Found in the notebook of ten years ago, dated 21 September 1999. Very much a draft, it was nonetheless written with potential publication in mind. I’ve reproduced some the draft-editing with the cross outs.

I recently watched an NFB film during the Atlantic Film Festival held in Halifax last September. And because it was the NFB, they had a two minute long (five minutes?) montage/ad showing various clips from their archives, to pat themselves on the back with the motto, ‘the images of our lives: NFB/ONF 1939-1999. Sixty years … etc. It reminded me of that the NFB is one of the few cultural products that Canada produces which is more obviously cultural. We are the country that claims to have a culture around shopping merchandise outlets (Eatons, The Bay) and a bunch of grown men chasing a rubber disk around on an artificially frozen slab of ice. (are Canadian examples of Can culture. This is not something to be proud of. It is just pathetic). My point is that what Canada claims to call its culture is really the experience of games and corporations. Anthropologically, there is a case for this, but it’s convoluted.

Now the Americans have a culture, there is no denying that. They have important painters and writers and musicians. And they have their Hollywood which claims to produce a cultural product (but in reality seem to produces 2 hour long for commercials they are commercials for the actors and the directors and the toy companies and in the at the turn of the century, the digital effects magicians).

Of course, the technically minded will remind us that the century doesn’t start until 2001, which illustrates why the technically minded’s reason and logic have never been too popular, because they ignore psychological realities. You have to reason it out, it’s not obvious, that the century starts in 2001. And the really stupid will say the same about the millennium, but it’s obvious that millennium are periods of a thousand years. I learned that three zeroes males a thousand. We didn’t call 999 two years before the millennium. Nineteen will change to twenty, ninety-nine will change to a thousand. One thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine will become two thousand. Roman numerals will be succinctly MM. And that doesn’t stand for Much Music – mille mille, a thousand thousand.

The NFB montage reminded me that film has been the dominant art form of this century. I would rather watch a movie based on a book than read the book, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this. Purists might think I’m lazy, that I’m some aesthetic chump, but why should I be embarrassed or ashamed to prefer a succint version of literature that I can enjoy visually?

Film images are so important to our turn of the century culture the NFB, Canada that they belong to everybody. Sure it says the NFB, it says Canada but it belongs to the world.

[This written as a callout]: Canada is an important source of important films that contribute to the world’s culture.

[Then this gets personal/reflective]: It occurred to me and then slipped from my grasp. What art was all about. It’s endlessly annoying to hear how art has been categorized, fit into a conceptual framework so that when an educated, supposedly sophisticated art person can give an answer when challenged by the question of certain exhibitions or curious crowd/patrons.

To me, the ability to give an answer to the question of what is art is means you in some ways missed the mark. I don’t think art is about questions and answers. I don’t think art is about meanings. I’ve come to appreciate that is which is [sic] dumbfounding, that which is wordless. An experience that is felt and not explained. It is a zen like think for me.

So, it is the information age / the space age / the computer age / etc etc. The multitude of names for a period in which we are living, exemplifies one of the stupidities of our post modern age times. “Agh, its too much! Too much …” etc etc. I suppose that type of condition, much cliched now, is the appeal of a dumbfounding art. Perhaps there are many of you that wish to understand, to grasp, who have believed that to know s the goal. But why? A painting is just another picture, a sculpture is just another lump to navigate around. I doubt that there have been such a large number of talentless hacks, that we, as audience members, and the witless appreciative hacks.

To make something that is different, to put something which engages the mind and the senses.

The importance of artistic things in our lives is numerous – the importance of being dressed, the TV shows we must watch, the song we must dance too.

The broad view is the existential one, that we will all die, and so who cares about anything. But death is not a reality for the majority of us. Most of us will not die tomorrow. And while we are young we are infused with the impossibility of death. We can afford to be bored. Art for us can be meaningless. Our young women can afford to listen to Celine Dion and Mariah Carey.

Art appears to be the biggest side show of all. Here in colonial North America, haunted by a past that as Canadians we are ignorant of, and haunted by the American history and the American culture, culture is a terrible thing, something to avoid by going shopping at Eaton’s, or by watching a hockey game.

Psychological Realities

If art has value it is in teaching the dominance of psychological reality over the land of logic and reason. I certainly am not advocating stupidity, but to be conscious and balanced historically what has been called “a well rounded person”. We must balance the basic stupidity of reason with the knowledge of experience. Art is one of the best, if not the best and the if not the only appropriate medium/vehicle for the communication of experience.

I like my art to be fantastic and fanciful. Full of make believe. Fairy tales. I don’t like my art to be political and the pretentious. I don’t like people who judge and make enemies based on style.

[The following is dated 22 September. Here I anticipate some of what I’ve encountered studying Christopher Alexander’s ideas about ‘centres’ and ‘wholeness’]

? Art is a manifestation of being. Art objects exist, but they are object or concepts that are dependent on other objects and concepts. They are structured from pre-existing structures. Art are a posteriori objects/concepts.

? Art objects contain souls. That is, there is within them an element that excites the subtleties  sense of the subtle. Art objects, because they are fabricated from pre-existing structures, like life forms, carry within them elements of the auras of meaning from their ancestors. A collage is just not a coll glue and fragments, it’s a little bit of this magazine and this it’s sources.

[More personal/reflective]

What is the need to vocalize, to write this down? If I want an art that is free from conceptual frameworks and labels, why do I find myself penning an essay on art? Won’t the readers use this to formulate new soundbites on art?

An attempt to understand using the tools of understanding: that is an effect on language. The constructed object is a creature of being more eloquent and noble than a drop of sweat of a pile of excrement.

The sufferings today caused by a lack of dignity. To create if to dignify o
bjects and surfaces.

Human dreams in concrete form
Wonders of the imagination
Achievements of the imagination
The Image nation

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