excerpts from A Personal Dictionary by Mike Schertzer
note: all entries are in chronological order, the higher the number being more recent
art: n; 12. All art is politically in-formed and all art is powerless to keep from disclosing this in-formation.
20. Eventually, in the creative process you reach a point where resistance is not an option.
22. I want to “create a complex space in which that which is happening requires a response that stimulates ongoing interpretation”. (from Gilmour; Fire on Earth).
23. Art is the (communicated) ongoing battle with human anguish and with those who further the cause of human anguish.
25. Art is the measure of the distance living (both in a public and in the artist) must travel to arrive at the fully human.
26. Art erects tenuous dwellings in the margin between criticism and exploitation.
29. A detour of decay.
30. Rousseau argued that civilization, and art specifically, corrupts mankind. His conclusion is not exactly correct. Art has the ability to corrupt and often it will corrupt those who are not ready (intellectually, emotionally, etc.) to bear the responsibilities of art. Art corrupts because it is disruptive. Disruptive does not imply a force of negative value. For instance, a disruptive force is exactly what is required to free a ship that has run aground.
31. Sometimes we create things which run far ahead of our understanding. In such cases, we must create things to overtake what has already been accomplished.
32. Art will always fall in love with a deluge.
33. You must find the Eden you wish to be banished from.
34. The cake decorator must understand that sometimes there is nothing wrong with the cake, sometimes it is the decorator's fingers that must be broken.
35. Every paradise has its subtle gate which opens onto devastation.
36. I make my art on my knees, like a penitent, or like one who is digging with their hands for buried treasure.
37. Art makes inauthenticity unbearable. And so, there are few artists, and even fewer people, who are willing to make room in their lives for art.
38. An experience of art (especially when it is an experience of making art) is, at its most profound, a feeling of returning to a house that I recognize as my own, a house that was terribly damaged but has been miraculously repaired.
39. Art is not a capitalist venture. The artist does not make objects for consumption. Art, as the adventure of a liberated humanity (Tzara), is a lifelong personal engagement with living. An artist can only be a dwelling into which all of life is admitted and the experience of such a being manifests itself unmistakably in a passionate, critical, resilient, and dedicated creativity.
40. “Worth more than truth” – Nietzsche.
41. Art attempts to achieve autonomy while at the same time exercising influence. Such an activity may be viewed as impossible. It may also be viewed as miraculous.
42. Art presupposes the existence of a common ground, a public space where individual understanding, education, provocation, disturbance, etc. are possible. This common ground may be, in some cases, difficult to reach, but not impossible. (from Gasché in The Tain of the Mirror).
43. We have art because we have walls.
44. When I see an object of art I see an instance of creative activity. More specifically, I see a person creating something as opposed to using that time to do something, anything else. Most questions of aesthetics and most encounters with art seem to ignore this central, obvious fact.
45. A work of art is evidence of a struggle to overcome, to resist, a disease… a radical threat. Eventually, after triumphs, advances and retreats, stalemates, the battle will be decisively lost.
46. Happy people do not make art, they destroy art.
47. Children can play house effectively because they are physically incapable of being husband and wife, of producing a child, etc. the same is true for those who play art— those child-curators and child-performers, and child-painters…incapability ensures their success.
48. Most of our time is spent attempting to support and preserve what is least supportable in our living, and the least worth preserving. Fortunately, art exists to relieve us of this burden.
49. “Art is the highest expression of an interior and unconscious arithmetic” – Leibniz.
50. Art achieves a truth-value— all else is aesthetics.
53. Art gives lies something to wear, something to talk about, and something to care about— in other words, art makes lies, those inescapable lies, bearable.
54. If science comes into being when the gods are not thought of as good (Nietzsche), then art comes into being when the good can no longer be thought.
55. When encountering art the aesthetic judgment of one who has never created is often: “I could do that”. While this may be true their judgment is incomplete; what remains unspoken is: “… but I will never do it”. When encountering art the aesthetic judgment of one who is a creator is often: “I could never do that”; unspoken yet understood, the conclusion of their judgment is always: “… yet, I have tried”.
56. To glimpse the difference between the creative act and art is a rare epiphany. To have worked to the point where one’s proper place resides in the creative act, as opposed to art, can only be compared to a visitation of grace— and in so doing one takes leave of the world. Consequently, the problem of how to communicate such creative achievements, or efforts, or failures, assumes its proper stature, accompanying one everywhere, a faithful and indefatigable companion.
57. Art that is in the service of the world is a failed art. The allegiance of an artist, and therefore his art, is always elsewhere… that is, everywhere the world is not.
59. Art is the protection and remedy required in order to endure a tragic insight (Nietzsche).
60. “Les juste vacances d’irréalité” – Bachelard.
61. Art, as Greenberg says, expands our possibility for experience. In this sense art is against all that diminishes our possibility for experience, which is, almost everything.
62. Art is how we forget what we have never lived in order to live with what we should never have forgotten.
63. An artist is an endless interrogation of normality and of the normative. If society must always solve problems without solutions (Canguilhem), the artist, through creative activity, exposes such problems. It should be noted, and is not surprising, that such activity is rarely remunerative, and moreover, is often internalized as a punishable moral offense against society.
65. «Un main tendu dans l’obscurité » – Kafka.
66. «L’art est toujours l’affaire de la personnalité tout entière. C’est pourquoi il est, au fond, tragique » – Kafka.
68. « La distance que le temps donne à la souffrance » – Camus.
69. My interventions began by seeking to surmount the institutionalized voyeurism that accompanies the reception of a work of art. Instead of insisting and accepting the separation of a so-called public from the significant space of artistic creation I desired to provoke the implication of this public within such a space— we do not observe art, we are co-substantial with it.
70. Art can massacrer les faits without any risk; science can do the same only by destroying its own foundations.
71. Art is not an activity of constant progress, of avant-gardes pitted against reactionary impulses, but moments of lucidity and beauty that emerge, seemingly impossibly from the suffocating mass of academic peurility that embodies an ideology whose aim is to negate every authentic creative effort.
72. Art, notably so-called contemporary art, is the savoir-faire de polluer l’air du temps.
73. When I speak of bad art, I am not referring to aesthetics.
74. “Une des fonctions de l’art est la relecture permanente de la réalité” – Giuseppe Pennone.
75. If art is a question that seeks no answer (R.G. Collingwood) then science is the comprehension of how a question and its answer are linked. Art then never abandons the question.
76. L’art ephémère est un art en dehors de la logique de la consommation.
77. I desire that my misstatements of truth are eloquent and coherent and possibly even beautiful.
79. It is only by submitting to a constraint that one can explore the possibilities of free expression.
80. Excepting those problems concerning art itself, art has never solved a problem and never will solve a problem. What art has done, and always will do, is to offer us the capacity to respond, in a truly human manner, to the problems that confront us.
81. “In art it is difficult to say anything which is as good as saying nothing at all”. – Wittgenstein.
83. For any visual art one must ask to what kind of space is it committed ? (Rothko) and then decide whether such a space is habitable or not.
art history: n; No artist has ever waited upon the pronouncements of a historian of art. Historians of art have always been, and will always be, exterior to artistic creation. However, the writings of artists are always possibly decisive for the creative activities of other artists for the reason that they are intimate witnesses to individual creative activity and any authority they may exert is earned, as opposed to the fictive posturing that supports the abstract judgments of the art historian.
art school: n; The proliferation of art schools is an example of the industrialization of knowledge, in the sense described by Proust: « une fois qu’une industrie les a vulgarisées l’art antérieur perd rétrospectivement un peu de son originalité ».
artist: n; 4. It is the artist's task to create arenas of ambiguity, that is, places where meaning must be negotiated.
10. “No group of people lacks freedom more.” – A. Tarkovsky.
11. The artist, not the functionary, has the responsibility not only of creating a new world, but of creating a world that can compete with contemporary worlds. This world must be inhabitable, in fact, that is its purpose — to be lived in. To achieve this the artist must get beyond the disparate production of objects and attempt to communicate a world. This communication of a world may be unavoidable; even the functionary who spends its time producing objects for consumption is communicating a world, the world of its owners, its masters. And that world, this world is barely inhabitable.
12. The artist that claims my art does not change the world is focused on something which yawns beyond their personal horizon. This distant attention necessarily implies that what is close-at-hand, intimate, is unnoticed, denied presence.
13. To be a marginal artist is analogous to being a receptor on a cell. Such a being exists is two worlds. It communicates with the external world, it spans the border, and it transmits its interactions with the world to the inside of the cell. For such a marginal existence to function there must be a functioning cell, that is, there must be sufficient processes occurring in order that the cell remains viable. If the cell is dead, or dying, the receptor still exists but it does not function. And with loss of function eventually comes the loss of being.
14. It is impossible for me to view my relation to life, to the conditions of existence, as anything other than adversarial. Life offers its surface, its appearance. But it is withholding everything that is interesting, everything that is desirable. Life must be forced to whisper its secrets, to relinquish its treasures. Sometimes the only way to force life to do such things is by refusing to accept what it would rather offer you. In other words, you must persist.
15. The artist understands its task is to paint every home in its city with an eyelash for a brush.
16. An artist differs from a scientist in the adherence to the dictum (in Nietzsche's words) where one can guess, one hates to calculate.
17. An artist can progress, can be productive by subverting or rejecting its entire technical and paradigmatic foundations (regardless of whether these foundations themselves are productive). Conversely, the scientist's rejection of such foundations is unproductive and can only become productive after consistent failure makes such a rejection a necessity.
18. The creative act occurs spontaneously, naturally, almost in spite of oneself. In other words, for a life to be devoid of creative acts such acts must be actively suppressed. If one can claim that they have truly not been suppressing such things then it can be said for certain that they have offered little or no resistance to those forces. For those people who have been conveniently suppressing such forces it is overwhelming for me to consider all the exertion and all the entanglements and elaborate constructions that a life must dedicate itself to in order to escape creativity. It seems it would be simpler to just make something.
19. (Supposing an artist lives to the age of fifty) the difference between an artist and a non-artist with respect to dedication and sacrifice (to art) is at least six orders of magnitude. The artist could be thought of as megapublic, or the non-artist as microcreative.
20. Something took hold of me, turned my head and forced me to look towards a horizon that was not initially apparent. A failing voice then whispered it is your turn. Walk and continue walking until you can walk no further. Someone will be waiting for you. You will instruct them as I have instructed you.
21. Build a city and fill every room. Then build a stable, and a manger... a miracle might happen.
22. Considering the enormity and intransigence of the world what can an artist do, what can an artist hope to achieve? Nietzsche has an answer— make the scales more delicate and hope for the assistance of favorable accidents.
23. The artist is always a beginner… that is, beginning is the act which realizes art, which is art’s disclosure.
24. “Something in his mechanism has been unhinged to his advantage”. – E.M. Cioran.
25. The artist, in its sublimity, tames the horrible (Nietzsche) and horrifies the tamed.
26. If an artist is, as T.S Eliot says, “a continual extinction of personality”, then wherever one sees personality (ego) persisting it will be in the place of, and at the expense of, art.
27. If I make nets out of broken glass what do I wish to catch?
28. An artist makes a comment on nothing— the artist is the thing.
29. People always wonder what an artist is searching for and rarely inquire as to what the artist has found. For an artist, the time spent searching is insignificant when compared with the time that is spent trying to figure out what to do with, or even how to bear, what has been discovered.
30. “It is not so much where my motivation comes from but how it has managed to survive”. – Louise Bourgeois.
31. It is not enough to struggle against something. One must struggle in spite of it.
32. There comes a moment in the life of every artist when he understands that everything he has been involved with no longer has any relation to his life as an artist. It is difficult to proceed from such an insight, and almost impossible not to retreat into the morbid security of craft and technique. Nevertheless, for the artist, to proceed is the only course of action that leads to life.
33. Failed art is a kind of private gossip (Kierkegaard) and a failed artist is one who has no respect for his essential silence.
34. There are those who create the protections and remedies for the tragic insights of others, and those who create such things for their own tragic insights.
35. To be an artist one has already succeeded. Therefore, there can be no such thing as a bad artist. Evidently so-called bad artists profit from being identified as an artist; however, since they are not artists they should be properly be referred to as not-yet-artists, or pre-artists.
36. The artist uses everything that falls to the floor after Ockham’s razor has been used.
37. Though we regularly pose problems that cannot be resolved, we cannot resolve problems that we cannot pose. Only the artist can resolve problems we cannot pose.
38. The subjects on which science must remain silent are a part of an artist’s materials.
39. “Une situation pénible pour un amoureux devient stimulante pour un artiste”- Odile Richard-Pauchet.
40. Those who profess to love art will never love an artist.
41. « L’artiste créera son propre monde intellectuel, son développement connaîtra des crises propres et spécifiques, sur lesquelles les crises sociales n’auront qu’une influence mineure sinon inexistante et la trajectoire de son évolution sera brusquement brisée et pleine de bouleversements fortuits. » - Karel Teige.
42. You can never paint yourself into a corner if you paint with a sledgehammer.
43. An artist sublimates a fraud.
44. « Aujourd’hui des artistes véritables, d’une immense talent, vivent dans le quasi-anonymat, loin des salles de vente, des grandes collections d’avant-garde, des commandes publiques, parce l’art qu’ils pratiquent ne coche pas les cases de l’idéologie de l’art contemporain et de sa fausse histoire de l’art. » - Benjamin Oilvennes.
45. « L’artiste qui renonce à une heure de travail pour une heure de causerie avec un ami sait qu’il sacrifie une réalité pour quelque chose qui n’existe pas ». - M.Proust.
46. For an artist the world is not a domain to be mastered but the experience of limitless possibilities for personal implication.
47. If I have to be taught how to look at a work of art, either the artist has failed in its task, or the self-appointed guide does not want the artist to succeed.
48. For an artist, if it is more difficult to destroy a work of art than it is to create one, there is a problem of priority.
49. Being an artist is the moral, intellectual, and practical sketchbook that may lead to a certain mastery called being human. Unfortunately, many are content with technical mastery, which always fails to attain the level of human.
50. Never confuse the momentary appeasement of my hunger for latent gluttony.
51. Art, being inherently free, is always menaced by its dependence on artists for its expression. Artists who, suspicious of freedom and, in order to obscure their fear of assuming its responsibilities, are always willing to submit to a patron, an authority, a master, and hence, betray the promise of freedom that art generously offers.
cataclysm: n; Sometimes even the earth gets the urge to make a collage.
collage: n; 1. The primary tool of collage is also a favorite tool for suicide.
5. The joy of collage is the same as that experienced when making art with your father's golf clubs.
6. You cannot be tidy when you are doing collage. That is, collage must do more than blow in through an open door or window, rustling curtains and scattering things which are casually lying about. What is required is the type of wind that can pick locks, open cupboards, overturn bookshelves, and unfasten clothing...
7. Collage is an apology for tearism.
creativity: n; 1. Those who build on the flood plain often have to re-build. but that is a cost readily paid for fertility.
2. Creativity always mocks one's training.
3. “In the world one cannot create by obedience alone” – N. Berdyaev.
5. The wells of superabundance can be plumbed only by patience.
6. Creativity resides in the immediacy of irreconcilable levels of energy (Roger Sessions).
7. The average is repulsive.
8. Contemporary life is characterized by the uncontrollable proliferation of forces that are ignorant of their creative capabilities.
9. “Ce pouvoir de defaire n’implique aucin pouvoir de faire.” – Diderot.
11. The creative life is often viewed as a luxury, as something done only if one has the means, or the time, and certainly only if one is not burdened by more pressing matters. What is lost in this conception is that the creative life, as embodied by an artist, is the exemplary manifestation of what is precisely required in order to lead a truly human life. Such a life, which is the birthright of everyone, is not a luxury, requires no excessive means, is precisely what time is for, and encompasses all that is pressing, all that can not be avoided, or denied. Not everyone can be an artist, and not every artist is a model human being, but the dedication and perseverance that being an artist demands, at every moment, and the inspiration that can accompany such pursuits, is a possibility open to all, and always in a manner that is in accord with the realities of their condition.
12. We never need to unleash our creativity because creativity is nothing to capture, or tame. Our creativity is not even ours. What we call our creativity is something we must encounter, respecting its otherness and refusing any urge to cage or domesticate it.
13. Creativity is the opposite of dying. It is important not to confuse creating with producing, which is a form of resistance to the creative impulse, an active point of suspension between creativity and death.
ephemeral: adj; 1. Achievements which resist time’s effacements often have failed to achieve what is most important.
2. It is a curious and possibly abysmal thought that all we consider solid, permanent, is composed of unstable, ephemeral elements.
3. An encounter with ephemeral art leads us to consider what in our lives could be considered enduring.
4. Ephemeral art is homage to spontaneity, which is a necessity for any free act.