September 2023 - About Art

I am interested in art. Yes. I'm interested in art, but from a perspective or point of view that can be summarized as follows:

"Art as a means of human expression and social development." 

I'm not interested in defining "Art."

I am certainly not interested in anything remotely connected with "artistic creativity" or with the "creative process" in art.

The fact that I'm not interested in those aspects doesn't make them any less important or worthwhile. They have their value and their meaning, but it would not be honest for me to say that I can embrace them.

Insomuch as art contributes to human expression, it is worthwhile and meaningful for me.

Insomuch as art contributes to social development, it is worthwhile and meaningful for me.

Why am I interested in human expression and why am I interested in social development?

Because I am a human being immersed in a world of other human beings. Our temporal and spatial existence is known to me as "experience." I am alive (apparently) and what I do with my life is important. My existence, as well as the existence of others, is strongly conditioned by a multiplicity of factors that I will not analyze in this writing but about which it will probably be enough to say the following:

We all come into this world without the ability to choose. We do not choose where we are born, or under what conditions. We do not choose our city, town, or region; we do not choose the social and cultural context we grow up in. We do not choose our parents, and we do not choose the name our parents give us. In short, we are born conditioned to the max by unchosen temporal and material circumstances, and by the particular historical/cultural moment in which those circumstances exist. 

Every human being is said to be unique. But my existence is not unique - it is an experience shared with others. Nor am I, personally, particularly unique, except for slight differences in physical features as compared with other human beings. Outside of that, outside of my enormous illusion of being unique, I'm just like everyone else.

No longer perceiving myself as unique, I've lost my belief in “uniqueness,” especially in the context of Art.

Before the Renaissance, artistic production was an anonymous endeavor, a social rather than individual undertaking. Neither signatures nor names were associated with artistic production. Art was a collective activity that had a different expression and intention than it has today.

I don't have enough understanding or data to explain why, but I perceive that since then, our architecture, painting, music, etc. have gone from being an expression of society as a whole to being a personal expression that highlights the individual and individualism kept growing stronger and stronger over the centuries, anonymity was degraded and all social effort was rechanneled toward the individual. Now we have arrived at the 21st century and much of what I perceive in art is clearly produced within the context of individual self-expression.

I understand that individualism is as strong as it is because we are all born into an individualistic system that subjects us to individualistic conditioning on all levels - social, cultural, regional, and planetary. All contemporary societies are characterized by individualism and a belief in individuals. Bathed in this individualism from the time we are born, every one of us absorbs a thoroughly individualistic approach to living.

In my personal process I value joint efforts. They leave me with a very special register of a soft joy, a register of complementation. Of course I can conceive of artistic productions that are not within the realm of the collective; but I am interested everything collective because of that direction. Perhaps in the not too distant future, work in the arts will be increasingly developed through joint activities.

In certain artistic productions we can see the best human intentions reflected. Often these intentions coincide with supra-personal searches, with intuitions of other spaces and other times, with conceptions that sometimes move dramatically away from what is imposed by the historical moment, with elaborations that have resonance with the collective rather than the individual. This is more or less what I am attempting to convey when I speak of the co-operative social direction that can be taken by the arts.

Several years ago, at the beginning of this century, I was part of a group of friends who created a cultural and artistic collective we called “Antoja.” Over the span of a few years we organized numerous presentations, retreats, conversations, joint productions, etc., until the image of the collective complicated things, and we decided to dissolve it. I have always had the impression that despite that dissolution in 2005, much of what we did collectively in Antoja, and many of our more interesting attempts to take the "artistic" to a level beyond the personal without "depersonalizing" it, were unique and important efforts that were much loved.

What we were striving for, in a nutshell, was to produce art as individuals within a group context, all of us moving in a similar direction that included a global perspective and a deep humanist sentiment. I believe our attempts were not in vain, but constituted an important step toward liberating the arts from the individualistic framework within which they had been confined for centuries - a step toward incorporating them within a communal, collective way of being in which the spiritual and the social clearly complement each other.

Here I am speaking of the spiritual in a very broad sense, one that is not necessarily religious. When one looks at the arts in this way, it is almost impossible not to experience moments of great inspiration, and it is also almost impossible to deny that a great deal of art down through history has been born out of states of inspiration. Such inspiration takes the artist out of the conventional world, into a different space and time where profound inner revelations can appear, connected as they are with the intuitive, and with that which goes beyond what we perceive with our sensory apparatus. Such inspiration is expressed in what we know as poetry, painting, music, theater, essay, sculpture, etc.

I would almost say that the sacred can be expressed through art that is conceived beyond the individual, and that such art in turn paradoxically transforms the individual.

Maybe the most important thing in all this talk about art can be synthesized in one simple question and answer:

Question: "And why all this?"

Answer: "It's just one more attempt to establish communication..."

EDITED & TRANSLATED BY TRUDI RICHARDS

PHOTOS BY RAFAEL EDWARDS