Primate art

Some people want art that reconnects them to primordial feelings any primate can have.

Some people want art that connects them to primordial feelings only a human being can ever have — and perhaps feelings for which he has only very recently acquired a capacity to feel, or is on the cusp of acquiring.

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Isn’t it strange that we have words for most of those feelings we can recognize in our wordless siblings, the animals? Rage, sadness, peacefulness, affection…

It is where we are uniquely our own species, dominated by language, where, strangely, language fails us.

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I’m going my take a crack at the “humans are the ______ animal” formula…

Humans are the naturally artificial animal.

We humans have biologically co-evolved with culture for so long now, that the notion of a human being liberated from culture is an absurdity. Human beings are essentially the interplay of essence and accident. Human being, being human, is corrupted when purified of accident.

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I want art to give form to the primordial experiences we have come to have, not to re-express the feelings we have had all along, feelings that everyone one of us can have, feelings that have enjoyed the benefit of language for hundreds of millennia — common feelings.

I want art that shows us a future some of us can feel, and many more will come to feel, as geist finds form. I want future-oriented art that participates in human being’s perpetual self-creation.

 

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