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Changing the Art Paradigm – Part 2
When I attended this winters' ADAA Art Show and then the Armory Show, I found at the Feldman Gallery an exhibit of Mierle Laderman Ukeles's work including Manifesto for Maintenance Art, 1969! Proposal for an Exhibition "Care" . This manifesto was framed page by page so that the typewritten original could be read without damage. I read it all figuring it would help me batter understand Uklele's work. It did. It also inspired me to write the Manifesto for UnGraven Image Art. I had recently completed a proposal for a show of the Genesis: Sunset-Sunrise series, which is being made available on paper and through a private section of my web site open by invitation to select galleries, curators and art spaces. I wrote my proposal because the books I consult advised doing it and it gave me a place to bring up some of my other plans, such as the book I am writing, that tie into promotion. Reading the Ukleles' manifesto I realized that I had material for a manifesto, not detailing a show but a whole new theory of art: UnGraven image
I already knew that my focus on symbol-stroke that I even hide by interweaving them, glazing over them with other symbol-strokes and creating many layers of it all, was a whole new way of painting that is a next step from Word Art.. With its emphasis on each stroke, not the narrative image, UnGraven Image is both a Conceptual type and Process Centered art. It is reinventing the paradigm by using ideas (symbols) that are interwoven, glazed over and basically indecipherable to create images. The meaning is inherent in the strokes. The narrative serves the strokes, a great shift from strokes that only create the narrative. Thus, although my work appears at first glance to be narrative, reminding people of Pointillism or Impressionism, it is not narrative art but Conceptual, and a radical artistic departure from all previous narrative art.
When I blog I often am inspired to write things that I actually had not realized the importance of, until I am rereading and proofing the material. Either just before or after the NYC art fairs I wrote a blog about my focus being on the strokes. I understood that the meaning of each painting was the meaning and symbolism of the strokes, not the image itself. This was a 180 degree turn about from when I began painting using the letters, and in fact, except for some Conceptual Art, and most especially Word Art, the meaning of the strokes of paintings or sculptures is nil, they simply serve to create an image.
The last understanding was eclipsed for me by another one that came along at about the same time. That had to do with the fact that using a binary methodology of painting (Torah font) I was also referencing concepts in the theology of Hinduism and Buddhism (think yin-yang). OK, so there's an even bigger grin on my face. UnGraven Image is even more inclusive, and I know this because I now know and have met Hindus who appreciate my work. The idea that art can change the way we see the world and inspire us is not new, it goes all the way back to the cave paintings at Lascaux. The artist brings down the fire from the mountain, or hopefully gives it a good go.
Calligraphy, Micrography and then Word Art have certainly inspired and informed by work. Each of those art forms uses words to create a work, sometimes creating an image of the words, sometimes allowing the words themselves to evoke meaning of an image. The huge difference between those forms of art and UnGraven Image is that in the new theory the strokes are not only letters, they are hidden or obscured, just as the meaning of our daily life is often hidden and obscured and certainly as the molecules, atoms and pre-particle branes are unseen. “We are walking in the words of Torah”, is a Jewish expression that is so ancient that Jesus and the disciples certainly knew it. We certainly have to “see” the words with our spirits, hearts and souls, because the strongest microscopes and machines ever built can only at best track the presence of the sub-atomic particles.
Recently I have been reading books on physics. I am especially concerned with elementary and atomic physics. Einstein dealt with light, naming the sub atomic particles of light, photons. There is a strange thing about the photons, though. The either behave like waves or particles, not that it is both simultaneously, but one or the other, much the way water is either a flowing liquid, solid (ice) or gas (steam). Now, light is important religiously as it is the first thing created in Genesis. Artistically, religiously and scientifically light is near the core of what I am painting.
Experiments have successfully and repeatedly proved that the photons are both, but not simultaneously sub-particles and waves. An example of this kind of behavior is water, which can be solid (ice) or liquid (flowing) but not both simultaneously. This sub-particle (matter) or wave behavior seems to apply to other pre-particles also.
It reminds me of words, even more basically phonetic letters which are either written (solid) or spoken (sound wave) but not actually both at the same time. That idea gives further significance and credence to the use of phonetic letters as strokes. This idea and understanding is so new, that it is not in the manifesto, but appears for the first time in this blog.
June 14, 2007 |
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