sculpture, art & poetry: dripping positively everywhere!
i have often thought of art as being a developmental exercise to keep the human toolmaker and human collector sharp. that is, the artist is the lay-craftsman waiting in the wings, honing her hand-eye operations with critical practice hours.
one sees in early childhood that play — imaginative play — is important to both make neuron connections in the brain circuitry and also to learn the environment. how can one really know what a pine cone is without tasting, throwing, and stepping on one?
in this regard, how can one really know what is in the subconscious, what has been suppressed, without artistic expression?
the values may have changed since 2 million years ago: tools and totems have given way to toys and decorations, but the need to carve, paint and act is still primal, still part and parcel of the animal.
in my poetics, i take a view that there are hardly any walls separating the methods of creativity — the same rules to make a good poem are the same to make a good painting, or sculpture. the modern poets are the rock and roll troubadours, and the folk singers. the modern painters are the photographers and film makers. the modern sculptors are the toy makers, the architects, the botanists. why hearken the old forms when the newness of art is everyday?
i especially noticed this this week when walking to work each morning in rainy Seattle. i was struck at how the city trees, stripped bare of their leaves, were truly miraculous in their inherent aesthetics: bilaterally symmetric, yet fukinsei-different; branching in softly-turned forms, organic in design; wiry; moving. they were sculpture, made by the metaphoric hand of nature.
then i realized that maybe there is no dearth of fine art in the city, no lack of sculpture: the trees were alive as sculptures, the buildings and fenestrations were sculptures of the symbolic, the advertisements and graffito were the semiotic visual art of the masses. instead of having marble statues bestrewn in ancient Greece, we have today’s urban objects bestrewn about modern Seattle.
thus, the human need to create and make objects of specialness is always robust, but our categories and descriptive taxonomies become rather anachronistic, and quickly.
well i say: cheers to the design of the pigeon dove and the moving flock! cheers to the maudlin weeping willow! cheers to the Chrysler building in NYC! and to the deep warm palette of Modigliani! and the pregnant forms of Arp!
yours always,
michael
beacon hill dmz, seattle, washington, usa
November 25th, 2009 at 8:59 am
I give you credit, Michael. Despite the decline of Western civilization, you still find cause to rejoice.
November 26th, 2009 at 12:39 pm
we are just atoms, as per the buddhas. empty containers. nothing. so aesthetics are really just qualifying the reflections. as far as declines — there is always always terror in beauty.