The Gift as Art: An Interview with Stephen David Ross - Pt. 3
James Coignard, "Deux Profils vis à vis" Blatt 2 aus "Twin" Farbcarborundumradierung und Collage 1979. Galerie Boisseree. "For the artist who has not yet decided to depict a specific theme or subject, one might well suppose that each time and at every moment the entire universe is ready to surge forth from the virgin canvas which he is contemplating before launching himself into work. All the possibilities are open, and principally the process of transformation and redefinition of the medium as a completed work of art (Pleynet, JC, p.20)."
INTERRUPTION #1: DIAPHOROS
“Where Heidegger takes the gift of language to exclude mammals and birds, everything nonhuman, Plato includes cicadas and bees in the sacred gift of art, includes all inanimate things under psuche’s care, gifts from the Muses. Where the gift of nous, including the art of reason, excludes, divides, and cuts, demanding that we choose, the gift of poiesis, in its madness, knows nothing of exclusion, cuts nothing off from the gift of the good. Yet, even so, rhapsodes and poets “speak many things and fine,” participate in the good (Ross, GB, p.27).”
“Certainly we wish to escape injustice, to avoid evil, to tell the good from bad, to choose beauty rather than ugliness. Yet in art’s poiesis, beauty resists exclusion, resists being cut off from ugliness, evil, repulsiveness, or what disgusts us…art does not exclude the ugly, painful, or bad. Art includes everything in nature, under the good. In art we take joy in everything around us, given as the gift of beauty from the good, in art (Ross, GB, p.27-28)."
