An Organic Lie

“The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths” –Bruce Nauman

In a post-post-modern paradox of creativity, what does it mean to be creative in a world where everything is fair game? Rather than grasping at immutable forms or ideas like the Hellenistic or Renaissance artists, contemporary artists are working to translate individual experience into a symbolic language; one that is decoded by the viewer. For the contemporary artist, experiential knowledge has been augmented by the proliferation of information media and the hastening advancement of digital technology. People must be able to filter a daily barrage of media in the form of images, sounds and text while vast banks of information are available at a moment’s notice; the world has shrunk to the length of a few keystrokes. In an issue of Appendix in 2003, artist Ryan Gander reads from a letter sent to him by a friend, “Spectators don’t want art, they want complete concepts…[n]ow people are so used to cinemas, expos and the Tate, that’s what they think art has to offer them. Complete concepts that bleep, buzz, flash and whirr like a new ring tone”.

Creative ideation in this morass of information is something that takes an incredible amount of effort, but in the end presents itself as effortless and begs inquiry into a deeper significance. Don’t worry, it’s there, but it was the artist’s responsibility to control how you recognized it within yourself. Sometimes meaning is buried beneath stylistic layers of abstraction or suspended within overt simplification of form; this kind of work will not give up its meaning so easily and so will actually resist definitive interpretation. Other works of art do not alienate and will require certain levels of participation on part of the viewer. The development of these varying levels of latency in artistic appreciation and practice parallels the proliferation of “acceptable” media into the white-walled vacuum of artistic practice. No longer restricted to ancient institutionalized concepts of aesthetics, artists may utilize any and every form of communication in order to craft their ideas. They are able to control the opacity of meaning in the things they produce by observing, retaining, repeating, verifying, and relating what they are trying to say with what they already know.

Artists are able to connect not with “universal” truths, but statements which are neutral, which make their implicit meaning explicit through a process of intuitive unfolding. This kind of art often is as much fun to interpret as it is to “get”. This experience is a kind of truth, for the subjective nature of the artist’s ideation leaves the art with a neutral meaning, whether it is abstract or representational in specificity, the concept becomes integrated into the form, style and interpretation of the piece. How many times have you thought, “I could have done that, why didn’t I?” while looking at modern art? This common question highlights the artist’s position within ideas of contemporary creativity, as one who unites vast differences in human experience in a single, refined statement. In a letter to Federico García Lorca, Jack Spicer once wrote, “Things do not connect; they correspond. That is what makes it possible for a poet to translate real objects, to bring them across language as easily as he can bring them across time…Even these letters. They correspond with something that you have written and, in turn, some future poet will write something which corresponds to them. That is how we dead men speak to each other”. Whether it was an emotion, feeling, or rumination, the artist realized something of importance to their intuitive understanding of the world and translated it through the language of their personal aesthetic style. These truths that Bruce Nauman is talking about are not really truths at all, but highly personalized observations that are accessible to other ways of thinking; the only thing “mystical” about them is the originality (or inventiveness) of their realization.

As communicators of mystic things, contemporary artists construct neutral realities; they are neither truths nor lies, but experiments in intercommunication. In that same issue of Appendix, Ryan Gander quoted Godard when talking about the fearlessness that artists must assume in their work, “I don’t say things to be understood, I say things to say them, and like the films, not everything there is to be understood immediately – it may take ten years, if at all”. These truths are mystical because they are anti-linguistic; because we may not have thought in that way before and may not ever in our lifetimes. The artist has no sole job, not to challenge convention but to be willing to try to be authentic and re-inventive. Like a pointing finger, they manipulate our attention through the things they create (sometimes on a mass, public scale and others on an individual private level) and only ask us to be open-minded enough to consider what they have presented from our own personal perspective.

*Read The Collected Books of Jack Spicer