Art: an unqualified rumination

Ambivalence is unbecoming of an artist. Perhaps that is why so many artists are religious – religiously religious or religiously agnostic or Epicurean or whatever category might come along tomorrow. For the artist, what is is vital; what is not vital is not. Even the artist who finds beauty in the mundane finds the mundane extraordinary because he has found it – because it is, and he is an artist.

We have been taught that art must have a medium and an audience, taking for granted, perhaps, that art must have an artist and that the artist must have something beyond himself which he can experience and love. Perhaps we have taken for granted that it is the artist’s sense of urgency for what is that makes her an artist and thereby determines her medium, and creates out of her fellow artists an audience.

An artist is an artist-in-medium, that is, for example, an artist is a painter or a photographer, only because the medium is just as real and vital as anything else which has made him an artist. A painter is an artist not only when what she sees is vital to her, but when the canvas and brush and paint are to her beautiful things in themselves. Likewise, the medium cannot make an artist-in-medium. A photographer is not an artist for simply taking pictures of beautiful things. With the photograph, he makes something distinct from either object or image because the art-in-medium is as vital to him as object or medium alone. Thus, what he makes can transform object into subject because the photograph, itself, is.

An artist, in the ideal, does not find an audience. Rather, she makes an audience by her art, which demonstrates (or is the demonstration of) the vitality of her experience, and in this act is found perhaps the greatest value (or peril) in art as an agent of transformation. For art which is novel or innovative even to the slightest degree does not have an audience when it is first created. Rather, it is a drama between the artist and an audience which exists only in his mind. And we, seeing the drama are offered a choice: Will we become his audience? It seems an undemanding choice, but it may not be. For in entering the audience, we become not only audience in name, but in truth. We are changed into people who are, in truth, able to be the audience and thereby able to enjoy and love the art. The art does not become something different for us when we love it; rather we become something different in order to love it. Any “art” which lacks such a capacity to affect change is not truly art.

Experiencing art, then, is an exercise in being and becoming, and both of those with the great, inescapable compulsion which is demanded by our existence. I hope always to be mindful of its power to affect transformation so that my transformation will always lead onward toward that great goal which is the Resurrection of my flesh, the Redemption of my mind, of all things.