Date: 2023
Author: Martim Brion
What loss were ours, if we had known not birth?
…whoso ne’er hath tasted life’s desire.
Unborn, impersonal, can feel no dearth. Lucretius
– Lucretius
As artists we produce work. What one means by ‘production’ has shifted over time, as have the methods for art-making. The word itself, ‘production’, which comes from the Latin ‘producere’, to bring forth, has shifted from manually crafting something to more often meaning an industrial process with well-defined and planned inputs and outputs. Art has shifted accordingly. New means of production have thus been added to the toolbox of creation, while old ones remain, even if some techniques, such as traditional drawing, are becoming more niche and thus disappearing from mainstream artistic practice, sometimes with a negative impact when it is a central part of this practice. But, overall, one could argue that the new methods have expanded the possibility for creation. Is this creation worth this expansion? As with everything, some are, and some are not; even Sewell would agree that there is quality to be found in contemporary art, albeit mostly folly, but as with everything, time is the great critic and selector. How this art will be defined/appreciated in 100 years is impossible to tell. The only possibility is to continue the best one can. An important component of this practice is repetition (mechanical); the more one paints, or sculpts or reads, the better one’s capacity for performing said act; this coupled with a plethora of other factors, is critical to becoming an artist with his/her own individual approach, one avoids unique, as unique is a tall order to be attained, and once again, time needs to be factored in. All of this is linked to freedom, freedom of creation, and freedom of living, but this topic one will leave to von Kleist’s puppet.
Production stems from creation. To create something, one must first have an idea; once that idea is formed, one needs a method/technique to bring it into the physical realm. Another intriguing aspect of this process is where this idea is located: does it already exist in someone’s head, or is it written somewhere, even if it is on an unknown or inaccessible piece of paper, or might it even exist somewhere in the ether? It is still unclear where these ideas come from; they do not appear out of nowhere; rather, they emerge from a confluence of influences, such as one’s life, empirical study, logical deduction, and so on. Creation is also limited by our sensorial capacity; the day we will be able to access different senses, our creative output will take a different form. As a result, we are constantly involved in our own social, civilisational cycle; the human derives the majority of its influence from what it knows, and what it knows best is itself and its fellow humans. Thus, art is what is closest to natural creation with a human behind it; it is aiming at God’s work in human terms, even if it is always nothing compared to the natural world because it is only the filtered vision of one individual who is a very small particle in a much wider space. This filtered vision works best when it stems from a large number of influences or inputs rather than just a few. This process is like Schlieffen’s plan: it is toiled and re-toiled, and once in motion, it is difficult to stop. Even when its end result is not satisfactory, there is a high failure rate in this process, just as there is in a non-technological life, a pre-modern life. Is this still the case? Probably, since it is easier nowadays to arrive at a convincing enough idea and to be able to find a method of executing it from the numerous production methods that are now available. Nonetheless, this does not discount many of these ideas as mere fait divers. Which means that at its core, it is still a very pre-modern process, as are we as human beings. It requires constant physical repetition, physical and intellectual, it requires a constant state of alertness as well as being imbued in society and its opinions, from the more lurid to the haughtier ones; and a high rate of failure. What never was may become, and what was or is may cease to exist. It is a never-ending cycle of production and re-production, as are we.
Martim Brion 