The Triumph of the Individual over Art

            Art exists only if one is not afraid to bleed for it; it’s a selfish devourer, as love. Photography, film, literature, sculpting all hold within its history artists who have seen only triumph in their careers, never over art itself. Modigliani asphyxiated, Tchaikovsky drank his own fate contaminated with cholera while Dylan Thomas just drank himself to death. Art is not a rival to one’s personal life because it is greater than one life.

            Even after life is over, an artists life is an unstable one, still haunting the pages of their last works carried on into the future by the stream of parallel intertia.  To all things outward, art will reign dominant, the ruins will outlive us all, the crater of our fall will remain stamped in the earth as monuments that will be visited and revisited for centuries to come.

            Death is no more the moment when one’s life comes to an end, one single moment. That one moment is feared by those held in captivity, fearful of what lies behind what is not seen, inasmuch the theory of what is not seen could bring about that moment. Art gives us the chance to live for the moment, to chance the height we can soar before we fall again back to the earth into our original chalked outlines. The fall is no merely a dispassionate accumulation, it is a gradual process; it takes its stand in space and budges only when we have tasted the earth. That taste, the clays of the earth, will be the end of all biographies and autobiographies.

Is it truly trivial that artists of today and of the past saw their deaths? Predicted their deaths? Saw the impending swing of the pendulum and refused to dodge it in a space so narrow that breathing itself had begun its inward decompression? Only those pierced by art will die of art, those bled dry of its prophecy, its proverbs, its poetics, its madness, only those who have gone around the world only to arrive at its tarmac. Man can be judged by his character, his momentum towards his own true disposition, his own reflection; if he chooses to ignore it, he only ignores what is viable, what is pivotal for him to survive his next endeavor to survive. Tortured self-doubt is the central image of one at their bare humanness and even in this humanness, art can derive from a molar pregnancy.

In the very search for self, the inward charter to truth, we can find an artist broken only by a self-imposing state of fragility.