Notes 2006
Post-modernist thinking has led to a disturbing level of cynicism, deconstructive methodology bent on dismantling everything in sight into a pile of meaningless rubble. On the heap, among other things, lie the uneasy carcasses of painting, the author, originality, authenticity, beauty, and mystery. What we are to have instead is a ‘criticality’ that is often glib, clever, and that insists on our origin within and confinement to a cultural prison; this thought structure has become as dogmatic and restrictive as the structures it replaces. It is now a sanctioned construct and therefore can be a comfortable place for the lazy.
This deconstructive process, once thought to be the cutting edge of social change, is now almost completely ineffective, cultural systems having mutated, developing the ability to simply absorb radical viewpoints into the mainstream at once and thereby rendering them innocuous. We are told that there is nothing outside of this construct just as we have also been told that if we did not accept religious ideology we would surely go to hell.
Existing cultural systems are in desperate need of revision. A new radicalism that might prove more effective in creating change could involve a simple refusal to accept imposed parameters, a non-acknowledgement of the mainstream vision or its critical counterpart. A third alternative might exist in a perspective that examines limitations originating both from within (the mind) and from without (the culture).
This perspective must embrace paradox. Art that is finely crafted honors the viewer, each one unique and also the same. Beauty may be reducible to scientific phenomenon but the scientific is the mysterious. The potential for originality is infinite but each thought, action or creation has a history that precedes it, and which it is dependent upon. The manmade is the natural, and the earthy the spiritual.
Art that uses materials in unexpected ways can create spaces that remove viewers from presupposed ideas, drawing them into a place where perspective is altered, where limitations can be seen as flexible constructs, and possibilities are open.
