Page 8 - November 2020

08
Litterateur
November 2020

Doue'e

There is a whole ecosystem that the ‘artist’
At Crater Lake is inextricably entangled in; any artistic
around 1974
production has a canopy, a humus, a root
system, a mix of soils, dampness and rock,
the occasional bird poop, deep underground
lies a mushroom sending signals while a
Her MA graduation corvid sitting on a branch plays the critic. If
we want to put it in social terms, it has to do
with the characteristics of your families and
communities over the years, their social
standing and circumstances, the places you
have inhabited, the people you have
encountered, your partners, friends and

enemies, the times you have lived in, the strokes of luck you have been granted as
well as the bad breaks, the opportunities, accessibilities and preclusions, your
body (its gender,sexual orientation and physical characteristics) as the dwelling
place of your brain/mind/soul/consciousness, and perhaps to a much smaller
degree temperament and natural inclinations. While today’s scientific approaches
dig for the source of ‘talent’ in particular chemical balances, arrangements of
neurons, characteristics of frontal cortex, (just as in the past phrenology was

developed to plumb the depths of the ‘aberrant mind’ focusing on the shape of
the skull), there are entire potential more holistic fields pertaining to source of
knowledge, its reception and processing, its evolution or devolution through the
million years of existence of homo sapiens and the environment in which they
dwell that are neglected, hindered or have not emerged yet. These potential
alternative routes are pretty distant from mainstream perceptions of ‘the artist’
today which tend to be viewed like Athena sprouting all grown up, armed and
wise from his father’s head. In today’s world of celebrities and stardom, the
emphasis is definitely placed on the individual, their ‘talent’ and the humus is
merely gossip material at best. For a person who has been identified as ‘endowed’,
in a world based on hierarchy and competition rather than interdependence, their
‘gifts’ are measured by the awards they may have received, the ‘milestones’ they
have achieved, the amount of accolades they have accumulated, the prestige of
their publisher or the galleries that have exhibited their work, how much visibility
they have gained and how well they have marketed themselves.