to render any aforementioned intent of the author (artist), and for it to be misconstrued and misplaced by the concept of an individual whose memories are embedding themselves into an idiosyncratic perception, and try as much s/he might, memorialized idiosyncracies of perception -"idiosyncreties" - can never be rid of.
syncretism n. - 1. Philosophy & Theology. attempted union or reconciliation of diverse or opposing tenets or practices; an instance of this. (See below.) 2. Philology the merging of different inflectional varieties in the development of a language. [ORIGIN: modern Latin syncretismus from Greek sugkretismos, from sugkretizo (of two parties) 'combine against a third' (as SYN-, kres 'Cretan', originally of ancient Cretan Communities.]
- in a religious context the term has been applied particularly to the principles of the German theologian George Calixtus (1586 - 1656), who aimed to harmonize the beliefs of Protestant sects and ultimately of all Christians, but many examples are found in the early years of Christianity; notably the heretical movements of Gnosticism and Manichaeism. Neoplatonist philosophy was syncretic in its synthesis of Platonic and other classical ideas with Eastern elements.
-- taken from the Australian Oxford Dictionary, 1999, The Ultimate Guide to Australian English
The notion of the individual - as dictator of its own reality - has been devalued and explained to a part by the underlying systems, structures and signs that individuals inherit from their point of birth into the world of cognition. All text(s) can be traced to its historical source and deconstructing it can enlighten one to the ideological evolution that their 'reading' of the text has been processed by. The structures of knowledge/power and the hierarchy of the binary preceding it unfolds, making a map which serves as a guide through personal experience and across cultural-historical traditions to finally end at a destination (which is absurd since a map does not have 'destination' demarcated onto its topographical assertation): destination implying a point of arrival and a related point of departure.
Since the individual is free to roam where it will and more often or not, choosing with a specific intention to roam where no one else has roamed prior, typified points of arrival and departure would be useless.
So where is the destination? The destination is where?
Destination.... Where?
As an artist, my art (for me) can be regarded as something concomitant; something with conspicuous correlations to my pasts. As a heritage, art continues on. Yet as a process of creating avant-garde whatever, it dies.
What are the reasons for this death? Post-structural thought mainly. Any text is prone to existing only in its history. So why make art(text) if it is doomed even before its very inception as an idea or concept, to be a his-representation: only a representation of its history.
It could be argued that art and its philosophical implicitness to the 21st century is not at fault here. There are clearly clever conceptualists out there creating or recreating - sometimes in the guise of cathartic process - an object (text) which exposes something underlying (latent) within the very object before its tautology was questioned. The people (who can be martyred for banishing ignorances of innocuous facts, and thence be seen as the creator of the 'other' half of whatever binary opposition is to be dealt with) are usually unaware of the intricacies, subtleties and hidden substantifications of what they see. Or they see it merely as something 'bad,' and concede to rational thinking that this author of 'bad' things has the ability to do more 'bad' things; the author is then scapegoated. Reasoning is misplaced by rationality and life continues.
Art Imagines What is Not The Case
Art has an a priori precept for me. This precept still holds with me and I still take as a moral truth. Art-Past (1850 onwards, the birth of "Modernism") was preoccupied with seeking new things, albeit via 'old methods.' The fact it employed that which was ingrained and known was irrelevant. The historicity of their mediums/processes and even predications did not impede their pursuit for the path that led to Avant Garde-iness. Along a path less pursued, a need for prevarication of the purpose/s of the eventual product/s are less perused, therefore such perambulations are also discarded.
As one can imagine, it is/is it impossible to go somewhere new if one has a specific intent (or imagined destination) beyond that intent which states to go somewhere not gone before?
Things like Structuralism & Post-Structuralism come along through their empiricizing tools and classifants; metaphorical historicity, semanalyis and meta-language used to define or seek reason for all. Yet you can't escape your past, nor everyone's past, and definitely not the legions of dead predecessors that plague your everyday existence. You didn't make your toaster - originally a dead person did. Today, you own it's replica but not it as it manifested originally.
The notion of the avant-garde is realized simply as an esoteric ideology that's followed and its followers revered once for what is held within that was not immediately apparent, nor understandable. That notion is destroyed (explained) using epistemological strategies and the consequent histiographical mapping of the knowledge/power and potentially all else that occurred in between. Freudian psycho-explanalysts rear ugly heads here too, since symbology is such a safer alternative for them.
But, with this consequent mapping and classification, how can inventions and innovations continue to emerge and propagate at a rapidly expanding rate?
Today we have at our fingertips access to more knowledge - whether correct or incorrect - than ever before. Like the painters of the late 19th Century - these old and not so old texts - do not encumber or stultify our imagination. In fact, they provide a ground for the translation and subsequent extension of the imagination itself.
It is the undefining feature of humanity, the most under-recognized ability of the mind is to imagine. And this is not necessarily in the context of vision of preparatory planning, but more important to imagine quite simply what is not the case.
