Movement is life

What it is about art, that the impetus for production is repression and deprivation? War, sickness, separation. Death. Unresolved love. Crises of the spirit catalyse art. The more we repress the subconscious it seems, the more active it becomes, the more its activity seems to bleed into consciousness and find an eventual manifestation.

The other day I was having a conversation with an Israeli about how much I loved the Israeli approach to movement, and how much respect I had for their movement techniques such as gaga and Feldenkrais. I reflected on how dancers here possess a totality of movement that seems to come from a much deeper attunement to the mind-body connection. She said with a sense of humour that it was because in Israel, where we are surrounded on all sides by the intensity of conflict, war, and crisis, we search for something else to focus on with greater intensity. We search within ourselves.

Perhaps it was environmental pressures that selected Israel to become the mecca of contemporary dance it is today. Richard Wolpert hypothesises that the mind was made to move; that the nervous system was evolved to allow complex movement, citing the example of the sea squirt, which digests its own nervous system for food once it has settled on the rock it will call home. It no longer needs to move, so it no longer needs its brain.

The humble sea squirt, incidentally,
may also present a potential treatment for mesothelioma.

There is something deep within us that needs to move. Whilst it stretches the metaphor to say the sedentary lifestyle is eating our brains and causing strokes, even in the language of evidence based medicine, we know this to be true.

We are in a generation which venerates the mind and dismisses the body. Yet the language of movement is impossible to quantify and analyse through the language of cerebral science alone. It needs to be embodied to be fully understood. That is what dancers do. Research movement. The connection of movement to the body, the connection of moving bodies to each other, the connection of movement to rhythms.

As the world turns to the advancements of medicine and technology for the elixir of health and youth, there is a need to return to the arts. To come back to what is within us, the fundamentals of who we are, and embrace and enjoy what it is to be humans - minds made to do, and to move.

Little Things With Great Love

"God does not call us all to great things, but calls us to do small things with great love." 

-Mother Teresa

Trying to soothe the chronic feeling of inadequacy with the balm of reminding myself that I am enough. I am reminded that it is not about how I want to fashion myself and serve my own ambition, but it is truly that I am His work, and I am fashioned according to his exact purposes.

Today, conversation turned to a hawker who worked from 6am to 10pm frying char kway teow and happily drove his Mercedes to work every day. Then, to a multi-millionaire businessman who, in university, made many friends, enjoyed life, and was mostly having his homework done for him by his more intellectual friends. Then, to someone who loved fiddling with watches, and now consults with top watchmaking companies.

Char kway teow

One capitalised on his culinary skills and became a hawker. Even though he may not be widely acknowledged with a Michelin star, the people who know of him appreciate his work, and he is the local's secret.

The other capitalised on his social intelligence, in working through the system to achieve their own ends, and became a businessman. He followed his interest in people, in talking to others, in managing money and making profit. He might not be as famous and high-profile as Bill Gates, but I doubt that was what he wanted.

All three pursued their passion. Did they know what they wanted? Yet each person created space in their lives to keep doing what they were passionate about.

Every moment of our day, every opportunity that comes our way, we are equipped with the sum of our experiences, skills, temperament and character, and we are leveraging this to move forward. Formally or informally, we are carving our own training pathways, and creating our own opportunities.

Too introverted. Too weak. Bad sleeper. Overthinking again. A litany of deprecation that never ends. I realise that everything is relative, and these weaknesses don't just mean that I am not cut out for something. It means I am better cut out for something else. When it comes to what I want, I would be a fool to think I know what that is.

What I do know is what I am passionate about. God. Loved ones. Writing. Dance. Health.

I realise that His grace is sufficient for me. I am reminded that all I can do is do what I can, with as much love as I can muster. Appreciate what I have. Make the most of the opportunities that lie before me.

I look at the love that I have, and the love that I have not, and lay it all before the one who loves me more than I can conceive of love.

"Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” 

-Matt 11:29-30 NIV

Word Ward

Struck by good writing or powerful speeches, I am reminded of the impressive ability of words. Read a review before you experience a product of consumption - be it actual food, or music, or literature - and you will find your experience indelibly coloured by the words of another. A journalist's grizzly exposition of a prominent personage's transgressions can be the harbinger for his resignation in the imminent future. Two simple words said in front of a congregation cement a lifetime partnership.

There is an odd cadence to words, and a rhythm to them that suggests they have a life of their own. Beyond the speaker and his speech or voice, the words he speaks have an intrinsic music, and a power of their own. The speaker's own abilities, like a musician's, make a difference between a good rendition and a bad one. But ultimately, the delivery is only a rendition. Words in themselves are something purer still. More than content or style, every word has meaning and meanings which you can tease out and make resonate by the way you string them together with other words. Constructed and deconstructed, they are greater than the sum of their parts.

Eloquence and story-telling. Eloquence in story-telling. I promised myself once that I would endeavour to these things. But I have failed my old primary school motto. I have endeavoured, but not persevered, in craftsmanship. Talking to a friend recently, I remarked on how I relied upon the spirit of inspiration to write. Her response was that in order to best do justice to that you need to have the discipline of consistent practise.

Reminded of this, I am resolved to write. I do. Not just as the spirit moves. Not just in fits and spurts, at times engorged on hypergraphia, sometimes starving. But in controlled, intentional way, chewing through the varying forms of texts in a regular diet intended for growth.

Process

Quite possibly the most beautifully eloquent and true pieces of writing I've seen in a while:

The creative process has more than one kind of expression. There’s the part you could show in a movie montage — the furious typing or painting or equation solving where the writer, artist, or mathematician accomplishes the output of the creative task. But then there’s also the part that happens invisibly, under the surface. That’s when the senses are perceiving the world, the mind and heart are thrown into some sort of dissonance, and the soul chooses to respond.

That response doesn’t just come out like vomit after a bad meal. There’s not such thing as pure expression. Rather, because we live in a social world with other people whose perceptual apparatus needs to be penetrated with our ideas, we must formulate, strategize, order, and then articulate. It is that last part that is visible as output or progress, but it only represents, at best, 25 percent of the process.

Real creativity transcends time. If you are not producing work, then chances are you have fallen into the infinite space between the ticks of the clock where reality is created. Don’t let some capitalist taskmaster tell you otherwise — even if he happens to be in your own head.

- Douglas Rushkoff, quoted from brain pickings

Pissed off with dissers

Nowadays it seems to be the fashion to take a very cynical view of life. I opened up the papers and the general tone in every article seems almost blasé. Every reporter seems keen to show just how incredibly stupid and dull everything is to him, whether it's Sarah Palin or the Mona Lisa. Granted, Sarah Palin does seem to have it coming with some of the things she does, but the point I'm trying to make is that journalists seem insist on making every mistake a newsworthy one, just so they can diss it with a yawn.

This could be hasty generalisation based on the fact that I'm only actually exposed to a couple different papers; I don't know. But it seems like journalists' sense of humour lies almost exclusively in criticising other people.

Just today in, well, TODAY, there was an article on the top ten overrated works of art, and the writer references everything from Duchamp's urinal to Hirst's formaldehyde pieces as being so overrated as to not even be worth mentioning. Instead he chooses to attack the likes of Picasso, Vermeer, da Vinci, and van Gogh.

I'll start with his criticism of van Gogh's sunflowers - his problem with them was that he paints 'gazillions' of them in different quantities. Well, I've got a newsflash for you: it's normal. Many painters choose a particular subject and focus on developing their style and technique through the portrayal of that subject. There are just so many things that one can think about in painting still life - the play of light, the composition, the colouring. And if it's the acclaim that's bugging you, then what about Monet's water lilies? Van Gogh's sunflowers aren't even that famous.

As for Picasso not being able to paint properly, well if you want to talk about passe criticism, that has to be it. If his work is overrated, it's because it's been overcritiqued. Part of the point for Picasso was a deliberate shift away from traditional realism to his cubism. It's not like he couldn't paint well if he wanted. And that's the difference between him and the unnamed reporter.

Admittedly, compared to some of the other greats in art, Mona Lisa seems to have had more than her fair share of the limelight, but just because you happened to catch the movie based on The Girl with the Pearl Earring, doesn't mean that it's overrated. It just means you watched a movie about it done in your time. Want to bet that if you were a 60s baby you wouldn't have missed a chance to attack Claudel's Bronze Waltz, just because they did the movie on it? Like van Gogh's sunflowers, I wouldn't say it's more famous than say, Degas' dancers or Botero's fat people. It would seem more likely that the reporter was running out of art that he knew, which really doesn't speak much of his exposure to art, or he wasn't really thinking very much anyway.

Now I don't disagree that a lot of art is simply a way of making money. In fact I wrote something on that some time ago (ok, it wasn't very good, but you definitely aren't reading this blog for quality). But there are more interesting ways to expose that angle on art than dissing famous (or infamous) art pieces.

And while I'm definitely not blind to the irony of dissing dissers, or the value of criticism, I am rather peeved at the self-important way that it seems to be done. In essence, journalists seem to be saying, 'Oh, I'm so terribly unimpressed by the world and amused by its stupidities. Because I'm so terribly important, because I'm bored, you the reader, should be bored too.'

I don't know, but the only thing I get bored of is reading the papers.

Emotion

Emotion is a powerful tool (just like science). But, just like the scientific mindset, it is only too easy for the slave to become the master. It's only too easy for our emotions to overtake us.

Emotion is most powerful as a way of knowing. For instance, admiration for the qualities in others can tell us what qualities are desirable and that we should strive to cultivate in ourselves. Even negative emotions, like guilt, or mortification, are useful in telling us when we have done wrong and can guide us to do better.

But all of us already know this.

It's how to deal with emotion, how to harness its power without being overpowered, that many of us seem to have problems with.

The way I see it, emotion is but a bearer of information. What you do with the information is entirely up to you. As a master of your emotion, you must decide and choose your course of action. Should you let your passion inspire you to do something wonderful? Or will letting your actions be dictated by emotion make you do something dreadful?

A concrete, and simple instance of how to be a master to your emotion lies in the emotion of revulsion. When we see something that is revulsive to us, we learn to look away. This is good. We don't want to be harmed by what we are seeing. However, sometimes we cannot let the emotion dictate that action in response. We must desensitise ourselves from it, for instance, when we must dissect frogs, to reap the maximum reward for that poor frog's life (I call this a love-conquers-all syndrome, where you're letting the love of the frog overtake your disgust).

Having said that though, it is only too easy to let your emotion run away with you. Indeed it's perfectly understandable. When you do this, it's important not to let emotions continue to dominate. Do not be overcome by guilt, or wallow in it longer than you have to. The guilt is important in stopping the other emotions, for instance anger, jealousy, or misplaced love. Beyond that though, wallowing in guilt and allowing yourself to be depressed by it, is pointless.

This mastery of emotion is what will allow temperamental artists to lead a balanced life. It is this that will allow them to play with their emotions in their art.

Perhaps this might mean a limit in the depth of the emotion and art in the works of such artists. But I think that's a sacrifice that I am personally willing to make.

---

muse

–verb (used without object)

1. to think or meditate in silence, as on some subject.

2. Archaic. to gaze meditatively or wonderingly.

–verb (used with object)

3. to meditate on.

4. to comment thoughtfully or ruminate upon.

[Origin: 1300–50; ME musen to mutter, gaze meditatively on, be astonished <>

—Synonyms 1. cogitate, ruminate, think; dream. 1, 3. ponder, contemplate, deliberate.

–noun

1. Classical Mythology. a. any of a number of sister goddesses, originally given as Aoede (song), Melete (meditation), and Mneme (memory), but latterly and more commonly as the nine daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne who presided over various arts: Calliope (epic poetry), Clio (history), Erato (lyric poetry), Euterpe (music), Melpomene (tragedy), Polyhymnia (religious music), Terpsichore (dance), Thalia (comedy), and Urania (astronomy); identified by the Romans with the Camenae. b. any goddess presiding over a particular art.

2. (sometimes lowercase) the goddess or the power regarded as inspiring a poet, artist, thinker, or the like.

3. (lowercase) the genius or powers characteristic of a poet.

v. intr. To be absorbed in one's thoughts; engage in meditation.

v. tr. To consider or say thoughtfully: mused that it might take longer to drive than walk.

n. A state of meditation.

bemuse

1. To cause to be bewildered; confuse. To daze.
2. To cause to be engrossed in thought.

amuse

1. to hold the attention of (someone) pleasantly; entertain or divert in an enjoyable or cheerful manner: She amused the guests with witty conversation.
2. to cause mirth, laughter, or the like, in: The comedian amused the audience with a steady stream of jokes.
3. to cause (time, leisure, etc.) to pass agreeably.
4. Archaic. to keep in expectation by flattery, pretenses, etc.
5. Obsolete. a. to engross; absorb. b. to puzzle; distract.
6. Archaic. To delude or deceive.

Artistic temperament

I mentioned once that artists have to be very patient. Today while honing my craft at piano (read: last-minute practise), I think I figured out why artists are so temperamental.

You see, a lot of art is about the craft - the technique. Mastery of technique is very important in art if you want it to reach new levels. Through mastery of technique, new forms of expression are made available to you. You have a wider range of options from which to choose the most suitable means of expression, and be perhaps more purposeful in the way you express yourself through the art.

But central to art is expression. One transient definition of art (I say transient because art consistently escapes definition) I will employ here is that art is the expression of some aspect of life. We experience lives through our selves (which is why art is often the expression of self), and one of the most powerful ways which we can experience life is through emotion. This is why art is often an outpouring of emotion.

This brings us back to my reason why artists are very often temperamental, and inclined to being moody and passionate. Beyond a mastery of craft, they need a mastery of the art itself. Since art is often an expression of emotion. They need to play with their emotions. They need to gain in depth and breadth in their experience of emtion. That's why they almost need to be temperamental. It's almost pragmatic, even sensible in an artist to be overcome by their passion. They need to do it for the sake of their art.

So as an artist, is it possible to have the best of both worlds? A mastery of art, a diversity of emotional experience from which to draw inspiration from, and at the same time still lead a balanced life? 

I've found that the answer is yes. For me, it's a matter of allowing a stronger emotion to balance my life. Love. In a way it's a struggle between love of art and love of life and the need to separate the too. But when you let your love of life guide you, you will want to lead a healthy life, and keep you sensible. You can let your emotions, positive and negative, find a productive outlet in art, and have it end there.

[Edit: Note to self - from experience, no you can't.  This is just like so many other times, this was just wishful thinking on my part.]

Poetry without words

We often describe movements, particularly dance movements, that are particularly graceful as poetry in motion.  It's funny how we can grow up hearing and accepting phrases and quotes without really understanding their significance.

For instance, I only really just understood, in one of those 'Aha!' moments, the significance of the statement 'dance is poetry'.

Consider: the only words used in poetry are those which are succinct and eloquent, as well as inspired by life.  In essence, that is what sums up dance.  The movements used in dance are distilled from life.

Some poetry has rhyme and meter, but all poetry has rhythm, as does all dance.

But for all I have said I have not really touched the core similarity between these two. It's almost impossible to describe it, although it's wholly tangible. They both share a similar evanescent quality - performed in an instant, but remembered and immortalised for eternity. They are doses of life, of humanity, concentrated and refined into art.

Art as a paradigm for life

Different people have different conceptions of art. This is simple - different people live different lives. And art is life.

Human beings like to compartmentalise, organise, classify, stereotype things. But the thing about things is that they often refuse to be classified. That's why art is life and life is art, but not really.

Art is how you get people to see through new windows, new viewpoints, and live different lives, or just live their own lives better. Art is how you enrich people. A well-written account of an abused child (touch wood, you weren't/aren't one), allows you to experience what it is like, see things in a different light. It allows you to experience things you may not be able to experience in your life. You ponder, and get a bigger, broader perspective.

Art is about self-expression, self-discovery for the artist.

But really, art cannot exist in an artist until the artist has a life outside (used rather loosely - no artist can really be outside art) art. From this life, the artist draws upon the basics for art. It gives him the experience and foundation for his art. However, the artist's life in his art will teach him much also. But without this outside life, there is really nothing for the artist to draw parallels to. The two lives feed off each other, the are one and separate at the same time. They cannot be classified.

So yep, life is art, and art is life, for lack of a better word than is.

Perhaps the most important thing you can learn from art is that you cannot classify things. You just have to let them be the tangled inter-connected, interwoven network of things that they are. But, (and here comes my favourite line) within that complexity, sometimes you can find a startling simplicity. And, maybe by classifiying things, you are just making things more confusing, and further and further away from simplicity.

Everyone is an artist. 

I wanted to write about love,
But I have no one.

I wanted to write about happiness,
But I am lonely.

I wanted to write about life,
But it is empty in words.

Therefore I can only dance.

I dance for sunshine,
I dance for rain,
I dance for joy,
I dance for sadness,
when there are none of these things.

In dance you can live another life.
In dance you can live life.

---

I learned something interesting this weekend. At my singing lesson, my voice teacher remarked that the most important thing for a singer is his/her ears. It's what you use to tell whether you're singing right, or not. It's what other peole use to judge you. It's how she knows whether I'm singing right or not.

I realised that the same principle can be applied to dancing, only this time, it'd be the eyes. Without them, you wouldn't be able to learn new steps, dance in sync with the rest of the class, see if you're using the correct technique, and so much more.

It's all very well to say that, and feel blessed to have a pair of eyes and ears. But really, the thing about it is not whether you can see or hear, but whether you can discern and observe. You may be short-sighted, or long-sighted, or half-deaf, or colour-blind, but it isn't mere clarity of vision and hearing that I'm referring to. It's really the ability to pick out the nuances in what you hear and see and learn from them (although acuity of the senses is definitely helpful when it comes to this).

Post-modernist art

Modern art still is based on the same principles that "olden" art was based upon. Modern art strove to progress in technique without first going back to basic principles, as it were.

Basic human instinct is that of reality. So when one paints a picture that replicates the reality of the world closely, it appeals to this basic human instinct. Put it this way, long ago, cave men drew on walls and stuff to comunicate (eventually this died out as other, more eloquent means of communication came about). Pretty soon, it became obvious that some were better at replicating reality than others.

When people realised that they could make a living off it, they slapped a cool name on it: art. Art sold for preposterous prices. Many rich people wanted themselves forever immortalised by art.

Some artists realised the superficiality of it all, and strove to attach a deeper meaning to the word "art". These people realised that art could also be used to represent things that one could not just see with the eyes, but could be felt with the heart. Because of this, lots and lots of people came and contributed new styles to art, feeling rather fine and dandy.

But with the invention of photography, the issue of reproducability came about. Artists who originally figured that they could make a living of reproducing reality were flummoxed and peeved by this new technology. Artists figured that with photography, the uniqueness of art was ruined, as mass productions of original works of art through photographs could occur, and they would lose big bucks. Luckily for artists though, with people's amazing logic, the opposite affect occured. The more a painting became a poster cliche, the more you had to pay for the original.

Artists were quick to buy into this new system, and exploited this philosophy and realised that any "ready-made" non-art object could be displayed as "art" if dissociated from its original context, use and meaning (abstract). Marcel Duchamp was one of the first to realise this. His best known example is a signed porcelian urinal.

Very soon the aesthetics of art flew out the window and a new era, Conceptualism, came about. Of course, the layman is easily impressed by novel ideas and is now, as a matter of fact, taking in this technique happily.

So with all this, what am I trying to say? In trying to find a deeper meaning to the word "art", artists went about the wrong way. Artists tried to progress in terms of technique, without realising that the reason why much early art was done was because of greed. Because of this, everything from there on was superficial. In trying to find a deeper meaning to the word "art", artists should've realised that their action was trying to find a righteous purpose, a true meaning, to the trade they worked in. In other words, they were trying to find hope.

Balancing ballet

Dancing ballet is the fine art of balance; the balance between relaxation and tension, the balance between movement and stillness, the balance between lifting up from the floor and resisting it. It is a delicate balance of these things that makes ballet art.