subject
Statement ’76

Artistry. What is it?

I wonder on this thought.

Is it the ability to successfully con people or is there more involved?
Out of patience, struggle, unsurety and what not else, is the artist’s desire to win people over to his/her realm born of an egotism. Is it sprung from the need of self-centered approval, the desire to subordinate others under a totalitarian, dictatorial, and inflexible dogmatic approach to life, its sorrows and its glories?

The artist’s final egotistical slap lies in demanding from others what the artist’s own self cannot give, yet concurrently passing that very self, that individual personality, over onto the others as a genuine artifact, as a primitive whse insights, intuitions and emotions have not been mercilessly strangled and starved, severed from their roots by knowledge. The offspring of knowledge include all who are big and bad, small and good; smooth, round, bumpy, irregular; shiny, juicy, dull, meaty; wormy, natural, healthy, cultivated; precious, abundant, unwanted, desired; and variations thereof.


Does the artist believe him/her self to be before and beyond earthly, knowledgeably, and survival oriented behavior and existences, aloof from and unneeding of the undesirable, malodorously elusive others? Is this artistic destiny?

Or, is the artist primarily, merely a quirk of fate, an individual marked to record, document and preserve; observe, interpret and unify; digest and expel, bound only by his/her own limitations and those of the life by which he/she came into being, which created him/her?

As such a tool, is the artist capable of enriching life, or is his/her being in vain.

A debased search, what is the holy grail?

The instinct for self-preservation
will always triumph
over the
desire for decorum.