An artist is someone who has chosen to pay extraordinary attention to a particular thing, isolating it from the whole experience of existence and then presenting it back to other people in the form of a particular experience.
Posts Tagged ‘art’
Jerzy Grotowski, 1989
August 21, 2008“Art is deeply rebellious. Bad artists talk about rebellion, but true artists do the rebellion. They respond to the consecrated order by an act.
Here there is a most dangerous and most important point. One can, in following this route, end up in a sort of rebellion that is not even exclusively verbal but anarchic, which is the refusal of our responsibilities. In the realm of art, this appears under the form of dilettantism: one is not credible in one’s craft; one has no mastery; one has no capacities; one is truly a dilettante in the worst sense of the word – so one is rebelling.
No, none of that. Art as rebellion is to create the fait accompli, which pushes back the limits imposed by society or, in tyrannical systems, imposed by power. But you can’t push back these limits if you are not credible. Your fait accompli is nothing but humbug if it is not fait competent.
Yes! It is blasphemous! But it’s precise.
You know what you are doing, you have worked out your weapons, you have credibility, you have created a fait accompli, which is of such mastery that even your adversaries cannot deny it. If you don’t have this attitude of competence at your disposal in your rebellion, you will lose everything in the battle. Even if you are sincere.
… Real rebellion in art is persistent, mastered, never dilettante. Art has always been the effort to confront oneself with the insufficiency, and by this very fact, art has always been complementary to social reality.
Don’t focus on just one thing as limited as theatre. The theatre is all the phenomena around theatre, the whole culture. We can use the word theatre as much as we can abolish it.”
Jerzy Grotowski, Tu es les fils de quelqu’un (You are somebody’s son), 1989, from The Grotowski Sourcebook.
Elliott Eisner
August 21, 2008“Some aspects of artistic thinking are inherent in the human condition, such as the need to confer form upon ideas and feelings in order to have them.”
Elliott Eisner, What do children learn when they paint?, Art Education, 1978.
Drawing as an act of rebellion
August 21, 2008“… every sanction of his art grows from the terms of its own creation.
What this means in actual practice emerges from a simple point that the artist himself has made over and over again: he draws. And after he draws, he animates, reproduces, and transforms each drawing. His task is not simply to represent, detail, or delineate the facts of suffering: rather, he draws from such a content as surely as clear water is drawn by patience from a dark well, or as pain is drawn away from the body by healing.
… His method is urgent, but he will not skip a step. Every drawing is a gesture against the ready-made, simultaneous, and quickly consumed facility of photographic imagery.
He reveals how drawing is a hermeneutic advance upon photography’s mode of representation, just as history writing is a hermeneutic advance upon the random details of mere chroniclism.
The most obvious fact of drawing – that it unfolds in time and records that unfolding – acquires a profound significance here as a counter narrative, an alternative speed, another opportunity to examine experience in a context in which violence has obliterated the possibilities of perspective and hence made the view of history unbearable.”
Susan Stewart writing on William Kentridge, a South African artist in The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics, 2005.
About influence
August 21, 2008“What numbers of people close themselves so as not to be influenced! That is real fear – fear, not of others, but of oneself. Fear of losing one’s ‘me’…
… An influence is a meeting. One cannot be influenced except by what one already possesses in oneself. Better than a meeting, a recognition. It is the accelerated revelation of our own personality, with the help of the experience of someone else.
We could not be influenced by something completely foreign to us. Influences are effects of chance which reveal us to ourselves. We were carrying the thing in us, but at the embryonic stage. Now we meet it fulfilled. What a leap forward! One must be indeed pretentious not to take advantage of it….
… Life? It is thirty thousand days, given plenty of luck. Life is short and knowledge is infinite. There is therefore not time to lose, and if someone helps me to meet what I could vaguely feel coming, I am gaining time for some other thing that I want. Let us not miss the short-cuts.
Influences define our outlines. They are never anything but the result of our choice and of our capacities.
Tell me who influences you, and I will tell you who you are.”
