If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
Spinoza
I’m about to start work on my next Still Life. So far, I’ve made “portraits” of an actor, a singer and a painter. The point of these so-called portraits is not to capture likenesses, which are everywhere (often telling you more about the technology used to produce the image than about the actual features of the person), but to try and get across what I find heroic, appealing or even appealingly mystifying in the subject. I’m trying to connect with the person in question by responding to their actions with actions of my own. It’s a conversation without the paralysis of words. Although the Still Lives series is ostensibly solo work, I prefer to see it as collaboration, even if the other person doesn’t know they’re involved.
My next piece will be about Baruch Spinoza (overview at http://www.iep.utm.edu/spinoza). He was a philosopher who, to put it crassly and briefly, believed that everything is everything. In other words, he meant that the universe, all that is in it and all beyond it, are one entity. I take that to mean there’s no need to pin all our hopes on miniscule particles as yet undiscovered or on a big man in the sky controlling everything – just an acknowledgment that everything is already, and has always been, connected (and without the need of a costly device in your pocket). I find this an amazing and comforting thought, even though it goes completely against the grain of our selfish, all pervading me-me-me consumer culture (as a small example, I bet if I went back and looked at all of my posts on Artists Talking, I would find the words “I” and “me” outnumber the words “we” and “us” by quite some way… and I’m supposed to be talking about collaboration).
I am trying to force myself to understand Spinoza’s difficult writings because I love the idea that it is merely our limited perception which fools us into believing in separateness, individuality and choice: in other words, we can’t see the whole picture. If that’s not a convincing argument for collaboration, I don’t know what is.
