Rediscover the Dumpster

At the end of class tuesday Ty told us to look up two words: Cartesian and Jungian Analysis.  My understanding of Cartesian is as follows; that mind is separate from body just as I am separate from you and separate from this world, promotes western individualism and belief that science can provide answers to everything.  Jungian Analysis is the idea that the unconscious mind is a source of healing and development for the individual.  Individualism is the topic of the week, in the James Hillman conversation one sentence really stuck with me on page 188 when James defines Aesthesis as meaning to notice the world and my definition of aesthetics being a philosophy dealing with everything beautiful and everything art.  Connection of definitions-noticing the world is beautiful is artistic.  My photography teacher I had freshman year at an art school told me, "once you see the world through a lens, you finally see where you've been living, and tomorrow when you walk that same walk to school everyday you'll see trees you never saw before."  I believe this world is art and like I said in my last blog maybe its not about creating it but about discovering it.  Dan Powell was awesome and had super amazing work, I loved his visions with layering and using trash to make something beautiful.  He totally connected with the two conversations we read this week, in the Hillman conversation he says, "it rescued and made use of discarded materials."  Dan Powell did this in his early years of art physically and I think metaphorically in his later years of art.  Powell continually mentions his fascination with capturing human interaction with nature and human thought; capturing the intangible.  His early work deals with physically gathering trash (noticing his world) and then bringing it to his studio to create something aesthetically pleasing (discovering beauty) later on he decides he wants to take his camera out into the world and capture it, live it, be one with it.  He went outside of reasoning, Hillman and Merchant would approve, and looked to the world to give him art, he became enlightened with the idea that traveling this world looking at its physical history to find current cultural meaning was the best way to capture what art is, by rediscovering it over and over again.  I believe art is the process of rediscovering what was to know what is.  Like Merchant discussing art as participatory and about relationships with objects, nature, animals, humans, the world.  On page 236 Merchant creates this idea that transformation into this new world will be about reflection, support, encouragement and nurture, that through crisis and chaos a regrouping and reorganization will itself emerge and provide us with something new.  It is not us writing our story we are simply just a part of it, reading it as new everyday, we can't predict or solve with science to know the ending... we need to be humbled and realize were not in a domination race with nature but a partnership.  The quote that I loved the most from Merchant was, "It will arise out of our attempts to get away from the betrayals of the past, to see what has not worked and to try to make something else work... these ideas will have to work in a context that is uniquely our own."  Merchant's creativity lies in language and teaching as does Hillman and Powell's.  They all have a secret love affair with the beauty of language, and if art is beauty then I guess the conclusion is language and art are but the same thing!!  The old views of looking for solutions to chaos in the world was to find solutions through science, to be innovative and technologically dependent, those people who hold these views are stubborn, resource hunger and have an ugly relationship with over consumption.  It's the younger generations, our generations, that are learning and listening and understanding the connection between everything, "the world as a big giant conversation in which everybody is involved," the interconnectivity of the world is what has been ignored for far to long and the act of finally participating in this conversation is the most beautiful thing a person can do.  You don't need a paint brush, a camera, or a pencil to be an artist... you need language, conversation, and relationships with the world you live in, participation is art.  I think all three artists were dealing with this week want us to, like Hillman would say, turn away from the loyalty to the God of commodity and money, and search for the God the artist in the river is serving... whatever God that may be.