{"id":5473,"date":"2015-02-12T10:19:17","date_gmt":"2015-02-12T10:19:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=5473"},"modified":"2015-02-09T21:51:17","modified_gmt":"2015-02-09T21:51:17","slug":"mindfully-uncertain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=5473","title":{"rendered":"Mindfully uncertain"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Memorial<\/a>

Memorial Art Gallery at Night, Jim Mott, oil on board<\/p><\/div>\n

I had a desultory conversation with Jim Mott recently, touching on why we paint, so I\u2019m just going to leap into it in media res<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Jim: In a better world the agenda for painting since the Sixties might have been to integrate the abstract and the real.<\/p>\n

Dave: Everybody tries to some degree. I think that\u2019s really what painting is, even the most abstract is representational and vice versa.<\/p>\n

J: But to have the dialog between them . . .<\/p>\n

D: Right. What I love about your work is that you create that tension between the painterly quality and the image.<\/p>\n

J: My worldview isn\u2019t defined very well. I try to do tighter stuff but it doesn\u2019t work. I would love it if I could do a Van Eyck. But I think it doesn\u2019t mesh with what reality is.<\/p>\n

D: How so?<\/p>\n

J: The uncertainty principle. We\u2019re here and we\u2019re gone and everything seems indefinite. I paint not so much delineating but putting blobs of paint side by side. There\u2019s an uncertainty about the image . . . it\u2019s sort of playing with uncertainty rather than being oppressed by it. Even though I\u2019d love to do something more real, I just can\u2019t do it. It doesn\u2019t mesh.<\/p>\n

D: Heidegger was about that.<\/p>\n

J: I don\u2019t know Heidegger that well. I\u2019m just saying things aren\u2019t really that solid.<\/p>\n

D: This is one of his central ideas. Death, the fact of death, means everything is destabilized. So if you are conscious of your mortality . . . nothing is certain.<\/p>\n

J: You\u2019ve summed it up nicely. I\u2019ve been worried about the abyss since I was about five.<\/p>\n

D: Anyone who is an artist has had some kind of confrontation with that.<\/p>\n

J: Speaking of philosophy, I was on the Internet and thought I don\u2019t want to watch junk again. I thought let\u2019s see if there\u2019s a lecture on Kierkegaard.<\/p>\n

D: (I laugh out loud.) Really? Just killing time? A little Kierkegaard?<\/p>\n

J: He would hate to be on the Internet. I found this guy doing a lecture, with a Texas twang but he was good. I checked him out and I really wanted to meet him, but it turned out he has died.<\/p>\n

D: This lecturer you mean.\u00a0Speaking of mortality.<\/p>\n

J: Yes. The thought that he left me with, he was talking about hyper-reality and he was saying the biggest battle of our time isn\u2019t rights or the environment. It\u2019s reality against unreality.<\/p>\n

D: My friend and editor Dick Todd wrote a book in which\u00a0that was one of the central themes. The Thing Itself.<\/em> He teaches narrative non-fiction at Goucher. I think\u00a0that\u2019s what Heidegger is mostly about. Thomas Sheehan wrote a book that just came out and I\u2019m starting to read it and his thesis about Heidegger is that in Heidegger \u201cbeing\u201d signifies \u201cmeaning.\u201d That\u2019s a different tack from the usual interpretation of his philosophy. It’s the question of what really matters.<\/p>\n

J: What was that paraphrase earlier?<\/p>\n

D: The host of Entitled Opinions<\/em> was saying, about Heidegger\u2019s philosophy, that when you are aware of mortality and not avoiding it through inauthentic behavior, it destabilizes the world and your system of meaning so that you are faced with uncertainty. The point is not to avoid the uncertainty but face it and dwell with it.<\/p>\n

J: That would be nice to have known that a while ago.<\/p>\n

D: It\u2019s there in Kierkegaard too. You have to leap.<\/p>\n

J: We were talking about painting and Jeff Koons, trying to define what it is that defines painting, as opposed to a lot of what\u2019s going on in art. I was thinking that when the power grid goes down you still have a painting to look at. Did you read that New Yorker<\/em> piece, Adam Gopnick, who runs into Jacob Collins\u00a0who\u2019s a realist painter so he starts to learn figure drawing and how hard it is. It takes him a year or two and by then his idea of what matters in art changes. It\u2019s great. But Collins\u00a0hates everything since Manet. That\u2019s reactionary. We aren\u2019t reactionary. I love Ai Weiwei\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

D: I love his work too.<\/p>\n

J: Meanwhile, though, we\u2019ve still got Jeff Koons, global warming, multi-national coporations. Everything is going a certain way. I don\u2019t see myself as reactionary or pointless, but what is our stance? I think of it more like environmental preservation.<\/p>\n

D: That\u2019s the essence of conservatism, the way Fairfield Porter was conservative. (Not politically or culturally, but in terms of painting.) An essay in one of the books of his paintings I have pointed out that he was conservative in the sense that he was trying to conserve certain vital qualities in painting, certain practices, in art. He respected the abstract expressionists and they liked him<\/em>. De Kooning got him into his first gallery. But he liked the French painters, liked the post-Impressionists and he was saying there was something there valuable and worth preserving. It wasn\u2019t being opposed to change or progress, but wanting to preserve what matters without resisting change.<\/p>\n

J: Prophecy. In the Old Testament sense of someone calling attention to what\u2019s real and what matters in a time when much of it is being lost.<\/p>\n

D: That\u2019s an interesting term because people associate prophecy with the future, but they were saying this is what\u2019s real. All they were doing was saying look at what you are doing, it\u2019s off the mark.<\/p>\n

J: Like you said, mindfulness. It\u2019s sort of a spiritual vocation. It would be nice if I could paint in the service of consciousness and someone else could articulate what it\u2019s about, why it matters.<\/p>\n

D: I agree.<\/p>\n

J: Oh, I did something totally different. In Tuscon in November I was there for three weeks. Usually I don\u2019t paint because I\u2019m lazy. I wanted an excuse to paint, and I was staying with strangers and for ten days the 14-year-old son of the guy I was staying with used this random GPS generator, which I found on-line. We randomized a GPS point every day and I would go and paint there. With the guy\u2019s son on my back, I had to do it. We\u2019d plug in the numbers and on Google Earth we\u2019d go, \u201cOh no, not there.\u201d<\/p>\n

D: So you\u2019d do it again.<\/p>\n

J: No. I’d go through with it. When it isn\u2019t picturesque you\u2019re more alive to it.<\/p>\n

D: You have to really look.<\/p>\n

I know we talked about more than this, because we\u2019re always trying to articulate what the point of painting actually is, but this is all I\u2019ve retained. On email, afterward, Jim elaborated a little more. He wrote:<\/p>\n

I was motivated to write by an interview I read with W S Merwin.<\/p>\n

Merwin mentions Max Picard, the World of Silence. \u00a0So does Merton in a book of contemplative essays I’m reading. \u00a0A very obscure book, but one of my favorites. Did I loan that to you? I can’t recall if we’ve even discussed it. \u00a0You must read it. And I have a rare book by Picard that even Merwin may not have heard of.<\/p>\n

Well, all this, and I have to report that the highlight of my trip to Memphis was getting a tire fixed in West Memphis, Arkansas. Just interacting with surprisingly nice and very different people.<\/p>\n

Lastly, I have been updating my website and now have a page on the Landscape Lottery that you might like. I won’t try to put a link in this message, but go to\u00a0jimmott.com<\/a>\u00a0then news and it is the top link. \u00a0 i also have a bird art page that might amuse you, i think\u00a0http:\/\/www.jimmott.com\/4x_birds.html<\/a>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 oh, i think that worked, so the other may be http:\/\/www.jimmott.com\/lottery.html<\/a><\/p>\n

My very last thought is that in these matters knowing what’s right isn’t as important as simply remembering to keep the asking and thinking going. You probably knew that already.<\/p>\n

What jumped out at me in all of this were two things: the distinction Jim made early on about the contest between reality and unreality, in which unreality seems to be winning handily these days. I watch far too much television, for example. And the other was the notion of painting as mindfulness. Unfortunately there\u2019s a mindfulness craze happening at the moment, but maybe that\u2019s a good thing. Even a quickly executed painting takes a few thousand times as long as a tweet, and one that really delves into \u201cslow time\u201d represents a completely different sort of mind from the spider monkeys our brains are quickly becoming, unable to sit still, thanks to smartphones, tablets, laptops and cable. Painting is one way of restoring my attention span and applying the\u00a0mind in a way that serves as a counterforce to the technological hive mind. It\u2019s a way of struggling toward work as some kind of spiritual commitment, an affirmation of life that isn\u2019t deceptive or spurious or glib, and humble as well, because it\u2019s a way of being the servant of what you see, not the master of it\u2014as science and technology constantly suggest we can become.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had a desultory conversation with Jim Mott recently, touching on why we paint, so I\u2019m just going to leap into it in media res: Jim: In a better world the agenda for painting since the Sixties might have been to integrate the abstract and the real. Dave: Everybody tries to some degree. I think […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nMindfully uncertain - represent<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/thedorseypost.com\/?p=5473\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mindfully uncertain - represent\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"I had a desultory conversation with Jim Mott recently, touching on why we paint, so I\u2019m just going to leap into it in media res: Jim: In a better world the agenda for painting since the Sixties might have been to integrate the abstract and the real. 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