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discussion about art: part n+1


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I am listening to the KCRW "The Treatment" podcast - roughly half hour

interviews by Elvis Costello with various film makers and Elvis is conversing

with the painter and film director Julian Schanbel about his recent movie "The

Diving Bell and The Butterfly". And Julian just came up with this great quote

from Russian filmmaker Andreas Tartovsky: <P><B><I>"Life contains death. Art,

unlike life, doesn't contain death."</B>

 

So it's a denial of death; it's life-affirming. As [Tarkovsky] said, <B>"There's

no optimistic or pessimistic artist. There's just talent and

mediocrity."</B></I><P>These podcasts (you can find them at KCRW.org --look for

the Treatment" I listen to them through Apple's iTunes) are a great series and

this is a particularly good interview.

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Ellis: I love the quote, but wonder if it is true. Am currently working on a painting called "Model Contemplating Suicide". Actually death appears a lot in art. To name just a few places: "Judith and Holofernes" the "Pietas" of Michelangelo, all the crucifixion paintings, the work of Kathe Kollwitz. And there is optimistic and pessimistic art. Just look at Picasso's rose and blue periods.
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I wonder if Tarkovsky is suggesting that images of death aren't death. Could he be clumsily alluding to what he may consider the eternal nature of art (which would not account for paintings being destroyed, say, in a fire) vs. the more finite nature of man. Puccini operas still live no matter how many times the heroines jump to their deaths or stab themselves in the heart. Photos of the holocaust survive to tell the tale.

 

Just a thought. Is it simply a statement of his belief in a transcendent nature of art?

We didn't need dialogue. We had faces!
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Denying death is not life affirming. Death is part of life. I forgot who said it, but he said basically that he lives life with death beside him. <p/>When we are conscious of our mortality, then we can live life to its fullest and not worry about or pursue the unimportant.
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personaly, I think that life not only contains death, but is defined by death which is the only absolute certainty we have.

But I would say Art, representing always a vision or conception of life ( the existing one as the possibilities of other ones ) is defined by death too, whatever the subject : It will always be about what is before death, or what could be before or after death.

 

Also I think any medium used to express art, is also meant to perish or to get lost one day or another, these mediums beeing either stone, paper, digital or spoken words

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"Also I think any medium used to express art, is also meant to perish or to get lost one day or another, these mediums beeing either stone, paper, digital or spoken word" Not so IMO.

 

Not sure about video shot on Super VHS Or Betamax. Shakespeare's sonnets have sure hung on though. The sonnets,well loved, deal with the affirmation of poet's art art in face of death. I guess am not sure I agree with the quote, Ellis, if I read it right that is..

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<i>Several of you seem to be confusing making photos of dying, or dead subjects with the difference that Tartovsky was making on the differences between life and art.</i><p>I'm not. Many people regard Ray Johnson's suicide as a piece of performance art. Johnson turned many of his paintings and drawings into performance art, did performance art, and may have killed himself as performance art, thus containing death within art, which Tartovski (sorry I said Schnabel in my last post) says doesn't happen. So it's Tartovski who either doesn't know about or is deliberately ignoring one of modern art's most interesting characters.<p>For anyone who wants to know more about Ray Johnson, watch <i>How to Draw a Bunny,</i> it's available from Netflix.
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I think what the methapysical minded Tarkovsky meant by that is that one always has to

create in the making of a physical or even conceptual artwork, therefore bringing

something to life that wasn't there before, even in artforms where something has been

taken away, deconstructed, there's always the creation of a difference, the creation of

another mind and matter. Art deals with mind and matter, it tries to become mind over

matter, same with life. In death, from a living point of view, there is no matter, so we can

never mind the difference, in art / life we can.

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Gerry : I'm not talking in term of years or decades. Shakespeare's work has been around for less than 500 years. But one day all this will be lost, either because the support won't exist anymore, or won't be understood, as the languages are evolving and dying too. Who can today read and understand for example the pre-greek egyptian poets ?

 

Jeff : That's one very good and valid example. But then, we could even say that any suicide is a performance and that act, beeing destructive by nature, is also creative and artistic and is the ultimate deconstrucive performance one could achieve, rejoining Phylo's comment, but in the opposite way : By defining art and life as mind over matter it still is a definition by opposition to or negation of death, therefore death beeing always the cetral part.

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"Art" is the ultimate vapid excuse. It dumbs down, has come to mean nothing. Picasso spoke of art, and he knew what it meant. That was then, this is now.

 

The point is made when someone compares Shakespeare to Egyptian glyphs.

 

Shakespeare will be eternal because his work deals profoundly and viscerally with powerful and universal human themes, is distributed in every new medium in virtually every language, is continually evolving, yet obsessively returns to its roots for refreshment.

 

Shakespeare's viral, not in the least like the static records of a dead civilization that were, even in their day, crude commercial and genealogical records, inaccessible to slaves and all but a few citizens.

 

Macbeth is one of humanity's greatest blessings, far transcending anything we now label "art."

 

Those Egyptians would have been shaken by Shakespeare.

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Ah john kelly, willy the shake, the bard of bards.

 

"Life contains death. Art, unlike life, doesn't contain death." So it's a denial of death; it's life-affirming. As [Tarkovsky] said, "There's no optimistic or pessimistic artist. There's just talent and mediocrity."

 

The Tartovsky quote sounds to me a little ... Tartovsky.

 

I'd have thought death contains life, that's it's mystery. But both life death and art are similar in that they do not do circumscribed. (Oh gosh, almost said circumcised).

 

I'm not altogether sure if Tartovsky, (lovely camp name), made this quote:

"Life contains irradiated fish fingers. Art unlike life doesn't contain eradicated fish fingers. They never appear in art? Of course not ... but viewed in the right light they are art, and indeed food for thought".

 

Which reminds me of this this quote from good old Rumi:

 

"Intelligence and talent is the shadow of the objective truth.

How can the shadow vie with the sunshine"

 

Which reminds me of ............... nothing. And melting ice cream.

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Maybe we can agree on some elements of the discussion. That art is transcendent. Transcendent in the sense that it goes beyond evolutionary imperatives,eating, hunting, growing old and so on. It therefore transcends death in the biological sense. The Pharaonic Egyptians had a way of looking at death and making it a part of their art. But it was transcendent still.

And the cave paintings in France show that "art" is a basic 'transcendent' impulse. Does that make sense?

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"The point is made when someone compares Shakespeare to Egyptian glyphs."

 

well the egyptian civilisation lasted about 8000 years.

 

christianism from which Shakespeare has been coming from less than 2000.

 

Let's wait 6000 years before continuing the discussion on that one...

 

And about Picasso you may like to know that he started cubism only because he was not able to eat every day, and did find somebody crazy enough at the time to buy some of his "african kind" of pictures has he did put it at the time. And at that time, what he was doing and seeling was not considered as art at all by himself.

 

Gerry, i agree with you, but there is one big difference sonce the XVIIIth century in art : Until then, art and religion could not be separated, and therefore this transcendance could not be avoided. Sometimes, some rich mecenes would have their portrait made, but that was far from the rule. The big problem started really in the XIXth century and romanticism ( actually i started with the reformation, but that will require quite some time to get to the point ), when the artist became more important than his art. Before, an artist was a good craftman in service of the church/kingdom/society, and therefore the ego didn't really come into the creative process and why the transcence really is today difficult to be found in Art, eventhough I agree with you that's a state art is still trying to reach, but fails miserably most of the time.

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