http://koreabeat.com/?p=8648
Thursday, July 9, 2009
Tuesday, July 7, 2009
Re: The Difference
Dear G,
In high school I took a biology class. It was one of my favourites, taught by one of my favourite teachers and has probably influenced me in ways so subtle and infinite that naming them would be as pointless as counting the stars. In that class I learned about flatworms. Flatworms are simple organisms. So simple that scientists study them precisely for their simplicity. In many ways they behave like single celled organisms. Their lifestyle consists of two things and two things only: survival and reproduction. For this they are equipped with flat, undulating bodies that propel them through their watery environments and the simplest of nervous systems, just a small bundle of ganglia, to synthesize environmental stimulation. Two photoreceptors located on their head serve as crude substitutes for eyes. They are sensitive to light, but are incapable of producing images, and so prefer to stay in the dark shadows where visibility among predators is sure to be low and survival high. The world to the flatworm is probably a simple, constantly changing sea of lights and shadows, free of any distinct images.
I imagine that if flatworms could see color, they wouldn’t like grey. White is easy to decipher. White is bright so there must be lots of light, which means high exposure, which means danger. White is death. Black is a simple matter as well. In the dark shadows, there is safety, away from the probing, hungry eyes of predators. But the grey is not so clear. How grey is grey? It’s somewhere in the murky middle; survival is uncertain.
The same is for me. I think the world for me is also somewhat like a sea of lights and shadows. I have never liked grey. Never. Not ever in the past, and not now. I don’t even like it as a color. It is a dull, muddy shade. Bland, listless, and everywhere. It is something that fails to appeal to me both aesthetically and philosophically. For me, grey is indecision and uncertainty. How can you act when nothing is for certain? Where do you place your feet when you can’t tell where the light ends and the thousand-foot cliff begins? So I gravitate towards the whites and the blacks. The black and whites are things that instill in me a confidence and assuredness so strong that I cannot doubt their truth. As Descartes said, "I have inferred that everything that I vividly and clearly perceive must be true... It is something that I know for certain and in an unshakable way· to be true." Of course everybody knows now that Descartes’ logic is flawed, but it was as good as true for centuries of history’s greatest philosophers. Regardless of whether or not this is the best way to navigate through life, this is, or has been, the way I perceive the world.
It’s not a very thoughtful way of living life. I know, and this is why I’ve been having problems. But this is not something I want to discuss in length for the time being.
Returning to the black and whites, art to me is perhaps the purest you can get in the color spectrum. But there are many kinds of "art" so first let me define what I mean by the word. I wouldn’t exactly call "visual arts that lean towards the subject of design and commercial art" "art" in the higher sense. Sure, it is "art" in some respects and they certainly have their place and are incredibly important for all the reasons you’ve listed, but they are not the kind of "art" with a capital "A," that is, correct me if I’m wrong, what I think we are discussing here. You are right, art is far too broad of a topic to cover, so I will limit my scope to the kind that I enjoy/glorify/revisit the most and which also is the kind that I most frequently refer to.
I once wrote this in my journal (this was a while ago, back in highschool. Probably junior year):
"Pure,
Plain,
Pithy,
Visceral. [triple underlining]
Pure gut feeling [double underline].
That is what I want my art to be."
You have called what I’m referring to as pure visual appeal. To me, that is close but not quite what I mean. I’m talking about an experience that lights the soul. Something so raw and natural -- spiritual almost. This difference must have a lot to do with the way we are hardwired. I am just a visual person. Visuals excite me, inspire me, teach me. They can trigger overwhelming emotions that thunder down upon my head like a waterfall or they can stop me so gently in my tracks that I never knew it hit me.
I will return to the flatworm analogy/motif. Like I said before, scientists study the flatworms to extract information about life’s most bare necessities. It is an attempt to take away all the extraneous matters and discover what life is about. What is the essence of life? For flatworms, life is not muddled up with intellectual discordance. They have a brain that is basically a light reactor. They don’t think. They react. Everything is instinct. Nothing is more complicated than what is most essential. It is the same for me when it comes to "art." I don’t want to think about art. I shouldn’t need to. Art should suck me in like a swirling vortex, a black hole. It should stupefy me and obliterate all necessity for the mind because what it is touching has absolutely nothing to do with it. Take away the mind, don’t think, just absorb the details: whatever that reacts is the movement of the soul within. Art, as I see it, is food for the soul. It should scratch away on the surface of the most pure manifestation of existence itself.
The things required to create this kind of "soul food" becomes complicated. Beautiful things are the most common, but even beauty sometimes becomes haggard and old, or contrite and forced. Sometimes its beauty lies in its ugliness. It’s almost always something raw and real. Something that "rumbles the bass line through the breast, down, deep down into the darkened rip curl of the intestines." Sometimes its been done before, but more than often it is uniquely its own creature. It is amorphous. Intangible and yet not, but always something you know when you see it.
But it’s easy to see why you would call it pure visual appeal, for obvious reasons. Even I confuse the two sometimes and I think that is precisely why I speak of art with a bit of disdain, a bit of disgust. The things that I have defined for myself as art does not nourish. It does not sustain. It is essentially shallow. That is, its effects are surface level if left unexplored. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but still an image is an image. It can only say so much. Images are silent but descriptive by nature. They often give limited context, are even stingier when it comes to history, and say absolutely nothing about the developments that ripple after its wake. If consumed only for its cathartic value, it quickly becomes a drug -- one that requires more and more to elicit the same high. I myself often see this "art" as a weakness, an addiction. I certainly use it as an escape, far more than I like to admit. I’ve said that artists are selfish creatures b/c as both someone who creates and consumes it, I believe that this "art" really can only be created when made for the self versus an audience or patron. Furthermore, the act of creation is incredibly pleasurable -- there’s an almost narcissistic purging. And an undeniable bit of voyeurism in the consumption.
I don’t think the descriptions we’ve laid out are incompatible. I think they could be interpretations of the same thing with emphasis on opposite aspects. You could argue otherwise. Ultimately, art should be whatever is most important to you. What I’ve described is a very narrow interpretation that is strictly subjective to myself. If it happens to ring a chord with someone else than, then happy day, I’ve saved someone a long meditation. But in no way should this limit the definition of "art." The art that you described is perfectly valid. It has power and meaning for you and for many others I’m sure.
I think there is a flatworm inside all of us. Little, thin simple organisms. They are slimy but soft, and sometimes truly beautiful creatures. Anything that can reveal more about them -- to me -- this is my Art with a capital "A."
Your friend,
J
In high school I took a biology class. It was one of my favourites, taught by one of my favourite teachers and has probably influenced me in ways so subtle and infinite that naming them would be as pointless as counting the stars. In that class I learned about flatworms. Flatworms are simple organisms. So simple that scientists study them precisely for their simplicity. In many ways they behave like single celled organisms. Their lifestyle consists of two things and two things only: survival and reproduction. For this they are equipped with flat, undulating bodies that propel them through their watery environments and the simplest of nervous systems, just a small bundle of ganglia, to synthesize environmental stimulation. Two photoreceptors located on their head serve as crude substitutes for eyes. They are sensitive to light, but are incapable of producing images, and so prefer to stay in the dark shadows where visibility among predators is sure to be low and survival high. The world to the flatworm is probably a simple, constantly changing sea of lights and shadows, free of any distinct images.
I imagine that if flatworms could see color, they wouldn’t like grey. White is easy to decipher. White is bright so there must be lots of light, which means high exposure, which means danger. White is death. Black is a simple matter as well. In the dark shadows, there is safety, away from the probing, hungry eyes of predators. But the grey is not so clear. How grey is grey? It’s somewhere in the murky middle; survival is uncertain.
The same is for me. I think the world for me is also somewhat like a sea of lights and shadows. I have never liked grey. Never. Not ever in the past, and not now. I don’t even like it as a color. It is a dull, muddy shade. Bland, listless, and everywhere. It is something that fails to appeal to me both aesthetically and philosophically. For me, grey is indecision and uncertainty. How can you act when nothing is for certain? Where do you place your feet when you can’t tell where the light ends and the thousand-foot cliff begins? So I gravitate towards the whites and the blacks. The black and whites are things that instill in me a confidence and assuredness so strong that I cannot doubt their truth. As Descartes said, "I have inferred that everything that I vividly and clearly perceive must be true... It is something that I know for certain and in an unshakable way· to be true." Of course everybody knows now that Descartes’ logic is flawed, but it was as good as true for centuries of history’s greatest philosophers. Regardless of whether or not this is the best way to navigate through life, this is, or has been, the way I perceive the world.
It’s not a very thoughtful way of living life. I know, and this is why I’ve been having problems. But this is not something I want to discuss in length for the time being.
Returning to the black and whites, art to me is perhaps the purest you can get in the color spectrum. But there are many kinds of "art" so first let me define what I mean by the word. I wouldn’t exactly call "visual arts that lean towards the subject of design and commercial art" "art" in the higher sense. Sure, it is "art" in some respects and they certainly have their place and are incredibly important for all the reasons you’ve listed, but they are not the kind of "art" with a capital "A," that is, correct me if I’m wrong, what I think we are discussing here. You are right, art is far too broad of a topic to cover, so I will limit my scope to the kind that I enjoy/glorify/revisit the most and which also is the kind that I most frequently refer to.
I once wrote this in my journal (this was a while ago, back in highschool. Probably junior year):
"Pure,
Plain,
Pithy,
Visceral. [triple underlining]
Pure gut feeling [double underline].
That is what I want my art to be."
You have called what I’m referring to as pure visual appeal. To me, that is close but not quite what I mean. I’m talking about an experience that lights the soul. Something so raw and natural -- spiritual almost. This difference must have a lot to do with the way we are hardwired. I am just a visual person. Visuals excite me, inspire me, teach me. They can trigger overwhelming emotions that thunder down upon my head like a waterfall or they can stop me so gently in my tracks that I never knew it hit me.
I will return to the flatworm analogy/motif. Like I said before, scientists study the flatworms to extract information about life’s most bare necessities. It is an attempt to take away all the extraneous matters and discover what life is about. What is the essence of life? For flatworms, life is not muddled up with intellectual discordance. They have a brain that is basically a light reactor. They don’t think. They react. Everything is instinct. Nothing is more complicated than what is most essential. It is the same for me when it comes to "art." I don’t want to think about art. I shouldn’t need to. Art should suck me in like a swirling vortex, a black hole. It should stupefy me and obliterate all necessity for the mind because what it is touching has absolutely nothing to do with it. Take away the mind, don’t think, just absorb the details: whatever that reacts is the movement of the soul within. Art, as I see it, is food for the soul. It should scratch away on the surface of the most pure manifestation of existence itself.
The things required to create this kind of "soul food" becomes complicated. Beautiful things are the most common, but even beauty sometimes becomes haggard and old, or contrite and forced. Sometimes its beauty lies in its ugliness. It’s almost always something raw and real. Something that "rumbles the bass line through the breast, down, deep down into the darkened rip curl of the intestines." Sometimes its been done before, but more than often it is uniquely its own creature. It is amorphous. Intangible and yet not, but always something you know when you see it.
But it’s easy to see why you would call it pure visual appeal, for obvious reasons. Even I confuse the two sometimes and I think that is precisely why I speak of art with a bit of disdain, a bit of disgust. The things that I have defined for myself as art does not nourish. It does not sustain. It is essentially shallow. That is, its effects are surface level if left unexplored. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but still an image is an image. It can only say so much. Images are silent but descriptive by nature. They often give limited context, are even stingier when it comes to history, and say absolutely nothing about the developments that ripple after its wake. If consumed only for its cathartic value, it quickly becomes a drug -- one that requires more and more to elicit the same high. I myself often see this "art" as a weakness, an addiction. I certainly use it as an escape, far more than I like to admit. I’ve said that artists are selfish creatures b/c as both someone who creates and consumes it, I believe that this "art" really can only be created when made for the self versus an audience or patron. Furthermore, the act of creation is incredibly pleasurable -- there’s an almost narcissistic purging. And an undeniable bit of voyeurism in the consumption.
I don’t think the descriptions we’ve laid out are incompatible. I think they could be interpretations of the same thing with emphasis on opposite aspects. You could argue otherwise. Ultimately, art should be whatever is most important to you. What I’ve described is a very narrow interpretation that is strictly subjective to myself. If it happens to ring a chord with someone else than, then happy day, I’ve saved someone a long meditation. But in no way should this limit the definition of "art." The art that you described is perfectly valid. It has power and meaning for you and for many others I’m sure.
I think there is a flatworm inside all of us. Little, thin simple organisms. They are slimy but soft, and sometimes truly beautiful creatures. Anything that can reveal more about them -- to me -- this is my Art with a capital "A."
Your friend,
J
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
And on the third day, he died and rose again...
Do you believe?
Miracles do happen:
These are known as herbaceous perennials.
Switchgrass is a deep-rooted perennial. These roots are more than 3 meters long.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_plant
Miracles do happen:
A perennial plant or perennial (Latin per, "through", annus, "year") is a plant that lives for more than two years.[1] When used by gardeners or horticulturalists, this term applies specifically to perennial herbaceous plants. Scientifically, woody plants like shrubs and trees are also perennial in their habit.
Perennials, especially small flowering plants, grow and bloom over the spring and summer and then die back every autumn and winter, then return in the spring from their root-stock rather than seeding themselves as an annual plant does.These are known as herbaceous perennials.
Switchgrass is a deep-rooted perennial. These roots are more than 3 meters long.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perennial_plant
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