Mein
Vater is Mein Vater
Adam
Lee Shaw
"With nothing can one approach a work of art so little as with critical
words: they always come down to more or less happy misunderstandings."
-
Rainer Maria Rilke
Allow me to begin by stating that I wish to be an honest person under
all and any circumstances. Honest meaning regarding my fellow persons
as importantly as they truly are to my life. I know that this cannot be
done. But that does not trouble me, for the unfulfillable journey towards
that goal is what I expect to be my life. I believe, however, that art
is the path that leads closest to truth. The language of art. A language
that I choose. I believe that this world is a monster of energy, that
my father is my father, and that there are difficult times ahead. But
also that art helps. Art resuscitates life. And that is why I do it.
The language of seeing, or visual language - the internalized, personal
form and the publicized, cultural form, surpasses other language. *(the
language of music also has this ability) We see before we speak, before
we are taught the written and verbal languages of the societies we are
born into. This original act of seeing is affected and greatly differentiated
in it's context by the other languages and concepts of our respective
cultures, such as religion and government, but this original act of seeing,
prior to these affects, is universal. One could even say that the experience
of seeing before speaking and writing is a type of pre-ethical state,
in that ethics are signified through language. I believe this is why art
is so powerful. While language fails ultimately to create truth, although
it claims to - in metaphysics, science, or politics - visual culture can
speak intensely to many persons. This does not mean that art is exempt
from corruption - not whatsoever. For just as art can be utilized to accentuate
the sublime, it can be used to propagandize the lame - meaning there is
no language with a greater capacity to be either unadulterated or adulterated
than visual language, because the act of seeing is so simultaneously individualized
and universalized. And as one who creates visual media, I am very aware
of the responsibilities involved.
I believe that our postmodern world has the unsettling potential of becoming
one of spiritual emptiness and cultural superficiality. A world fragmented,
full of alienated individuals with little sense of self or history, tuned
into a thousand different television channels. I am not exempt from these
detrimental affects of my society - I battle them through my art. My images
deal with the eternal human questions, the pathetic, whatever its form,
about what we call the human. The meditation and discovery involved with
isolation, and likewise the pain, and the fear. I select this subject
matter to release these feelings, in an attempt to find community - and
precisely because the event of mental solitude is not an event, or an
episode, but the continuous state of life. I do not want my viewers permeated
by the quasi-personal, or the pop-intimate. I want my art to serve life
and seek the individual, to avoid irony and it's subsequent dispassion.
I hope to transcend some of the common assumptions of postmodernism by
reintegrating the social with the personal and by genuinely exploring
and appreciating certain past traditions. I accomplish this with my skills
in printmaking and drawing, but with aide from the affects and effects
of photography, in addition to the manner in which I present my work.
There are times when I feel that I am no one but what others have told
me I am through language, as signifiers. Creating a piece of art is rebelling
against this feeling. Creating a piece of art is attempting to contend
with the lack of control we have over the supposed objective nature of
reality. The point at which the subjective workings of our minds and the
objective experience of our surroundings meet is what causes love, what
causes hate, along with such pillars of humanity such as government and
religion. These things - they are not permanent, they can change, disband
- and I don't mean to suggest that they deserve disdain - only that their
pitfalls must be known, and sublimated. The creating of a piece of art
is the opportunity to sublimate - to pull the subjective into the objective
world in a unique way. My art purposefully accessions through harkening
back to past traditions - most apparent the late nineteenth-century. I
am drawn to this period of art for several reasons. I am intrigued by
the way printmaking and drawing (along with painting), reacted to the
dissemination of photography. This was also a time period just prior to
the marked advent of modernism, and the First World War. Meaning, I believe
that there was a great anxiety, sometimes thoughtful and tender, sometimes
intense and anguished in art at this time - in accordance with fin de
siecele theories of art and culture. Hence my interest and drawing of
style and imagery from artists such as Odilon Redon and Edvard Munch.
Munch said of his work: "My art is rooted in a single reflection:
why am I not as others are? Why was there a curse on my cradle? Why did
I come into the world without any choice?" and "My art gives
meaning to my life"
It is my opinion that Munch's work was
his life. Not family, not religion, not sex and money, but the transposition
of the pathos in his soul into the physical world, through art. Certainly,
it is the experience of family, religion, sex, money, etc. that breeds
our suffering - these things are life. But the arts - and artists such
as Munch - absolve us from suffering alone. I suffer with Munch, I suffer
with humanity, and I celebrate an art that speaks of isolation, but in
an attempt to know community, and that is what Munch's art does, as well
as Redon's. The artwork of Odilon Redon has greatly inspired me artistically
and emotionally, and spiritually. Redon said that the sublime is the victory
over the obstacle, and that the obstacle was fear. I couldn't agree more.
There is a gentleness to Redon's work that, though perhaps mysterious
and dark in presentation, is ultimately sublime. Unlike the works of other
artists of the symbolist movement, the group that Redon was lumped into,
for his efforts were hard to catalogue, Redon is more passive, and humanitarian
in his imagery. Redon made it clear that his work had been inspired by
his dreams, and they inspire in the spectator a conviction like that of
dreams - intense - but not quite palpable - not quite real. The thematic
content of his work over his last twenty years is more densely mythical,
when Redon began to use more color. It is my opinion that the mythology
of human history that Redon was dealing with is a universalized extension
of Redon's personal dream imagery to the dream imagery of humanity. This
is something I search for in my work as well.
The body of work that I have created was created just as that - a body
of work, with each individual work being considered one piece of a larger
corpus. My work is presented in a style that restates aspects of the nineteenth
century salon. This is done to indicate the commerciality involved in
the display of art during that time period, and to also express a certain
pathos concerning the evolution of art from that time as it shed it's
superstructural traditions in an effort to innovate at a pace in rhythm
with modernity's infrastructural advances in technology. Due to photography,
industrialization, and advances in the economy and technology, art of
the type that I admire and take from vanished in the high-velocity quest
for originality. The salon presentation also simply emphasizes the display
of multiple prints and drawings as a unified corpus, complementing each
other. Single pieces are not presented as separate from each other as
they often they are; my pieces are be displayed in close proximity to
one another, filling the wall space from top to bottom. My images will
also be displayed in an enclosure, one that only one to three people can
inhabit at one time. Because my art is presented in this manner, the images
are often not entirely illustrative of their individual content. For instance,
I incorporate an image of Christ crowned with thorns, an owl, and a simple
portrait of an anonymous female all into the same large "piece",
whose content is a reflection of life as a whole, contemplation in its
varied physical and mental manifestations.
The photographic eye, the single eye, is the eye of Apollo, the eye of
the intellect. This is not to say that photography can be utilized in
ways outside of this definition - for that is exactly what I care to do
in my work. The photograph claims to capture, to freeze, reality. My use
of photographs in creating prints and drawings, instills a sense of tangibility,
or more so documentation. I believe that my prints and drawings, mingling
in their production with photographs, breed emotionally real images. It
is my way of being postmodern - of maintaining as sense of the past, and
what I value in my ability to create drawings and prints which allude
to past images and styles, while bringing in what I see as an intellectualized
element, the reality of the camera's eye.
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