The artist as Critical Thinker

[coberst]

The artist as Critical Thinker

The Critical Thinker as artist

First, for this essay, I wish to define the artist as a creator of the concrete forms that give credibility to the abstract ideas of a society or culture. Since we are creatures driven by artificial symbols we need more artists capable of the concretization of the symbols we live by.

In “Art and Artist, when speaking about primitive humans, Otto Rank says--"The urge for abstraction, which owed its origin to a belief in immortality and created the notion of the soul, created also the art which served the same ends, but led beyond the purely abstract to the objectivizing and concretizing of the prevailing idea of the soul."

The creative personality makes use of the art-ideology of her culture in a critical manner. He abides in it, but constantly struggles against it in a critical thinking manner. S/he does not merely “trust but verify; he analysis and forms a concrete expression that is intended to present a critical evaluation of the ideologies of the epoch. However, no matter how strong the personality of the artist may be, s/he is deeply embedded within the ideologies of society and thus greatly affected by the same.

In a chapter titled “The Artist’s Fight with Art Rank focuses upon the dual role the artist often must play. Naturalistic art, which grows out of wo/man’s sense of superiority, represents man’s imitative command of his world; “on the contrary, in abstract art, which is born of a sense of dependence, he appears as self-creative.

Otto rank has, as some conclude, arrived at “this knowledge of the artist’s soul and of the creative process¦Because he has seen this process as a phase in that larger creative activity by which man, being man, has built up the totality of civilization. Thus, specifically, he has been able to interpret the development of creature to self-conscious creator in the course of the ages and, above all, the process whereby art gradually becomes differentiated from religion and tends finally to take religion’s place¦he solves the old riddle of “imitation in art, proving that the creative activity is always a free and by intention a transcendent one, of which “imitation is but a cultural mood and method.

Rank tells me that the artist is a creator who gives concrete form to abstract ideas. This artist may be an Einstein, Picasso, architect, engineer, or even you. Do you ‘buy’ that as a possibility?