On Aug 25, 2009, at 8:37 PM, Allan Sutherland wrote:
To know what is art, is to eliminate the joy of doing it.
mando
This sounds like absolute improvisation, making music without
knowing how to play an instrument or make a sound. It is likely
possible, it is likely it has been done, but is it adequate to
enable a variety of arts to be produced, I don't think so. It is
rather romantic or even mystical to think art is created without
knowing or knowledge; making art entails knowledge and skills. . .
I think you've over-construed Mando's comment.
To think about "what is art" while you are in the process of making a
work of art is to keep you eye on two things at once -- not easy to
do, and usually not successful for either.
When I stand in the studio with a canvas on the easel and a paintbrush
in my hand, I know that whatever comes next "is art"--i.e., I intend
to make a work of art, all of what I do in the service of that end
during the next hours is part of the process of making a work of art,
and that all of my concentration will be on ... NOT making art,
because I've already set myself to that task ... but on painting
different specific parts on the canvas. Everything about painting for
me is enjoyable, as I assume it is for Mando, even the tedious parts
and the dull or repetitive or mere housekeeping parts.
BTW, "absolute improvisation" is not "making music without *knowing
how to play* etc." What you describe is just banging the keys or
strumming the guitar. It's undiscipline. I expect in the music world
that "improvisation" denotes a way of producing music by trained and
disciplined performers who know what goes into music-making and how to
depart from a fixed point of reference. (Perhaps the point of the
anecdote was the fact that Lacy couldn't think of how to get to the
point of departing from the fixed score). Discipline is the basis of
freedom in making things, whether it's carpentry or music or painting
or writing. Just now, as I am typing this, my skills and discipline in
word usage, composition, logic, etc., allow me to compose quickly and
with a high degree of confidence that I'll form a cogent comment.
Those same skills and discipline enable me to produce the puns and
wordplay that I do almost effortlessly--a kind of improvisation with
language.
Unskilled people cannot improvise: they just make odd noises in
public, or strange marks, or misshapen forms, or clumsy movements.
Your reference to "romantic or even mystical" strikes me as a throw-
away dismissal of both of those mental stances as insubstantial.
Perhaps the vast majority of the people you've met of a romantic or
mystical persuasion have been rank amateurs (that is certainly my
experience), but the good Romantics (think of Wordsworth's Preface to
the "Lyrical Ballads") or mystics (Hildegard of Bingen, e.g., or
today's vogue for Rumi, and, of course, Thomas Aquinas) certainly rise
above vulgar fatuity.
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Michael Brady
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http://considerthepreposition.blogspot.com/
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