My misgivings about keeping a blog are numerous, actually the main thing is the idea of it being like writing to myself alone without an audience in mind sort of throwing my thoughts out with no one but myself listening. Because after all the anonymity is really not the case it’s more like the trolls are amidst everything on the net. The algorithms betray our desires, the lack of filtering results in wildly distorted portraits of our work and leisure. In the earlier incarnations of my blogs I felt some urgency to make my case for my art working and my thinking about art and philosophy. But of late it seems more direct communication works better though misunderstandings dog any kind of explanations. The internet is simply wrought with underlying compromises that emphasis it’s commercial nature as a tool of the advertising and propaganda agencies of our times.
I used to get personal as when one writes a diary entry but now it feels more unwell to express such intimacies, as if the net is a giant eye and mouth that consumes data as always contingent regards selling . Maybe I am seeing this all through a glass darkly? I began relatively innocent to the prospect of writing to no purpose but to make the case for my art working, my thought my wandering thoughts but now I feel more of the mind that without an editor my normal tendencies are to ramble along until I stumbled over something worth saying or thinking about often concerns of an immediate nature dealing with my poor health and impending departure from this life.
Truth be told I never cared much for criticism save that without it creative work just doesn’t move much off formulas and traditional tendencies , indeed critical ideas often are implicit in the work itself. I have always wondered about Mondrian’s classic abstractions as a sort or terminal state of modernity. That at some point all the activity of early modernism devolved into his geometric matrixes these wonderful puzzles resolved before our eyes. But what was to be of art after the facts of these resolutions ? Apparently the movement towards expressionism was a reaction to the tense rigor of more calculated modern thought. But the distortions and caricatures of these styles seemed some sort of seeking to break the boundaries of structuralist modernity. I always had my doubts about self expression as being a sort high style kvetching. Oh woe is me a mere human amidst the history of ideas finding myself born at an in opportune moment as the fire of abstract expressionism begins to dim amidst the colorful circus of pop art and it’s joyful abandonment of all that angst and mush. Doors opened to new horizons new possibilities for aesthetic investigations.
What I saw in my youth was an opportunity to move my own art working towards a different sort of synthesis somewhere between the joyful spectacle of early pop and optical art towards the mystical formulations I found in DADA and specifically the mysteries of Marcel Duchamp’s art working and it’s overlapping inquiries into art and language. I would never be able to completely appreciate the work as I might if I were a specialist but it gave me a point of departure for my own investigations. My studies of Kabbalah and various ancient mysteries led me to the conclusion that the work we make often deals with the depth to which we enter into the mystery that life is in it’s entirety. I followed a thread but like the cookie crumbs the birds ate in the forest make finding my path back impossible. Indeed early on I realized part of my fascination was trying to unravel the mysteries of my own psychosis which took hold of me early in my youth and scrambled my experience of life and art into a huge tangled puzzle. Interesting though that for most people contemporary art is a puzzling phenomenon difficult to fathom. So these twin issues intertwined how my madness begat my special fascination with the inherent mysteries of life and art made my art working , my writing my journals etc. into a sort of voyage into my own psychic unraveling. The art was really a sort of slow motion long term anthropological inquiry, what after all was I looking for some sort of Rosetta Stone which would make sense of all my madness and obsessive art working?
Yes, now later in my life I begin to see some semblance of order and insight in all my though and work. It’s the magic of living long enough to see your life in it’s totality all this work all these pieces of a gigantic puzzle finally falling into place , some internal reasoning some desire to know what can’t be known. The mystical experience is that whatever I did I was able to crack the code of my own investigations by living long enough to see the totality of the effort to find myself in the spectacle I created. These last few years have allowed me to find certain things to be true and durable amidst my wandering art and thought. And I understand why my work is misunderstood better than I did when I was younger, the world is in a big hurry and art at it’s best when it slows down to see itself in the reflective mirror of posterity, a posterity that may not reveal itself in this life but that surely will sort through what remains of our curious journey into the unknown .