A FEW MODERN WORDS FROM THE ARTIST

Art gives us unique access to our unconscious parts. That’s what makes it art. It can do other things, too: Decorate, Instruct, Depress, that. But, the definer of art is that it triggers a different access to parts of us hitherto concealed. An image may do that for one person and not for others.

An art image has to start with at least a fragment of the known culture-- perhaps no more than a bit of color. From there it can go anywhere. Art has no arbitrary limits.

However, no piece of art can be as unusual as the extremes of our own experience.

Art is less intimate, more conservative, than our dreams and imaginings. On the other hand, it endures. When well made, it can give a new experience to countless individuals for a thousand years.

For me, painting is better than writing. In Paris in December 1987, after thinking it over for hundreds of hours while putting colors on papers, I wrote out my brief statement on the work of the artist in the western world.

THE WORK OF THE ARTIST IN THE WESTERN WORLD

An endless cavern of gleaming gems is the human unconscious. When needed, to deal with an event, you can bring to the surface of consciousness only a single jewel, a single broach or diadem, at one time. Many myriad remain untouched. The work of art brings you to reach for new clusters of treasure, now and in the future.

The First Age

Many centuries ago, in the age of innocence of the tribes of the western world, the tight social structures and the ways of gods and chiefs were inextricably one. Where their ways worked well, economic success was theirs. Here the works of the artist were the implements of the gods and chiefs and the emblems of their prescriptions. What we know of their art was as imperative to their lives as any tool or social relation. As populations expanded, as tight social structures controlled by gods and chiefs crumbled under the complexity of great numbers and of competition for resources, emblems of the gods and their ways became the works of the artist. There the age of innocence and of heroes died.

The Second Age

The age of faith and free will came and required new musics and new images. The prescriptions of the gods were decentralized, given formal logics and celebrations unrelated to economic success. The classic arts made possible the continuing discovery of godliness within each of us. We hoped for a rediscovery of the perfect relation to the gods that was a fading memory of the former age of innocence.

The Third Age

The twentieth century (starting well before 1900) brought us to the new era of unending and un-completable pursuit of knowledge, of the perfectibility of humans...in short, the age of science. The essence of science is the creation of models of external reality, the proposal of theories about the relation of the models to the realities, and the systematic assessment of these theories.

As a result, we enjoy the new era where uncertainty, randomness, repetitiveness, mindlessness, responsiveness and noise require of the artists new creations emblematic of the strategies individuals must prosecute in order to deal with their new age.

The work of the artist is unchanged. The content is different, and the imperative of economic issues is once again inescapable.

The Fourth Age

If we are part of a new era, that certainly prevents us from recognizing it. As we cannot know it, we can only do it. That we must.

Dec. 15, 1987; 41 Rue de Saintonge, 75003 Paris. Writ on Tandy/RadioShack RS-80