It wasn't until I finished the 32 by 72 inch
panorama some months later that I noticed all the other marks individuals
had subsequently added farther down on the panel. Anasazi, Fremont,
Ute, frontiersman, Chinese, cowboys, and modern day travelers. My
first reaction to the latest additions was, "What is it with these
people anyway? Why do they feel they need to scratch their names and
dates all over the place. This is isn't a bathroom wall. It's a site
of significant historic substance!"
Then, laughing, I found myself, trapped in a
conundrum mid sentence. Age and unanswerable mysteries tend to make things
seem holy. There is a big aesthetic difference between something an illiterate
human painted in the deep past and some tourist's name and date scratched there
two years ago. None the less, everyone who had made their mark there, in a
very primal way was doing, exactly the same thing.
If I could define what they were doing, I
could both, draw a circle around one of the core evidences of modern man, and
define something I had been seriously involved with for sixty years. It
could change the question, (What is art?) to a statement, (What art is.) Even
if such a definition solved the question for me and no one else, it would be
worth the effort.
What art is, begins with an urge to do
something brought on by an awareness of our self beyond the demands of bodily
need. This happens after our animal core is satisfied and there is still an
emptiness needing to be filled. However we choose to fill that emptiness is, in
a very concrete way, us celebrating the awareness of our own life in the now.
What we do to satisfy that conscious need is the Art. What is left i.e.:
painting, drawing, sculpture, video, text, musical chart, record or memory of a
performance is an evidence of that action not unlike the receipt of a
transaction. Therefore:
ALL ART IS A CELEBRATION OF
CONSCIOUSNESS.
The following poetic is my gesture of respect for
those who left their marks on the Sego Canyon sandstone and helped me
comprehend, not only my life passion, but one more piece of the mystery of
human nature.
THE BIRTH OF ART
It is with such indifference
that we the sentient
drift incrementally
into dust.
The Natures,
like mother in the glow
of a back porch twilight,
call us in for the night.
The door closes behind,
and all that we were
is lost,
like toys in the moonlit
grass
of a dream we called
life.
We could have done more.
We should have
stood up from the
stories we were telling
as our distant ancestors did,
selected the best rocks,
and good flat walls of stone,
rich in patinas of brown and
red,
to paint, peck,
or scratch
our dreams out
for all to see
how it was
to be,
us.
Here we are.
Great hunters with
spectacular genitalia
and weapons blessed by the
spirits we see in dreams
in the very act
of turning our hard sought
animals
into food.
When we return to our
fertility goddesses,
'we scratched images of them
on that other wall,'
there will be feasting,
laughter, greasy faces,
swollen bellies, and warm
breasts
to curl up with until
dawn.
Even when we follow game to
the far horizon
There will be something of us
here,
And when we return next year
we will laugh at what
we have done,
feel good and make more
images.
Us in this place now,
and even if we never
return
we will still be
here forever,
good work.
copyright 2014 Malcolm
Graeme Childers
"AN ANCIENT
CONSCIOUSNESS AWAKENS IN THE VANDALISTIC SOUL OF THE TAG PEOPLE,"
CAVE HENRAUX,
CAMPAGRINA, ITALY
This next image continued the "nature of
Art" conversation in my head. Before humans developed a written
language, pictures were the only permanent way they could convey
conscious meaning to themselves and others.
With the development of symbols to stand in the
place of their language, there was considerably less need to spend time making
pictures. In the Sego Canyon photograph above, this shift is as
remarkable away from pictures to words as it is from words to pictures in this
next photograph.
Even though I revel in the range and energy that
the written word provides, I know there are places that writing can't go.
Writing is limited by the time someone has to read and the continuing varieties
of language, The visual image delivers its initial content with much greater
speed and has a much longer expiration date. Try reading Beowulf in the
original text and you will see what I am talking about. Unless you are an
expert in primitive English you will probably get more comprehension out of a
sculpture or mosaic from the same period that you will from the Beowulf in the
original.
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