PAUL BUTLER: the space of forgetting

All men are born free but everywhere are in chains

The City

All men are born free but everywhere are in chains                                                                 2009

THE CREATIVE ACT

MARCEL DUCHAMP:

"In the creative act, the artist goes from intention to realisation through a chain of totally subjective reactions.  His struggle toward the realisation is a series of efforts, pains, satisfactions, refusals, decisions, which also cannot and must not be fully self-conscious, at least on the aesthectic plane.  The result of this struggle is a difference between the intention and its realisation, a difference which the artist is not aware of.  Consequently, in the chain of reactions accompanying the creative act, a link is missing.  This gap represents the inability of the artist to express fully his intention; this difference between what he intended to realise and did realise, is the personal 'art coefficient' contained in the work."

Not thinking

Einstein and others ....

" ..... what interests me ...... is I don't think this process is peculiar to the arts and I think that is what is fascinating.  One of the things I dug out (before the interview) was a book by somebody called Jacques Hanavard who was a french mathematician and he got fascinated and he sent a survey around all his fellow mathematicians asking them ' how did they think?' and he got replies back.  He got a reply back from Einstein and all sorts of people (who) basically ..... said ' well we don't'.....actually once words come. thinking stopped".

Tom Camps interview 21 May 2006

Remembering and Forgetting

 An old  friend, artist, partner in crime, humourist (as so many artists are) Bev Brennan, said one day as we were walking through the Painting studios: “what students don’t understand is that you have to lose control in order to gain control “! Ah! one of those little casual insights that stays with you. In the same way, I suppose, as the unconscious is revealed through those little slips. We all say things which simply express complex ideas. At our lightest we can be most eloquent. Which is precisely the problem: Oh to lighten-up! To not care! – to forget!

Do practitioners forget, whilst theoreticians remember? Notwithstanding the debate about the nature of practice and category definitions such as “Theory” and “Practice”, one of the crucial issues in the debate about the relationship between theory and practice has to do with whether theory must necessarily bear directly on practice, or whether all that theoretical furniture can clutter up the mind causing one to bang into obstacles and trip over things. Theorising should not be confused with thinking. I do not think and then do (I can do both at the same time!) and theory does not necessarily precede practice. Writing does clarify thought but it does not displace practice - practice also clarifies thought. It may be that an internalized knowledge of theory informs thoughtful practice, but we should beware of an implicit hierarchy which makes text synonymous with theory, or places the word above the act - both require an intellectual engagement. Thinking and doing are not mutually exclusive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Beside the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still: the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

TED HUGHES