Doing and Being

 “...the dialectic between surface and depth”

   This is the description, by Glenn Harcourt, of the shared interest between a film maker and the 2-dimensional images that he is attempting to capture in a 3-dimensional visual format. Written as a reflection on Werner Herzog's 'Cave of Forgotten Dreams', it resonated with something I have been thinking about recently: that is, the relationship between doing and being: or, doing or being.

   I had thought that the two were synonymous: that to do art was to be an artist, and that being an artist was all of one's existence and life. I am an artist, I make art: the work that I do is the thing that I am, that is all. But they are not the same, in the way that doing academic research is not the same as being an academic.

   These dualisms describe a cognitive gap between what one thinks of as one's self, and one's practice. Rauschenberg's famous, and oft misquoted (a sin I have been guilty of) comment about working in 'the gap between art and life' is seductive precisely because it describes a place between doing and being. An interstice between marks on a plane and the architecture of the space in which it resides or is created. This is a trope that I have been exploring, clumsily, for the last few years, without any real sense that I am close to succeeding. 

   Maybe that is why, while continuing to consider myself an artist, I have simply stopped making art.

   The difference between making work that occupies these interstices, and work that simply reflects an image or idea – be it figurative or abstract, two-dimensional or sculptural – may reside in this problematic interplay between surface and depth. Interpret this notion literally, or philosophically, as you will.