LIFE VS ART

“life makes art better than life
art makes life better than art” so said stephen dillane, or tacita dean, the artist or the one living the art, the actor…

together, life and art define our time on this planet, for beings who share a unique faculty called consciousness – or a light shifting behind our eyes – that we strive to understand, or at least define.

art is more than likely the closest we come to going beyond the binary conversations of science and philosophy around dualism and physicalism. art allows for both, or neither, it forges a path beyond our misconceptions and into another realm, where processes and activities become our purpose and define meaning, and hence may give us further understanding to what is i. or really, where is ‘i’.
right now, it is in the bus, or on the rope, or moving toward a large drawing. but that i is not only mine i, is it?

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the human faced with the choice of art or life is really not asking a question at all. how can one be without the other?
is the better question or tension perhaps more about flow vs interruption?

if i flow with this life i am leading or that is leading me i will come to a peace with it and it will come to peace with me, what the universe that i am offers me in the short term will become the narrative to my long term, it will be a ‘natural life story’ – no?
or will this flow not be close enough to pure life force, as in breath, light, water – will the flow i go with actually be the forces of economics, of unbalanced information, of irregular eruptions based on someone else’s greed or need – and so, if I choose this flow will my narrative not end up being something i dread? something totally untoward what i believe in? what do i believe in? and where am i? and is there or ever was there belief after i had my heart broken the third time? if god is dead, where is nietzsche?

surely art (or some other humanities) can help me oscillate these understandings and give me the knowledge and experience i seek?
or will life, the thing outside of me, that truly becomes me be the tide i travel to help me be free. opening to this, i will be, surely, happy?!

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as we go deeper in the great tug of tension (and i’m not talking group masturbation here) let us pull toward the force which will help balance out the other – can one be without the other? of course> but what would be the point?

Written as an introduction to Fee Plumley’s first Tug of War at OpenSourceHome – “where life thought it had it, but art ran away with it”. FP