I am a visual artist. I am a visual learner, and I am an artist. I use and express my art in a 3-D world. Art is kinesthetic, experimental, and often beyond the norm. Art is also, subtle, indirect, and mysterious. Art can be felt, touched, loved and discarded. Art is life experienced consciously.
For me, Art is about living life fully, happily, and realistically. Art in this way, is beyond the accepted version of Art that is called "art". Art is thinking outside the box; outside the boundary; outside the limits; beyond what is typically considered.
Just think of the word revolution.
What do you imagine?
Do you imagine unrest? A band of humans coming together, aimed to overthrow an establishment?
Or perhaps particles spinning around a center-- revolving.
Now imagine words with the same essence and power. Thoughts, clustering in spheres of coherence; where-in topics emerge, sentences fall in line, like soldiers commanded into battle.
The revolution of words, moves along a polar axis.
As they revolve, they can serve to train the mind-- looped and repeated over and over again for good; Repetition conditions both the mind and body. As any trainer will tell you, repletion creates familiar pathways.
As words form into thoughts, these thoughts may eventually find a need to revolt. To break the established flow and pace of revolution (of spinning) and go against the very momentum it created. This is where the effort of revolt is necessary. In order to break a habituated pattern, concentrated, precise change must be created.
Words are beautiful and descriptive. They have power to inspire and frighten. The ego, the mind, the body and spirit can all speak with words, and that is something unique. Unique, in meanings and messages are uniquely configured, yet the function is universal. Communication is an Earthly matter. Animals, plants, humans, and smaller earthly creatures all communicate. Sound travels, whereby passing along meaning through wave particles.
As I begin on one tangent, I follow through and come to a finish. This is called the beginning and the end. These moments are grounded in something-- in time, space, or imagination. Time-moments like mile markers. We remember moments of elevation, elation, dissension and descension. The moments-- the every now-moment-- woven together, have the power to be the somewhere within the beginning, middle, and end, as well as the very beginning and end in their wholeness.
It is the way we configure our lives that determines, how we relate to the now-moment, which is ever changing, shifting, dying and rebuilding.
Barbara Dilley, a modern dancer in the late 60's, 70's and 80's highlighted these time markers in her approach to performative dance. The "beginning, middle, and end" became both a theme and an approach to studio time dance as well as creating performances. The approach is very simple. You have ten minutes. The markers are very honest. Begin when the time starts and end when ten minutes have passed. But what about the middle? Does the middle begin two seconds in? Or is it at the five minute mark? Does the middle fill all the gaps within the framed time-- the time window, or does it own its own clear boundary?
These are but a few of the questions that one may consider in Contemplative Dance, an Art form and dance practice developed by Ms. Dilley herself. Contemplative Dance has a history-- an origin and a lineage. It is an approach to dancing, as well as a performative form of Art. Contemplative Dance (C.D. for short) urges the participant to take what is rightfully theirs. Time and Space. There is no need to force the production of art, because the Art is revolving in its own spectrum of revolution.
Art in this way, is righteous, from origin to expression. Art in this way, is alive and therefore relevant. As all living things have the inevitable fate of death, Art in this way, is susceptible to the same moment-- death. But it is not always the case, and that is what is amazing. Art that is honest and real, has the power to live for thousands of years. Art has the power to flow through decades, centuries, eras, and the winds and the waves of the sea.
But Art is not always eternal. When exposed to dangers, Art can weaken, thereby becoming vulnerable to destruction and death. And that is where the ego slides in. Where the space that contemplation creates fills up with the need to survive, the ego begins to thrive. Protection is ego's agenda. The mission is to preserve the sense of a "separate-self". The "identity" of the artist, if permitted to spiral into unawareness, loses some or all of the true graces Art bestows. For the grace of true Art, is that it is focused, disciplined and aware. Art is life awareness.
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