The Place of Ambiguity in Life and Art
In writing or speaking about art, or anything else for that matter, I encounter the ambiguity of my existence. “I”, the author or speaker, exists in different rolls, as a person, a painter, a writer, teacher or whatever; but to actually “materialize” this “I”, to become the author, an “I” which can be fully understood and grasped as a holder or producer of meaning is playing with an unreality. I author an “I” that only exists in the context of others with whom I seek meaning. In this context, “I” is limited and at best just an ephemeral, moving target within, which feeds on meaning. Meaning becomes a currency of relationship.
In the economy of meaning, “What does it mean?” is a question I am often asked in reference to one of my paintings. But whatever meaning a thing holds is totally dependent on the meaning one has constructed for oneself before encountering that thing. That prior meaning is a unique set of baggage that we all bring to each experience of our daily lives. It’s a conceptual prison and at the same time, the doorway to a more free and expansive consciousness. However, the door has to be opened.
These words, which you are currently reading, partially limit your focus of awareness to their serial display on this page, which is one layer of context in which their meaning is constructed. Viewing a painting invites another type of context, a visual whole, an “at once” experience. But the linear propensity of the mind immediately jumps in and is drawn to one element after another within the painting. Associations appear among the visual elements which are identified as a bird, a sky, a tree, a person, etc. The mind can’t let things just be.
Yet, paradoxically, it is this “just being” that is the purest expression of “I”. In just simply being, one can find great contentment, even love, and bliss, a feeling of at-one-ment. But to open the door to that state of just being, one has to first accept a certain kind of ambiguity about oneself and his/her condition of being. It’s an ambiguity about existence, an existential doubt, that drives us to applying meaning to every moment of living experience.
That drive toward meaning has to be suspended to cross the field of our ambiguous existence, to settle into just being. The “I” then melts into being, and the boundaries and limitations that normally prop up the “I” with meaningful points of reference fade into the ground of that being.
As I write this post about the place of ambiguity in life and art, what comes to me is that art serves three purposes in the subtle, but ubiquitous state of ambiguity. One is to make things more clear to us, to help us see things in a new light, to supply points of reference for the making of meaning that we might not have considered before. This purpose aids us in our personal development as human beings, as the “I” that seeks meaning. This voice of art speaks to different levels of our evolution and brings a confidence to oneself and a sense of place in the world which is then able to confront our ambiguous existence.
The second purpose that art serves is to bring us face to face with the myriad ways in which the ambiguous challenges us to go beyond the comfortable, to loosen our mental and emotional grasp on our limited world view. Here we begin to navigate the field of ambiguity and expose ourselves to it’s inherent paradoxes. Our attachment to a world view is questioned and we become more open to the realization that our perspective on life as much as it may serve us well is also limited and confining.
The third purpose that art serves is to point us in the direction of that more free and expansive consciousness that lies beyond all ambiguities, and rests in a place of simply being which is void of meaning, a being that is beyond opposites such as being and non-being. Here there are no answers to “What does it mean?”, because there arise no questions.
To achieve this final purpose the artwork has to portray a high degree of integration of its elements, and its composition must communicate a strong sense of balance. An interconnectedness of all its elements presents a visual wholeness. This wholeness is a reflection of the viewer’s own state of perfect unity before the mind makes waves on the waters of ambiguity. To the degree that a piece of art accomplishes this is the degree of its success as a work of art.