| General | "Art has no other purpose than to brush aside… the conventional and accepted generalities, in short everything that veils reality from us, in order to bring us face to face with reality itself." -- Henri Bergson, French philosopher of the early 1900’s
"The task of the artist is to make the human being uncomfortable." -- Lucian Freud, contemporary painter
"Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions." -- Andrei Tarkovsky
So to just what “reality” is it that Freud, and Bergson, and Tarkovsky point? A reality which we apparently would avoid, and which requires a special skill and artistry to reveal to us? A reality which we must be seduced through the magic of art to confront?
It is the reality which religion institutionally exists to deal with, but at which, in our time, it largely fails - perhaps in another time it succeeded: the reality is a simple one, one which each of us knows in the core of our being, but which we spend most of our time fleeing, avoiding, evading, ignoring, doing whatever we can to distract ourselves from considering it.
It is the reality that our lives are fleeting and brief, and that death awaits each of us, and with death - whatever your religion may or may not have you believe - “you,” as a conscious and sentient being, cease to exist, and your passage in life ends. It is that reality.
And this is the function of art - to remind you of this, not as a morbid exercise in self-flagellation, but rather as a necessary step to in turn fully embrace life and live it to its fullest... In its myriad of ways, harrowing and/or exhilarating, all good art does this, and in turn it fully engages the mind and spirit.
These days, against the clamor of an insatiable consumer society in which distraction is the constant and norm, this seems nearly impossible. In the noisy echo chamber of our world, with its cell phones, I-pods, PC parlors, the rush of work, the avalanche of trivia which is pop culture - a culture carefully cultivated and developed for socio-economic-political reasons - there is almost no chance for art to exist, to be made, or to be properly utilized...
Rather than having the space, the time, and the conducive atmosphere in which to be seduced by the serious narrative of art, and its contemplation of life, we are instead gang-banged by the constant and shrill distractions of a society rushing madly, and it seems mindlessly, to its auto-destruction. It is a world in which all perspective has been lost, and in which, for yet another idiot toy or brief superficial thrill, we risk our collective suicide. It is a world in which the genuine concerns of art are utterly alien, and in which the rich fundamental narrative which animates all good art has been ripped to shreds and replaced with the ersatz sex and death of a video-game.
-- Jon Jost (excerpt from speech at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. Full text can be found here) | | Music |
| | Movies | 
| | Television | 
"Contrary to the common misconception, the psychological umbilical cord between our mothers and us is severed at a very young age. Nearly the instant we are able to intellectualize we drop mom like a hot potato and become psychically parasitic, our hosts being those ubiquitous devices known as televisions.
When we were in the womb, our mothers’ rich and nurturing blood flowed through our veins, quite literally providing the essence of our physical being. Fast forward a few years. Our psychic umbilical cord detaches from mom and is immediately seduced to fuse itself to that seemingly innocent yet deeply nefarious pusher of mind crack. In stark contrast to our mother’s wholesome blood that nourished us in a way that ensured healthy physical growth, the rancid filth we derive from television cripples and malforms our psyches in profound and perverse ways.
Planned or not, television has become the power elite’s primary weapon in the daily propaganda war they wage to maintain the American Way of Life, furiously beating down any and all challengers. Calling the content of television “programming” is quite fitting. Through our addiction to pixilated images, the lords and masters of American Capitalism manipulate us into participating in the banality of evil without giving it a first thought, let alone a second one."
-- excerpt from an essay by Jason Miller. Full text can be found here...
| | Books | "...To tell the truth, ideas are the most dangerous germs mankind has ever been interjected with. They are introduced into the brain by injection, in schools and by means of newspapers, and then we are done for... An idea which is merely introduced into the brain, and started spinning there like some outrageous insect, is the cause of all our misery today. Instead of living from the spontaneous centres, we live from the head. We chew, chew, chew at some theory, some idea. We grind, grind, grind in our mental consciousness, till we are beside ourselves. Our primary affective centres, our centres of spontaneous being, are so utterly ground round and automatised that they squeak in all stages of disharmony and incipient collapse. We are a people - and not we alone - of idiots, imbeciles and epileptics, and we don't even know we are raving." -- DHL (1922)
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"...What opium is instilled into all disaster! It shows formidable as we approach it, but there is at last no rough rasping friction, but the most slippery sliding surfaces. We fall soft on a thought. Ate Dea is gentle,
"Over men's heads walking aloft,
With tender feet treading so soft."
People grieve and bemoan themselves, but it is not half so bad with them as they say. There are moods in which we court suffering, in the hope that here, at least, we shall find reality, sharp peaks and edges of truth. But it turns out to be scene-painting and counterfeit. The only thing grief has taught me, is to know how shallow it is. That, like all the rest, plays about the surface, and never introduces me into the reality, for contact with which, we would even pay the costly price of sons and lovers. Was it Boscovich who found out that bodies never come in contact? Well, souls never touch their objects. An innavigable sea washes with silent waves between us and the things we aim at and converse with. Grief too will make us idealists... I grieve that grief can teach me nothing, nor carry me one step into real nature. The Indian who was laid under a curse, that the wind should not blow on him, nor water flow to him, nor fire burn him, is a type of us all. The dearest events are summer-rain, and we the Para coats that shed every drop. Nothing is left us now but death. We look to that with a grim satisfaction, saying, there at least is reality that will not dodge us." --RWE
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"...All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. If the greatnesses are in conjunction in a man or woman it is enough... the fact will prevail through the universe... but the gaggery and gilt of a million years will not prevail. Who troubles himself about his ornaments or fluency is lost. This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is always ready ploughed and manured... others may not know it but he shall. He shall go directly to the creation. His trust shall master the trust of everything he touches... and shall master all attachment."--WW
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"...In America, underneath all the food and toys, obscuring the openings to escape or resist, is a giant torture camp, producing a range of psychic maiming from people so alone and broken that they refuse to ever try or care again, to people so painfully enslaved that they will look only through the eyes of the master, to people so alienated from life that they jealously destroy it everywhere.
I have explored this world and escaped barely alive into the hidden democracy of Underground America, and this is my report. They call the torture system by many names, "opportunity" or "success" or "the American dream." Key components are called "individualism" and "competition." It's implemented through social isolation, brilliantly executed commercial advertising, and games and classrooms and workplaces that punish honesty and reward calculating selfishness. Yes, there are many messages about love and cooperation, about feelings being more important than money, but here, conveniently, the propaganda is badly done, stilted and preachy, and Americans cynically rebel.
All this together means that the ideal American lacks any healthy social relation, that our only relations with other living beings are domination or submission or zero-sum competition, that our only way to sense any meaning in our lives is to grasp greedily for scarce fabrications: money, toys, tokens of status, shallow pleasures, coolness, respectability, fame, victory -- or to associate ourselves with some symbol that has these attributes. That's why Americans cheer their local sports teams, and worship their omnipotent sky father deity, and display their national logo. That's why they will convince themselves of the nobility and goodness of their bombing of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, North Korea, France, California… That's why they lack class consciousness, why the poorer classes sympathize with the rich and not with their own interests. That's why they are devastated by defeat or failure. Because Americans lack any emotional grounding in anything real, they must be "winners" or associate with a winner or they will be empty, annihilated. And their definition of "winner" requires a loser." -- Ran Prieur
| | Heroes | N/A |
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