maandag 14 januari 2013

On the opposing demands of observation and art

... the interaction of opposites can be engineered to create something new. The trick, of course, is not to get involved in judgement or compromise, to just let the opposites occur and proceed: they do the work, you just go along for the ride. The opposites need to be harnessed in a way that allows them to interact and create energy, the way opposite polarities of electricity are harnessed to make light by the bulb. So, we need to create a bulb of some kind in terms of our process. I like this approach because it involves a simple set of questions – is it too real? is it too artistic? – and an element of unpredictability, both in the moment and cumulatively, over time. If I follow the map of observation only, or the map of making art only, these both actually lead to pretty predictable places...
When both maps are operative at once, though, the journey that the painting takes is more complex, moving from one map to the other and back, giving the results the potential to be more interesting because they don't come from me, but from what is over the border, beyond the membrane that defines me-ness.
- Tad Spurgon, 13 januari 2013