Writings
It may not be immediately apparent what I'm up to as one looks over the dozens of artworks on this site. The seemingly nebulous nature of this effort hinges on the question of self-expression. Most artists try to find some emotional or spiritual essence in themselves that they then try, with varying degrees of success, to express. This approach was epitomized by the Impressionists and Expressionists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. But in the early 20th century, another way of doing art was championed. We see the beginnings of a "dry" art, one that is not suffused with the emotional life of the artist. The most effective of these efforts is not the result of some emotional deficiency on the part of the artist, as most people assume. As T. S. Eliot observes, "The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material." And so exceedingly strange manifestations like the Readymades come into being, just when they were needed most. What is Duchamp's Fountain? Even he could not provide a fully satisfactory answer. One thing that is certain, it is not self-espression in the sense most people mean this term, as some effulgence of the inner aesthetic vision of the emotional and spiritual life of the artist. And it is not some gigantic leg-pull,either. It is a challenge, the greatest artistic challenge ever put before the spectator. In other words this kind of "art" is more focused on the impact the work has on the onlooker than in any attempt to reflect the aesthetic predilections of the artist. The approach involves a cultural strategy. White pawn (Alice) to play, and win in 11 moves.
I have arranged the pieces in this online gallery chronologically, earliest first. In this way it might become apparent how I am playing with the concept of artistic development, which appears here as a travesty, in that old-fashioned sense of the word, meaning burlesque. A kind of strip-tease by the artist--but have I lifted the seventh veil? I wish to engage another way to attack the concept of taxonomy.