The gift of vision
Is it what we see that defines us, or how we interpret what we see that defines us? The mental merry-go-round these two questions spin round describes the relationship between the art object and the critical response, the framing of the art experience. An artist begins to explore the stuff of life as soon as he begins to chart his options for creating an object that will be presented for interpretation. He will ask, “How much of the world is visible? What about the transient shape of every moment and object? Does the eye choose red before yellow, and why?” For the critic, questions also arise: “What effect does one’s position relative to the artwork determine one’s interpretation of it; how much of my response is visceral, how much emotional, how much spiritual, and how much is intellectual? Is my response or the art prefabricated or stylized, or is it original?”
A work of art should be made to inspire the viewer to ask such questions. If an artist is making such art, he should be rewarded, because the pantomime described above is a model for developing and exchanging free thought, the kind that improves communal life.
My entire adult life I’ve devoted to producing the content for the art pantomime. Let me clarify this statement, because this statement is colored by my own understanding of art. I understand art to be dimensional. I perceive art not only in its structural state, as an object, but also in its contextual state. Art – a sculpture or painting – may or may not interact meaningfully with its context. I believe that this depends on the degree to which the object is sited in its environment. This view is pre-dimensional. It can sustain without a critical discourse beyond the parameters of taste or craft or representation.
My dumb definition of art: Sculpture and Painting; is complete, but from my point of view is by no means exhaustive of today’s artistic enterprise. If that declaration seems contrary in nature, that’s because my nature is contrary: both sides of the equation are true, even if apparently exclusive, because the actions or elements they contain manifest in space and time differently. I can photograph a representational painting in a landscape depicted in the painting that I photograph, and the complex relationships presented in the gallery where the painting and photograph can be hung simultaneously, a gallery (virtual or real) contained within the depicted landscape comprise, as a perceptual device, a totality that expands the critical discourse required to describe the event of the installation significantly, exponentially, dimensionally — for example. I suggest linguistically the dimensional form is Germanic, because the name can go on and on, linking descriptions, actions, states of being and definitions in a stream that is designed to satisfy a comprehensive knowledge of a limited view.
In the past I have produced diagrams that further suggest that the phenomena I must attempt for educational purposes to contain in words can be, possibly, better represented through the devices of geometry. The form of dimensional art is reflexive in one aspect. Therefore, the fundamental definitions of symmetry apply. This is why computer-generated imagery that incorporates flipped and composited images emerges as a poetic or expressive medium in contemporary art. An interesting correlation is the culturally diverse library of pictorial devices, such as the Celtic knot or symmetrical embroidery borders of several evolved civilizations, which engage the eye, mind and spirit simultaneously. Today, an artist can produce, with the aid of cameras and computers, mandalas generated from the visual data of anything that reflects light. The mind-bending sensation one experiences in confronting the reflexive - which in this sense is as much an application as an expression, successfully practiced by Escher, and about a hundred thousand anonymous craftsman of a thousand tribes across the globe – is not art. It is a feature of dimensional art.
Likewise, there are many features and devices that can be described through geometry, that progressively reveal the nature of dimensional art. As someone who appreciates the notion of expanding and reducing infinitely simultaneously, I personally favor the Golden Rectangle. Geometry is rich with inspiring and proven dimensional means. The same is true for the craft and devices of topography. In fact, as the great mathematician Perelman discovered, mapping the next dimension is possible, even when witnessing it as a visual concrete or definition is not (Note: I am not 100% certain that this statement is factual. I’ll try to determine its verity in coming years). I suggest that this is why a collective such as the Center for Creative Land Use Interpretation has a presence in the contemporary art milieu. It is also why so many young artists can be found with notebooks and digital cameras and thoughtful gazes across the landscape, scooping up samples of dirt and flora, thinking large thoughts, and their photographs printed on various substrates can be found in humble galleries around the globe and in the network of shared explorations, the web. This is not evidence of nostalgia for colonial-era pioneering and wonder cabinet collecting, nor is it a commentary on the ever-present artistic alienation, nor is it the expression of insufficiently talented hard scientists. Mapping and data collection is an inherent function of dimensional art.
It may be effectively argued that mapping and data collection are actually two distinct subsets of dimensional art practice. Maybe so. Perhaps more interesting than the mining of hierarchical distinction is the phenomenon of artists imagining interpretations of existing data that either operates as faction or as a subverting of history. Whether such subversions are in fact the residue of political agencies long since lost or failed is moot. Now, the dimensional artist feels free to introduce fabrications or imaginary data trees that the artist can graft onto real ones fairly seamlessly. There are many artists and collectives who devote their operations to this end. Wangechi Mutu collages come to mind, as does the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Integrating the historical with the interpretive by way of the expressive is common to old and new art, and storytelling, in the embellished or fictional manner. That, finally, is what we should discuss in this essay, which is concerned with Truth.
I propose that dimensional art is truthful. I propose that truth is not a mere cog in spiritual or moral schemes to organize human behavior. I propose that truth is more like the answer to a very complex and difficult-to-solve puzzle or math or geometry problem. I propose that an artist can map the truth, even though it is not inherently visible. As a sidebar, I would suggest that the value of artists to churches and states alike is clear, given an understanding of this artistic function or capacity, for good and ill. I propose that the dimensional artist possesses the most advanced tools for determining truth.
He is not limited to material fact, as is the sculptor. He is not limited to schematics, as is the draftsman. He is not limited to a point or position, as is most everybody who self-identifies as a doctrinal realist. A dimensional artist, with the combinative tools of the Artist, plus the computer and camera, networks, collective configurations and above-referenced practice applications (as well as the many others not described above), can undertake to answer the question, “What is true?” The undertaking itself is healthy. The production trajectory is open by nature (it is Humanities-oriented) to both aesthetic and scientific critique and evaluation. The failures and successes are equally valuable. It is in the presentation that truth is offered in a pristine frame, such as the white cube.
At that point, artistic endeavor and critical response converge at a point, which is the object, the artwork. In a dimensional format, the installation is resonant of the process. That is another discussion. The artist presents the viewer, which is both individual and communal, the truth. The critic in this formal context, at the scene of trans-animation, demands of himself the ability to discern true from false. To suggest this ability to be anything less than rare is not generous, fair or kind. I honor anyone who enters the field as a devotee of truth. Anyone who enters the field for any other reason (and I won’t list those ugly reasons here), is worse than a thief, due to the critical importance of the pantomime to the survival of freedom in a democratic, or even civil society. If one is so devoted, and also possesses clear reason and beautiful articulation, truly such a person is blessed, as are any who read or hear that voice.
Today’s art is ineffable to many. I would suggest that this fact is a massive failure. Whether it is a failure by design or defect has been debated as a dualist trope, in such an affect that the debate is measured as the academic truth of criticism, instead of the truth. I would suggest that the failure is dimensional in nature as well, and thus a function of both failed design and defect. The truth, as a dimensional artist can now objectify and envision it, surpasses the dual measure of this or that rhetoric, philosophy or political scheme. Criticism, as it was practiced, in the form of court jest or wit contest, no longer holds measure of meaning, since dimensional art is not part and parcel of the normative operation of desire, except insofar as desire is fact of human experience. The former art of device, or concrete placeholder of value, is no more relevant to truth than the rat turd in a de Kooning painting. The camera and computer, and the rest, as any politician can tell you, have obviated that coded system of standards. The truth for the dimensional artist is immediate and fierce.
Dimensional criticism is not its own art form, either. I hardly know how otherwise to state it. The critic cum curator cum artist is a transitional character born of the design and defect of contemporary art. This configuration is a failure of discernment of the gravest sort, bordering on insanity. One’s capacity to be one, in play with others, is elemental. Art cannot save those who fail to accept the parameters of life and its simplest, most lovely limitations. The same is true for the society that accepts such debasements of the discourse of freedom, perpetrated by those to whom society appeals for discernment. Today art is ineffable to many, and the few are responsible. Truth will survive these ones, but the society and its freedoms may not.
In summary, a dimensional artist does not require hope to survive. The act of creating art is fundamentally hopeful. However, the artist does require truth to survive, and this truth is a shared value. It is dimensional in nature, and as such, exists in an open plane, a field of play, a plaza, a forum, an arena, and an open architecture. I propose that the current institutional drive to make art interactive is a failure in practice, rooted in a convergence of failures, both designed and the result of defect. I am committed to producing art that may precipitate the correction of existing flaws in the system of presentation and analysis. I endeavor to create art that’s true and truth-centric, because art that is true somehow reorients us who love art, life and truth to love. Whether my art can produce the effect of truth is the great mystery that moves my dreams and me to dream.
