Technology, part 1

Technology in the context of speaking about style means the tools and materials used in the making of a thing. People rarely look to foundations. They are moved, or not, by the effect of the whole, but every object is a structure, and it is the job of the practitioner to look to the building of it because the foundation determines the object, and every tool leaves its imprint.

It is interesting to note how easily our tools become presumptions. You wish to write a letter, and you naturally pick up a pen and paper. Your writing proceeds until you have completed your idea of what a letter should be. It is the purpose of your letter that is on your mind–the greeting to Aunt Mildred, or the things you must tell John. The tools become automatic. This continues until a change in our tools is forced upon us, often with kicking and screaming and a stubborn allegiance to “old school“ methods. Witness the rise of email and text messaging, and the cries from some quarters about the way these technologies harm the art of writing. And it’s true. The art of writing with a pen is fundamentally, radically, different than the art of writing with a computer. The tool shapes the product.

We live in an era of rapid technological change and innovation, and it is easy to forget that a brush is a technology, as are paper, canvas, charcoal and all the other paraphernalia used in the making of things. Each cultural tradition also possesses informational technologies developed to produce certain effects. In the European tradition these include perspective, shading, anatomy and color theory. All of these tools shape the product, but within a culture we often do not see the marks of the tools, rather we see something closer to “correctness“. A thing that matches our assumptions.

It has taken a century of “Modern Art“ to challenge the presumptions of the European tradition, and many still feel that one of the purposes of making art is to challenge and shock the observer out of preconceived notions. I suspect this is changing. Ezra Pound writes about the soul healing function of the artist in society. This function takes two forms, the diagnostic and the curative. The diagnostician defines the disease, the healer makes glad the human heart. We are due for a time of healing. But, to speak to this era, we will need to use the tools of this era, and to use them, we must see them.

I still use brush and canvas, and I believe that more important than the tool is the awareness of the tool. There is a temptation in an era such as ours to constantly chase the new, as if newness itself contains significance. But, there exist depths of attainment that have little to do with mastering technique and much to do with mastering the self. It involves knowing, and then going beyond knowing; past boredom, past futility, past insight. No one can teach you this. You can’t read about it in books. It is a journey, and you arrive when you have traveled there.

It is a matter of balance. We readily become blind to habitual patterns of thinking and doing, and learning can help us be aware of our habits and challenge them. On the other hand, we only engage deeper aspects of who we are and what we do when we no longer need think about what we do, when we are a simple doing. Magic lies in the combination of both, and all art is magic.