Betty told me that your first assignment has to do with
creating a hybrid of methods, materials, and ideas, so I
have chosen to address that idea in my talk today. I would
like to extend the phenomenon of the hybrid and start to
pick at the way we think. Perception itself is very porous
because meaning is constructed, and the prevalence of any
one paradigm over another is a question of which culture
is dominant. Since we construct meaning, since it is a
map and not the territory, then we can make adjustments.
Artists have always been a primary source in the production
of cultural meaning, so we cannot take a passive stance
in relationship to our assumptions. In my own work I have
questioned the premise that we think about art in catagories.
This practice is not the truth, it is the extention of one
world view.
Art is not exempt from science. As a matter
of fact, they are collaborative approaches to the same questions
of our existence. Newtonian Physics and the concepts of
Frances Bacon have underscored Western thought. That world
view is one of the machine. Bacon secularized science in
that he stated that human beings were no longer beholden
to a higher spiritual order. They were no longer a part
of a larger cosmos. They were the cosmos. Stripped of its higher power, nature could then be taken apart with its
components either exploited or discarded according to man’s
industry. Newtonian ideas were actually hostile towards
the vastness and unpredictability of nature and sought to
subdue and control it. It is in this world view that categories
exist. It was also with this world view that Europeans justified
the colonization of the American continent, its indigenous
peoples and their organic spiritual belief structures.
The
idea that our existence is secular is key when we consider
our perceptual prejudices. In our culture, we only believe
in what we can see. Our language is rooted in the noun.
We speak in terms of things. We do not speak of the invisible,
potent, liminal space between things, the forces that create
relationship and meaning, nor do we live our lives with
any consciousness or reverence for it. Take the first 100
days of Congress. Makes you gag. But our culture has been
from the beginning rooted in values of the marketplace.
If it’s not a thing, you can’t attach a Newtonian value
to it, meaning you can’t count it, and you can’t sell it.
Newt (Gingrich) is trying to force all efforts of human creativity
into the marketplace, meaning that anything that has a fundamental
value in a different currency, such as a spiritual, humane,
social, poetic, complex, diverse, experimental value will
be coopted by the market place and drained of its original
transformative power, in essence, “fenced in”, or what Herbert
Schiller in "Culture Inc.", refers to as "enclosed". If it cannot
or refuses to be enclosed, then it is starved out of any
kind of assistance. That is why the right seeks to disassemble
public broadcasting, and the NEA, a public agency whose
mandate is to fund excellence regardless of its marketability
and for purposes of the common good.
When civilization was
moving west, American leaders, such as our present day Newt,
were trying to solve what they called “the Indian Problem”.
Their solution, in addition to the widely known method of
genocide and starvation was to abolish common property,
to attach Native Americans to real estate (out of the wilderness,
on to a fixed place within a grid), to separate them from
the tribe, (a paradigm of interconnection), and to infuse
in them the “selfishness” which was “at the bottom of civilization”
as Senator Henry Dawes put it.
The reason why I am swinging
so wide is to point out to you that the disconnection, alienation,
loss of center, purpose and faith, the great manipulation
of what is seen and unseen in this culture is BY DESIGN. It was stated
clearly by early American leaders that common property and
connection to a community are antithetical to civilization.
In civilization, all human conduct is controlled contractually,
by law and punishment, not by human bond, grace,or common
needs. Think about the “Contract with America”. This is
old stuff.
At any rate, we are not automatically righteous
because we are artists. We have assisted in this design
and continue to do so. That is why it is very important
that we examine our own thinking. The fact that much of
Modern Art is based on the grid is not a coincidence. Nor
is its argument that art is autonomous and not bound to
its audience or culture. Part of the reason why American
Modern Art was so championed was because its lack of a sense
of place and its refusal to engage in cultural discourse
(deregulation?) conveniently located it within the subconscious
gears of capitalism. It is also not a superficial development
that much of contemporary art, driven by feminist, multi-cultural,
interdisciplinary and environmental discourse is insisting
on reconnection, cross-over, and contextual accountability.
We are beginning to realize that the Newtonian universe
is not only an inaccurate map; it’s actually a very destructive
and inhuman one.
©Sono Osato
