I am not interested in theories. I
am interested in Ideas.
I’ve been sitting here in front of
a blank virtual sheet of paper for a while now. There’s quite a few pieces of
roughly modeled rock downstairs, ready to be further processed into axes and
other pseudo stone-age paraphilia. I do have thoughts about them, even deep
ones. But they escape my fingers, which just end up resting restlessly on the
keyboard. I suppose writing pointless
crap like this is illustrating one way I employ, to evoke some creative forces
buried in me. The point is, one has to keep whatever concept emerges into the
white emptiness in the text as a whole.
Exercise. Exorcise. Possess.
Voodoo cults arouse in ones mind
images of pinned dolls, skulls, bones and people loosing themselves in weird
states of trance. This is a mostly fictive narrative perpetuated by the
entertainment industry, but still it has its roots in reality. The pinned dolls
would be the westernized image of the figurines present at various voodoo
rituals. Those figurines do not only represent the gods worshipped, they are
considered to have the essence of the divinity in their form. The statues are
alive. They are living gods. Such way of asserting essential values to
inanimate objects has been dubbed Fetishism by the European scientist.
A quick virtual shuffling through
the pages of Wikipedia reveals to us several strains to be explored under the
umbrella term fetishism. All of them however hold at the core of them the idea
that an object in itself carries, or holds inside it, some meaning or is an
abstract concept materialized and is to be revered as something past the
material sphere we inhabit. Of course
one cannot avoid attaching sexual connotations to the term fetishism, and
indeed sexual fetishism would be one avenue to explore within our thematic
framework, but I refrain from walking down that path, mostly to avoid being
viewed as a pervert under the scrutiny of my peers.
Another fascinating train of
thought sets of when I pass through the pages dealing with a concept dubbed
commodity fetishism by the mammoth Karl Marx himself, in his book Capital:
Critique of political economy. Skipping over some of the parts that are so dry
they make ones eyes cry for lotion, I could, by shifting sentences out of their
original contexts, summarize that under capitalistic systems the means of
exchange aka money and goods are seen as having far more value that the labor
spent to produce them would suggest. This is achieved through branding and
image marketing that pretty much define the state of our culture today.
Being a stand up participant in our
beloved western hegemony I however chose not to take into consideration the
obvious subversive nature of Marx’s writings (well, more precisely quotes from
his writings). Instead I’m formulating an idea more useful for the struggling contemporary
artist. One that runs along the lines of Karl’s writings with an aim to
replicate the process of fetishizing the commodity, or in this case a piece of
art or an artifact, in order to extract as much imagined value from it to be
used in case of an exchange involving more conventional forms of currency.
So, a long story keeps on getting
longer. I am producing at this moment a
ceremonial versions of stone tools inspired by what I imagine the Cro-Magnon
using 50,000 years ago. Which again links me back to the subject of
animistic religions, if I so wish to proceed in the course of my ranting. I aim for the finalized object to convey a
sense of meaning and value way beyond my subjective evaluation about the worth
of my labor used to produce it. I also wish to make it clear here, that it is the creation of an Object that I am
interested in, rather than producing an image or a sketch of an abstract
concept. I believe art in itself is profoundly linked to this process of fetishisation and it should be understood
and celebrated as such, rather than reaching towards the desolate spheres we
have dubbed objectivity and reality.
Another point of interest for me is what happens before an object is
fetishized. How is an object born?
Rock as such to me is an endless borderless mass of grey, sometimes
taking on shades of pink and green. Rock is solid. Rock is silent and
nondescript substance.
What then happens
when this abstract or primordial sense of matter is transformed into a tangible
object. For this part I choose to loosely study or appropriate the concepts of
individuation and reification, borrowed straight from the wondrous simulation
of a dictionary, the Wikipedia.
The term Individuation would refer
to the process in which “a
thing is identified as distinguished from other things”, or from an abstraction
to an object in this case. Individuation can also refer to the way in which we
ourselves become the I. In short I am stating that the process through which an
object is born, is the process of our minds actively producing it from all the
fuzz of chaos that surrounds us. Even more shortly put, noticing something is
creating it as an object. I also suspect that the act of separating and
defining objects from the Fuzz is in the end a key factor in our own Becoming.
Reification, is basically another
way if saying what has been said above. It is a Marxian concept to be shunned
upon, but holds in it self some level of poetical weight that I’d wish to use
for my own purposes during the process of celebrating the fetishisation of art.
Also, I figure it would piss of some of the more self righteous leftist
creatures inhibiting our cultural spheres.
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