The image and the word are my tools.  I play them together in a dance, that is to say, not as a simple recording of what I may or may not have seen or said but what I think I may have felt…or may feel yet.  Though each might stand alone in some vague symbolic gesture like a mime on a street corner, together they form a conduit of expression that requires no further action on my part, in essence freedom, a liberation from gravity.

 

In some future I will achieve that ultimate goal, removing my ego entirely from my art, at that point I will become the tool .  When that climax is reached and the image and the word communicate with the viewer, as one would with a confidant, without the interjection of what “I” meant or might mean or attempted to evoke or instill, “I” the device, too, will be liberated, a glorious art.  After all, really, in the end, what value is in trying to figure out the tortured soul of some artist?  Only to another artist is that useful, a therapy perhaps? And to force emotion through that method on the unwary traveler who by happenstance should fall upon the work of some artist or another, or even mine, is a mind game, a dominance that in good conscious and in elevation of the spirit should be transcended.

 

I believe ultimately that this Buddha nature is what Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Breton truly sought but inverted to superego.  Had Breton taken his own vision to heart he would have righted himself in a mirror or so his words read. 

 

But why the still image in the camera, why the frozen word?  What purpose the artist? Why not video cameras on street corners anonymously creating art recording landscapes of the consumated?  Focus!  The still image captures a defined slice of time in a manner unavailable to other mediums.  The written word grasps all of time, all of human history, a gene on a strand of DNA when tethered to a poem.  The artist, as ego is removed, becomes like glass finely ground, clearer, sharper, truer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Gregory Gusse

March 2005