New York street

* an ongoing series of quotations – mostly from artists, to artists – that offers wisdom, inspiration, and advice for the sometimes lonely road we are on.

Artists are individuals willing to articulate in the face of flux and transformation.  And the successful artist finds new shapes for our present ambiguities and uncertainties.  The artist becomes the creator of the future through the violent act of articulation. I say violent because articulation is a forceful act.  It demands an aggressiveness and an ability to enter into the fray and translate that experience into expression.  In the articulation begins a new organization of the inherited landscape.

My good friend the writer Charles L. Mee, Jr. helped me to recognize the relationship between art and the way societies are structured.  He suggested that, as societies develop, it is the artists who articulate the necessary myths that embody our experience of life and provide parameters for ethics and values.  Every so often the inherited myths lose their value because they become too small and confined to contain the complexities of the ever-transforming and expanding societies. In that moment new myths are needed to encompass who we are becoming.  These new constructs do not eliminate anything already in the mix; rather, they include fresh influences and engender new formations.  The new mythologies always include ideas, cultures and people formerly excluded from the previous mythologies.  So, deduces Mee, the history of art is the history of inclusion. 

Ann Bogart in A Director Prepares:  Seven Essays on Art and Theater

Comments are welcome!