Painters are the very best of imperfection and human disproportionality, and even if they could restrict it, they would fail to even fully harness it! It’s a wild beast and a tame socialised pet that still can be feral!
Human imperfection is our autobiographical inheritance and our fundamental lifelong companion, but in the 21st century it is more contemporary than ever because of the dawning of AI. Just how many incursions deprive human individuals of choices and freedoms today compared with in 10 years’ time? And then what? It is our human shackles to be ‘mortgaged-out or dependent’ (the conventional agency of our day ) within our own mortal coil that intimidates us all or out thinks us all that is restricting our human culture and society by replacing it , not with the state, but with Artificial Intelligence? The question of the ‘existence of a society’ (a preoccupation of many 20th and 21st century thinkers) will be decided and defined by AI and its capacity to remove humans from decision-making as well as turning our democracies upside-down! Theoretically you can hand-over all the rights of Trade Unions to get paid more than billionaires if the workplace is fully automated. But, we have used Paint in all our human history to both document and hold all institutions (and now AI institutions) and dictators to account, but today Paint used by humans offers something even more atypical : it translates an undisguised imperfect frightening world by revealing human imperfection itself, and also becomes the subject matter as well as the implement for it II We adapt via Paint, so no wonder the medium of Painting has been removed from the designer rebellion of more hedonistic values and breakthrough of Conceptual Art!! Because Painting clings-on to its surface and when dry transforms our long-term grip on not relinquishing our dominant Art gene of low and even anti-tech qualities that make us our human freedoms whether we like it or not!
It is often said (and I will say this later) that it is the range of what we don’t choose that can make a Painting work. Hundreds of decisions take us along trajectories where we find coincidence and references to all that we are (past present and future e.g. that form or reform our experiences with Paint with the factual and fictional, our lives or the lives of others that can inform a Surreal figurative colliding (or fusing) with the abstract in our ever expanding Painting Universe of optical visualisation or happy accident that disprove the air-brushed perfection! Indeed, just how many perfect Paintings are there in all the history of Art, besides the Masters of the Painting medium that we believe to be utterly perfect in both human and AI terms? Not many. Why? Because we are constantly amazed that a Leonardo or Michelangelo etc. are superhuman rather than technically without imperfection!! It is their eternal vision that transcends mere mortals and their contemporaries that cannot be measured by any criteria; but it is AI that can be programmed to copy it and even personalise it, but it can only plagiarise the essence of a Painting (its human uniqueness) and simulate ‘correcting it’! Why would you want to do that? Indeed, the finishing of a Painting is both subjective and thus not calculated, just as the mutation of all the mass of all brush marks used can’t measure or conform and yet break-up tradition by reforming it!! We are by our nature a paradox and a collision of extraneous juxtaposed random matter that are formed by rock and a hard place of Surreal collection or melting pot of unlikely constituent parts of a wider Art experience, Universe and make a contribution as part of a human Chain! But, like all Paintings, they will eventually be lost to the sands of time despite multiple restorations, but they will return to the very dust and rock that will provide new generations to recycle what the earth is made of to form their own Paint for expression of all their cultural life! We are baffled by our own human foibles, vices and yet saved by the paradox of Painting -in spite of ourselves we value human free will by ultimately disconnecting from our plans and method unsettling our secure final image on canvas. We can't stop ourselves from imposing criteria that we just deviate from I With Al, tech Art and Conceptual Art we are inspired to participate in thought provocation and inspiration, but in 21st century Painting we experience Art by ourselves that often is the point! As Painters we can’t control or micro-manage with a definitive image in our minds without going off on a tangent, leaving the final image an act of freedom from exact premeditation. We don’t often shy away like Eric Fromm’s idea of escaping responsibility for our own freedom, but we do actually end-up with undermining or transforming boundaries and unravel accepted conventionality! But our boundaries tend to be man-made, like the frames of a Painting, but do these frames lock-in or lock-out? Break-out or break-down? What is ‘busting out of the seams’ of past Paintings and what is encapsulating the immensity beyond all barriers that only physically confine (just as the 1980s TATT failed) but defy and resist any endgame and that means today too? TATT only sent up a flare that was fired in distress (as Cold War superpowers tried to undermine each other on every Art platform as well as militarily etc.) only for the flare to spiral until it exploded in a riot of colour illuminating in the darkness of post-war globalism leaving a free Eastern Europe to explore its own identity of political and economic freedom as well as new Art forms and renewal of the ancient and pre-Soviet medium of Painting without centralised control and dictat I Or so we thought!! I wonder what Russian Painters think and paint today? I bet they can paint but Ukrainian Painters are too busy fighting a war against invaders and colonizers I But ironically, I wonder whether Ukrainian Painters are freer to paint what they like, where Russian Painters can’t?
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