18 November 2014 Kinutil, CDN 193, Guerrilla Romantic by Raymund L. Fernandez They went to Bacolod, co-teachers, his students, and him bringing home only pictures and memories. It is more than enough. When he was a young unmarried man, he thought it a matter of self-discipline that he should hold nothing higher than his art. Those older than him said this was the only way to pursue ones art if one wants to succeed. He has grown old enough to see how wrong they were. The artists of old thought it terms of technique, dexterity and virtuosity in the sense mostly of the classical. They were only trying to acquire the colonizing Western culture, desperately trying to fit it into the culture from which they were born. And, of course, they would fail to some predetermined extent. Used to be that we succeeded in art only to the extent we mastered the foreign, the extent that we got academically educated. It is still the current working formula. But the writing is on the wall, literally. The times they are a-changing. So said Bob Dylan. And Bob Dylan it was, along with so many others, who taught us that art is not, not ever will be, just the mastery of art. Above that, art is the mastery of life. One must therefore put everything else besides art above art if one seeks to be a good artist. True. One can make art about the mastery of art. One might even seek to play Mozart better than Mozart himself. That is not a bad goal. But in these times, it is by far better to take Mozarts engagement with life and translate this into, for instance, installations using bamboo or spaghetti, if not music. Mozart was always far ahead of the art of his times, which is why we remember him. If he lived now he may well have become a guerrilla artist. Every musician like every artist, looks only for a place to play, a habitat on this earth that would feed him and support his life so he can live and do his or her art. This is the truest measure of success. He or she, does not desire for too much. Too much luxury is a waste of precious time better spent in learning about life and about how this translates into ones art. They saw the movie Lucy before their journey. There was a line there which went like: The organism placed inside an an environment conducive to its survival will most likely seek immortality. The organism placed inside a hostile environment will more likely seek to reproduce. His environment has turned him into a teacher and a father of children. And he is too much of an Asian to think in terms of immortality. We only transform. Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and stars. Not even that. No thing lasts forever. What lasts is only the memory of something. All art is only a fossilized artifact of something doomed inevitably to fail beyond its own marketing concerns. Make a painting. If it finds a buyer it goes into a wall and stay there mostly out of view of anyone besides the buyer or collector. . If that painting becomes fortuitously successful it goes into a museum and may be viewed by others generations thereafter. Otherwise, the art that serves people the most are reproduced imagery. Images of art which we find in books and the Internet. The persistence of this imagery is essentially the art itself. In many ways, it is even more important than the original art object. Which is the reason why temporary, non-archival media, graffiti, performance art, are finding a resurgence nowadays. And of these, the most interesting are those art which rebel against the most visible establishmentarian institutions of art, the galleries, the auction houses, even the museums. Which is why, we will be seeing more graffiti in the future. Beyond this, he has been experimenting with his children performance art and guerrilla installations. If you follow this essay in Facebook, searching out Raymund L. Fernandez or Kinutil. You will find there photos of the art of his students to accompany this text. They went to the Visayan Islands Visual Arts Exhibits and Conference (VIVA ExCon) in Bacolod last week and viewed the exhibited art works. Which only encouraged them to contribute their own. Thus, they did guerrilla performance and some installations they documented with pictures. How many will view the images of their art? How far will their images persist through time? Now they will find out. ###
Posted on: Sat, 29 Nov 2014 04:39:26 +0000
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015