Mission Statement & A Tribute To An American

Here, for archival reasons only, the original verbose description of this blog and below the new visual one

An amused to comfortable numbness hi-tech rock-solid heavy-fossil-fuel-fired journey through the scandal-scam-spam-pornography-infested, fact-fiction info-overdosed cyberspace as well as through the cemented and asphalted terrestrial biotopes and bank-bourse-blessed cash-crops-saturated bizarre Bazaars of our planet, occasionally _ as a reprise, spiced with bemused wanderings through the still green and lush gardens of the Muses.
For brave-hearts only!

Revealed quite appropriately on 11 September, being as it is, a tribute to an American and his Jack of many Hearts, i.e., all those hearts that beat in more than one dimension and sometimes even in unison!

Scribe of the Muses
Mushtaq Bhat

Photo of Bob Dylan (digital manipulated) 1963
CBS Archive (courtesy: www. coldhaus.com )

Why The Muses?

The overt homage paid by the modern enlightened post-industrial Self-Awareness, which is generally regarded as the consciousness of the modern human being¹ to it's own achievements, although having played absolutely no part in its genesis, and manifested amongst other things in it’s disregard of the Muses, is according to my, predominantly an artists point of view, a reflection of the ignorance about the vast elusive recesses and resources of the human mind, fleetingly and superficially comprehended by the individual, and even if disclosed to a chosen few, a secret to the community.

Can you elucidate? An example?

Well thoughts, especially as creative solutions to a problem are not weaved by awareness but are offered to awareness as ready made solutions. And you yourself are surprised and need to shout, "Eureka!"

Who does that?

At present, I have no better word than the Muses.

Why not multi-cameral gods, the monotheistic God, the great Spirit, the demons?

That would be sociology, psychology and history and social-anthropology, which would however highlight only a small spectrum of that specific aspect of the mythology in which we are interested. Such a way of describing the phenomena would probably leave this aspect out of the discussion but not out of the reality or banish it from the life we live.

Do you mean to say, mythology is not dead?

It never was! It is only the terminology that changes. The behavior of a native in some remote culture, collecting relics of some dead person may be Christianized, by the Christian anthropologist as fetishism or something similar, the phenomena being perceived within an implicit linear evolutionary framework and left to the anthropologist to explain, whereas a fan collecting souvenirs from Elvis Presley is indulging in a personal hobby and the phenomena falls in the realm of the sociologist. In similar way, the primitive cults of persons are relived even at the Universities, you can have a cult of the Professor or a school of thought or a cult of the Rocky Horror Picture Show and the Star Wars.

They are not the same?

They may or may not be, however they seem fulfill certain similar human needs, albeit under different guises.

Alright, why not say, some dynamic structures at lower levels of mental hierarchy, which although at present shrouded in mystery, may one day be accessible to this very awareness, you accuse of being ignorant and arrogant, thereby consolidating them and even controlling them and ensuring the victory of the Socratian reason?

Victory of the Socratian reason? You probably mean the victory of Newton? They are two different things. No doubt you can create temperatures below absolute zero, split an atom, own and exploit mines on Mars, but look at the state the world is in? Millions and millions of human beings in all societies, enlightened or primitive are willy-nilly drawn in a conflict, that has to do with some acres of almost barren and increasingly hostile-to-life piece of land, reminiscent of the sea-lions at the time of breeding, and nobody seems able to solve this conflict. May be here is something more involved than just resources and even history! And it is an evidence of the sorry state in which the human and political sciences are wallowing! One would assume, we have not till now discovered even one single pertinent fact about the human mind, that could make a difference. Human sciences have no Newton. And don't forget Heisenberg, you will probably be revealed mostly that, what you have yourself induced.

This sounds hopeless?

Far from that! Human sciences need a Martin Luther and not a Newton, albeit of different sort. Someone to remove the middle man and the unintelligible texts, manuscripts and middle-age gibberish between the ruling class and the masses, between the almost always warped rationalizations of the demagogues and consens producers and their followers or subjects, between the weapon producers and their helpless victims, the children and in dearth-living hard-working innocent families. No not a Newton, but educators and teachers, who impart the global village kids a knowledge of why we are, where we are; teaching them, how not to accept the lies, partial-truths and biased interpretations of history or the delusions of their peers and self-proclaimed benefactors but the achievements of the worthy historical persons. They are the only persons capable of removing the need for demons, which still feed on ignorance.

Eh, the Muses?

Apollo with his torch! The Muses! And the dance!

---

¹albeit represented by an almost negligent part of its academic population, a population moreover still mainly ruled, besides some minor or greater gods and trendy-tides, by

1. the representatives of the lowest common denominator (evident in genuine but hard-to-find democracy),
2. a class of individuals obsessed with power and social prestige and the ultimate symbol of success, worldly wealth (when the populace is manipulated and persuaded with "convictions" rather than facts, which the latter love more than they love football),
3. by foreigners or natives, who talk and behave like foreigners at home and who accumulate wealth in foreign banks, use foreign goods, as they purchase foreign cars and deodorants and weapons, with which they terrorize the "natives" and exploit their resources,
4. by a clergy, interpreting and elucidating to their deliberately in-ignorance-held-sheep, some difficult passages from ancient manuscripts,
5. by marauding gangs of dissidents, freedom-fighters, revolutionists, folks-heroes, religious-dogmatists, communists, anarchists, drug-lords, war-lords, weapon-traders, mafias, gangsters, small-girls-exploiting sex-barons and an exotic new species of stream-lining mass-sacking managers, who get paid with fruits of the labor of those they sack and
6. only in rare cases by a Solon or a Solomon!

Art? For Whose Sake Please?

I have an instinctive inhibition of protesting against any historically inherited episteme, not because I think they may be eternal but because I am too well aware of the fact, that such a protest it is quite often just a methodology to:

• to prize one’s wares,
• to justify one’s own work,
• to promote one’s own self,
• to cater to a public looking for new sensations, especially in modern information- and products-saturated world and
• to pose it as a problem that is bringing havoc to our real world (and not merely to an academic or market episteme, which may be justified and therefore a legitimate protest), when in fact it is utterly removed from it’s most significant and mind-boggling problems, when such preoccupations with conceptual abstractions may appear to some, as spoilt children’s luxuries feeding on the market-economy surplus, whose aim may be more to keep the surplus from seeping down, creating modern Baal’s in order to heuristically fulfill the needs of a specific alienated groups of the populace and consumers or even to create such a surplus on value in mind and market. No doubt Phidias and Da Vinci may have been a problem for the Artist Picasso, but not for the mankind __ Phidias and da Vinci still are towering giants, whereas Picasso, although no doubt a great artist of a century, can feed historically only on crumbs. And many of the works of the varied schools of this and that after cubism literally fade before the works of some African artist, who can show an astounding stilistic consistencies and varieties, if that is what it is that really matters in art without their fighting and debasing another school of thought or some self-created ghosts of the past. The conceptualization and all the associated mind-boggling interpretations of modern artwork are a wallowing of elitist in morass of smudgy terminologies. Detached from the problems of masses of humanity and their plight, moulded in cement of the metropolis, smugly looking down from Olympian heights on the rest of us, callous to the danger of loosing our most precious resources, like fresh water and wild-species of plants and true to their upbringing in cement perpetually alienated from the developments in biology and invariably still committed to mechanistic geometrical abstractions and synthetic materials, oblivious of our great biological heritage; they find absolutely nothing aesthetic or mind blowing in the acts of creation, the significance of an earthworm, the complexity in the eyes of a fly, the aesthetic in a flower, their own motives and their creations of a few lines of metal wires eliciting eulogies of fertile imaginations reminiscent of the mind-boggling pantheon of the million gods of the Hindus and more complicated to understand than the works of Darwin, Einstein or Shakespeare. An almost obsessive preoccupation with insignificance and subtly in tune with the accumulators of wealth and their potlatch mentality. Thousands and thousands of pages have been written on a certain abstract painter, more than on da Vinci. Understandable _ da Vinci needs no interpreter! Much of it elicits no participatory reactions from the ordinary folks with common sense. Not necessarily so with historically inherited and well established emotive and liberating and positively enriching experience of the people through centuries, who witness these great works of art, be it the Parthenon, the Pyramids, Borobudur, the Sistine Chapel, the Taj Mahal or the Venus of Praxiteles or the landscape of a Dürer, Rembrandt, Turner or Monet _ and they are not an inheritance from the times where the ruling paradigm was at-any-cost morbid, sterile, conceptual aesthetic, bereft-of-positively- emotive- participation of the onlooker. Of course not being constrained by the past and demeaning and even debasing the past are two different things., but I am afraid this is what occurs in most of the contemporary critic’s eulogies to the modernist. Who am I debase such giants on whose shoulders we all stand, to inculcate in the public a profane attitude toward the real great achievements of great men and woman and most important shared global values? This is perhaps the reason that three colors on a canvas are purchased by a national museum on tax-payers money for mind-boggling 25 million dollars, whereas hardly anyone has 200 dollars for restoration of the Borobudur or for the protection of the Taj Mahal , the Pyramids or the Parthenon or some other great artworks and manuscripts!

No artist should be well aware of the problems currently besetting us all and a morbid preoccupation with one’s own ego, obsessive indulging in conceptual endless cyclic abstractions are only good as long as the artists can live in a false sense of security, inherited by being on the temporarily better side of the global biotope absolutely unwarranted by the state of the world and probably reinforced through the negligence of the change occurring outside their secure world, which may topple overnight if not properly addressed and refrain from attacking global shared values in order to promote their own financial gains and prestige.

No this is not ethics but a bitter fact that we all have to confront. The world is changing fast and its problems are increasing. One of the greatest issues is not conceptual abstractions of thousands of modernists but danger we all face through the disappearing ethnic- and biodiversity, which may suddenly make these preoccupations seem… well ? A joke of mother nature!

I hope that this all does not appear as a provocation; far from that, my aim is to present perhaps a view, that may express the feelings and ideas of a lone artist, in order to emphatically assert that there artists around that don’t necessarily subscribe to a homogeneous episteme, which in my opinion is subtly manifested in the media. And although knowing well I could subscribe to the current episteme with probably less effort than to the one I am committed to, I don’t because I know too well, that my Muses are from a different category and they are as real as those evident here but from a different Universe!

The Image of The Artist _Then & Now

Mark Irving's article: Artists on the road to martyrdom

Times Online UK (06.07.2006)
about the exhibition:
Rebels and Martyrs: The Image of the Artist in the Nineteenth Century, National Gallery, London WC2
(www.nationalgallery.org.uk ), June 18-August 28

and commented upon in Art-News Blog

The above article and the comments that it gave birth to, are the factors that inspired me to blog my own views (my first ever public-place blog, a late-comer at an advanced age of 54yrs). I suspect the issues discussed here do touch my own personal convictions and feelings as an artist to such an extent that I feel I can't let the matter rest as it is, without adding or contradicting some arguments or just adding a couple of verbal ingredients, which may however be far from reality but nevertheless hopefully make the final dish a bit more spicy and no doubt thereby reinforce the arguments presented.

In all of the fore-going comments, the arguments are apparently based on the premise that all of the creative artwork ( of the genius artist) or the routine productions (of the “artisan” designer) are basically willed conscious acts. I however doubt if the explaining away of a designer, “I am doing this meaningless work, because that is what they want” holds true. I am inclined to believe, that if she/he really wanted to do something different, he/she would somehow find time and means to do so. There may be more subtle reasons behind such a type of rationalisation, in fact in having chosen a specific profession, the person has already made a decision, which may fulfil other more important needs, than just the one for being creative in any specific way. It is more a question of an inner urge rather than rationalisations of the thinking mind, that determines the grade of achievements in fields of all creative endeavours; coupled with a privilege system, that the person has been inadvertently inherited or that has been imposed upon him/her due circumstances ( as happens, when one feels helplessly succumbing to the norm that makes for news and headlines in the media at any given time) or in rare cases, that an artist has willingly chosen _ a specific “episteme” as the determinant for ones endeavours, in tune with personal goals in life. The last being by far the most resilient feature of any good artist.

But chance and opportunities play no less an important role.


There is certainly some truth in artistic destiny!

It may however be

• associated with talent and an upbringing that reinforces this urge positively, Picasso may be an example. How many great talents all over the world, do grow up in an environment that fosters this potential?
• An artists stilistic specificity and themes may be incongruous to the times, ahead of their times or just in tune with the time, if the artist is an original content creator and not a sign-of- the-times pattern-weaving message-multiplying voice-amplifying agent. Like a wave, an artists peculiar stil may arrive at its highest amplitude after his/her death in the public or the art-community mind and media consens, loose energy and reappear with new vigour sometime later. These aspects are beyond the control of an artist. True one artist can probably “smell” the public opinion more than the other and consciously tune his output accordingly, but public is a very fickle connoisseur, and anything done with primarily the public in view may have very unpredictable consequences, to say the least. Generally there should be less remorse at the failed endeavour, if I remain true to myself, compared to the one totally dedicated to the current trend or the public opinion.
• European self-depiction and self-pride as manifested in European Art is as old as Albrecht Dürer. Whereas Cranach was an disembodied eye, Dürer certainly knew and was proud of his worth. With Rembrandt, it gained a new venue (his self-portraits sold well in England, in the new upcoming middle-classes). The new modern episteme in West however appears to have five major reasons behind it.
  1. A post Freudian legacy, that lays stress on subconscious and symbols of new meanings created through indulging in the recesses of the mind, and that gained ascendance, as more and more of the socially traditionally accepted norms (especially religion) lost hold on the society, with the result, the people in west becoming increasingly occupied with their egos. Without doubt Freud had significant impact on visual artist, especially through the intermediate medium of the literary artist, who absorbed Freud without critic for decades after his death.
  2. The modern implicit distrust of any explicit altruistic and ethical declarations of individuals, artist, politicians and corporations, which has lead to a new norm that appears to be something, that one can accept at its face value without having to take recourse to the countless subjective meanings attached to it by the media and the experts:  "I and My Feelings & Convictions!"
  3. The increasingly sharp demarcations in the fields of human endeavour, the over-specialisation,the wide diversity in the media, any of which can function in a post-Duchamp world as a mode of expression and social communication (with a catalytic input by a growing class of media experts and critics)_ facts that squeeze the artists in very small enclosures and niche’s. Even a universal genius like da Vinci would have hard time today to master a few fields of cumulative knowledge, let alone remain up-to-date!
  4. The penetration of the media, the world of Banks and Bourse, Corporations and the auction houses into the secluded world of the academia, radically transforming it’s ethic and episteme and catapulting it into a state of disorientation, where any recourse to an unifying theory of aesthetic would elicit only a condensing smile at an quixotic enterprise. The artist is left more than ever to seek his own answer. And more often than not it seems to be leading to some artists making it well in the market place, with their individual neurosis, obsessions and fetishism and their local Baal! A sign reminiscent of all periods of great transformations in civil societies.
  5. A lack of more self-transcending goals in social fabric, explicitly bereft of values independent of money and what it entails!

Seems as if each true artist has to solve this main dilemma of his/her life alone. There can be no general advice for us all, except that the work itself should give us a sense of achievement and satisfaction rather than the public consens. The creative act itself, and I well believe that it can do that, and it should be a reward in itself, not to be measured with what you can barter it in for or who will hang it on the wall or display it in the show-rooms or how many news-feeds it creates. And if it does imply all that, so much the better. But it seems that one of the most successful artist of our times, as far as these aspects are considered, is in a more-than-in-an-usual way, (I won’t say in a obsessive way, since we probably all are aware of all those busting and inflations of the market place) preoccupied with the ephemeral nature of the glance-metal gold, he even worries about his bank going bankrupt. This is no doubt the result of the lopsided extremes evident in almost every field of modern enterprise, extremes of success and wealth and extremes of anonymity and poverty and what they imply for an creative artist. There seems to be at present no golden middle way existent! Or if there is one, it is inadvertently hidden from the view of the opinion-consumers of modern times!

Make it to the top or go bust!

Mushtaq Bhat

artist@mushtaqbhat.com