To be frank, all comments on either the meaning or purpose of anything are irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, because all are but a form of ideology, a kind of software that runs in our minds if you will, and contrary to common belief that humans are nothing more than complex Turing machines, no programs are actually alike.<\/p>\n
What I believe my purpose is, could not be further from what you or your friends might think your goals in life should be; while we might all resemble each other in the ways we operate \u2014 we may wish to expand, to satiate our insatiable curiosity about life, to play and consume and of course gain as much power as we can (or believe is appropriate to have) \u2014 each and everyone of us has a distinct means of operating in the world.<\/p>\n
What I\u2019d like to focus on today is the distinction between form and function or between self-actualisation and power appropriation.<\/p>\n
But I think a bit of foreword is necessary to explain this possibly convoluted choice of a dichotomy that, like many philosophical ventures into the banalities of over-theorisation \u2014 this hopefully not being one \u2014 can produce, when \u201cknowledgable and well informed\u201d minds tend to propose the proverbial 2 + 2 = whatever-the-heck-I-want-it-to-be equation in their thinking and at first glance making it work by twisting and oversimplifying semantics.<\/p>\n
I hope I won\u2019t succumb to this, but as with all my blunders, all you lovely souls are the judge and you can all decide not to leave any tip for today\u2019s blunder if you so decide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n (The tip jar by the way is located on the website called Patreon, so if you wish to find it \u2014 so as to be able to ignore it \u2014 just type in Surviving Art into the search box. Or if you\u2019re feeling generous and like my blunders, well, you can choose to drop a coin and support this channel \u2014 it is called Surviving Art, and as Austin Dobson so eloquently puts it: \u201cThe bust outlasts the throne, the coin Tiberius.\u201d)<\/p>\n But back to pondering the meaning of life and what not.<\/p>\n Form and function rule the world of the living; the former making up the world and the latter giving purpose to it. And I do not mean this in any mystical or magical or even religious way, because form is merely the substance that we call reality \u2014 but function, function is something different entirely.<\/p>\n For someone that has dabbled in philosophy, function can quickly come to mean functionalism or the view that form is irrelevant, what actually matters is what things do, how they behave and how such behaviour can be experienced.<\/p>\n On a side note, functionalism is extremely entertaining as the core of such a view on life and reality as a whole dictates one to believe that a 1 to 1 copy of me \u2014 let\u2019s call it a zombie me \u2014 that would look like me, behave like me and pretty much do things exactly like me, but would not have any free will or any means of actually expressing himself (or itself, I\u2019m not sure if zombies have genders, because the movies tell us that they reproduce asexually by gnawing), well, that zombie copy of me would by all functionalist terms and conditions be considered the same as me.<\/p>\n Free will and attention thrown out the window, such a creature obviously isn\u2019t even close to what makes a person or even a human, but such is the belief of functionalist philosophers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So, this is not a functionalist text, what I wish to talk about is function as projection. When I make anything that I decide to call art \u2014 be it a painting, a sculpture or just a random movement, backed up by a bunch of gibberish theoretical text from the golden 60s, the renaissance of performance \u2014 whatever I create that I decide to call art, becomes art only if I actually believe it is art.<\/p>\n This is the never-ending question of what art is, that we talked about in the last blunder. The experience of any object or subject as art, makes it so. And now, I think it would be interesting to venture further into the details of how and explore the incredibly interesting question of \u201cWhy?\u201d!<\/p>\n But, let\u2019s start with form.<\/p>\n Form is nothing but potentiality \u2014 not to confuse speculative realists, material potentiality, that is potentiality to be used or become anything it is capable of becoming via the act of projecting function.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The true nature of form is absolutely inert, it does what it can; water flows downhill, fire burns, hot air goes up, cold water sinks to the bottom of a glass\u2026 Form is reality, moved and transformed by the physical rules that govern our universe.<\/p>\n And again, contrary to common belief, there is nothing even remotely interesting about form \u2014 at least not for any reasonable human mind \u2014 but to be honest, human minds weren\u2019t created to see form. We mostly see function.<\/p>\n When looking at a stick in a forest, it might not even register \u2014 it\u2019s a damn stick and nobody cares, there are thousands of them and when one is taking a hike, there\u2019s really no use in looking at sticks if you have hills and \u201cthe sublime nature\u201d to look at.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But when our walking stick breaks or we sprain our ankle and need something to help us walk back home, suddenly a myriad of interesting and appealing sticks start to appear before us.<\/p>\n When we indeed need anything, we become attune to finding it. That\u2019s the crap that The Secret tried (and sadly succeeded) to sell and while doing so, sparked the entire self-help market for years to come.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n (If you\u2019ve never heard of The Secret, it\u2019s a book about how positive thinking will make you happy, rich and content and how negative thinking by the Jewish community was partially the reason for the holocaust \u2014 dear lord the author\u2019s words, not mine, the book is complete rubbish is all I can say.)<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not wishing for something that makes it magically appear \u2014 I can dream of sticks night and day, I can make pretty drawings of them and pray to the stick god that he may be so kind as to grant me one someday, but if I live in the centre of a desert and more or less eternity stands between me and the next thing that even vaguely resembles a tree or bush, there will be no stick for me.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Ever.<\/p>\n This phenomena of suddenly constantly seeing or encountering a particular object \u2014 like when you buy a new car and out of the blue there are hundreds of cars of the same model on the road \u2014 is just a natural process of how our attention works.<\/p>\n Imagine the first people that roamed the earth with no clue as to what was edible and what was not; if they had no ability to memorise familiar objects and get adept at finding them again and again, we\u2019d all be extinct due to berry poisoning hundreds of thousands of years ago.<\/p>\n But we didn\u2019t, and all because our minds are incredibly attuned to finding patterns and familiarities in our surroundings. That\u2019s why abstract art, that isn\u2019t that well done is so horrible to look at; the second that blotchy painting kinda resembles a penis or a weird smiling octopus, the magic and intrigue is out the window. All you\u2019re left with is a hidden dick pic or marine life snapshot of questionable quality on your wall and the hope that no-one else ever sees either of them.<\/p>\n Form for us is mostly an amorphous void, an amalgamation of a myriad of unimportant bits and pieces and the only thing that makes it appear on our \u201cradar\u201d and gets it noticed by our mind is if we find it interesting. It could be beautiful, or ugly or just plain sad. Could be a horrendous or grotesque experience \u2014 the main point is, that it must be something, because if it\u2019s nothing of interest, it might as well not even exist.<\/p>\n Here learning comes into play; the more we know, the more we understand our surroundings and the environment that we live in, the more we are capable of noticing things. And if the first step is understanding, we need to focus on it primarily, because understanding can only be found in form.<\/p>\n Form therefore is the act of curious exploration and the creation of understanding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Sociologists call this the act of transference. Not to be confused with Freud\u2019s idea of transference \u2014 the act of projecting feelings about someone else, particularly someone encountered in childhood, onto ones therapist \u2014 something Sigmund liked to call \u201cplaying daddy\u201d. This is the pure idea of transference, the act of spreading ones boundaries, ones body and being into the world.<\/p>\n To put it simply, when I buy a new watch, it becomes my watch by me paying for it, wearing it, scratching it when having fun with my friends and eventually loosing it, because it sometimes happens and life isn\u2019t about material things anyway so you learn to live with the loss and just become content with using your phone like most other people.<\/p>\n Somewhere in the beginning of my encounter with that watch is when the act of transference happens; when I decide that the watch is suitable to become part of my body \u2014 not my physical body, at least not until Phillips or Samsung begin selling implant timepieces \u2014 but my perceptual body.<\/p>\n The same body that grows exponentially when I sit in my car, the same one that gets even bigger when I come home to my apartment and that gets tiny when I am stranded on a busy street during rush hour and thousands of strangers are rubbing against me, while I keep constantly checking if I still have my wallet and keys.<\/p>\n Our bodies really don\u2019t end at the skin \u2014 one could argue that even the parts that keep us alive don\u2019t just reside inside of us (we have air, water, food and other sources, that we constantly need to replenish in order to stay alive, none of them really only coming from within us, but all incredibly vital for our survival).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The human body \u2014 and the body of every evolved creature, because it\u2019s not just humans that have this ability \u2014 has a physical and a perceptual volume; the physical being our meaty vehicle, and the perceptual being whatever we have transferred ourselves upon.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n That\u2019s function.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n And what is function if not the ability to control, to have power over something, to make it yield beneath our bodies and make it a submissive part of ourselves, to be used for whatever we please and discarded whenever we tire of it or it has served its purpose?<\/p>\n A bit dark, I admit, but true. Function is our attention, our perception and ability to remember certain objects in such vivid detail, that we are instantly able to recognise them as our own \u2014 even though there are millions of the same kind or type of them on the market all around the world.<\/p>\n Functions give us purpose \u2014 they are what Nietzsche called: \u201cThe necessary illusion.\u201d, a fake and completely unreal value of reality, not in any way pertaining to it, but vital to our survival as a species.<\/p>\n Had we not evolved this ability, we could not even dare to dream about understanding what other people want or need \u2014 in other words, compassion towards others. Because compassion, like all other social skills, is based on one core aspect: Humans have the ability to understand not only their own functions, their own illusions (even though no sane person calls them illusions; we like to use the word beliefs or politics or religion or philosophy\u2026), but the illusions of others \u2014 at least to an extent.<\/p>\n This is the true power that we have, the true head start that we have gotten from evolution or god or some high-school alien researchers that did a terrible job tending to their science experiment and dumped it on some rock, far away from their teachers perceptive organs (I have no idea what aliens use to interact with reality, but I am rooting for ocular tentacles).<\/p>\n It is our ability to be able to feel compassion and empathy and to anticipate other peoples moves, to manipulate and destabilise and lie and cheat and fake that makes us superior to any other life form on our planet.<\/p>\n And it is the same capability that makes us believe in god(s).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n But more on this next time.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n I hope this one wasn\u2019t too philosophical or sociological, but to be frank, without understanding what we are and how our most basic means of expression operate, we might become great craftsmen and craftswomen, but I do not believe we can become great artists.<\/p>\n Because to be able to mould reality into whatever we wish it to be, to infuse objective reality with illusions and dreams and to create ideological structures inside even the most common objects, like chairs or butter, we first need to understand reality.<\/p>\n In the past, there were alchemists (the predecessors of modern scientists) and you might think of the contemporary artist as one too \u2014 but unlike the alchemists of old, the artist\u2019s words and creations, our intricate ability of expression can actually turn anything into gold.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Just look at any contemporary art auction today.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To be frank, all comments on either the meaning or purpose of anything are irrelevant in the grander scheme of things, because all are but a form of ideology, a kind of software that runs in our minds if you…<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog-uk"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2262"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4792,"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2262\/revisions\/4792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2262"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2262"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/survivingart.com\/si\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2262"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}