To Be Integral With Art (Response to Dallman)
[I read Matthew's blog every day because it gives me encouragement and insight on the path of becoming a more inclusive and well-rounded artist. What follows are some comments on his recent post "TO BE INTEGRAL WITH ART". His text in italics, mine in roman.]
TO BE INTEGRAL WITH ART: is to be inclusive. It is to ask, 'is this as full as I can make it?' It is to ask that again, and again.
Fullness, fullness, like a big plate of spaghetti with sausage, salad, garlic, cheese, olives, herbs, and wine. Integral Art is the Slow Food Movement of the creative sphere, the intention to give that sated, satiated feeling that accompanies a good meal, a good lay, or a good day at work. One has tested and expanded one's pallete, refined one's tastes, explored the spectrum of one's own experiential apparatus.
It is to create at your edge of honesty, and just over it, as you leap into the unknown.
Many of us interpret this as "put yourself in a fucked-up altered state and see what happens." Shrooms, booze, sleep deprivation, moral depravity-- we artists often interpret "the unknown" as "the unknown vices". But what about plunging UPWARD, into new levels of self-control, self-disciplined, self-awareness, increased ethical commitments?
To be integral with art is to open your areas of contraction, to open as the contraction, and make artifact of this tender, delicate new awareness, as do so transparently.
Matthew is using "contraction" in the Adi Da meaning, as that sense of being a separate self in a hostile world, a selection of matter which "contracts" or recoils from the rest of the world and deems itself an island floating in a sea of random, fleeting connections. This contraction, though ever-present in our every day reality, may itself be an illusion, but nevertheless it is useful to the artistic soul as a vehicle for the expression of his/her vision. The idea with integral art is to further expose the flasehood of this contraction, and to stand as firmly as one can in those fleeting glimpses.
To be integral with art is to commit to a practice of openness and fullness, through activities and experiments that jog our consciousness awake and vibrant.
Now we're getting to where the rubber meets the road. Activities and experiments: in other words, DO SOMETHING! JUST WRITE! JUST DRAW! JUST PAINT! JUST COOK A LOBSTER BISQUE IN A VODKA CREME SAUCE. JUTS GET ONSTAGE AND CRACK JOKES ABOUT YOUR LOVE OF PHLEGM AND THE DISTURBING PALLOR OF GEORGE BUSH'S SKIN. Support your main creative practice through a smorgasbord of cross-training activities. If you're a musician, lift weights, pray to the the God of Jim Morrison, eat a ton of fruit, and improvise on keyboard 30 minutes every day. Design a little icon for each activity and hang them on your wall, then touch them like buttons each day as you program yourself to do a sequence of art-supporting activities.
It is to realize the spectrum of ways that people view, absorb, and interpret art. It is to realize how the same spectrum of capacities can operate in your own thoughts, actions, opinions, and beliefs, as a creator/artist.
This seems like the one area today's artists are most loathe to tackle. The general feeling is either a) fuck what everyone else thinks or b) do what everyone likes so I can get laid and make money. Why aren't the Fiery Furnaces concerned with how their music is interpretted? And if they were, what would they do to collect that feedback and make use of it without compromising their onw personal (and lovable) sound and vision?
[Matthew's post continues, but I'm out of time....]
TO BE INTEGRAL WITH ART: is to be inclusive. It is to ask, 'is this as full as I can make it?' It is to ask that again, and again.
Fullness, fullness, like a big plate of spaghetti with sausage, salad, garlic, cheese, olives, herbs, and wine. Integral Art is the Slow Food Movement of the creative sphere, the intention to give that sated, satiated feeling that accompanies a good meal, a good lay, or a good day at work. One has tested and expanded one's pallete, refined one's tastes, explored the spectrum of one's own experiential apparatus.
It is to create at your edge of honesty, and just over it, as you leap into the unknown.
Many of us interpret this as "put yourself in a fucked-up altered state and see what happens." Shrooms, booze, sleep deprivation, moral depravity-- we artists often interpret "the unknown" as "the unknown vices". But what about plunging UPWARD, into new levels of self-control, self-disciplined, self-awareness, increased ethical commitments?
To be integral with art is to open your areas of contraction, to open as the contraction, and make artifact of this tender, delicate new awareness, as do so transparently.
Matthew is using "contraction" in the Adi Da meaning, as that sense of being a separate self in a hostile world, a selection of matter which "contracts" or recoils from the rest of the world and deems itself an island floating in a sea of random, fleeting connections. This contraction, though ever-present in our every day reality, may itself be an illusion, but nevertheless it is useful to the artistic soul as a vehicle for the expression of his/her vision. The idea with integral art is to further expose the flasehood of this contraction, and to stand as firmly as one can in those fleeting glimpses.
To be integral with art is to commit to a practice of openness and fullness, through activities and experiments that jog our consciousness awake and vibrant.
Now we're getting to where the rubber meets the road. Activities and experiments: in other words, DO SOMETHING! JUST WRITE! JUST DRAW! JUST PAINT! JUST COOK A LOBSTER BISQUE IN A VODKA CREME SAUCE. JUTS GET ONSTAGE AND CRACK JOKES ABOUT YOUR LOVE OF PHLEGM AND THE DISTURBING PALLOR OF GEORGE BUSH'S SKIN. Support your main creative practice through a smorgasbord of cross-training activities. If you're a musician, lift weights, pray to the the God of Jim Morrison, eat a ton of fruit, and improvise on keyboard 30 minutes every day. Design a little icon for each activity and hang them on your wall, then touch them like buttons each day as you program yourself to do a sequence of art-supporting activities.
It is to realize the spectrum of ways that people view, absorb, and interpret art. It is to realize how the same spectrum of capacities can operate in your own thoughts, actions, opinions, and beliefs, as a creator/artist.
This seems like the one area today's artists are most loathe to tackle. The general feeling is either a) fuck what everyone else thinks or b) do what everyone likes so I can get laid and make money. Why aren't the Fiery Furnaces concerned with how their music is interpretted? And if they were, what would they do to collect that feedback and make use of it without compromising their onw personal (and lovable) sound and vision?
[Matthew's post continues, but I'm out of time....]
posted by Paul S. at
1:45 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home