Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Rant

What makes you a legitimate artist? Is it that you have a body of work. perhaps you have a really good idea and create things that represent that idea. What if you like to create things that represent but have no idea? No matter where you go or what you choose to do there will always be someone asking you why you are making what you make. What does it mean? What are you trying to say? How does it fit into the art world? how has history impacted it? What influences do you have? What artists do you look at?....These omnipresent questions surround us and at times can almost suffocate the excitement derived from creating, but there is no escape. The only thing to do is to confront their existence and try to deal with them. More often than not it is the confrontation of those ominous questions and issues that provide us with a better understanding of what we are actually trying to do, and manny times are a catalyst for breakthroughs.
Personally i have always struggled with these issues, feeling at a loss when asked these questions generally resulting in self-conscious questioning and doubt in, what moments ago, seemed like the best idea in the world. In response to these questions, it is all to easy to simply reject them because they are difficult, and to simply not care. but the problem is that they wont go away, and in fact seem to act as a enigmatic filtration system to separate the A’s from the B’s, the Art from the Bullshit. So from my viewpoint, it seems that the only LOGICAL thing to do when faced with these questions is to deal with them as soon as possible, so as to survive as a LEGITIMATE artist , in a time when being an artist is the most ILLOGICAL thing one could probably do.

1 comment:

  1. I heard this interview on Fresh Air when it was first played. Transcript at http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=123810319

    It's worth a check out! Oh yeah, and has anybody seen my robot toy? It has this screen on his stomach that shows words..like what he's thinking.....

    Mr.�CAMERON: Very much so, and that's probably really the heart of your first question. A lot of the imagery in "Avatar" comes from dreams that I've had over time. I can remember distinctly having a dream in college of a glowing, bioluminescent forest and getting up and very quickly sketching it with oil pastels, trying to get the colors down, trying to get, you know, what I had imagined in the dream down on paper and feeling this great sense that I hadn't succeeded. It just was this ugly thing. It wasn't what I had seen in the dream.

    So, you know, part of I think that's part of what drives a lot of artists is dream imagery and the kind of subconscious associations that happen in dreams.

    I know the surrealist artists strongly believed that their mission was to translate to the canvas images they'd had in dreams without any attempt to analyze or mediate them and that that was kind of their ethos, and I kind of adopted a little bit of that when I was making "Avatar." I thought, you know, if I like an image, I'm going to put it in the movie, and Im not going to try to justify it.

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