The Inconsistent Abstraction, again.

Life is too complicated, politics too problematic and corrupted, morality doesn't have an objective base, scientific systems are ephemeral and perishable, so called truths had proven to be wrong. Any theory, system of thought or rational construction is always flawed because times makes everything obsolete. Things change and the mind cannot catch up with them.

The old centuries opposition between eternal truths, everything stays always the same; and the reasoning that we can never bathe twice in the same river needs to be solved aesthetically.

I'm looking for something eternal, beyond human and universal limitations. I have no choice but to pursue an eternal truth in aesthetics and through aesthetic mediums. I'm tired and fed up with everything and I should go ahead and enter the realm of beauty and reductionist aesthetics.

I know myself enough to know that I cannot keep being consistent like a modern times factory assembly worker, repeating the same part time after time until the day I die or retire, that my thoughts and my actions change day after day. Psychiatry would find the right place where to put my soul, but I don't believe in psychiatry and on the categories of mental illnesses. What is considered mental illness in some cultures are considered a blessing and an advantage in others (more on this subject please read http://renemarin.blogspot.com/2011/02/shaman.html ) 

What matters to me is that I stay focused on aesthetic problems and forgo other distractions such as politics, or the news, or what is going on in the world. I must concentrate in aesthetic things only. I hope I can achieve that goal. I know I'm inconsistent. Consistency is a category that belongs into the production paradigm and that is still practiced in aesthetics for commercial purposes (the always the same, instantly recognizable Botero is one example). Nevertheless, in order to achieve good aesthetic results you have to follow the process from beginning to end, thus you have to be consistent.

The most radical gesture for me now is either to practice a kind of radical formal abstraction or to execute a figuration where the elements of the painting will cancel each other out producing no meaning at all; thus becoming an abstract painting in the overall, conceptual sense.

Perhaps the moral duty of a visual artist today (if artists are allowed to have moral duties) is to give joy to the world. This world is in so much need of joy. We have forgotten the capacity for happiness, freedom and beauty and perhaps we need to show that those things are still possible. We can show that they are still possible, at least in an aesthetic way and employing aesthetic means.

But beauty seems to be such a dull moral statement on the purpose of art in the world of today. And what about the disastrous consequences that a pursuing of beauty has had on political systems and individual practices, such as social engineering, fascism and communism, fashion and anorexia.

If the purpose of a formal arrangements of elements was to produce beauty then we would have to create configurations of an orderly, well balanced, contemplative, peaceful kind. But those formal configurations would not be representative of the world of today and the social relations of alienation, dismemberment, fragmentation and disconnection among the parts of the individual and the social bodies; in itself and among themselves.

In order to represent this social configurations we have to strive to achieve its equivalent in formal terms. And that is not going to be beautiful. Unless we take the eagle point of view that everything in the world is perfect and beautiful despite illness, war, decay, destruction and death.

To see things as beautiful will be to accept everything, even genocide, as part of the beauty of the world. Then you would have to become an Andrew Breivik of some sort in aesthetic terms. A mass murderer of art and aesthetics. How would you do that without being a Dadaist? Perhaps the opposite way, by being anti-Dada?

There are not shortcomings to your destiny and sooner or later you will have to face the truth. Better face it sooner than later because life is short.

I also don't want to make an Abstraction that looks like is a Masturbation.



Note: I wrote before about the need to do abstract painting in http://renemarin.blogspot.com/2012/04/contained-tension-abstraction-or.html.