8/14. 2016 “part 2”
I’m going to start out by saying I wrote all that follows this paragraph or two some time back. I often lose track of time so its no big deal that I cannot remember what happened when…..
but I am very aware that the passage of time seems considerable.
But what I’m grappling with in all this is what I think may be important ideas…… (or again maybe not). I could really use someone who thinks a lot and is considered “smart” or even “very smart” to validate what I’m driving at …but in all likelihood that will never happen.
However, in what I wrote previously I mention a sculpture that I called “The Parade of Happenstance”
In whatever time has elapsed since I wrote “part 1” I have done a lot to this sculpture adding a lot but trying to be at least somewhat judicious in what I have newly spawned” in the sculpture.
But in general, lately I have leaned heavily on the side of “adding more” and “not less”. The same characteristics are infiltrating a lot more of my work in general and I perceive it all as somehow “even wilder than usual.” I have changed the title of that sculpture to what is currently “From out of the Parade of Happenstance” as I believe in essence that is what I’m driving at. It is a creation derived from utilizing what I perceive as “Happenstance”
I will shut up now and let you settle into all I wrote in the past.
Somewhere in time (Part 1)
I awoke the other day and realized that I suddenly had an idea ….or maybe I have had a few more, than one idea …… but if so, the other ideas have all been unusually quiet lately.
But on that particular day, this idea seemed to make sense.
Maybe it’s an idea… or maybe it’s more of a theory, but whatever it is, its roots are buried deep in my artwork and it goes back to some simple question that I first pondered when I was a child.
Art involves decisions ……and lots of them. Also, nobody gives a s*!#& what kind of decisions you make, because this is ART and “there are no rules”. Or, if there are any rules, or were any rules, those rules have been, or will be, overruled.
In short if you are a contemporary artist, (and which artist, still breathing is not a contemporary artist?) you can pretty well do whatever you damn well please when making “ART”.
So, how can one make decisions in such a chaotic system, or should I say such a open ended system? The only way to get out of making decisions in art is to decide not to make art …and that in itself is a pretty big “decision”. If I do decide to make art, I better decide something before I start, and that is “HOW” to start.
Then each decision I make “after that” is based on the previous decision. And, not to be redundant, with unlimited choices, how does one tell which possibility is better than any other?
My father, as well as a lot of other well-meaning and good intentioned people, would go out, take one look at contemporary art, and then retreat back to a past when there were still a few rules around. Or he and his like-minded cohorts conclude that art is bullshit, and that all contemporary artists might either be “nuts” or “bullshit artists”.
I heard one story about Picasso that may or may not be true, yet it still says a lot about art. A man approached Picasso on the street and said. I want to show you some real art…not that stuff that you do. And he pulled out a photograph of a painting of a woman, showed it to Picasso and said, “there is real art…it’s my wife.” Picasso studied it for a while and said “Your wife looks very small and very flat”.
Of course, a photograph is literally flat so the woman depicted is also flat.
There seems to be a little more going on than simply rules vs no rules in art. Maybe some things about perception creep in here?
When a clear objective or endgame (no matter how broad) is sought, all decisions play a role in the attainment or the thwarting of the goal. So that a decisions usefulness within a chain of events can be determined by the results that occur, and a decision can then be evaluated based on its success or failure.
But what happens when no perceived goal is obvious?
Even in the past when rules did rule in the world of art I think a lot of anomalies existed.
Suppose Michelangelo decides that the left hand of the Madonna figure in his “Pieta” is 1/2 of an inch “off”. Let’s say its shorter than what he wants it to be.
Should he simply “start over” with a new block of marble, and forget the one he has been working on?
Or can he say “what difference does it make? No one will notice.” After all the figure of Madonna that is being “created” has never existed before so who is to say what is correct? In fact, Michelangelo may have tons of “mistakes” buried in his work, and they may or may not be perceived by the artist or the audience as mistakes. And if the “mistakes” are purposeful, we might be witnessing the overruling of a rule or “reason” itself.
Here is a bit about a perceived “Mistake” Michelangelo was accused of in his time:
This involves “The Pieta“. The masterpiece comes with a major flaw, which Michelangelo, perhaps wryly, insisted was a manifestation of grace. Jesus looks his age. He appears to be a dead man in his mid-30s. But you needn’t look all that closely at the Madonna to see a teenage mother. When his critics drew attention to this age discrepancy, Michelangelo quipped, “Chasity enjoys eternal youth.””
Also, what else is at play in this “train of thought”? I often try to imagine the world without me or my artwork in it. It is a lot like what the angel showed Jimmy Stewart in the movie “It’s A Wonderful Life”. Without the Jimmy Stewart character in the world, his brother would have died when he fell through the ice at age 9 and the town of Bedford Falls would have become Pottersville (not a very nice place). So, at the end of the movie all are grateful that the Jimmy Stewart character is in the movie, alive and breathing as much as all the rest of mankind.
So, is the known universe the gatekeeper to what “is” or to what will become? Can the universe, which has obvious forces that affects all things, not play a role in how something comes into being? After all, if I wasn’t here, there would be no Ed Haddaway Art.
And what is imagination anyway? Is it our ability to perceive that which is not real?
Now we are off to the races about what is reality.
Ok, ok…. so much for this kind of conjecture…… at least for now. I have my answers and questions about the nature of things and how the universe works…..and you can go to work on your own ideas.
A few words that get tossed around in all this about decision making and art are: capricious, arbitrary, impulsive, unpredictable, and of course “whimsical”( all the opposites of “reasonable”).
My curse is that I have to live with being called a “whimsical” artist. And as best I can tell, that means that I make choices that are somewhat haphazard and that I should not be taken seriously as an artist. Whimsical though is defined as “determined by chance or impulse or whim rather than by necessity or reason.”
Of course. reasonableness and logic is what I find objectionable about so much of modern life.
Life devoid of idiosyncrasy seems “stale”
One or two final thoughts need to be stated at this point:
I have always had an innate instinct about the choices and decisions I make when working on my art. In some ways my decisions seem “primal”.
Call it a connection with Carl Jung’s “collective unconscious”
or call it whatever you want, I think things which appear to have been done capriciously, may actually have a “hidden road map” that is difficult to grasp or quantify, but is still very real. And I think there is a good chance that the universe is very much alive, just as we are, and involved in all things. From time to time I perceive the world or universe that I live in as something that works with me in the art making process
I am currently working on a new sculpture that I have already titled:
It’s called:
“The Parade of Happenstance”
“ Happenstance” is defined as “chance or a chance situation, especially one producing a good result”
When I started writing this, I tried to sound smart and sophisticated and some of what I wrote and quickly abandoned has even worked its way into this version.
However, the more I wrote, the less I seemed to really understand.
So, wanting to not just “seem smart” I started looking around, trying to see what others(maybe more scolarly) have said about all this stuff, if anything.
For some reason I looked up “Chaos theory”. I may be dead wrong, but as far as I can tell, the “Chaos Theory People” are wrestling with the very issues I am trying to get at in this bit of writing.
Here Is A Short Description:
Chaos theory is a method of qualitative and quantitative analysis to investigate the behavior of dynamic systems that cannot be explained and predicted by single data relationships, but must be explained and predicted by whole, continuous data relationships.
And A Bit More about It:
In common usage, "chaos" means "a state of disorder". However, in chaos theory, the term is defined more precisely. Although no universally accepted mathematical definition of chaos exists, a commonly used definition, originally formulated by Robert L. Devaney, says that to classify a dynamical system as chaotic, it must have these properties:[
it must be sensitive to initial conditions,
it must be topologically transitive,
it must have dense periodic orbits.
In some cases, the last two properties above have been shown to actually imply sensitivity to initial conditions. In the discrete-time case, this is true for all continuous maps on metric spaces. In these cases, while it is often the most practically significant property, "sensitivity to initial conditions" need not be stated in the definition.
If attention is restricted to intervals, the second property implies the other two. An alternative and a generally weaker definition of chaos uses only the first two properties in the above list.
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I don’t know about you, but I am fairly lost at this point……but I look forward to working on acquiring more “dense periodic orbits” in my artwork.