h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Art Is Life. Paint the Rose. Die a little, smell the Rose, and be reborn. Look at the Rose and revel in its beauty and be transformed. Feed the rose in your garden and be nurtured. Conceptualize the Rose and it becomes a personal vision. Without Art, be it paintings, photography, poetry, mindthink, we die a little and with it our lives are saved.
 
 
 

So are you suggesting that we should take up horticulture? Because if a man takes up botanical exploits as a hobby he can kiss his name and reputation goodbye and join the lonelyness of Big Girl's Blouse City

Lord Humphrey 'Thunderguts' Dagenhurt

I don't know what the "big girl's blouse city" is, but, hmmm, guess what I mean is that art is everything you do, you should do artfully, art has a rather huge persona as paintings, sculpture, etc. but while I make art as photography, it's not that rarified. The Fluxus movement led outings of dead end New York city streets as art pieces and, why not. Washing dishes can be art - depends on how one participates - onemindedness, I guess - when you're doing the dishes, do the dishes...employ your senses.

Ok let me get this straight... when you say "rose" then that is a elegant metafor for womans quim. Otherwise I'm afraid I don't get it... Rose this, Rose that... Art saves lifes... This kind of shit don't fly with me... sell that kind of bulshit down in Bosnia babe and see how far that will get you.

Matrix Mage

Well, why call it art then? Why not just ordinary life?
Art is beyond life. It isn't life itself. that's why we have two definitions, because these are two different things. Art...and then LIFE.

besides...When you are a big girl's blouse, it means you are not masculine.

Lord Humphrey

I gather this site is about trying to express a personal vision. If mine didn't come across to you, I won't apologize, I'm still working on it - your snap judgment is your snap judgment - doesn't seem there was any thought involved - that's your red wagon, and your comparison is inappropriate. So, just keep draggin' your red wagon along. Best wishes.

Please see the entry "Fluxus" A11470. It's hard to explain, but I'm still trying!

Og course this is about expressing personal views. But If you want to be left alone with your views and not have them discussed and criticized, then you shouldn't epress them at all or "express them alone in a darkened bathroom very early in the morning. You see, this site is about discussion and information gathering - like the rest of the web. On the WWW no man (woman) is an electronic island. BTW, our views on pretentious pseudo-intellectuals who, despite living on welfare, have adopted an obnoxious holier-than-thou attitude towards the productive element in society, are not "snap-judgements" - they are well based prejudices.

Yours, Tosser

Thank you for elucidating. I had no idea you were a pseudo-intellectual living on welfare in your bathroom. I do hope thing improve for you.

And they say that sarcasm is dead in california! I bow befor your superior intellect and unsurpassable mirth...generating ability. You are the god of humour and snappy answers! Calirfornia must truly be the Golden State since such perfect specimens of our race spring forth from her loins.

Humbly

Tosser

No God am I, but Goddess, and since learning the meaning of "Tosser" from my British friend, may I say that your wit springs eternal from your manly loins and you are "ART" indeed. Fluxus epitomized, a happenin' happenin'. : - )

I must admit, Erica, that I find it hard not to sympathise a bit with Thunderguts - art may not be life, because there is a method to art, but life could be art, if it is lived methodically.

Fluxus sounds interesting. I guess anything could be dealt with on an artistic level, as long as you are deliberately aware of what it is made of and/or how it is made. A dead-end NYC street could be thought of as artistic, for example, particularly if it is to be portrayed to be appreciated, but could a tornado?

Fluxus makes ideas reachable through gags. It's not tragedy, but comedy....but somehow, I think tragedy can be broached through comedy, although that wasn't the principal. (from Jon Henricks) "Clearly Dada was a precursor to Fluxus. Both sought to unnerve a complacent, militaristic, decadent society by bringing art into direct confrontation with triviality and aethetics, and to controvert the idea that art is incapable of affecting social or political change." Fluxus, as I see it, was about humor in the face of tragedy, about communication before the www, Yoko Ono was a participant in mail art and mail art was the early 'net, but it was concrete, artists made boxes of ideas or phraseology and mailed them. It was daily life. The San Francisco Museum had an entire wall of boxes and bottles and pill containers of an artist's life encased in lucite. It's an everyday experience, but it's art and communicable, but laughable, and if we don't laugh, how do we circumvent the tragedy?

I had a look at the Fluxus website on your list of links, as a result of your postings, and Fluxus is indeed interesting, but I still can't see how it saves lives!

The combining of artistic modalities seems like a fair thing to do, to me. The Fluxus movement was obviously an artistic precursor to the latter-day obsession with "multimedia" etc. which make television and movies so much fun to watch. The political stance of the movement, apart from advocating "change", is not really clear, though. The humour in the movement doesn't seem to be anything other than celebration of the practitioners' cleverness - not that I'm against this, in principle, but what is it actually meant to achieve? Humour can certainly save lives, but what's funny is not normally considered in terms of aesthetics, I don't think... What is the purpose behind the enormous effort some of these artistic creations require, and why aren't they better known?

I think you just answered your own question!!! Fluxus is a question that answers itself...it's so obvious most folks don't investigate. It's rather like the "Just do it." a well known advertising slogan which originated from the Zen, "How do I achieve enlightenment?" The endeavors of the Fluxus movement weren't, in my view, enormous to those people that started it- they were everyday stuff that they took the trouble to document and to communicate to one another, yet it was natural, and fun, "He who laughs, lasts.". And the end result was that they lived each day as an important event, equal to a Rembrandt on a museum wall, but with a sense of humor, which we all should, because each of our lives are important, and we each influence one another. Here's another Fluxus link:

http://www.panix.com/~fluxus/

Would that I could better explain my affinity to Fluxus....the museum show I attended was interactive - people had so much fun!!! I've directed a gallery and seen a lot of art but this was very true to life and I somehow got it, that life is art. Saves me every day.

OK, I can feel a little more comfortable with Fluxus as a result of investigating that link - I only had time to read a couple of the writings in the writings section of the site, but I bookmarked it and will give it a bit more thought over the next couple of days.

Tongue in cheek is good - this sort of stuff is right on the edge of inanity, and it appears to be the way it should be: not the sort of thing you need to think too deeply about, is it? Should it really even be given the status of a genuine artistic movement?

By the way, the statements "art is life" and "life is art" are not equivalent: which are you advocating?

Regards,

H.

Hrrmmm...well, let's quote a certain Mr. Charles Dickens, or in more particular a Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Hard Times:
'You don't walk upon flowers in fact; you can not be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets. You don't find that foreign birds and butterflies come and perch upon your crockery; you can not be permitted to paint foreign birds and butterflies upon your crockery.'

Although this was written as an attack on the too rigorous thinking of the industrial age and how it stifled imagination and fancy, it will do in proving a point of mine. That art is not life, but in fact a simile of it. A pale copy, a frozen moment in time meant to represent not lifes total complexity but a single aspect of it.

Art is an insperable part of life, yet art will never come close to being life in itself.

Lord Humphrey 'Thunderguts'

WOW!!!

Your verbiage is splendid!!! (I mean it, no sarcasm intended)

It is a painting in itself, and yet, I am tooooo sleepy to properly appreciate it although it WOWs me even at this late hour. Admit it, this moment is a work of art!!!

All I can do with my latenight muddled brain is quote some profound lyrics from "The Innes Book of Records"

"I like Cezanne," says Anne
"He does something for me.
I like Cezanne" says Anne,
"It's not what you see.
The power of nature is something to feel.
I like Cezanne," says Anne.
"To me, he's surreal."

Yep,
'Night

Well, I guess the question is, what is a "genuine artistic movement?" And, I think it is the stuff that one thinks deeply about. It's the grass under one's feet, not the painting on the wall. And, after studying art, doing art, selling art, that is what I have come to believe art is, and it's worth looking into. And, I do think Art is Life and Life is Art is equivalent. Give it some thought for a while. You may not agree, and that's okay, but check out the Dada movement - Fluxus was Neo-dada, but more underground, it was Art without caring about getting certification, just being itself, and it was worldwide and it smiled, and I think that lack of self centeredness was its center.

Interestingly enough, I have just spent the past week+ finishing my modernist rendition of 17th century Vanitas, where, indeed, nature is comparable with human life and all is encompassed, flora, fauna, butterflies, worms, mice - emoitonal relationship to flowers as metaphors for human existence, blooming, dying. I have painted all of the above in my photography. Sorry, Mr. Dickens, errr. Gradgrind. It's all a metaphor, you know. And what I am talking about is living your life as art, not living your life as a painting, but ART, not as a saleable commodity or a painting on a wall, but the art of life. George Maciunas put his entire bedroom in a box in a museum and it was his art. Why not? Make your bedroom your art?