con text

The last post was a bit incomplete, but it just kept hanging there in our sick house not getting published. Since the previous post, our family is still on the up-and-up, notwithstanding some additional emotional and physical setbacks. But we've had painting sessions at the dining room table and laughing fits that turn into hacking coughs. We've had face-offs and exhausted tears, ear infections and returning little-boy energy that tests the walls of our house. But let's get back to the Indian art :)

Context. Literally "together with a text" Or, from the online etymology dictionary:

1432, from L. contextus "a joining together," orig. pp. of contexere "to weave together," from com- "together" + textere "to weave"

Hmmm. The Indian court paintings are especially linked, woven, by a consistent text. The Bhagavad Gita, or a text like it, might have been the actual book reference, but an overall cohesive weave dominates that is borne of a more homogenous culture than that in which most of us find ourselves. And the paintings are even more focused by a single central commission- the royal court of Jodphur. What happens is that there's a style that transcends the individual creative viewpoint and becomes a collective vision. Innovation is important more as a means to new understanding than as a way for a single artist to show off his or her creative prowess. As a result, I found myself thinking very little about the individual artists who would have been enlisted to do these extravagant paintings, and ended up thinking much more about the central ideological aims. There was something intellectually calming about this.

In my world, countless texts overlap-- both actual books of text and CONtexts. Individual aesthetic innovation is prized highly-- from style to thought. Looking at work by fellow contemporary artists can be like flipping through radio stations-- especially the way we used to do it with a rotary dial that would chaotically zip through white noise to oases of sound-- each station a different voice or set of instruments, usually in progress as a series of non sequiturs. So it is with art these days; I flip and plow through white noise and unlinked imagery until something sinks in, and then I take more time with it. Its context must be assessed by whatever trail of crumbs I'm given, and I attempt to weave that person's work into the texture that makes up my own understanding. This is vigorous and engaging at best, alienating and listless at worst. And the internet amps this up, as we all know. It has beautiful international-intellectual linking properties, but also presents us with the challenge of finding and establishing context continually.

So these are some of the things that "Garden & Cosmos" have brought to mind. There's something strikingly metaphorical about those orderly walled gardens, within which hierarchies are clear and the rhythms of ritual are understood and shared.