The following is in response to talking plant’s retort to a post of mine. You may wish to read the original posts first, but certainly don’t have to.
Links: (for those who want ‘em)
- living this life of illusion (my original post)
- allow me to retort (plant’s response)
To the extent that a mere exercise in semantic brain-flexing can be called a controversy; the controversy stems from the various implications to be taken from a quote . . .
Whoever is completely and wholly an artist is to all eternity separated from the “real,” the actual
- Nietzsche
talking plant took up his end of the argument with a definition of “real”, essentially arguing that by saying the artist is separated from the real, the artist is separated from truth, and that this runs contrary to the very definition of the artist . . .
ultimately what the artist does is to point at the true, point at the real
he goes on to . . .
posit that the artist is immured within a personal truth (and what other kind is there really?)
certainly, i have absolutely no quarrel with that statement.
my quarrel arises from the jump required to concur that a personal truth -
is the same as the “real”
(and this is not the same as to say that art is not real,
art is most certainly real,
but only once it has been created;
art [good art anyway]
points to the real,
points to truths,
but first it must be made)
the artist must have a personal truth, which i hope to show is very different from the “real”, and while i don’t agree with vast stretches of Plato’s thought, i think this is quite apropos . . .
For Plato, art is a pursuit whose adherents are not to be trusted; given that their productions imitate the sensory world (itself an imitation of the divine world of forms) art necessarily is an imitation of an imitation, and thus is hopelessly far from the source of the truth. Plato, it may be noted, barred artists from access to his ideal city, in his Republic.
From Wikipedia
to me the artist is primarily an observer
and even when art (as created by the artist) does manage to point at, or even reveal, something of the truth or the real, they are still divorced from its ultimate value . . .
Art must be constructed from an inner vision woven of the interpreted pieces of the ‘real’ that the artist confronts in the course of their lives. However, during the time when the artist is confronting this ‘real’, what they are doing is dissecting it, teasing it apart, subjecting it to all manner of odd inner processes;
There are a whole slew of interesting intellectual and emotional processes that we all, as (i suppose that ‘we all’ is to include the non-artistic) humans, automatically filter all new stimuli through.
In the case of someone who is “completely and wholly an artist”, I would state that these processes have an extra level of poignancy. To use a simple example, when I find myself in a crowd of any size, my favored reaction is to find an unassuming place on the sidelines and simply observe, as opposed to participating in whatever it is that is going on. (there are of course exceptions to this ‘rule’, but nine times out of ten) I’m on the outside looking in, confronting the “real” as it occurs in the sphere of my awareness with a certain, almost critical, mindset. This mindset is itself perhaps best defined as:
‘in opposition to simple experience’
-
i’ve had moments where i was simply experiencing
i tend to notice them
as the final act of the experience,
the moment of notice heralding the return of
what passes for normalcy
This is not to repaint a very tired portrait of the artist as poor, tortured soul. The harshest critique I can deliver on this, my poor attempt at philosophical explanation, is that it could easily be construed as terribly elitist, to say nothing of egotistical.
although,
what in the hell do you expect?
i’m sitting here defending Nietzsche!!
and in the process of such
applying to my own person
the lofty title of
“wholly and completely an artist”
Seeing as how I’ve more or less thrown aside the thin veneer of intellectualism that I had hoped would provide some sort of coherence to this thing, I’ll simply heap upon anyone foolish enough to still be reading;
a final rant.
it is a wonderful,
and damning,
experience,
to be an artist, to feel art (which in my case manifests itself as strange poetry like this) bubbling up inside of your psyche at all manner of odd occasions,
or in a statement that i know plant and i can agree on,
life is art
if your life is art, that casts you into a different, primarily personal, reality
one which i would say, in direct contrast to Plato, probably has a better chance of being in line with the “divine world of forms” than most of what is experienced here in this strange what-have-you that i call ‘doing the life thing’
but
in order to report back on the “real” the “actual” or the “truth”
the artist must be separated from it
otherwise you cannot properly observe it
Everything that the artist constructs is an artifice, a mocked up ‘reality’ which holds up its mirror to the ‘real’ world only because it exists outside of it, in the privileged category of the artifice.
ultimately, i’m certain that the dance of semantics could chase this sort of thing around for hours and hours and hours, but that’s half the fun isn’t it?