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?
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.
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.
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| Centrepoint |
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