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Mind:
The Great Mirror
Essay
by Monte Schatz
Joseph
Beuys, the late German artist, believed that thought itself
was sculpture; that everywhere he "thought" was the Academy.
Taking his belief deep within myself, I can conclude that we
all harbor a phantom art within ourselves. The word "phantom"
implies that we may not be aware of what we elusively know...until
we force it to the surface of consciousness, where it becomes
art.
Beuys,
a brilliant and highly influential artist and a great teacher,
had been a Nazi Luftwaffe pilot during the darkest period of
the 20th century, perhaps in some ways the most extreme era
of evil in history. Throughout the extraordinary body of art
that he created after the war, he referred continually to the
following event: in winter, his plane had crashed, and he was
rescued by being wrapped in fat and gray felt, and carried on
a snow sled to a farm house where he was nursed back to health.
These elements were used throughout his work.
Recent
evidence has suggested that he lied about this rescue, and many
of his admirers feel betrayed by his self-invented mythology.
I disagree. What's important for me is that art was a way for
him to atone and make some form of reparation for his Nazi involvement.
I encountered
Beuys when he came to America in the early 1970's for a unique
performance/exhibit. He never set foot on American soil. He
was met at the airport, and taken directly to the Rene Bloch
Gallery where he spent three weeks in a cage with a coyote (an
American archetype).
I went
frequently to the gallery to watch him and speak with him. He
was intense, but very likable; he was most definitely a showman
of sorts, but also part shaman. I went at first with great malice
because of his background with the Nazis. It felt like seeing
Mengele in a cage. I reasoned, even as a Christian, on whose
authority do I have an obligation to forgive a Nazi? My feeling
was, may they ALL burn in hell, in perpetuity.
Nazi
Germany calls up these extreme reactions through its utter,
incomprehensible evil. It is not simply because genocide was
committed that this period was so unique. Historians still struggle
with Adolph Hitler.
Lina
Wertmueller, the Italian filmmaker, made perhaps the greatest
film ever made about the holocaust in the shocking and intense
"Seven Beauties". At the beginning of the film, a monologue contains
the sentence, "the baby that should be killed in the crib,"
in an obvious reference to Adolph Hitler. This thought has haunted
me for years, because I know that if I could be told with certainty
that an infant would grow up to perpetrate the evil Third Reich,
I would be capable of killing it without hesitation. I am rattled
in knowing that I, a pacifist, could even think such a heinous
thought, and in seeing my own potential for evil, given unlikely
and extreme circumstances.
The
concept of evil is an elusive and far-reaching one, but in reflecting
deeply on Beuys' concept of thought as sculpture, I believe
that art is to become conscious of the things that we know,
but don't know that we know until we search it out of ourselves.
In this respect, we "mirror" ourselves, our nakedness exposed
in the pursuit of knowledge of self. "Know thyself" is certainly
an objective, yet what we call art can never surpass the subjective.
In conclusion,
we can only know vague traces of ourselves - like gazing into
the night skies of unfathomable galaxies. We are all pieces
of matter and time and the metaphysical ether, pieces of space,
light years from ultimate knowledge. Now and again we pull fragments
from this ether, this abyss. This then becomes what might be
called art. All the more difficult to ponder...
Mirroring
of Self
Art as Art
Life as Art
I am
troubled by the demystification of art in the 20th century, and
now. There is a dogma that art has the ability to be only about
itself - its objectness suffices. How can this be?
This
seems not only improbable, but impossible. Even the contemplation,
the notion of "nothingness" has to be contained within "somethingness"
to be considered. Nothing of matter, or the immaterial, can
ever be independent of the greater whole, in and outside of
our minds - the Great Mirror.
But
further, to the average person it might seem that nothing can
happen in nothing. But to a quantum physicist, nothing is in
fact something. Quantum theory holds that probability, not absolutes,
rules any physical system. It is impossible even in principle
to predict the behavior of a single atom.
If this
is true, a work of art is a living molecular entity with uncertain
consequences. It could be said to have life, because atoms are
present in all things, binding it to a greater whole, a whole
where art can once again find its identity.
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