Paul Clay on 11 Mar 2001 02:57:31 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> Re: madness and art |
I know very little about this topic, but it strikes me that many people who can be classified by some other aspect of their life can also be said to be artists, yet these two things may bear little relationship to one another. Leni Riefenstahl was an artist and also Nazi propagandist, yet we do not expect her politics to indicate some quality which all artists share. The whole idea of using psychology and personality to understand artists doesn't strike me as a particularly revealing avenue of study. I think artists do operate by creating meanings outside the mundane in some way. Conveying impressions which travel interstitially, between the culturally defined catagories constituting a particular world view. Whether it is as traditional craft practices in folk societies which are done to alter perception through religion and the sacred, or contemporary art in the pseudo-western global culture mix which creates unexpected disjunctures in our usual thinking, in all cases the work brings perceptions outside the boundaries of day to day existence. I think it was James Turell who once said he thought that people had no more control over the urban sprawl of structures in New York City than the coral do of the Great Barrier Reef. We are part of larger processes, and while analyzing our supposed inner psychoses to understand art is flattering, both this and studying "mad" people who also happen to be artists don't necessarily get us very far in the process of understanding art and artists. Its fascinating (and more than a little frightening) to see how much meaning is being derived from a kind of 19th Century romantic -or even Renaissance- notion of art, artists, and madness. _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold