Some artists view
the world as if looking through a window at things happening ‘out there,’
while others view the world inside themselves. Either way, the autobiographical vantage point is
implicit.
If art is about
the self, the widely accepted corollary is that making art is about self-expression.
And it is -– but that is not necessarily all it is. It may be only a passing feature of our times
that
validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art.
What gets lost in that interpretation is an older sense that art is something you do out in the
world, or something you do about the world, or even something that you do for the world. The
need to make art may not stem solely from the need to express who you are, but from a need
to complete a relationship with something outside yourself. As a maker of art you are the
custodian of issues larger than self.
Some people who
make art are driven by inspiration, others by provocation, still other by
desperation. Art-making grants access to worlds that may be dangerous, sacred, forbidden,
seductive, or all of the above. It grants access to worlds you may otherwise never fully engage.
It may in fact be the engagement –- not the art–that you seek. The difference is that making
art
allows, indeed guarantees, that you declare yourself. Art is contact, and your work necessarily
reveals the nature of that contact. In making art, you are declaring what is important.
…Carol
Golden
1. Art | Fitting Together
