Philosophy for Artists

William Burroughs famously wrote that his goal when writing was to "wisen up the marks."

Spiritual author Eckhart Tolle claims the point of life is to develop more awareness. He directs people to live in the now, and to achieve moments of graceful selflessness.

During an 1991 interview artist Martin Kippenberger said:

...Good artists who look nice and paint nice things are very simple persons. Again there is the glamorous example of Lupertz. And Baselitz. He acquired all available information about furniture, painting techniques, engraving, collecting, and living in a manor house, and the woman wearing Chanel all day. One can acquire everything. One can learn any technique, but everything else must result from your own life. And the idea you can "express yourself through the paintings" isn't really appropriate. It's impossible because there is always something behind or beside it - though there are still people who are said to believe it is still possible to work like Brancusi worked. No. No. One has to move through the noodle-souffle of science if one wants to have it more than "lukewarm." Then again one must not get too clever either!

Jung:

As a rule, however, the individual is so unconscious that he altogether fails to see his own potentialities for decision. Instead he is constantly and anxiously looking around for external rules and regulations which can guide him in his perplexity. Aside from general human inadequacy, a good deal of the blame for this rests with education, which promulgates the old generalizations and says nothing about the secrets of private experience... In general, however, most people are hopelessly ill equipped for living on this level, although there are many persons today who have the capacity for profounder insight into themselves. Such self-knowledge is of prime importance, because through it we approach that fundamental stratum or core of human nature where the instincts dwell. Here are those pre-existent dynamic factors which ultimately govern the ethical decisions of our consciousness. This core is the unconscious and its contents, concerning which we cannot pass any final judgment.

more Jung:

Hence I prefer the term "the unconscious," knowing that I might equally well be speaking of "God" or "daimon" if I wished to express myself in mythic language, I am aware that "mana," "daimon," and "God" are synonyms for the unconscious - that is to say we know just as much or just as little about them as the latter. People only believe they know much more about them - and for certain purposes that belief is far more useful and effective than a scientific concept. The great advantages of the concepts of "daimon" and "God" lies in making possible a much better objectification of the vis-a-vis, namely a personification of it.

Art Philosophy as Dictated by Bill

The question that has been occupying me, along with a nagging feeling that being an artist is too self-indulgent, is: What is valuable or good, specifically, about what an artist does?

It seemed like a big secret. Most artists I know are lost, and desperate; and I was desperate to put something together that could work like an art life infrastructure.

Having embarked on an epic reading campaign covering art biographies, spiritual books, psychological books, and myths, and having now backed off and let it settle in for a few months. I have started to arrive at an opinion.

Signs are the black magic of today. There are street signs, logos on clothing, hair cuts, speaking accents, cars, languages, and ad infinitum other things that are read in a way that manipulate the reader. Directed towards people who have self-knowledge and inner space, signs are amusing and can be graceful. Used against consumers, signs are tools, and they force people into spiritual sickness. Consumers are vulnerable because the have identities that are abstract creations which they conform too.

Artists who do meaningful things:

• Use signs to separate the audience from their identities, which are limiting.
• Keep an open relationship with their unconscious, unknowable part.
  
• Work a lot.
  

There are some problems with achieving these goals:

• Art is only recognized if it looks like art, this sets up a situation where signs (this is a: sculpture, painting, video) are used to manipulate the viewer into recognizing art - and value. So where honesty is most important, the audience won't be able to recognize it. So an artist has to walk a fine line of honoring the past, while at the same time doing their real work.
  
• Money is a sign, and to live you have to make money. So everyone traffics in signs.
• America has a underlying relationship with the philosophical branch called Positivism, which says every idea needs some parts that are verifiable as true. Truth and proof don't have anything to do with living, they are just ideas that exist in a system, and are most valuable in science. They are terrible, horrible things to look for in life. It appears in America as an obsession with the literal, and chokes the life out of meaning - which is psychological and has no relationship to either being literal or being true.