back to the source -- pictures

bovines     48"x48

The reality we inhabit is as deep as anyone cares to go. There’s always more to see, and all that’s required is to look, but even so, the world we all inhabit has been getting shallower, until it’s mostly just surface. Maybe you haven’t noticed. Advertising cultivates lowest denominators, and that’s fine with the overlords, since the mass of human flesh concerned about what brand of beer to drink, or what sports franchise to root for, is so much easier to herd and exploit. Those dead-eyed zombies cashing in on war and famine have an ongoing beef with art, and a raging dislike for artists, mostly because they wake people up, arousing their sense of self and causing them to question their place in the world.

In totalitarian countries, they pump out their single-world view, manipulating the masses and dulling their aspirations. These terror states just throw independent artists in jail, or worse. Any art that doesn’t promote their program of control is labeled degenerate and making it becomes a crime, fairly simple, but in open-market societies the approach has been more nuanced. The state, under the guise of progressivism, devotes massive amounts of public money to promoting an art no one really cares for, until serious people begin to lose interest. As though on a sacred mission, they inundate galleries and museums with the non-objective and self-referential, a style turned out in great quantities by the salaried wing of their vast art bureaucracy. Either way the goal is similar -- reducing their fellow humans to a drone population intoxicated on festivals, parades, and sporting events, never asking where they’re headed, or who’s in charge.

Societies, at large, are just going to have to work this out. Will the essential human spirit emerge from the ashes of the twentieth century, and wizened by all the cheap lies, finally assert itself against the dumb narcotic miasma they’ve cast over the land, with sitcoms, cop shows, seven layer lotteries and overlapping rounds of season-long tournaments. It looks like a long-shot from here, but we have to live our own lives in the meantime, right? Maybe we should ask, each as individuals, what is it about visual art that has it censored and controlled in one society, and reduced to a poker chip by another? What are they afraid of, and could it be somewhere hiding in plain sight?

Millionaires have attempted to turn art into a signifier of elitist sensibility, the market begets a branded commodity, there’s even a form of state-sponsored secular idolatry, and it would be best for the serious person to see through all of that. On the walls of caves, millennia before the dawn of history, people made marks in charcoal and ochre, and with our pampered modern eyes we see long-extinct animals as they were. Have you been taking that for granted? It’s an amazing human attribute, and it’s the crux of what they’re concerned about, pardon me boys, those mollusks in the star chamber, high above us.

Visual art enters the nervous system through a service door, at a level not accessible to intellectual thought, and responding to it is experienced more as a kind of knowing, or even better, can sometimes seem like remembering something long forgotten. If the beguiling image is only attempting to sell you a product, it’s empty promise can seem stale, no matter how talented the artist. On the other hand, an original piece of art, even if the product of only sincere and honest effort, already embodies an example of an aspiration that goes beyond a desire for money, since it’s an arduous apprenticeship, and the nervous system knows it. I may not share a meal, but I’d sit and watch the sunset with a cave-person anytime. We’d compare portfolios.

revival in the heartland -- seeing salvation

Religion isn't really about worshiping a god, that’s just a cover story. The basic mission of them all is altering reality. Civilizations located in arid climates didn’t necessarily revere the rain god, but sought to flatter it with great ceremonial displays of affection, along with the occasional sacrifice ......so it would rain. We’re modern people, and we can cut out the middlemen, even though they be legion. Instead we can talk about bending reality directly, without all the incense and chanting. 

First of all, it would be handy to decide what’s meant by ‘reality.’ Is reality just what you perceive, based on your own little bundle of life-experiences and unquestioned habits of thought, or is there something real out there independent of us, that we could all see together? The answer is ‘no, there isn’t,’ or, if there is, we can’t know it. All we have is this little machine that sorts all we see into discreet comparisons with stuff we’ve seen before, we call it thinking, and constantly discards the rest. If you’ve evolved ahead of the rest of us, and can see around corners and understand time, none of the rest of this applies to you, but for any remaining, you’re living in a box and the walls are defined by where you’ve been and what you’ve seen, perhaps along with what you’ve read and thought about, and that makes all of our realities a bit different.

Instead of religion, consider art, and it’s ability to shape and alter reality by exercising and stretching the flabby physique of the perceptual net, by tuning and calibrating personal discernment and stretching out the attention-span, and by opening up silted channels of sight and dredging out harbors of thought. Something else art does for us, has always done, and that’s to give us an island to swim toward, all of us are adrift in this sea of infinite possibility. Religions have all employed art to shape the reality they wanted, angels in clouds and demon enforcers below, but we don’t have to do it that way anymore.

Could looking at art cause rain to fall on parched crops, probably not, but no one knows how effective sacrifice at the temple is either. What art can do it is offer new possibilities to the nervous system, knocking the needle out of its well-worn groove, and the person probably won’t even know it's happening. Even so, in time they’ll begin to notice more detail in their surroundings, they'll listen better, and for some reason even good food will taste better. This is altering reality, as real as it gets. In the larger world, being more open to the array of possibilities at almost every moment should lead to better outcomes, and when the notion of irrigation arises, the rain god becomes less relevant and sacrifice goes out of style.

As identity silos become slimmer, as music becomes more fundamental, and as advertising covers every visible surface, wouldn’t now be a good time to unclog reception channels pounded shut by invasive stimuli, and utilize art for altering your own reality, tuning in to the world we all see, together?