….This briefly brings me back to the ‘make do and mend’. It is a dubious phrase laden with ideals and images of small holding, knitted gloves, grow your own and buy the greenhouse! It’s nostalgia smothering with cupcakes and marketable equity! It is another marketable source, commodity driven and new bourgeois taste dictated to the masses. In mid thirties and mid life crisis over beng the perfect man or woman, 30 somethings’ are the easiest disillusioned market. Or are they? Is it just a matter of learning ‘an art of life’, that at this point it’s time to realise that tilling the furrow is hands on, that to be a kid again is as easy as digging a hole to Australia in the soil! There is nothing quite like messing around with stuff. Maybe Joseph Beuys is right and Edith schaeffer had caught on – anyone can become an artist! In a time when there is little funding available for artists, many look resourcefully on how to continue to make, what to sacrifice and time is limited as earning climbs in priority, the make and mend policy borrows even more time. Therefore the sole artist/researcher are challenged.
Kerouac knew that to write ‘On the Road’ needed a sense of collaboration, being with, experiencing and making the art out of time first, before he could write about it. Schaeffer knew that she needed to be living in the sense that made every act; in Koestler’s words ‘an act of creation’ ( 1964, The Act of Creation), before the work would evolve and become apparent. I’m trusting in the same right now as I begin this writing drivel, in vain efforts to encapsulate musings that live between a sense of scholarship and digestible letters! Both Schaeffer and Kerouac, interestingly would describe themselves as quasi religious – ‘strange solitary crazy Catholic mystic’ (Chambers. A, of Kerouac, 1991) and Schaeffer of Christian origin. J. Schaffer a philosopher of considerable clout on metaphysical logic and wonder, similarly reveres time and existence. I wonder on the fusion of spiritual, mystical general allusive dream ideal here, that perhaps hones the idea of the hidden art of life and can be quite rightly accused of romanticism rather than religious wanderings or existentialism. So in experiencing and writing I’m attempting to extend the ‘grow my own’ art of life, reach a little further and collaborate a little more. This writing maybe useless but dear Gombrich has it right, ‘but there is at least one thing in common between art and scholarship: both may appear utterly useless – as useless in fact as dreams and all memories’ (1957; 1963, Pg 106), but in catching his real drift, it is born out of a sense of my own Spacetime. Adios for now!
