Territorial, aggressive, academic displays of power and authority impoverish ways of thinking about art
Keats had an idea he called negative capability..
"....several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature which Shakespeare possessed so enormously -- I mean NEGATIVE CAPABILITY, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason -- " ~John Keats
Linked to uncertainty and doubt is the possibility of non-achievement and even failure. I add to the notion of negative capability the notion of failure as a source of creative production. Even before Samuel Beckett, failure was a facet inextricably bound to the production of art. We artists fail all the time, right?
I like the idea of Certainty being supplanted by Ambivalence. Experimentation and questioning become the dominant mode. A sense of search inheres in the works made with this attitude.
“With the demise of socialist utopias and the upheavals in the former Eastern Bloc, failure was invested with an additional dimension almost 20 years ago that has left an indelible imprint on the artistic production of an entire generation.
-From The Art of Failure
5 May-1 July 2007
A project by Sabine Schaschl and Claudia Spinelli
Our own utopia, known as the American dream, failed at the same time. What is the best way to handle the dismantling of societies and the erosion of values upheld by them? How can new ideals and objectives be formulated and further developed?
There is no evidence at all suggesting the existence of an emerging and universally held world order. With the end of the aspiration to modernity, the consequent end of modernism and the loss of absolute ideals, artists have been called upon to respond to ongoing social changes and a sense of insecurity.
As artists, how do we hold our own in a context of incessant questioning and criticizing? Creating something provisional, non-finite, ambiguous, but at the same time rather serious, straightforward, and non-ironic is a method of turning failure into a compelling act.
I am interested in absence, disappearance, and a concomitant uncertainty in many of my paintings.