Writings
A Process, Is Not A Process
Natural curiosity stimulates the energy that leads to discovering human potential. It is difficult to know exactly what we want, from the brief time we exist on this planet. What then is the drive to externalise and communicate that which we think we know, and again just when you thought you had discovered something, it moves on into a different mode, a state of flux and constant change.
Art is constantly concerned with the present, the condition of man. The Artist pushes for that which cannot be stated, this is the greatest challenge. I am not stating what I already know, I challenge my perception and am able to say I do not exactly understand what this activity is about.
There is a history of course, of knowing certain things, no-one starts with a clean slate, the history of the personal search, the gathering of information and a degree of understanding, a history of doing, and learning, and using skills etc., but each time I begin a process of visualisation that again commences at the point of posing the question "What am I", and what am I capable of discovering about being human, aware of limitations and potential, about mind processes and existing in the here and now.
The positive experience of not quite, or not yet understanding, occurs in a state characterised by openness, puzzlement, day dreaming, lack of control, culminating perhaps in a feeling that certain thoughts or connections have somehow found expression by way of the externalising process, in a work of art.
As an artworker you respond to the most vital state of consciousness that describes, with a degree of clarity, what we know about being alive today. The result is an individual awareness process that is not necessarily totally conscious or absolutely controlled.
Thus a work of art is also self referential, about itself, to be seen without prior conceptual commitment, without thinking of it as a representation of something else other than the image or object seen. The spectator is free to experience his or her own world in relation to the work, in other words the art need not be re-experienced, by the spectator, in the same way as the producer, making the work.
A reference may be made to a previous experience or a natural phenomenon and this reference may be appropriated into the work in some way or other, either loosely or exactly, the extent depends on the artist´s intention, but this is not all there is to the work. Many references or appropriations may appear in the work or become part of the work idealistically, but it is the sum total that makes up the work of art.
Out of early 19th Century Romanticism came the objectivity of naturalism, ìthe affirmation of the objective worldî. Exactness of rendering acted as the vehicle for depicting extreme states of feeling. Romanticism refers primarily to a state of experience within the individual, rather than to his relationship with a work of art, in other words, the artwork was seen as a means or a medium of communicating a known feeling or state of mind and the artwork sometimes became an illustration of it.
Lately, I have noticed, I don't really know what I am doing, it is as if I was a spectator to my activities, but without applying judgements to these activities. Images and objects simply seem to appear and only afterwards, when I am the spectator, am I aware of them as meaningful experiences, albeit puzzling sometimes. I am not in control, yet I don´t feel out of control.
At times, we seem to get caught up in a process of thinking, that says we are totally dominated by the language we use to describe the world, that somehow all philosophic problems are embedded in grammar.
In "The Wanderer and his Shadow", Nietzshe wrote "through words and concepts we are still continually seduced into thinking of things as being simpler than they are, as separated from one another, as indivisible".
Again, some years later he wrote "Language is built upon the most naive prejudices, but we cease from thinking, if we do not wish to think under the control of language, the most we can do is to attain to an attitude of doubt concerning the question - whether the boundary here really is a boundary.
Rational thought is a process of interpreting according to a scheme which we cannot reject". (end of quote) But is that correct, does that really apply, DO we cease from thinking, if we do not wish to think under the control of language?
I subscribe to the notion that potentially we can and do become aware of things, ideas, concepts and the notion of existence, in a pre-language state, formulating visualisations, prior to translating the experience into language.
As in dreams, the formation of images is induced by the psychological interaction with an emotive physical event, an event that occurs visually in the mind, usually symbolically, requiring interpretation by way of internal discourse, in order to disclose its content externally by way of language.
Generally the aim of philosophy is "to show the fly the way out of the bottle", but it should be noted that in my view, that is not the aim of the art process. The art process is response - motivation based. Stimuli occurs necessitating action in the doing mode.
Often it is a matter of forgetting what you have learned and pay attention to what you already know, the dreamer should dream, confidant that imagination makes substance. To fulfil human potential, it is the artists function to attend to the unknown and push the boundaries.
(Richard Ball) made a statement sometime ago in one of the weekend papers about divergent thinking. "Divergent thinking is when you follow your impulses, to go sideways and sweep in things that you would not normally pay attention to, and notice associations that you would otherwise ignore" (end of quote).
Art provides a path from fantasy to reality and is a constructive activity. A constructive activity operates only if the artist is prepared to walk the fine line, the knife edge of awareness, to be able to tap into the whole self and bring out parts of the personality, by way of personal myth.
It presents the Artist with an opportunity to confront and respond to his own myth making, and a work process not confined within boundaries of the "known".
Externalisations can then be relatively pure and undiluted, not necessarily completely logical, as in providing clearly defined explanations of intent, but allow for the surfacing of memory based visual explosions.
If anything, the artwork process becomes a symptom of a fragmentation, each work existing as a fragment of a total awareness pattern, that can, after a while, communicate accuracy of intent, not as a notion of formal descriptions, but as intermittent flashes of insight, objectified with the immediacy of recording, not siften through conscious processes, but undiluted reactions to stimuli providing the accuracy of knowing what it is like to operate in the here and now.
My work is meaningful to me, I like the work process, and the not knowing, and the surprises, the exasperations, frustrations and hard work, because it is a living process, one that I can equate with my view of the old aboriginal culture, where identity and knowledge of place, as in landscape and their relationships to it, and each other, was governed by a totemic belief structure guaranteeing continuation and survival.
A reality that understand the potential of being - and existing - in a place on this earth, without having the need to modify or re-shape that place, who can simply be and know and see.
Adrian Mauriks, 1992
