Resistance in Art?

Two things are vying for my attention at the moment and in a real sense I'm neither here nor there as to uncovering them simply because if I leave stuff alone it'll find it's way to me eventually and usually in a worked out manner that makes the intellectual process obsolete. But this, while almost a perfect world, doesn't seem to be that way for many others and so a swaying, of this slow acceptance, to meet outside obligations is sometimes required to adjust myself to a world that may want things of me.

One comes by way of offering to do work then being asked where I might like to do this work. This immediately frees me to define myself in a way I don't enjoy so much as the opposite, this is where you will do the work, offers a resistance that I like to work from as in with well defined boundaries then as in laws, laws are made to be broken, and so boundaries are made to be pushed beyond... but you need the boundaries in the first place.

This brings me to the work of Tracey Emin who I've recently discovered, by way of a friend who admires her, but in finding her work this boundless art practise, or being without restriction, seems rather sad. While I find her spirit wholly commendable the art she seems to have done, in the public arena, seems more about spectacle and concepts far more than it might be about accepting a restrictive index and going beyond, as in a craft based procedural based art, which in turn seems entirely restricting to her ability to actually speak her art to an audience outside the pundits that parade its veracity.

And that's sad and woe to all those artists who's freedoms are so great they seemingly forget to be artists and become merely performers in some side show touted as a main event.

I suppose I secretly hope that she has a whole private world full of real things like brushes and scalpels and carving chisels where she tests the coordination of hand and eye in a real and sweating brow attempt towards a mastery which can never be got, that she hasn't forgotten her child that knows frustration must be battled by throwing ourselves against the insurmountable paradox of vision and dull ageing bodies. But though it seems there a little in her comments of how to work with bronze, this inner sense of creating resistance to get beyond, even that is played out in the public eye so my dream of her actually finding a self for only herself, played out against a public unwilling to read dull esoteric tracts to find merit, seems a perishable commodity alike all the other plastics and neo-neo's that pertain to commoditisations.

But I am spoiled more by my luck than I ever was an expert at anything, art included, so in that respect I can challenge myself ad infinitum with the resistance against being unfound knowing that keeping the finding of relevance is something I can always keep at a distance that it remain an obstacle I can choose to surmount or not knowing too the inherent folly of constantly fooling myself is a folly worth the effort.

And who have I to thank for this perplexing view? The cats of course. Those feline creatures who have races to be the slowest, or at least that's what it looks like might be happening, that when I call them for lunch it's not a run to the trough but a seemingly complex set of always changing  reference points that measure some sort of higher dis-interest, so high in fact that when they remember it's food at the end, the surprise and reward, which seem to be at the heart of the enterprise, renews the whole venture, made it ad-venture. And I don't really try to figure it out as realise the subtlties of my parts in the process. They kind of let me know that they are the masters but that without my parts to play no such mastery would occur and so it's less an apology and more an acknowledgement.

So I am dull by comparison with their ease of just living but it still behoves me to spread what I might be learning, this coyness of possible intent, that far greater waves are awash than our obvious needs to be vital. So it seems resistance is not something to be pushed and prodded into submission but a necessary constraint we might eventually notice isn't even there, that it is more a tension between inner and outer that the stretching of creates resilience, where we've come from and where were going aren't absolutes to be attained but simple markers that keep us to the middles.