KUNSTERSTELLUNG
a Statement of Polyphonic Art-Making,
KUNSTERSTELLUNG
Polyphonic Art Making
When a branch grows from a tree, it bears both the name and the nature of the tree. What grows out is the same as what remains within and what remains within is the same as what grows out. Thus, the branch is an expression of itself. -Meister Eckhart
Semper agens, semper quietus
The art-making disciplines, Kunsterstellung, which I serve: painting, printmaking, drawing, puppetry, poetry, even agriculture, are practices of a deep and sincere listening, communion and attentiveness. If I am “telling” a story, I am really only listening to the telling for something of Everything’s Heart afforded by the polyphonic intercourse of the narrative essence with all the idiosyncrasies of my practice, afforded by the energetic physicality of the materials, afforded by the peculiar visual phenomenon of line, light, form, texture and color through the filter of my body or being, and finding its way into the presence of a sensitive interpreting viewer-receiver. In Kunsterstellung, my peculiar position is not of expert or master or knower, but an un-knower, or fool even: the raven who brings the bread. The work does not do my bidding, I serve it: the love concealed. I seek particularly to be a student of these processes and arts in the School of the Transfer of Energy, and to encounter Everything. Kunsterstellung has led me into the desert, has made me into a tree rooted in a hidden grove, has led me into a furnace of unquenchable fire, has placed me in the pupil of the Great Father’s Eye, and has uprooted me and planted me again, upside down as a tree standing on its head. Kunsterstellung places me at the feet of Everything, by its singular virtue, the spiritual mechanics of Kunsterstellung. The art and its artefact are the technology and the witness and the record. They are how I got there and what I saw. The art and its artefact hunger for the never-ending light, remnant from the birth of the Universe, Onforan. Even in darkness they find it, illuminating supervening goodness. The art and the artefact persist, in alchemical and earthy madness, through reliance on the materials grounded obstinately in physical realness for their immanent and imminent transcendence. For art and the artefact, baryonic matter is always on the true liminal verge of transfiguration because of its rootedness in the earth of incarnational material: black ink, oily earths, stone, copper, hide, skin, wood, lignin, cotton, linen, brass, iron, gold and silver, and hands and eyes and brains and bodies and hearts.
Go on.
-jack
As artist’s statements go it completely sidesteps artspeak, which has to be a bonus. I am tempted to say it is actually plainly written; you’ve reached for the most straightforward terms in which to speak of how the ineffable gets translated into those materials shaped by you - which of course will never be straightforward or easy. Perhaps you have made it is simple as it can be, but the plainness is the plainness of poetry that seeks plainness. Come to think of it is has the clarity and difficulty of a manual for some task. Full instructions included! Easy self-assembly!
“The work does not do my bidding” - oof. A simple uncovering of what I often overlook. And now I want seek baryonic matter.