Art is a famously nebulous word. Both philosophers, politicians, and priests have tried (and to an extent) failed to do so. It’s a know-it-when-you-see-it type designation, a sign with no direct significat only a web of interconnected ideas each serving as separate connexions. This seems to surface in modern debates over Aesthetics and classification--something almost always rooted in the politics of the opinionator. One might, in our sanitised culture, attempt to remove this aspect; however, there’s no denying that beauty and art are political, and control of their definitions is a continuing project of many ideologies.
What seems to be neglected in many of these understandings is the process. Art is the resultant of labour, it’s a solidified object or idea constructed by humans, molded into a consumable form, but the labour itself matters, for that constitutes the ontology of artistic existence. Without the process, there is no final object, no resultant, no ‘art’, and by extension there is no meaning to the finished piece. The process provides the meaning.
As is fundamental to reality, the process of art is counterbalanced by oppositional forces. The artistic process is one of creation (not genuine creation but transformation). To allow for this it must necessarily be a consequent of destruxion, its oppositional force. For every axion there is an equal and opposite reaxion, Newton tells us. For each novel a tree must be destroyed--a camphor tree for film. Cellulose must be introduced to acid for paint--and film as well. For the minting of one idea another must shrivel and die, for one identity means death to the last.
You may notice, these deaths too are transformational. They are not destruxion in the sense of complete cessation, but only in the sense of non continuous existence. The tree is still contained within the book, just as the ideas of the book were contained within its constituents, the synthetic line without origin. Both pieces retain their physical reference, but their sense is separate. The tree does not mean the same to the world as a book, nor does it to a human. We cannot cherish them in the same way. That’s because one is art and one is ‘nature’ (a truly disturbing word). One is 道 , and one is a manipulation of the flow.
Art is a damming of the river. Instead of allowing water to pass, we must declare ourselves masters and redirect the flow. Now it will serve our ulteriors, whatever they may be.
Art is transformation, transfiguration, the ability to adapt the world into a human parameter, and that’s why art is absurd. We view ourselves as separate operators, detached entities who funxion inside of but without nature. Yet, We are nature. We are 道. Our funxion, ‘naturally’, is no different from that of a tree, so why are we the transformers and the tree the transformed? Such is the dichotomy of subject and object, a linguistic enframement which allows for the modern conception of art. But don’t be fooled, art can be much more… or much less.
Is there then ‘natural’ art? Art belonging to our objectified selves? To the trees? To the world? Or is art only the domain of the subjective, of humanity and its transformations?
Could a butterfly be considered art? It too is a process, a labour rooted in creation and destruxion, the morphing of a caterpillar into something new, something nearly universally agreed upon to be beautiful. Could this not be a natural process? A resultant? Art?
Furthermore, there’s that point of beauty. Is that a necessity? Need art be beautiful? Now raises again the dominion claimed by ideology and traditional thinking. Has art never not been beautiful? I say instead: Art has never always been beautiful and rest the case entirely.
Think of art funxionally, as its intention, as its states. Think of the tree as the same significat as the book. Create a universal sign between the two. Art is naturally human, naturally so. It’s nature and humanity, the One and the Two, belonging to and excluded from both domains. Nature⊆Humanity. Humanity⊆Nature. Art as H∩N and as ~(H∪N). It can’t be objectified, it remains its own subject in {Art}, its own set. Both without and without subsets. Both ∈N/H and ~∈N/H.
I offer you now my humble definition of the finale, of the culmination of the process and transformation. Art is a resultant of human labour (as is all Media)--though with the exception that art is sans ulteriors. It is, for simplicity's sake, uninspired labour. Labour not paid. Labour not for fame nor glory. Labour not for necessity. Labour for the ethereal. Art (mind you now, we’re talking about true Art not its impersonators) cannot be bought, it cannot be bribed, it cannot be forged under threat or out of obligation. All these pieces exist, these resultants, no doubt, but they remain flimsy pieces of Media voyd of the ephemerally artistic.
One can be paid for Art. Being paid is not the same as being bought. One is for money. One merely has money as a consequence. Art is a built-in part of the human psychology perhaps, a small longing to create and transform, to ascend nature and usurp it, to subjugate it. Art is this project. The Human Project. Nothing is more human than Art, thus why true Art breeds the purest of empathy. It is the toil of fellows who have lived a life not dissimilar. It is the unspoken connexion between all people. It is the glue. It is the consequent of the process of truly living.
Comments