and you can visit the link at YouTube should you like to watch it in glorious 720/1280 at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xs81UeXlQ5I
And right now, it looks neat, but what is it? That seems to me to be the worst state of affairs for an artist. When I listen to Matthew Barney talk about his work, talk about the concepts behind his work, as an artist, when I listen to someone who just doesn't jive with me, all I hear is I made this thing from my intuitive feeling about what is aesthetic and I came up with a way to justify the images later. On one hand, it annoys me because so much money backs his productions and his sheer charisma and social (or socioeconomic) opulence propel him into a world that is his oyster - one in which he is allowed to express narcissistically and like pop artists, we look at a well-chisled american football player's face and assume the art is profound. I don't think his art is profound I don't even think he's charismatic.
But in all this, I realize it's more that I champion the underdog and loathe the celebrity. In this sense I see myself as a balancing force. I'm not going to turn it all the way back around, because the irony of this situation is that as soon as the underdog becomes the jesus whose face we see in the towel used to wipe the fluids away, I no longer see a savior or a confidant but a mere celebrity. I should look for the world's answers in the gibberish of a homeless man before I turn to someone with too much celebrity because I lose trust in someone who has happened into this type of power and embraces it. While I fully understand with all the empathy a human can possess what it is to lust after the "truth" in the world, I came to understand what a temporal concept "truth" is. Truth is not eternal, people just want it to be.
So I've been reading philosophy for a bit now - I was into Ayn Rand's theories of Objectivism in high school, but more importantly I was into a boy who was into Ayn Rand. I left my beliefs in Christianity because I had found someone with the truth. I found someone to take care of me and lead me out of delusion and tradition. Four years later, my savior had lost his shimmer. He didn't really know the truth, he just had a big personality and very persuasive way with words. He was a dialectician, a logician, an orator, and a huge deluded misanthrope. In a small town, he was also the underdog. I trusted him completely and justified all his actions because of my trust. But I feel certain that it was his actions that made me trust him in the first place. Actions are, after all, movements from point A to point B, not the intentions that drive them. Those intentions are as ephemeral as "the truth" and equally subject to interpretation.
Now I'm reading Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy and considering the world's famous polarizing German personality for his influence and his power. Another great orator, I find a great deal I like in his perspective. On the one hand, he's a snooty elitist and typically chauvinist, but what surprises me is how difficult it is for great humanists to apply their philosophies to their own lives. Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer (and smacking of much older Eastern Buddhist thought) believed that there were two drives in all of humanity. Apollo named the drive that compels us to make order of things, to categorize and individuate. I think this runs parallel to Freud's libido or creative energy. But later in life, Freud recognized Thanatos, which was the name for his "death drive" which he eventually believed was in conflict with the libido. The death drive was a limiting force which drives us to suicide and self destruction because like Nietzsche Dionysian drive, we are always trying to return to our original primordial inorganic state, a state of "oneness" with the world. Dionysus is the force of chaos that makes us dance in a crowd, losing our faces to a group ritual where we no longer exist as individuals but feel the "truth" of that blissful "oneness" sought after by Buddhist monks. He romanticized the society of the archaic Greeks whose Attic Tragedies were the locus of all activity, just as the Christian Church was in the Middle Ages and as Science became to modernity. Socrates, for Nietzsche, ruined the world by having such a profound influence through his charismatic oration that he caused us to think optimistically, and with great arrogance that we could "know" everything through logic. But even worse, Socrates believed we could "know" morality through logical reasoning. Great job Socrates - knowing requires education, and education then becomes another subjective measure by the elite or those in power. Classes emerge and the "unknowing" become justified as morally inept and thus dehumanized and we enslave them. Slavery, Socrates. The logical end of morality. Yep. Logically infallible.
Nietzsche sums it up for us:
Through art, that thing that is so illogical but as yet full of "truth" in an opposite but equally viable manner to scientific and logical "knowledge," we experience the Dionysian return to oneness that has become so foreign to us since the Industrial Revolution. I get it when I look at a Rothko painting or watch Tarkovsky's films? Does that make these artist more "truthful?" I think only in the sense that any "truth" is a fleeting, overturning ephemeral thing that we can lose ourselves in only for a moment, like the glitter of silk spun in the wind.
Do I know what this test piece of film that I made is? It's practically part of something bigger, a section of the entire form of an artwork I'm making. At worst I believe it has nothing to do with the larger philosophical issues I have discussed and is instead something much more personal to my own subjective aesthetic, technology, and expression, but at best you and Nietzsche and Socrates alike can get something out of the product that I am able to get out of the process of culmination.
No comments:
Post a Comment