Back to the question.
Why?
Why is it what I am writing in this moment, what I have to write for myself today, is what I have to write for myself? Why do I have to write this, why not let somebody else write what it is that has to be written? And why for myself?
Artist Donald Shambroom writes “Art presents itself. It wants to be seen. If an object remains in darkness, removed by its maker, absent from the world and the “art world” it is not art.[1](Shambroom: 39)
Shambroom is not the first and won’t be the last to make this statement. It is a statement generated from that old empirical philosophers thought experiment on observation and perception.[2] If something is not witnessed (observed, perceived) does it exist? Jumping forward a few hundred years to British philosopher Richard Wollheim’s lectures on Painting as Art [198?] and his premise for painting to be seen as art the painter must see the painting as the spectator sees it, leading me back to Shambroom’s statement and the question if the painter making the painting is seeing the painting as the spectator sees it, can the painter while making the painting simultaneously remove it from the world making it, despite Wollheim’s assertion, “not art”?
In short, when making, writing, or engaging in any other creative act for myself if I am simultaneously aware of the possibility of the presence (somewhere, sometime, someday) of an observer, unknown others to whom the creation could be presented, then even if my intention in the moment is to squirrel away, maybe even destroy, that which I am creating, if I do not know if, when, or to whom the creation will ever be presented
TBC
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[1] Admittedly, I am taking Shambroom’s statement out of context here in order to apply his words for my own purpose. He uses these words in connection to the photographic portrait made by Man Ray of Marcel Duchamp on his Deathbed in large part to call into question whether the portrait was not just an artwork in and of itself but a collaboration in the moment of death of Duchamp and Man Ray. On the one hand Shambroom’s assertion that by hiding away the photograph for twenty years after its making Ray was preventing its becoming ‘art’ answers his question “Can the lifetime collaboration of two artists be extended a few hours after one of them has died?” with a resounding ‘no’. On the other hand, by the same argument the photographer's eventual appearance …
[2] If a tree falls in the forest ...