Digging In The Dirt

Note #1:

a. Lux-Deprivation: Lack of lux; no lux. See lux.

b. Lux: Muzak on the macro level. Not just functional music but TV images, films, art, magazines, food--all in their different ways designed to have a definite effect on people in a store, work place or home. Lux affects our moods and attitudes in a ‘positive’ way. Whether as background or foreground these kinds of created environments take us away from who we are at present. It takes us into an artificially-created space, enclosed and isolated from the outside world. Lux creates a nostalgic space that speaks of another time. It is not our own experience. Lux orders our emotions, interprets our culture, defines our art works and lives our lives.

For strategies to counter lux-dependency, go to note #2. ‘Our-story’. (Optional)

Note #2 (Optional):

Our-story: Ambiguity in relation to concepts of truth, reality, art, social science and science are part of a Non-Western tradition. Chinese, East Indian, Japanese, African and indigenous cultures, such as the Native Americans and the Aborigines, share a common thread of not limiting, narrowing, controlling, segmenting or defining reality. Nature is always in flux; or, shifting like the river. For these cultures, the notion of time is not, as in the Western or European tradition, linear (ie: birth to death), but mythic and circular. Past, present and future are amorphous. The spatial, temporal, genealogical, and generational time of lived experience merges and re-circulate in our memory.
This notion of shifting or merging time and reality is also historically reflected in the Non-Western approach to Art. That is to say, unlike Western classical notions of art, there is no division of art into clearly defined realms; or, a submission of one art form over another – image over word or word over image. Instead, the arts merge into each other. For example, in Chinese calligraphy or African hieroglyphics there is no separation of the written word to visual arts and expression. The scripts form artistic composition, and, in the case of hieroglyphics, they are also part of architectural structure. Similarly, in Japanese haiku theatre there is also a mixing of art, music, and literature to give a layered sense of reality. (Continued; see note #3)

Note #3 (Optional):

Cont from #2.: The Eastern tradition of merging the arts makes clear the distinction between reality and the representation of it. That is to say, unlike the Western classical styles that try to mimic a fixed reality without making the viewer aware of its artifice, Eastern art makes no attempt at either a defined reality or truth but makes the viewer aware of its form as representation. For example, in Japanese haiku theatre, masks are worn and the voice is separated from the body of the actors for the purposes of making clear that it is not reality but a staged scene. The haiku mask (like the African mask) or image is not the object of reality but an image or a representation of it. Moreover, there is no effort to glue the scene together or to make it a seamless space. It is a layered representation of reality--not reality itself. This approach to representation does not reduce meaning to a straight signifier or a one-dimensional view, but offers the viewer many subtle perspectives or representations of life. (Continued; see note #4)

Note #4

His-Story (History): On the other hand, the European tradition (as I have already alluded to), since the Middle Ages, is to define, codify, separate, simplify and narrow reality. The classical approach to reality is to see it as a fixed or a set state. In fact, unlike the Eastern tradition, Western artistic concepts are aimed at copying, imitating or capturing nature--the river, and the ‘reality out there’. In science, for example, nature was seen as mechanistic, ordered and dead –- with reducible or immutable laws or truths. Science, literature, poetry, and art were specialized to attain their particular part of the truth.
Although Classical Western approaches to specialize, of attempting to represent and codify reality have brought a closer or narrower understanding of some ‘parts’ of nature. It has lost the picture of the whole. Only now, in the post-modern era, are Western notions of science and artistic expression broadening out imaginatively--seeing nature as Eastern and Indigenous populations always have--as living, spontaneous, chaotic, shifting, amorphous and indefinable. (Continued; see note #5. – Hybrid Stories; Optional)

Note: #5. (Optional).

Hybrid stories: In response to this tradition of fixed, limited reality, Modern/Post Modern Western theorists, artists and scientists, influenced by the East, countered their classical History and expanded notions of reality. For example, in the arts, Margritte’s phrase “Ceci n’est pas une pipe”, renders the two principals of classical painting (1. resemblance or plastic representation or reality, and 2. the subordination of one art from to another) mute. The notion, that -- "this is not a pipe"--but is a representation of a pipe undermines, clarifies and exposes the artifice of plastic representation. Furthermore, by mixing word and image, Magritte (like Klee and Kandinsky) subverts and ruptures the notion of total separation and subordination of image to word, and, of linguistic ordering. This change opens up the possibilities for new relations of words and images. Similarly, in the field of music, John Cage, breaks from the nineteenth century tradition of excluding, narrowing and defining dominant music from other tonal, sound and noise possibilities. By using stray or accidental sound as music, he breaks the definition of music itself. In literature, classical narrative is also opened up to post modernist concepts by merging mediums of poetry, fiction, history and myth. This technique of mixing prose, known also as minor literature, is not only a way to layer reality but also to subvert dominant hierarchical and ideological codes of language. Additionally, this layered reality, is a means through which marginal groups can regain their own histories and create their own language. (Another technique used is to interrupt or subvert the linear and manipulative time flow of classical narratives). (Continued; see note #6: Hybrid-Film-stories; Optional.)

Note #6

Hybrid-Film-stories (Optional): Just as the movements in literature, music and art, alternative and independent films also benefit from post-modernist ideas. For example, in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film The Mirror, we see a mixing of poetry, word and image in a mythic and non-linear time format. Tarkovsky, did not want to limit reality but wanted to merge and fill images with all forms of time and subjective feelings, As he says in Sculpting in Time: “In a word, the image is not a certain meaning expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected in a drop of water.”
This hybridization of styles condemns all forms but is hardest on the documentary format, which considers itself objective. As Trinh T. Minh-Ha says in From a Hybrid Place: “Every representation of truth in the depiction of reality is a question of degrees of fictitiousness. The more one tries to clarify the line dividing the two, the deeper one gets entangled in the artifice of boundaries.

End Notes (Optional)

The old pond was still
A frog jumped in the water
And a splash was heard

- Basho

"Haiku cultivates its images in such a way that they mean nothing beyond themselves, and at the same time express so much that it is not possible to catch their meaning. The more closely the image corresponds to its own function, the more impossible it is to constrict it within a clear intellectual formula. The reader of haiku has to be absorbed into it as into nature, to plunge in, lose oneself in its depth, as in the cosmos where there is no bottom and no top."

- Andrei Tarkovky

"All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that, remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to the original place. It is emotional memory. And a rush of imagination is our 'Flooding.' Like water, I remember where I was before I was straightened out".

- Toni Morrison