The criticism eternal

Artist:  Leonard Bernstein said "this will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before". 
I believe in this intention. For myself I would replace 'music' with 'art', but it is all the same.
Thanks Lukas!

External voice: Your golden forest is unworldly. With so much going on in the world, how can you spend so much time and effort saying absolutely nothing? There are civil wars in Africa, Egypt unstable and Libya having overthrown its government, atrocities in Congo and Somalia a haven for pirates. The Middle East reels from the Arab Spring uprising. Israel and Iran gnash their teeth and threaten war, Syria destroys itself in violence and bloodshed. In Europe the people carry the financial burden of a greedy capitalist structure that has left Greece penniless, and Italy and Spain trembling as their economies teeter dangerously on the brink of collapse. Brasil continues to expand and absent-mindedly destroys its rainforests in the name of 'renewable' energy and progress. The USA struggles to regain a global economic advantage in the face of an imminent collapse if its binary political system cannot agree on an answer... is it in decline? China continues to suppress its individuals in order to further its 'nationhood', and churns out cheap consumables to feed its growing political and military engine. India is corrupt. Australia mines its resources into oblivion, and will soon be a wasteland. South-east Asia struggles with corruption and internecine religious and political conflict. Masses of refugees criss-cross the globe in search of a peaceful life. And with all of this going on and more, you paint a picture of a golden forest in excessive 24kt gold-leaf!!?? What does it mean? What are you contributing? How are you existing in the world? What sort of middle-class attitude are you bringing to bear on an existence devoid of normalcy and filled with the desperation of humanity?

Artist: It is not in ignorance of these global issues that I create a golden forest. In fact, it is a response, or reaction, to the immediate confrontation of these realities of existence that I choose to create a golden forest in the first place. The golden forest symbolises togetherness, not just of people but all things and meanings and actions and futures and pasts. I do not wish to depict the atrocities or wade into the political warfare that some Artists wish to be part of. I wish to make a statement that I do not condone any aspect of this bloodshed and violence and injustice, on a global level or on a trivial level. I wish to not be a part of the argument, because both sides are wrong and right, thus there are no sides! And I will not accept that "no side" is a side, for "no side" is all sides, therefore none. I do not believe in creating anxiety for my reality, or anybody else's reality, and the golden forest is the antithesis of anxiety and trepidation. 
Yes, it is an escape. Yes, it is not a place that exists outside the realm of the individual psyche, but it is a place that all psyches can go to, or achieve. I believe in the place-ness of beliefs, that when someone 'believes' something, then they are in that place. I believe in the non-denominational, apolitical, holistically organic nature of existence. It is not anything in particular, because it is always growing into something new, shedding the old identity for the new, but always retaining an aspect of that which it left. 

The golden forest also symbolises divine providence without a god. There is no god in the golden forest, but there is no "no-god". There is neither a god or an absence of god, there is only the complete synergistic concordance of all meanings and actions, thoughts and possibilities. Nothing escapes, all relates.

I chose gold because it is eternal, it is beautiful, and it is a symbol of a metaphysical existence. I did not choose it for its cost, or its rarity, for these aspects are accounted for by its first characteristics. The golden forest is not unworldly, it is particularly worldly, and its existence is a silent statement that says nothing but itself. It speaks only that which the viewer speaks. It is an image that means only what the viewer gives it to mean. It is a place that cannot be destroyed, for it is a symbol of a belief that has no content except its symbol, and that symbol is anything and everything. 

Centrepoint

The Leap of Faith

External voice:  Ahh, it speaks! And what does it have to say. More of the same attempt to defend an emotional position. Be rational. I notice how you attempt to twist my words to your own ends, by making me the bad guy. But all I wish is for your focus to be in the material realm, not caught up in the fantasy of narcissistic projection. There is nothing that is not in the world of your senses. The fantasy that you escape from harsh realities with, is nothing but a re-organisation of conceptual fragments derived from the original material world. It begins and ends here, where we all meet.

Artist: Your ideas and projections are only in your mind. I do not accept your reality, you can live it without me. My consciousness never escapes from the gravity of existence, even as it tries to leap into oblivion. We are saying the same thing. 

The Leap of Faith

A response

Artist: Up until this point I have ignored your barbed words and inflammatory remarks. I have ignored your empty criticisms thrown from your empty house. It is easy to criticize creativity if you do not create, far too easy. 

It is to create objects within the material world that is true. 

The true experience.

It could be argued that the metaphysical world of the individual is the truest and most ultimate reality, and that the material world merely provides the medium for an expression of that reality. I wouldn't expect you to understand such impractical abstractions due to your 'normal' and 'material' understanding of reality. But note that the simple fact of our disagreement is enough to prove the subjectivity of personal reality, not within the world, but within the mind of individuals. And it is through the expression of that reality that a broadening of our limited reality can occur. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it merely limits and suffocates the creative individual. But how would you know, how can you comment if you do not express yourself creatively?

Pointing into the Storm

As for the journey, do you expect that your life is only taking place in the external, sensible world? That it is not taking place in the confines of your own mind and understanding?

To ignore the personal journey, and not reflect on its meanderings, is a terrible ignorance, and one that I would dare not inflict on my psyche. So I choose to look at the path, at the symbols and synergies, the serendipities and stumbling steps.

You say that it is not very interesting to read the description of the journey, and you deride the need to do so. But it is equally uninteresting to wade through your unconstructive negativity spawned from  selfish ignorance. So I will not waste any more of my time in trading pointless blows with your empty bluster.

Furl your sails in a Storm

Caught between the fear and the wish to create and express something personal, it can be difficult to take a step. But any step is useful, and 'no step' is not a step. A decision to express something freely is not itself a free decision, and that can be perceived in the product. A freely produced expression has no reason or rationalization as its motivation, and any attempt to describe the motivation voids such an example immediately.

I simply wish to express myself freely, without the "you should do that", or "you should do this" whispering distractingly in my mind. When my mind has no self-conscious thoughts it expresses itself freely. A free thought has no idea about other people and their opinions, it has no understanding of  itself, it cares not for its beauty or vulnerability or silliness or naivety or genius or mundanity. And most of all a free thought has no fear, especially of your criticism that you shoot without understanding. 

Your ignorance is terrible for its pervasive and eternal recurrence.

Your lack of understanding is as ignorant as my free thought.

Your criticism and my free thought are both devoid of an other. 

Are they brothers? 

Or are they one and the same place?

Erassimagio

External voice: Ah yes, the search. The journey merely for itself, how trite. The inner search for meaning, and the importance of the search, is the journey itself because the search always ends up back at the start, here. Thus the search is only for the truly naive and insignificant minds, for they could have bypassed such a waste of time and spent their energies creating wealth within the material world, the ultimate reality. But no, the search must be made, for what, you ask? They're not sure, that's why they're searching, and then there's always some lackluster finale in which the epiphany provides the insight that life is here, in the world, and the angels sing in triumph when the discovery is made. But real humans merely shrug and continue about their business, already understanding that the real world is where the real things are.

Erassimagio

It is not very interesting to read your visual diary that symbolically illustrates the mental journey that you underwent through the darkness of insanity and the loss of reason. Because, nothing actually happened, and as a narrative for me it is simply boring, and a pursuit only fit for self-reflection. And because self-reflection is a waste of energy then the whole illustrative exercise is a waste of energy. Now all you find is that you are unprepared for the reality and clinical desperation of the business of the real world, and that you must learn new things. The empathy and sympathy that so idealistically clogged your neural pathways up until now has yielded a big fat zero of reward, and what is work without reward? Idiocy. The material world is not some Spinozan hypothesis, or some other metaphysical system that may be grasped. It is the experienced world, beyond even an empirical theory, beyond all descriptions to the final point of ultimation, you, here, now. So what are you going to do, go on a little metaphysical journey?

Through the doors

Artist: So I searched. I searched with the logic and multi-faceted reason that the emerald symbolizing my mind contained. Pros and cons, pros and cons. But there was also intuition, and the intuition needed no reason, it simply felt answers, a finer mesh, yet it couldn't be substantiated or described, or reasoned enough to be believable. Intuition could only be intuited. An attempt to describe it would state that it is simply an answer to those equations that are beyond the ability of consciousness to grasp sequentially, for the variables are too fine, yet there is still an outcome, an answer, to the complex human equations, and it can be felt, intuited.

Searching through the storm

Searching over the hills

So I began searching, searching, maybe for years, maybe a few minutes in total, the amount of time is unknown and irrelevant, needless to say that being lost in one's own mind is a confusing and at times terrifying experience. Watch the clock tick, tick, tick, tick, I don't want to go to sleep, that's where the end lies, I don't want it to end, I don't want to die, tick, tick, tick. There were darker areas, full of fear and paranoia, unhappiness prevailed in those places. And they are indeed places, there are many places that consciousness can be found in, and these places are not very different from person to person, and the reasons they are there.

And finally I decided to choose life. The searching had been redundant, all along it had only required a choice. And I made that choice in the deepest of darknesses, I chose love, and I immediately began to grow lighter and rise, though it was slow and painful. The ascent was interminable, with the broken parts that I had to fix on the way, mend them and keep going.

At last I was feeling less grim, and my gaze began clearing and looking upward, and then some happiness returned. And then all of a sudden were in front of me two enormous doors. And through the doors the light streamed, and I stood in that light.

At the doors

But the doors were very big and black, and they didn't seem to be working. So I scratched at them, and through them I could see the yellow light that I had painted behind the doors. So I kept scratching, and made patterns on the doors, and as I did so it occurred to me that I could use this technique to scratch through paint and create pictures by 'drawing' through the paint to another colour. (This is, in fact, called  "sgraffito" and has been around for an extremely long time.) And the picture that I wanted to create with this newly discovered technique was.... a forest! 

A golden forest!

The first golden forest

So it turned out that "through" the doors was a golden forest, and that was the light that streamed through the doors, which revealed itself by my desire to get through them.

After I had created the first golden forest, I thought that it would look amazing if it was real gold. 

This would initialize a six year journey to discover the material ways of achieving such a result...

Second-hand symbols

External voice: There's a lot of flappy-dapping with your mouth about some sort of self-reflective narrative that only makes me think of an ineffectual, confused and pitiful person. Don't use pity as a tool to create sympathy, it does you greater damage in the long run. Speak plainly and clearly, not softly and uncertainly. These symbols you use are strange and overly complex, what are they for? Why do you need them? What reason do they serve? You could have done yourself greater service by simply facing the facts, and looking the challenges and pitiful failures in the eye and referring to them as what they really are, not creating second-hand symbols in order to attempt some weak therapy.

Second-hand Dreams

I can't even believe that I have to spend time here engaging with this tripe that you so effortlessly spew, so honestly believe in and imbue with a quasi-cultish intensity that defies sensibility. And that's not even the worst, the worst is you won't even argue about it and take a stand, you'll cave in and think that what I'm saying is right, and you're wrong, and you'll  never get it right! But all I want you to do is stand up and say, "Hey, this is what I'm doing because I want to." Not, "Oh, maybe I'm wrong about this and that... or I could do it your way if you think it's better. Or, do you think I'm going about it correctly?" etc etc, blah blah blah.
Don't give me that namby-pamby uncertainty, get a spine! Believe in what you're about, don't waste your time searching for what's glaringly obvious. But just so that I'm glaringly obvious, and you don't miss it because you're an unperceptive naive half-wit, let me tell you.

It's what YOU like! The answer is only what you like and want to make. And you can discover it immediately, for it's always there, because it's you, it's looking in the mirror back out at you saying "here is the question and the answer. Me" Ignoring the befuddled imbeciles who pepper you with their half-baked concepts and dimwitted responses and criticisms is not ignorance, it's strength. Lead the donkeys, go your way, only see your mountain that you wish to climb. Have the confidence to say "yes" to yourself.

Dark Forest

Artist: "The story unfolded all by itself, whenever I attempted to force a direction it would simply guide me back onto the path that it wanted me to travel. I often feel helpless when it comes to the decisions that I make, to the point that I can weigh up the pros and cons and deliberate interminably, until a simple decision is made. The process of weighing up the two sides of any decision is exhausting, and I can't let go of the grasping thoughts of yesterday that peer into my clarity of today. Suspended in movement I am lost and require letting go of the need for decisions in a place that I am only found. How can I be lost in my own mind? It was the discovery of the Emerald, the symbol of my mind, that led me into the golden forest, the symbol of my heart. I let go of the Emerald, and in doing so the forest was lit from within by the golden glow, and my decisions were changed from to-ing and fro-ing between why and why not, to only trying to listen to the single direction of my heart, the strongest and surest guide. There was a Fool, who pointed into the darkness of the trees, before the trees were gold. And previously I had run from the forest holding my mind as though it were my greatest treasure, all sparkling and glittering with infinite variations and patterns and perfections."

Fleeing the forest clasping the Emerald 

"And then I had entered the forest again, and the Fool had urged me deeper, away from the edge where I had wandered unsure, looking out at the promises the world had to offer, and looking in at the journey to be taken to discover what was inside, in the darkness."

Manifesting the unreal

Artist: "The infinite divides the whole."

External voice: I am an animal. Thirsting, hungering, desiring.

Death will come, and the older I am, clearer is the inevitability. Why worry about others? They should worry about themselves. Don't even worry, be happy, be the strongest, be the best, have ultimate confidence in your ability to achieve power through whatever means possible, don't let weak socially imposed rules, guilts and ideologies ruin your strength. Move outside of their rules, bend them to your will, the real reality has no rules, and only the ruthless survive. The ruthless trait is more attractive than it may at first seem to your agrarian attitude. It will succeed where you will fail, through your reliance on the superstition of self. Tut tut Artist, it would be unseemly of you to appear as weak as your ideas really are, given that artists are traditionally considered free of such social restrictions. If only you lived the hedonistic free-wheeling, tempestuous life that the audience craves.... womanise, destroy yourself, destroy others, steal, kill, cheat!! They love it, you will be famous, though your life will be tragic and unhappy! But you will love them loving you, for they love the tragedy and the unhappiness! They love the tears of the women and the flippant callousness of the chauvinist. They love the deplorable self annihilation in the dank pits of drug-induced despair where lights are brightest and songs of hope are most mournfully felt when the ballads are sung. They love the break-ups, the recriminations and vengeful violence enraged by the other lover, sometimes bottled and expressed helplessly alone, cast aside once the drama has assuaged the Colosseum. They love it because they dare not live it. They muddle befuddled as they wish for one thing and do another, jealous of the strong, who live their life with only themselves to blame. It is right because I truly and transparently want it, and it comes to me effortlessly and quickly, without strain, and Oh, how you wish for such manifestation, yet your superstition cannot manifest the unreal.

Your golden forest is unreal.

A nightmare, with pits for eyes.

Moral compass?

Bludgeoned by a distant future unmade by the last possible insight left unattended.

Artist: "It's a moral position in the sense that it is a position anywhere on a moral spectrum. It doesn't matter where, it only matters that I say that this is the moral ground where I feel most within myself. I have found that when I make decisions that differ from my natural, or core, moral alignment, then I am unhappy, dissatisfied, guilty, quite often hurt mentally or physically. I can only speak for myself in this regard, for I do not know or care about other people's choices, that is their path to explain or ignore, or follow. And so I strive to live as close to my moral alignment as possible, without deviation. Through expression of this journey I found that symbols emerged and fell back from the aether, and they told a story with personal symbolic imagery that ran parallel to the lived. And the symbol that has emerged most recently, and continues dominantly, is the golden forest."

Golden Forest Twilight

External voice: Pretty. Pretty soft and useless.

Who needs rules? No one cares about these reflections, rules or guidances... make mistakes, do what's in your heart right now, do it with all your heart. Don't sit around reflecting on it all so that you become a useless flapping piece of flesh incapable of initiative besides that which searches for support for the tiniest decision. Is it the right thing to do? Is it ok to do this, to do that? Am I on the right path? Who cares!! There is no path, that's the path! Do anything, go anywhere, you silly Artist, making rules that merely bind you to mediocrity through the suffocation of dynamic action. Shame on your freedom that your heart reached this shackled state... moral position indeed!

My symbol is success, and it's in my head, I don't need to draw a picture of it as though it's not really there. But then, you are the struggling Artist, not as successful as me. I made my decisions for myself, I have no loyalties, no need for a silly moral compass that situates me in some absurd and invisible "moral spectrum". I don't care whether it's oil, or gas, or telephones or gold that I buy or sell, show me the profit, show me the opportunity, what else is there? You're deluding yourself that there is an ultimate goal apart from the here and now. I am here and I am now, and I'm going to take what I want and get what I want. There is no such things as lies, it's all a game, that I play well, no attachment is the key, everything will perish, survival of the fittest, and I am fit so I will survive.

A decision illustrated

Artist: "It's a moral position"

External voice: Amoral position?

Artist: "No. A. Moral. Position."

External voice: So the Artist's golden forest is suddenly a moral guide? A light, a beacon in the ocean of restless greed and desire that the lost souls can use to keep them from the cliffs of self-destruction? But it does not speak, it has no analogy, its message is mute, deaf and blind.

Artist: "It is a symbol of a decision that was made, without the desire for an imposition of its content upon others."

External voice: If that was true then there would be no need to express it externally, you would have it as a personal truth and not require an image to "crown" it. No, there is ego in the Artist's production, whatever the motivation or excuse or rationale. There is always the ego searching, requesting adulation, and it employs many tricks to gain a foothold in another person's eminence. The Artist even says that it is only for the self, for no one else, that it is not worthy, but they are simply different words from the same motivation, to be seen, to be heard, to be applauded and made worthy.

Journey? No thanks

External voice: Where is the edgy impasto paintings referencing the photography of an award winning journalist documenting the Arab spring uprising? Where are the kitsch irreverent products of a highly conceptualised manipulation of iconic modern technology? Where is the significance in a golden forest that seems neither to engage with social mediums or media, and refuses quietly to maintain an outdated reverence despite its lack of denomination?

The art that the Artist produces and thinks interesting and clever, will generally not be interesting and clever. The viewer loves the instant fix, as is the viewer's right. An illustrative cacophony of silence bends the light into the golden boughs and whispers nothing, and it has no content but its form.

But the Artist defends the meaning, or lack thereof, by referencing the invisible works that came before, like some grand narrative or concatenation of self-reflexive and mentally unstable self portraits masquerading as externally directed imagery.

Artist: "No, no! It's more like the crown of a description of Being that cannot be described in circular phrases, yet relies on the appropriation of the logocentric journey to delineate the boundaries and form the structure of the edifice that the image must crown."

External voice: Oh wow! What an amazingly esoteric and formidable browbeat, no wonder a recourse to imagery was needed. And why not dramatise it excessively by referring to it as a crown, the top! The pinnacle of achievement, wow, it must be great.... not. The Artist couldn't say it, and he can't paint it!

Artist: "But the intention was to illustrate the end of the journey and, in a sense, the beginning, the finding of the whole amongst its parts." 

External voice: Never heard that before, 'it's about the journey' they whine, and 'it doesn't matter about the product' they mewl. Well, it's not about the journey! The journey is nothing if you don't get somewhere or something, and so it's all about the product, we're nothing without the tangible reward, the success, the trophy of the win.

Ludicrous?

External voice: Ludicrous would be giving the Artist too much credit. Unimportant and meaningless would be better. The Artist continues to etch through the paint into the gold beneath, and does so regularly and with conviction, as though there will be a spectacular moment of revelation upon the completion of the work. A golden forest stands upon white, created with patterns of curling and useless intricacy, dizzying the eye, a redundant throwback to Celtic abstractions that symbolised a deeper significance than that of the absurd arrival of the empty forest of gold. What zeitgeist can it grasp? Or what zeitgeist can grasp it? 

None to speak of, and none are spoken of, as the spirit of the times waxes silent and mysterious, though it is not mystery that defines it. Electrolysis pulses rampant through the screens and begs for the attention of it's viewers, a veritable hive-mind grows inwardly stretching out through the burgeoning consciousness of the youth growing into the hyperlinks and terrabytes of the lived and programmed... and the Artist draws a tree, a golden tree among other golden trees. It is justified then, that derision be directed toward the moral high ground that the Artist purports to live and dully expresses so dutifully and systematically, whilst stripping his freedom and imagination bare of colour and the vibrancy of chance and passion. Reverence is not kitsch, and so commend the work to the cellar and search for more meaningful resonances of our time.