American Primitive

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In general I follow a creative pragmatic approach in both my teaching style and the ideas developed in practice. I teach sculpture with the understanding that to do so is to incorporate real thoughts in both time and space with concrete material interactions. Which is to say, I do not make distinctions between working with material and thinking critically. In fact, thought and matter are so interconnected that for me it is essential that students explore the “continuity of differences” between the two interrelated fields. We literally involve ourselves in the objects we make. In other words, thought is the contour of the forms and movements that our lives take, and sculpture, as an embodiment of thought and matter, is an extension of life, not a reflection upon it. Therefore, connections in sculpture are not limited to dynamic material relationships only but biological and social relationships become important features of an embodied understanding of the world, where mind and matter meet.

My creative approach to teaching is fundamentally similar to the way I approach making art. Artists are makers expressing a constructionism of different aesthetic experiences. Whether I am teaching or making art, the process consists of material and thought bringing a very real dynamic to form. This dynamic exists in time, and, as such, I am interested in bringing immediacy and novelty to sculpture through the creation of unique forms, which embody the human organism as well as other living and nonliving kinds of organization. What one literally encounters in the process of making art is the creation of habitats and, with the intention of engaging other objects and thoughts, the artwork communicates across a whole diverse wildlife of form. After an artwork is completed it is often captured by a more “retrospective analysis” for measuring and comparison. One’s aesthetic experience, whether in teaching or creating art, is informed by one’s physical, biological and social relationships. As creatures our aesthetic growth is art’s living holism.

I emphasize significance rather than signification in my teaching methods. “Significance” refers to the assignment of meaning just as “signification” does, but with one key difference, which is that significance directly expresses something unique or singular, whereas signification creates a series of elements arrived at through analogy or metaphor. In contrast to signification, semiosis is the real action of signs in the world! I emphasize to my students that they be aware of the semiotic attributes of their work—and there is no attribute of their work which is not semiotic. Thus, the semiosphere is composed of all kinds of sensations: sounds, textures, movements, smells, shapes, signals of all kinds and waves. Every sense carries the imprint of another sense. For example, vision feels texture at a distance! Our creaturely world is directly situated in an expressive form of communication: semiosis. Art emerges in the interaction we have as living creatures with not only the semiosphere but the whole biosphere in general.

I find that making art is often times a nonlinear process speaking to the whole and not only the parts. I extend this understanding into teaching as well when linear methods (planning and execution) become infused with nonlinear experiences (our experience in time), primarily a combination of creation and presentation in the process of making an artwork. The process is nonlinear inasmuch as our internal sense of time converges with different states of mind. As living organisms our irreversibility marks each quality or element as a unique and unpredictable opportunity for reflection. I emphasize the importance of bringing together material connections with an open process philosophy of construction (immanence and transformation) where thought, feeling and action unite in complex ways, specifically in context to pursuing what I have called a radical natural history of sculpture. When one makes sculpture, an “inorganic life of things” comes into being, including the objects and constructions in our cultural environment. With an expanded field of perception I see what happens in both the classroom and artist studio as essential in putting art into action. The physics of matter and thought are brought back into sculpture by having sensation and expression take on new kinds lively forms. As living creatures we literally inhabit the things we create!

My relationship to institutions has always been on this creative pragmatic level where creativity and exploration travel hand in hand. The kinds of colleges I am interested in teaching at support a whole ecology of cultural diversity and concrete student interaction. As I have already noted, making art and teaching are deeply interrelated in my life. The creative process at times goes beyond the individuals involved. As a kind of “composed chaos” artworks locate new possibilities for sense making as philosophy and science share with art the ability to describe complex intensive processes. In short, a new kind of materialism has emerged over the last few generations, one which is inherently dynamic and full of “spontaneous organization.” As an artist, I see novelty and creation as open models set upon a plane of interaction, incorporating a whole ontology of matter, and, revealing in the deepest furrows those immanent qualities belonging to living and nonliving things alike.

I feel strongly about a more embodied dialogue with nature as tantamount to understanding both natural and cultural systems – exposing us to an aesthetic possibility more pragmatic and wild. Our physical, biological and social processes are essential to understanding the wider implications when it comes to making art and teaching. I say this because art has to do with human flourishing and, as with deeper nonhuman elements, it is the inclusion of living and nonliving matter that a more immanent approach comes into being, bringing together experiences across different natural and cultural geographies. If culture is the way nature evolved in humans then art too must strive to locate its own natural history, one where natural and cultural systems embody more open creative processes in science, design and art.

Mason Cooley

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American Primitive[1]

The project on which I have been working is called American Primitive. What I propose to do here is give a very brief description and introduction to the sculptures and videos under this title. For some time now I have been interested in what I call a “pragmatist aesthetic,” one which brings to attention the concrete interaction in the landscape between living and nonliving forms. My work moves away from linguistic-inspired theories and, instead, pours into the concrete sympathies of the living organism. In other words, as a way of generating sculpture and video I have turned away from methods of representation and toward an exploration of the ontological conditions of artworks in their embodied state, as existent not in the environment only, but in the environment as organism. I am interested in how and why sculptures exist over what they represent.

The sculptures embody forms conveying a sense of expression beyond human analogy or fixed representation. Does sculpture start with the animal who carves out a home? Isn’t there a larger aesthetic growth which all living things express and, if so, is art a “morbid overgrowth of functions which lie deep in nature”? In other words, art is nature’s way of educating itself (a whole “zoology of form”). The subject in sculpture now centers on the interaction between not only the human but nonhuman subjects including animal and plant creations, while they connect together through a dynamic materialism, by which I mean that a nonliving form is equally present in these constructions. The landscape is pitted with the anonymous indwelling of living and nonliving entities. There is a deep isomorphism between forms created by humans and forms not created by humans: from ant colonies, animal shelters, plant and geological formations including weather patterns with those human made forms like so called “comfort stations” and “bat towers.” I propose an interior to sculpture exploring the “remote geologic epochs” of open evolutionary processes! Again, I encourage the creation of a wilderness of form, a bend in the direction of process but one which engages those deep epochs spanning from the situational to the concrete.

The metaphysician’s tools par excellence are the jigsaw and video camera. For example, living images share their durational qualities through the direct presentation of an immanent material approach. The organismic embodies not just the human but a whole organization of forces living and not living. Time is in matter. The various states each artwork creates, as narrative or series of sensational attributes (between humor and habitat), implies the creation of thinking-images and the creation of sculpture-minds. A range of vivid experience is created between the sculptures “Landscape Vision Shelter,” “Mind Sweep One” and “Texan Spiritual” with the video “American Primate!” This not only appears in the creation of various physical structures (e.g. bat towers) but is also generated through the fact that we live in a creaturely world. As living creatures we literally inhabit the things we create! On a still deeper level art animates the inanimate. I mean this not as mere metaphor, but in reference to the fact that an “inorganic life of things” is constantly taking shape. As I work I keep in mind that such constructions, whether in the landscape or in the gallery, are “attractors” for all kinds of idiosyncratic modes of behavior. Finally, the fact that each sculpture is "testable" to the conditions of our actual existence radically suggests that our thoughts are both practical and creative at the same time.

Despite heavy cultural emphasis on the “analytic aesthetic” and a rigid belief in a rather narrow form of human communication (articulate “symbolic” language) I now find in art a requirement to explore the non-linguistic expressions belonging to all kinds of living creatures. Thus beyond mere symbols we live in a world full of signs. Signs are experienced through my action in the world. The action of such signs is called semiosis which embodies a more wild form of communication across plant and animal species. Indeed art is situated in what some now call the semiosphere! Thus the semiosphere is composed of all kinds of qualities: sounds, textures, movements, smells, shapes, signals of all kinds and waves. There is “natural meaning,” like the event of a plume of smoke, but also expressions between animals through physical action, sound or smell. In other words, meaning is contingent on our action in the world before “symbolic recognition.” For example, I do not need the “symbol” of smoke to understand it is real: the sign and its meaning are directly connected by their action! Signs refer to their action and not to their symbolic re-presentation. Examples include “natural signs” like footprints, smoke and thunder but also “medical signs” like pain, rashes, pulse-rate, and even “signals” from living or nonliving things like gestures or a knock at the door. Finally, signals include all kinds of “recordings,” from film and video to sound, but also mark making in general. Such Signs of Life are real because they exist in time as a unique quality or expression. There is nothing arbitrary about signs in this embodied form. Again I am interested in this more descriptive semiotic approach, especially when exploring the organism in greater nuance and complexity. Semiosis supplies the raw matter-energy for both the sculptures and videos as each embody natural and cultural phenomena equally.

In my work I aim to, rather than speak with mere symbols, demonstrate a concrete interaction between the thing and its creation, including the organism’s own tacit response. Creation over representation implies a world that artists are not always willing to acknowledge, especially as it regards their institutional allegiances. But culture is the way nature evolved in humans, and so there are now aesthetic qualities to explore including those which are physical, biological and social. My interest in abstraction is an expression of this kind of morphogenesis of form. I realize, however, that for artists to be concerned with the ethological dimensions of human and nonhuman behavior I may be in a shadowy place. The phrase which comes to mind and where I will leave this is my desire to explore a whole ecology of practice rather than “indexes and references” to a canon of art across centuries of hard-headed rational thought. Leaving then for the work of others - I include myself here - more aberrant forms murky and lacking proper representation. In many ways, each sculpture makes real a person, thing or quality that I regard as important features of a living semiosis: the sculptures are not reducible to works of art responding to other works of art.

Mason Cooley

[1] The title’s history is as follows. The phrase not only references John Fahey’s cosmology of “finger picking” but it also suggests two other connections, one which outlines an interest in action before comprehension, otherwise known as prehension, the second explores the ontogenesis of artistic expression. I am interested in the American landscape and how all kinds of entities create novel “arrangements of form” in the environment as a whole. A pluralistic universe of artistic expression comes to “mind and matter” in the artworks themselves. In part perception exists outside the body, among the wilds of organic and inorganic form.

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Mind Sweep One, 2005

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Detail, Texan Spiritual, 2005

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