We are constantly fed (not always nourished), by external stimuli that come in, are mapped, and go out as response. And when we think about internal stimuli we talk about moods, nature, instinct. But what does that really mean. What is the data that is affecting us? How? Where does it originate? Why? Certain birds are born with the ability to cower in the nest when a predator flies overhead, yet not when a non-predator flies over. This is an Innate Response Mechanism built from millennia of experience and evolution. Imagine the spectrum of our human innate responses.

For example, I have just reread The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway and recognised several motifs that correspond with the tale of The Wounded Fisher King of Arthurian Romance legend, who is excluded from the hunt by his injury, leaving the world a wasteland. Hemingway’s protagonist has been wounded in the groin in the First World War and left infertile. His is the emotional wasteland of ‘The Lost generation’. He gains pleasure from fishing for trout in the streams of the Pyrenees (Romance country) and from watching the bullfights in which he cannot take part. I looked up Hemingway and the Fisher King online and there is a commentary on this subject but it seems to me to be in error. The debate centres on whether or not Hemingway was aware of the Romance tales of which TS Eliot was writing contemporaneously in The Wasteland, influenced by the academic treatment by Jesse Weston. However the tales of heroes wounded in the thigh or groin are many and ancient, (here are the ones of which i am aware – King Amfortas by a spear, Jacob by the angel, Tristan by Morold, Telephus by Achilles, Chiron by Hercules, Hercules himself, Adonis by the wild boar and Alexander by a spear. Of course Jesus was also wounded in the abdomen with a spear). I suggest that Hemingway is not knowingly retelling the tale but channeling the archetype that maybe concerned with spiritual infertility – who knows? That is to say, the Archetype of The Wounded King is expressing itself through Hemingway, carrying with it whatever the dream like message is that it needs to make us aware of. Such is the creative principal of the universe and the nature of our evolved, inherited, shared and subtle Innate Response Mechanisms.

So, in other words, where is the place where I stop and Everything begins? This is what interests me as an artist.

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The Ego gives us a thick skin and sets us on a promontory that necessarily separates and protects us from Everything. As TS Eliot says

‘Human kind

Cannot bear very much reality’ (Four Quartets, Faber and Faber)

However there is a longing on our part and on the universe’s for a reconciliation (Science probes this. As does religion (re-ligio trans. re-link (ligament, ligature) or reconnect. Also Sanskrit Yuj – root yoga, union etc) and art.

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Is there a sense that when Barthes wrote about the death of the Author God it was interpreted as an instruction to artists as doxa to remove themselves from the production and/or product of their labour in the name of the viewer/consumer? a sort of ideal, democratic self-immolation? presumably with the kernel ambition of producing pure, inclusive objectivity. Im attracted to this idea and I like dogmatic art. Im sort of jealous of it. I like the idea of producing work in which a feedback process of copy, paste, copy, paste becomes a mechanical separation of the producer from the product, the personality is removed in a sort of creative degradation.

And yet Hermann Hesse wrote about how he sometimes imagined taking all his work back from the altar on which he first proffered it as sacrifice to be cut up and dismembered by reader-consumers, critics and subjective opinion. I make subjective art. I make it for me. Consumption by others is incidental and a sort of justification. The conversation i am having is not primarily with an audience but between myself and Everything. In fact it is a probing of the relationship between myself, as a subset of everything, and the set that is Everything.

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Create

Curate

Collect

all attempts to address (control) ownership of the creative act and its issue.

Owning is a form of creativity, an expression of the creative drive.

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Looking at the primal matter and activity of human consciousness is like staring into the crater of an active volcano filled with potential for creation and destruction and its going on ALL THE TIME.

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Money is a symbol of value.

Art is a concretion of value

Art Is Value.

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There is still some discursive connection between Beauty and Art –  a sense that the art object should … what? contain beauty? represent beauty? BE beautiful? But does beauty inhere an object or is it a response? It is an effect, not a cause. It takes place not in the object but within us.

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I think of Postmodernism as the consequence of gravity, volume and velocity. Many streams become one torrential river becomes shallow delta as its waters reach sea level, as all water pursues its own level: losing momentum and depth there is deposition and dispersal. The result, a myriad of rippled sandbanks spread over a wide area finally merging in oceanic conformity. And Post- Postmodernism? a hacking and slashing climb back up in search of the source or a new universalism? Or a compression of the deposition into a new stone to be mined? Of course it might also be dammed water, deep but virtually stagnant, as The Market releases just enough to power itself and irrigate a narrow strip along its downstream banks.