Wednesday, September 3, 2014

Art is Never Completely Original


Preface

As Dr. Ron Art took sufficient shape for me to launch it via a Facebook page three years ago, I wanted to share my Art Manifesto.  This manifesto isn't just a set of beliefs about art, but also a proposal about the very nature of art.  Physicists work at discovering the immutable laws of the universe, and in a similar way I work at crystallizing some fundamental truths about art.  More broadly, art is an integral component of The Tripartite Model, along with science and religion.

My Art Manifesto
  1. Art is cross-art by nature
  2. Art is always autobiographical
  3. Art is sensuous
  4. Art is synesthetic
  5. Art is never completely original
  6. Art has value
Dr. Ron Art is a sizable complex with five main wings, under which several projects are at various stages of progress:
My Art Manifesto is the undercurrent for these projects.  This is the fifth of six articles, where I introduce this manifesto. 



The four points I've written about so far in my Art Manifesto - (a) art is cross-art by nature, (b) art is always autobiographical, (c) art is sensuous, and (d) art is synesthetic - came to me five years ago, but this fifth is a recent inclusion.  I crystallize it here.

We are all inviolably connected to each other, and we belong on long, billowing ribbons of life, since the beginning of life itself.  So while we may pull things together in a novel fashion, while we may take a radical leap of creativity, and while our work may strike others as duly original, the fact is we are never fully alone or isolated from others in the world.  Our art may be original to some extent, but never completely so. 

Literature

Consider the famous reflection by the English poet and cleric John Donne (Meditation XVII):
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were: any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee.
American novelist Ernest Hemingway drew from Donne for the title From Whom the Bells Tolls.  William Shakespeare, Donne's contemporary in the late-16th, early-17th centuries, drew quite a bit from his predecessors, and they from their predecessors, too, for instance, for `Romeo and Juliet:
  • The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Brooke, and Palace of Pleasure by William Painter were primary sources. 
  • In turn, for his narrative poem, Brooke may have translated the Italian novella Giuletta e Romeo by Matteo Bandello.
  • There are characters named Reomeo Titensus and Juliet Bibleotet in the works by Pierre Boaistuau, who translated some of Bandello's novellas into French, such as Histoire troisieme de deux Amants, don't l'un mourut de venin, l'autre de tristesse (The third story of two lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other of sadness, rf. A Noise Within).
  • One Bandello story was La sfortunata morte di dui infelicissimi amante che l'uno di veleno e l'atro di dolore morirono (The unfortunate death of two most wretched lovers, one of whom died of poison, the other, of grief, rf. A Noise Within).
So one of the most famous works in literature and theater follows quite a lineage of art.

Film


`Stoker is very stylish 2013 film by South Korean director Park Chan-wook, and in its simplest, most obvious theme it is about the coming of age of a young lady.  But it's more complex than that, and quite a lot move and shift in the interiors of this family.  The acting - led by Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman - is simply superb. 

For the purpose of this article, I want to highlight American film talent Wentworth Miller, the screenwriter for `Stoker.  The name didn't ring a bell to me.  But because I love film, and I am obsessively curious about the background and crew, I Googled him.  I found out that he played the younger Coleman Silk in another beautiful, very curious 2003 film The Human Stain, also starring Kidman and Anthony Hopkins.
[Miller] used the pseudonym Ted Foulke for submitting his work, later explaining "I just wanted the scripts to sink or swim on their own."  Miller's script was voted to the 2010 "Black List" of the 10 best unproduced screenplays then making the rounds in Hollywood.  Miller described it as a "horror film, a family drama and a psychological thriller".  Although influenced by Bram Stoker's Dracula, Miller clarified that Stoker was "not about vampires.  It was never meant to be about vampires but it is a horror story. A stoker is one who stokes, which also ties in nicely with the narrative."  Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt also influenced the film. Miller said: "The jumping-off point is actually Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. So, that's where we begin, and then we take it in a very, very different direction."
Reference:  Stoker.  

I have been enthralled with `Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) for a long time.  I watched that Hitchcock film (1943), and it too was superb.  I'm sure the inspiration for Miller is a bit more intricate than we can know, but an evocative name like "Stoker" and a conniving character like Uncle Charlie are the threads that stitch Miller to his creative predecessors.


  

Poetry

The influences to my poetry are many, but Shakespeare, and poets WH Auden and John Ashbery are prominent.  For example, my latest poem - Swan Song of Ophelia - is about one of the most tender yet enigmatic women in ShakespeareAuden wrote a breathtaking commentary on The Tempest, titled `The Sea and the Mirror, which in turn inspired me to write a long poem about a patient I worked with, who committed suicide.  Ashbery, along with surrealist painter Salvador Dali and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, were instrumental to the poetry I wrote in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But let's take one from my collection The Song Poems.  The idea is simple:  I take any music video I like from YouTube, then I let it take me wherever it wishes to take me.  These poems are an account of these journeys.


The following are the specific music videos that inspired me to write this song poem:


  

 

Nowadays social media, technology devices, and digital content all extend and tighten the ties that connect us to one another.  What I've captured here is just a small sampling of my argument that art is never completely original.  To come back to Donne, none of us is an island onto himself or herself.  There is no person born and raised in complete isolation, and biologically we are forever bound to our parents.   

Art simply gives us the means, the knowledge, and the opportunity to do what creative thing we wish to do with whatever and whoever came before us.

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