A culture in ruin or ruins as culture:
There has been a long forum thread that has been winding itself down the ages from the time of Aristotle to our age of confusion with Robert Hughes, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Derrida, and Baudrillard.
It has remained remarkably consistent, it has been unswervingly on message and it has always boiled the blood of this world’s more sensitive and passionate souls.
Damn it already – what’s the question?
What place does art have in this world? What purpose does it serve?
There have been so many answers and so many refutations. There have been artworks that have attempted to address it and others that ignore it all together.
Many would say that this question is limited to the scope of art in politics, that to answer the question of whether art is necessary in any other capacity is worthless.
Is art necessary in the art of politics? I would think not, for the process of politics has a logic that excludes from it any concern for any other endeavour. It does not seek beauty for its own merit, it does not seek war for its own merit, and it does not seek advantage for its own merit. It seeks all things as a means for obtaining and maintaining power. It coils back in on itself. Always seeking itself out. Always seeking another term of existence.
What interest does art have in any of this? Art has no end. Once it has dislocated itself from the artist it needs nothing, wants for nothing. It does not live, it has no form of self propulsion, and it can only be handled or viewed or felt, like a dead thing. We examine art like we examine the dead.
Art is not human but its consequences are nothing but human. It finds itself justified in existence once it penetrates the outer boundaries of being human. Art cannot only be perceived, like a wall is perceived. To be merely perceived is to be registered. Art ceases to exist if it is marked as an object. It requires the fluctuation of human existence to become more than its materials. It requires recognition, as the face of a loved one requires recognition. You cannot love what you do not recognise. An artwork always has to pre-exist in your own mind before you can adore it, before you can covet it.
Politics can not follow its own reasoning when it allows the emotions of its vectors. Why do you think there has never been a successful practice of the political arts? If we could erase human emotionality we could see a perfect system, an international interconnection of logic, but alas the logic resistors that we call humans will always thwart the reasonable attempts of reason.
When a thing justifies itself by intending to influence anything outside itself, any other human system, it fails at being art. Its human intention overwhelms it. It carries a voice that is too loud and too long in dying. It becomes a pulpit and not the art it claims to be. Picasso had nothing of Picasso in his painting. It was a form of seeing that had never and never will exist. It did not dictate that we see the way the painting did. Picasso is not present when we look at his paintings. Time, colour and form are present. A possibility is present, a possibility that never presents itself, a potential that comes to nothing. Art floats free and seeks out a procession. It is demonic.
Art always discovers a new body which it can occupy, which it can possess, a fabric it can illume. It found a wall, then it found space, it found architecture, it found parchment, it found the page, the novel, the canvass, glass, clay, metal, bodies, minds, silver nitrate, film, a projection on the wall, electronics and the soul. Why the soul? Because what is religion if not an art? It makes nothing beautiful. It makes it valuable. It makes it endless. Jesus is 2000 years old and he endures. Does this not make him art? Do we not treasure him like we do a Dynastic vase? The older the more fragile, the more intangible. Lyotard makes this point – we love ghosts and apparitions.
Art is a haunting. It is always more beautiful when it is terrifying. It is why we invented the word sublime.
Art can take a moment and extend it indefinitely. It can stretch time beyond the limitations of the artist that gave birth to it. It does not recreate us, it does not clone us, make us immortal. It makes us selfless. Art is Buddhist, not Christian. Do not try to find the ego in art. If the artist stands next to you and tries to whisper his reasons into your ear, shrug him off, dispossess him of his art. Make it pure by making it less his. Paint it without the pronoun.
I think that art belongs nowhere. Not in this life and not in the next. I have always noticed how time turns everything into art. Ruins as art; Decomposition as art; the rot of things as art. Decay makes all we make beautiful. Time has always been the greatest artist. We have been too small to understand. We always ask who of us has been the greatest artist of all time. Time has always been the greatest artist of all. Time always makes art more profound because it subtracts the human. It subtracts its weakest element.
Art is not human. It just inspires human reactions. It inspires humans to invoke it. But it is beyond us.
The artist is not immortal. The art is.