Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 16:25:08 -0500 From: edwin ruda <edwin.ruda-AT-verizon.net> Subject: Art and Life --------------D08B0482E52AB3122637999E Michael Eldred, Thank you for your prompt response to the question of discussing Heidegger and the arts, an ocean of perplexities (for me), as deep as it is wide. Since I've been practicing and exhibiting abstract painting in New York since 1960, I thought well, why not begin with the very word "abstraction" itself. While many of my cohorts practice it, we rarely if ever agree about its beingness, or how to distinguish its way of being from other modes or styles of artistic practice. Ordinarily, the word "abstraction" would suggest a sort of pure essence, or idea that has been deduced (?) from the world of lived experience, would it not? Or inversely, one might begin with a mental image or concept, which only then emerges as a materialized painting let's say. Frankly, I am uneasy with both suppositions which still seem metaphysical to me, "a manipulation of things in accordance with the will" as you once phrased it. In your "Artefact" essay, "Heidegger's Holderlin and John Cage," you suggest another approach which, to oversimplify, is to let the color or sounds be, to see the color ascolor, the sound as sound. since they are what they are. Thus, they would "open up a world" Which leads me to the crucial question, a question of difference,the difference between abstract artists like Rothko and Pollock, and those who were influenced by Duchamp, like Warhol and Cage. The philosopher-critic, Arthur Danto, remarked that his own thinking was shaken and inspired by the fact that Warhol's exhibited Brillo Box was indiscernible from the one in the Supermarket; from then on, the way was open for any thing-object to be accepted as an artwork. Consequently, one finds a mayhem of materials today - found, constructed, or imitated - that are indistinguishable from their life counterparts. Artists don't usually criticize other artists except privately - they let the work speak for itself in the way that it unveils and conceals what's happening. Or as the painter Barnett Newman abruptly put it: "If you don't like what you see, go home and paint what you like." So without griping or critiquing, the question I am asking is this: Are artists who transfer "things themselves" from "life" to the stage or gallery, opening up a world or closing one up? Ed --------------D08B0482E52AB3122637999E
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