Art is sex.
It is the mystery and the solution, the extreme moment a light is switched on. It’s the cure for something but I forget what.
Education is the intangible, the endless beginning of life, the enjoyable method that does not reach a goal, though we strive as artists to achieve this inexplicable feeling of complete fulfilment and genius.
You are never sated and everything always seems to end.
Does this switch even work?
How come if you only gave me two, I’ve got four left?
…and have you noticed how everyone orders their puddings here like they’re ordering wine?
You’ve got to keep drinking through your generation.
Literature, music, art, photography, theatre, film can all be non-starters.
*Click*
*Boom*
Is this an everlasting climax?
You are the sort of person who’ll only enjoy the whole progression.
You’re also the sort of person who really shouldn’t be drinking at this time but that’s a different matter entirely.
Give me static art.
Your paintings, your sculptures. I’ll pretend i care about yours and not just mine.
Consider the abstract as timeless and paint my portrait from there. I’ll lie on the bed.
And you’ll paint me whole and at my peak. Potential, commencement, rising/running, conclusion and thrill. It’s all bound up in this moment.
*Click*
*Boom*
Remember it.
A single photo, one suggesting movement for instance, can begin an idea or a feeling without evolving, but a series or a montage of photos can suggest a narrative, open up a journey, and spur you on to an end.
“We’ll go down on the morning of the 17th, that way we can be back in time for Jake’s on the 21st and that gives us two good days in Savannah.”
“I’d like that, as will Edie. What do you reckon about Davis?”
“If it’s just me and you.”
“Not Edie?”
“And not Davis.”
“It’s too complicated?”
“Similar.”
“But two days in Savannah?”
“There’s a good crowd down there.”
Consider the situation when that waitress comes over.
What if you saw death in her eyes? What if you fall in love all over again?
Can you handle the choice?
“Theatre and film can afford the loss of ending or beginning,”
“You have always hated a steady plotline, a narrative arc. That’s just you. Your understanding doesn’t breed a hip dialogue.”
“I’m not saying that, it doesn’t matter whether is goes ad infinitum or reaches a crescendo. As long as it retains its cathartic quality.”
*Cut*
The novel still has the tendency to begin and fulfil, Modernism introduced in part the timeless aspect static art has benefited from through cyclical themes, parallel and déjà-vu (no more spoon-fed passionless skip-to-the-end plots), or the Imagist way of using non-analogous metaphors which broaden feeling and break from the logical and the expected.
Choose one photograph to be remembered by.
Though I’m not sure if I agree with art at all right now. Art is not actually sex, it is displacement, it is avoiding life. How can the abstract ever be represented; made concrete? The moment I feel, i have felt, it is gone. Just calling it a feeling, just calling it an it, does not seem (seem?) right (right?) anymore. Yes, yes, I should just get over semiotics. But what a blow that was. To see the world as only surface. Art is communication though, you say. It is to understand. Art is not the fact, it is a representation of the memory. So we see the young man nod and cry as he hears that speech from our sofa on the TV.
But the camera is in soft focus, and the man is framed by two smiling people to enthuse a contrast, and the lighting from the stage is shining across his sweaty face.
It is artistic.
Do I want to be the observing artist?
Maybe I don’t want to hold the camera any more.
Maybe I want to be that crying nodding man
by Gordon Macrae and Jen Calleja
