For many years ,I sculptured toys that sold by the millions and were
enjoyed for a very short time. Great job,but little else. But i also
sculptured for my pleasure, with as much
judgment of longevity instill in my work as I think I know. Nothing
else matters.
mando
On Nov 2, 2008, at 4:52 PM, Michael Brady wrote:
Previously, I have stated that I believe that an essential quality
of a work of art is the fact that it does not have to satisfy
external judgments of truth. Art is a fiction, it doesn't have to
be that way. A woman can have a green strip in the middle of her
face, a goat-man can play a wooden pipe, human figures can fly with
large wings, etc.
Another absolutely critical part of a work of art is its limit, its
finitude. A work of art *ends*, whether at the frame or the
pedestal or the footlights. It ends in space and in time. Life goes
on endlessly in our spatial-temporal continuum. When Shane rides
off into the distance, the movie ends, but when anyone else rides
off into the distance, he keeps riding, the people in the town do
something else, and life continues.
When Aristotle described the three parts of a drama, namely, the
beginning, middle, and end, he could do so because plays were
limited in time and space, which allowed him to mark out those
components of them.
Aesthetic attributes--the so-called experience, the rules and
guiding canons, the discussions--exist because various qualifying
artifacts are finite and set apart in some way from the entire flux
of life.
Rauschenberg famously said he wanted to work in the gap between
life and art, but the problem with that is that art in enfolded
within life. There is no gap between them, as there is between
buildings or books on a shelf.
We can comprehend art because, literally, we can: we can see the
thing in its entirety from the plinth up, from edge to edge, from
curtain to curtain, from first page to last, and content ourselves
that we have seen all of the work. Then we can reflect on it,
remember it, renavigate its various parts. We cannot do that with
life: the earliest part of our life is unremembered, fading
backwards into indistinctness, much as our visual field merely
fades into the imperceptible edges at the periphery. The end of
life can, at best, give us an opportunity to grasp 99% of the
entirety. And even then, we cannot know what extends laterally from
us, other people's lives, other experiences. Life it way too big to
grasp as a unity.
But art is manageable: it is defined by manageable limits, it is a
fiction that allows us to contemplate it rather than act on it (as
Aristotle describes vicarious fear of the dramatic action); and it
is a representation, which means that it is composed of
intentionally chosen approximations, averages, condensations of
larger experiences, that is, a mapping of one thing (the subject or
referent) onto another (the work itself).
I can't think of anything else that consists of these three. Even
our entertainment is *for us* not a representation. We are actually
amused or not, excited or not, by the movie or the basketball game,
the Picasso or the jete or triple-somersault in the pike position.
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Michael Brady
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
