Mission for the contemporary artist : learning to see... "In order to remain faithful to my temperament, which is fundamentally positive and which indulges only indirectly and grudgingly in criticism and contesting, I'm hastening to expound the three tasks for which teachers are essential. We have to learn how to see, we have to learn how to think, we have to learn how to talk and to write. The goal of these three disciplines is a refined culture. Learning to see: accustoming the eye to quietness, to patience, to letting things come to it, to suspend judgment, to learn to consider from all angles the particular catching it in its totality. It's there the preparatory school basic to life of spirit: not to react immediately to any solicitation, but to know how use the instincts which hold back and isolate. Learning to see: to my way of thinking, it's almost to have what the no-philosophical language calls the strength of will: what is essential here, it's not to want to do something, to know how postpone his own decision. All anti-spiritual attitude, all vulgarity comes from the incapacity to resist to a solicitation: we are forced to react, we act on each impulse. In quite a few cases, such a constraint is already a sign of disease, of decline, a symptom of exhaustion. Almost all what the no-philosophical coarseness defines by the word "vice" is in fact this physiological powerlessness in not to react. Practical consequence of this sight education: afterwards, when we'll have to learn something, we'll use to be slow, distrustful, reluctant. In the first place, we'll let come near with a hostile coolness all what is unknown and new, whisking cautiously the hand away. To be open-minded to the four winds, to bow obsequiously low before each little fact, with eagerness to rush at the others -and at all what is other-, in brief the famous modern "objectivity" is a matter for the bad taste, above all else it's the contrary of distinction." Friedrich Nietzsche Extracts of "What German people don't have" in Crépuscule des idoles ou comment philosopher à coup de marteau, Gallimard, Folio Essai, p.55-56. "In winter, when there are no roses, I can see a rose, so soul has the power to produce noexistent things as God creating things from nothing... A thing doesn't come from outside to inside, but it comes to outside from inside." Maître Eckhart "Our eye is a target for the objects which are in front of us. It's these objects which are aiming at our eye and not the contrary." Superconductive
sight Guillevic, 2003 |