Wittgenstein's Desire (How Vienna Became a Wiener)

Body

Wittgenstein created a logic that was precise and clean. Subjective content was not part of an equation which gave us modernity, trains running on time and the gramaphone, infinitely repeatable music and speech. Caruso in your own home. Wittgenstein understood the necessity of a modern logic by which language would become more efficient and useful to technology. The so-called metaphysical questions could not be made into sentences that conveyed meaning.You can't know anything after you are dead, you no longer exist even you itself comes into question as an expression that ia intrinsic to existense. You my friend are a mortal being who will vanish. When I was very young art and specifically painting seemed a hedge against the vanishing that comes with life, after all art has been one of the main languages of civilisation. So I remember I got into my signature, a bit Picassoesque  but mine none the less. The idea of death is part of life part of thinking. It gives us a measure of our time here on earth. I thought some beautiful things left behind might be a way to stay in the world, the art work being my sensibility, my skill put to the future viewer as a proposition that art transends times. Not that art doesn't crumble and die but it has a longer life than we mortals. This viewpoint about art and it's posterity maybe influenced by my father's atheism, or the general decline of culture after World War Two.

As to the desire for better outcomes, it does seem that we have quite alot of time but we don't always have a plan, a sort of strategy mine was to make art to find ways to paint and I did but I never had alot of support. Not having enough money made my art take different forms. But I found the work sold poorly if at all. The audience was there but the wealth, the support never really made itself known. I did it without a net, losing my teeth but still I had my focus to do work, to make art. My political and spiritual instincts lead me towards a critique of this moment in contemporary art, art is the trace of life, given form by the artist which one hopes will communicate with generations to come but still no certainty . But then it is a rather uncertain life we lead.