The Message of Art

Not only is no man an island but, simply, there is no individual. This is the message of art. Not the “artist's message” which, like the putative individual, doesn't exist or, if one insists on presenting it as a discrete phenomenon, exists only on the level of total opacity and incomprehensibility.

It is precisely this chasm of subjectivity which art touches upon. To confuse it with a personal or individual profundity is, simultaneously, to mystify the human animal and to deny unknowability to human experience. It is to indulge in the magical thinking that justifies material inequality by cultivating the illusion of access to infinite self-hood and to escape from the truth of the impossibility of an unrelated self.

The face is the basic node of human communication. It has been through/with/by faces that the majority of us have come to the identity we currently advertise and to the personality we exhibit (taking personality as that encrustation of possibility dried in the sun of the contingent relationality that has made up our social environment).

Before the face is the other, the face is the self. One is what one sees and even when one sees oneself, one becomes two. So the greatest threat to the other, as an other, is that it is assumed into the self-hood of the subject which is the only agent capable of recognising – and so manifesting – the other.

Consciousness is the breakdown in the order of material efficiency (physical process). To say all art is useless is on a par with conceptualising original sin: it insights that necessity is infinite and impersonal, a universal constant or ground that doesn't need any subject to exist.

The mothering of invention is not the field of human genius but its matrix. The subject as such, whether inspired or not, is the radical openness to this void of ownership – this unrelenting and unconscious drive to produce. 

Here then, self is negative experience. It is what is not present: a lived absence that opens a gap in the illusion of the permanence of an ever changing world.