Customer Reviews

The Writings Of A Savage

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I was slo interested in Gauguin's comment on "the refinement of a work." I am not sure what he meant by it being a visual artist. A performance artist is expressing themselves in the moment, which does not lend itself to refinement of a work. A work of art that is developed by an artist is conducted with refinement until what the artist conceives begins to show and only ends when the artist has no more ability to go further. It took four years for Da Vinci to produce the Mona Lisa, refining it at the end with a single-strand horse hair brush. Gaugin's need was to schuck culture sense and sensibilities back to what he was before he put on those garmets. To shed the cultural shell or identity which handicaps natural instincts. These natural instincts includes the existential identity one has as a child, to identify only with what one thinks, feels, and knows, especially when in youth, freedom of thinking, feeling, and knowing is allowed. From his writings, the struggle to change his cultural identity is what I think drove him for the last half of his life. At great cost, he succeeded. An excellent source book about the struggle of an artist.

The line that has always remained fixed in my mind was Gauguin's comment

on the refinement of a work. I think on a very basic level, to simply
make a primary statement and move on has a very satisfying feeling to it.
Miles Davis, among others, was fond of one takes because there is a spirit
that is captured in that take, often lost on recurrent ones because
of increased expectations, abstraction of an "ideal", and trying
to recall of the "good stuff" while dismissing the "bad". Gauguin's work and
life capture this idea quite well, and he voices a call-to-arms by bringing
to light this notion of the non-refinement of the work. In Japanese ink
calligraphy, the calligrapher has but one chance to draw to the rice paper;
the live jazz improvisation must consider ALL of the performance to be part of
the statement. It is a further comment against the hyperabstraction of Western
artistic ideals, psuedo-ideals, that canonize relative cultural ideals and
discard that which is considered non-beatiful or non-meaningful.