I remember my freshmen year at Bard College - that's the first time I even considered this question - before that I was just making friends and being exposed to amazing things all the time. I would take what I liked and pair it with other things I liked. An artist about ten years before I figured out I should be calling myself that. The best thing I ever made, to this day, was a rose that was just a blow pop wrapper shredded and tied to a dry rose stem. It was so much cooler than giving a real rose on valentines day and I gave it to the dude. Better. But back to Authenticity. I remember how intimidated I was when I got to Bard - I had never been around so many fashionable people before. A friend turned to me and said, "It's hard to believe that they have parents, it's like they just appeared. Out of no where." They were all so attractive I was intimidated. I had never seen anything like these kids - I didn't read fashion mags, the only thing I did was go to shows, play keyboard with my friends, and vintage clothing shop - I always looked like a doll dragged through a stack of t-shirts, it was awesome but these kids were like models doing it. Looking back, I think my friend, who was a model but a modest one, were more intimidated by the fact that these kids were interested in the same things but so very attractive. Jealousy makes it easy to second guess motivation, but back to my point.
I think that an artist, to be any good and have an evolving body of work, has to be able to take anything in and spit it out with their twist - or something less goofy sounding. I had a friend in high school, Andrew, who would talk about this - he was a huge influence. He always talked about how he didn't feel like he was expressing anything, he was vomiting out what the world fed him. I have never heard anything smarter said about art and I think it takes care of any question of Authenticity or consistency (though it is a "who should get paid" nightmare...oh well.) That allows for a totally disparate body of work since all that is needed is a being to take in stimulus and spit out something that isn't what went in - we all become functions. And, since humans change, they needn't be static functions. In college I wrote my thesis on Pierce's theory of truth - the idea that a consistent system of logic and a clear definitions for universally accepted terms could allow for different eras to believe different truths while still allowing for an absolute standard against which these truths could be measured. If the artist is considered to be a logical system, which necessarily changes over time as new truths and trends are discovered, then the art is authentic and consistent for this reason alone and doesn't need further justification. An artist DOESN'T have to pick a "thing" to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment