RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,152
(of gutturals and grunts, pt.2)
Much of life being conjecture, I
did eventually find that such a
concept lasts only as long as
you've not stubbed your toe or
walked in front of a moving
delivery van, or a train, for that
matter. One any of those things
occur, 'conjecture' has a way of
leaving very swiftly as a basis
for any consideration of life.
Solidity, hurt, and injury take
over; altering the essence of
that which is 'real'. Pain and
discomfort quickly take their
place. No two-ways about it.
Not much conjecture there.
-
Yet, in a single respect, I did
find Art to be about conjecture.
Solely. It took all I could do
to make sense from the morass
of what I was learning; to put
it all into functional locations
within my life. I did it quite
eccentrically, and quite my
own way. The 'conjecture' in
this case being senses of other
or alternate spaces and places.
Created conjecturally, by the
Artist.
-
A lot of words went into what
I was living; not just conjecture.
The long, high line that ran from
the past to the present, for me,
included aspects of most things
peripheral to 'Art' as well. The
17th street leatherman, working
on shoes, cobbling heels and
soles all day, why indeed was
he too not considered and artist?
Those cabbie mechanics along
the westside - in their sheds
and car barns of yellow vehicles,
hoods up, or idling and ready-to-go;
the horse tenders in the feed-sheds;
the guys along MacDougal and
Bleecker Streets who made guitars
and repaired banjos and dulcimers
too, why weren't they considered
artists - in the most medieval sense,
all of these levels of humanity were.
Each of them, in the feudal-village
sense, served with a particular level
of craft to assist and better their
fellows, bringing skills and art
into their own small communities.
Life was once settled like that -
and then, I found, and until, the
'profit-motive' entered the picture,
and - as it usually does - got rid
of the art aspect immediately. It
kills, as well, any communal spirit.
Corners get cut, materials get
cheapened, and the time and
the effort allotted to each task
gets cast aside or shortened so
as to better allow for profit.
-
Art is timeless, and never - or
should never have - faced that.
In later respects, population killed
Art, in the sense that a million
children arrived everywhere with
some sort of manufactured need to
'study' or 'learn' something, and a
fair enough proportion of them had
decided to take up the system's
offer of cheesy education: Art; Art
History; Curatorial Studies; the
most bombastic of aspects of
critics, essayists, profilers and
observers of hat became an 'art'
scene. The long curve of art-learning
- which used to be self-generated -
took its own errant course into the
more fractured realms of 'profession.'
Music was the same thing (Voila! The
garage-band era!). Many years before
this, music existed freely, and the art
of musical notation was non-existent.
There was a time when 'Music' meant
oral transmission of tales and stories,
epic forms of self-realization by 'peoples'
to remember their local roots and origins.
One spoke to the 'King,' and in turn
hoped to be entertaining that royal
court. Musical notation was developed,
so as to retain a means of saving what
was just heard. Like a shoemaker with
his style and guide book, or the artist
with his or her color-guides and mix
panels - in fact, paints in tubes. It
wasn't until very late when the French
Impressionists - because of their
proclivity for painting outdoors -
finally came up with paints and colors
in tubes - as a commercial enterprise.
Before that, artists mixed, on-site,
their own pigments, oils, and colors.
Anyhow, once 'Music,' like Art, was
streamlined and powered, eventually,
by commercialism too. Notation and
rhythm and tempo, and all the more
standard things like staff, meter, and
counterpoint and theme/variation
motifs took over. Music then became
a language to be learned, another
task along the way.
-
I sort of considered all this as I went
along. The world confused me, the
world of 1967 confused me less than
did '68, and then '69. Everything was
all mashed up; out of control, and
each new year seemed worse than
the last and the previous. As a whole,
Humanity had somehow moved itself
along - 7 centuries worth of something.
Progress? I wasn't so sure about that.
Every specialty then had its own science.
From car design to wars and killing,
each aspect of Humanity's time on
the planet had left its own, sullied,
trackmarks, like needle-marks in an
addict's arm; always trying to find
more - even if the veins were weak.
I didn't even like dwelling too much
on all these points of what, essentially,
had become 'specialization.' Art. Music.
It had all been translated over into a
form of work, and I refused myself the
chance of any concentration or specialty.
Probably my fatal flaw, that was, and
the one which, even today, left me in
a shambles, and nowhere. A man
without a country? A motherless
child with nowhere to turn? At some
point in the past, I missed a string,
a thread, that had never been given
to me. My own personal past held
none of it; I had to find my own.
-
We all live among strictures. The
'strictures' turn into structures, which
then entrap us. Bach had his structures,
and as good as his work was, the
progressions of logic and form were
apparent and prevalent in his music.
Connecting that to art, via jazz, I
soon realized a key! A saving grace,
and a formula. And it went for Art
too! Music and Art combined, for
freshness, spontaneity, and vitality,
but Art did it, by the 1940's, through
a form of improvisation. Something
continually discovered anew. ('Since
the Renaissance, the fine art of painting
has been dominated by the concept of
the picture as 'composition' - the
precisely calibrated, balanced, and
carefully analyzed and premeditated
arrangement of pictorial elements in
a harmonious order. The end products
of this composition have usually evolved
through a series of experimental studies
used to determine the proper values,
proportions, and location of specific
elements within a general, geometric
scheme of design'). My friend, Judy,
often went on about Giotto, the
early Italian artist on whom has
been pegged the title of 'discoverer
of perspective.' If he had 'discovered'
perspective, as was said, and from
which the geometry and structure of
so much old art stemmed, I wondered,
then 'what else was there to be discovered,
art-wise, in this world. I also often
thought about his world, before the
idea of 'perspective' had even been
formulated. How had people seen
things, and how hard those who
drew and etched had to work in
order to get across the ideas of
distance, scenery diminishing, and
the depth of that corner over at
Via Caesari and and Strada Nero.
Someone (Giotto?) had managed
to blow all that apart; before that,
cartoon-like, flat-image'd drawings
in clay?' I was ready for the rest,
in my own modern day. 'The idea
of the grid was an especially
revolutionizing invention and it
came into standard use as a means
for conceptualizing, structuring, and
analyzing the picture surface, for
breaking it down into more manageable
components, and for projecting and
measuring more specific design ideas
such as perspective.' All I knew was
that I did NOT like that rigorous and
rational world, even when it overlapped
into what could be called 'Art.' I was
ready for something new. The old
way of academic art education
just had to go.
[pt. 3, next]
No comments:
Post a Comment