Why?
My bias of
course is for all things stemming from the Road. By default we all have a
relationship to the world, the landscape and to other people that has been shaped
by the global industrial experience, which is by and large characterised by the
use of fossil fuels as an overwhelmingly predominant energy source. The
combustion engine is in my mind an appropriate symbol.
In ways that
remain invisible to us – like the invisibility of water to a fish – the cultural
fabric of experience has been stretched so greatly by everything the combustion
engine represents directly or by association. Painting is no exception, and its
transformations, reinterpretations and current incarnations are a testament to
the freedom we have achieved as the world’s first global, industrial culture.
On the downside,
it may also be symptomatic of an utter disconnect from Nature herself that
painting has been able to wander so deeply into the wilderness of the inventive
imagination.
The age of the
combustion engine after all is at its heights, and its willing participants are
now coming to terms (wilfully or not) with the limits that Nature imposes on
all ecosystems, sooner or later. It is popular, in this age, to pretend that
the marvels and achievements of our times will exempt us from such a fate, but
my understanding of systems is that it will not – for detailed reasons I will
not go into here.
Why is this
important?
It is just as
important now to consider Gauguin’s famous questions: What are we? Whence do we
come? And, where are we going? Not because it encapsulates the angst and
uncertainty of the world facing a nascent industrial system about to go global,
and embark on the unprecedented rise of a mechanised industrial society (i.e.
Gauguin’s time). Rather, the opposite is true: the path of that rise has arced
across recent history to the present dawning of its own twilight, where angst
and uncertainty creeps back in.
Pausing to
consider the implications of this present, one comes to understand the shifts
that are taking place. Whether this is an advantage or not, remains to be seen.
It does not, unfortunately, appear to be the kernel of truth that might have
“saved the planet”. Instead it is just a rare shining example of truth itself
amid the flotsam and jetsam being thrust to and fro in the tsunami of culture.
For me it, as a
matter of composing a requisite “artist’s statement” it is the best way I know
how to suggest the angst and urgency that feeds my studio practice without
writing the book for which I already have the title… yet.
