EGO; taking a singular and enlarging it to encompass all it can reach.
my definition obviously. i think it’s a really good understanding of what a lot of emerging and mid-career and even established artists of today seem to gravitate toward in their making. as i mentioned in my previous rage post, a lot of visual art seems to fall into the column of personification. where work is created to take to the space as the artist, giving it an essence of personal and private. this offends me because i know not of who you are, or how you are seeing the world. when i encounter a work which lives in such specific context i cannot interpret it in vagueness. i cannot just assume that the work means nothing when the nature of the visual is so specific and personal to the artist that I must confront them about it. i don’t, i usually just go home. i wonder if since everyone has claimed mental illness now they can write off their creations as from the depths of the soul. when you know damn well your sadness is never soul deep. your soul lives somewhere outside your mind and body, not within. these are the only places in which your sadness can lie. when the artists of the world are stuck interpreting their ego it cuts the rest of us off from the intended soul searching experience of viewing art. now we must ask you about your family.
i don’t want you to misunderstand, it is very well acceptable to create for oneself. to make sense of your world through art is powerful and potent. the specifics and details can open places within you that are sealed with spells that could have lasted decades. but as an artist that works publicly, where you seek gallery representation and ask for others to look there should be a different approach to making. we must be aware that the artist is only half of the thing, it is the viewer that completes the circle. and when we understand that art is inherently collaborative in that nature, we must also understand how our work sits in this context. it’s limiting to the public where they must relive the bounds of your trauma and family life through your work. the way the artist seems to view their trauma can be interpreted as “these events have made me who i am.” though the essence they should rather create from would be, “that is just something that i went through.” that point of non sense, the point where things align and all the pieces fade away where you are literally left with nothing.
there is so much nothing out there, why must we put context upon it. why can we not interpret the journey into the deep with visceral gestures and poetic marks. not to confuse this ideology with the decorative art market. art must be immersive to the spirit, an experience that moves the depths of the self. and, if you are human the self is that vast unknown. we move our whole lives to find the place within us that we can truly grasp as ourselves and the material world does a very good job of piling lots of things atop of that. this underlying current is what art speaks to, it always has. as our understanding of connectivity to collective conscious grows and expands art must expand to meet these conversations. there is a reason why the phrase “art is dead” exists and we must push against that idea, how will anything make any sense if art ceases to matter.