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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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