Art As Alchemy

What is art? To attempt a tentative formulation: art is essentially the artistic Act, a certain mode of relating to the world guided by the leitmotif of sublimation, that is in some sense productive. And the artwork? The product of the Act, a monument commemorating it's creation: a eulogy proclaiming: "Art has taken place", with certain cultural cues to make the audience to read it as art, and thus perceive "content" by relating to it as such. Furthermore, if successful, a piece of art is also a catalyst of further Acts, seducing the observer, stimulating novel thoughts. A sort of alchemy: an artwork as a fragment of the Philosopher's Stone, which then conversely can be redefined as Total Art, as true completion and perfection of the artistic-alchemical project.

This formulation reveals a vector of progression: approaching Total Art. That is: making the move from treatment of the singular and particular towards approaching the multiplical and Universal. To not deploy one idea per work, but to map all ideas amassed so far, with new ones constantly being accumulated, having them combine and proliferate, there, in the piece. In the most radical sense this means union of opposites, a common theme in alchemy: to mediate things which seem incommensurable, and create unity. Take for example post-modern art: works completely liberated of specific forms and materials, which are theoretically sophisticated all the while alienating the wider public, often deliberately distancing itself from grandeur and visual beauty which it deems as bourgeois and antiquated. Juxtapose this with old master painting of the romantic era and earlier, which virtually no-one can avoid being enchanted by, with it's technical achievement and grandeur, but if practiced today seems indulgent and reactionary, and contingent in it's limitation to traditional media. These two seem to constitute opposites in a stronger sense than any other we can find in art, so how would we go about unifying them? There are plenty of examples of post-modern works that quite literally juxtaposes these, placing the old next to the new, but this is not really what mediation means. We are rather looking for a union of the practices that creates a new practice, as much in debt to the one as the other, with the characteristics of each interwoven on a minute level, impossible to disentangle, a true synthesis rather than mere juxtaposition.

The question then arises what characteristics of each movement we want to lift out, to have emphasized in our synthesis. The achievement of post-modern art is the liberation of art from contingent forms and materials - anything can be art as long as it is interpreted as such. This freedom is something to relish, a return to flat-surface illusory painting with repression of the materiality of the media is a regression and indeed reactionary. Another strong characteristic of anything post-modern is it's rejection of meta-narrative, and the hero-worship that goes with that. As a reaction to the modernist hubris that resulted in two world wars this made a lot of sense, but a vector of history is returning as the neo-liberal status quo is falling apart, and the incredulity towards narratives of progression seems to only have led the post-modern subject into passive nihilism. The old master painters, best exemplified by the romantic and christian spiritualistic painters, on the other hand have a very strong element of meta-progression: an endeavor to perfect the rendering of Gods greatness, or the grandeur of Nature.  This also ties in neatly with the alchemical logic outlined earlier, which really is the 'archetype' of progression-narratives, abstracted and rendered a spiritual practice.

So we want to unify the freedom of form and psycho-philosophical awareness with the alchemical vector of progression and the enchanting grandeur that comes with it, while at the same time tempering it's hubristic heroism with internal critique and humility. Working with these poles I have come to find a third, mediating factor in my practice: the impasto fields and surfaces of impressionism, also present in many directions of modernist painting. When blending a found object into a flat illusory image impasto paint can serve as a universal substance that makes the object-object distinction an object-object gradient.

This holds interesting conceptual implications. For one, impressionism-modernism is the historical bridge between the two periods, so this intermediary period should plausibly also serve as a conceptual bridge. Furthermore it seems reasonable that to have a readymade object and an illusory painting be perceived as part of a unified image, the fundamental constitution of the human field of visual perception has to be accounted for, much in the way the impressionists tried to do. The impasto noise is thus equated with the phenomenological noise of our visual field and becomes the ground of the image as much as that which holds it together.

With that we have our dialectical trinity in place: the matter-form freedom of post-modern art, the meta-strife towards completion and grandeur of spiritual-romanticism, and the phenomenological phase-space of impressionism mediating between -and grounding- the two. Within this trinity art is practiced as a rotary motion, clock-wise and counter-clockwise, a pattern inscribing itself on a higher plane of consistency as a unified practice. The alchemical vector together with the post-modern freedom of form implies the continuation of this process of synthesis to every conceivable domain, at the seemingly highest level rendering life and art one and the same.