aesthetics

[abknight@zzzzzz]

Duchamp and the Urinal: unedited notes from a coffee
drinker: a dialectic of hope

I sadly missed perhaps the most intense exchanges between
Bill and Clive on this aesthetics thing.  The pull of the
dance is so strong I must leave off tapping my foot and
arise to my feet!  I don't know all what has been said but
I will say this: that urinal is the most desperately
beautiful thing I can think of!   Where would I be without
Gerhard Richter's gray painting or Damien Hirst's
spectacles of anatomy and death?  I do draw the line at
Hermann Nitsch's bloody orgy mysteries theater, but by
striving to be repulsive it cannot but have the message
that there is mystery, wonder, perhaps even beauty in
slaughter decay and death.  By extension there is beauty
in everything.    Duchamp had only said something as
ordinary as pissing was not invulnerable to our
unquenchably thirsty minds and spirits.  We have the
capacity to hold absolutely anything dear or meaningful.
Life would be unbearable did we not.  Indeed it takes huge
amounts of illness or suffering to kill the idea of
meaning or hope, which are really much the same.  For
meaning in the end is always a map to point: hope this way
and despair that.

Why carve?  Carving is an expression of hope.  It is an
act of faith in a meaningful/hopeful outcome.  That we
shall grasp and know the moments of our lives, even as
they are taken from us.  This would include all the
processes of our imagination; Norman's awe before a virus;
me imagining I'm Bessie Smith; everything.  Getting out of
bed on Monday morning.   Once an idea or self-regard is
born, it is immortal.   Carving is perhaps a mortal
sacrifice to the ideal.  But we theoretically could be
doing anything and have the same result.  This is the
aesthetic capacity.  And as Bruce Nauman pointed out,
since in the field of art these days nothing is out of
bounds, the choosing of one's topic/medium can be quite a
challenge.   One needn't do art at all.

But if one does commit art, she cannot hide the corpse.
Art involves an engagement with a material from outside
the mind.  That existed before you met it and will exist
after you depart.  The material is hunted, struck dead and
transformed to another purpose, but remain it must.

To be in the medium of stone right off the bat simplifies
things greatly.  But it also adds great gifts beyond what
we alone cannot supply, as perhaps any medium does.  For
it is always it's own great subject and imagination can
only stir the pot and add zest.  The great gift of the
form/medium is that with enough effort and imagination
applied to it, the methods and material combine with the
human.  A spirit is born.  As many have said, there is a
certain point when the stone "declares itself".  It speaks
it's own name.  It is from beyond our imagination and is
therefore of endless necessity.

Disagree with that, somebody.  I dare you!   For I have
already contradicted my own self.

Bill, the idler and dilettante(one who finds delight)