Date: Sun, 21 Jan 2001 07:45:31 +0000
Subject: Re: Art and Life
From: "Michael Pennamacoor" <pennamacoor-AT-enterprise.net>


Michael Eldred recently wrote this:

>I think it holds generally that the biography and idiosyncrasies of the
>artist/poet/musician/thinker can never account for the creative blossoming, but
>rather, the work to be created uses the individual (with all their
>shortcomings, failings, etc.) as its vehicle.

Nicely put... I think the work can begin to work on the artist-worker once it has begun
flowering it-self, and, thusly, the work and the (artist) worker can collect/compose
themselves into the working... this is not crude effecting or causal determination, more
like the relation of "erection" that Marx suggests between the economic infrastructure,
the base, and the (social, legal, cultural, etc) superstructural elements that come into
being, that raise themselves upon (the base) -- and, of course, the superstructure can
also 'influence' the history of the infrastructure (nicely shown in the very eruption of
Marxism and Marxist culture and its determination of a socialist/communist economics...).

Again I think that a certain kind of gardening displays this relationship near perfectly:
the gardener-artist does not just take-care (Sorge) of the raw materials (plants, soil,
light, wind, sun, rain, nutrition, etc) and enable their blossomings; the artist-gardener
also attends the logos of the garden itself... listening, taking-note, receiving, etc what
the garden (the
work) 'says' (I do not mean here [for those so literal-minded] anything remotely like the
notion that plants can 'hear' or speak or anything of the sort) to the
artist-gardener-worker; a good gardener does not just determine with a will what is and is
not in the garden... a good gardener-artist takes in what the garden *is* and re-sponds,
and, the way the good-garden-work develops is outside the simplistic will of the gardener;
the good gardener-artist is as much the work as the garden;

it is the working that *is* the being of the gardener-qua-gardener and the being of the
garden-qua-garden; the working 'determines' both in their be-longing together...

and I think this (the being of gardening) is a possible 'model' for what art is about...

blossomings to all

michaelP


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