On Art and Heidegger.

Heidegger asserted that the process of Revealing has as its natural and inevitable corollary Concealment. This means that all Truth contains not only the possibility but the inevitability of Untruth.

The artist, depending upon his or her proximity to the painter, will be well aware of this on a level that the logician, technician, or layman will take for granted. To the painter, the process of any aesthetic departure within the confines of a single work necessitates the process of submerging an existing paradigm. Once the canvas has been covered, I cannot introduce anything new without obscuring something that had been there hitherto. Even the process of beginning a painting necessitates the submersion of the blank canvas.

Any change in personal character or direction may be likened to such a change. Failure is not merely virtuous insofar as it is necessary to have a Winner. Outside of the confines of mere competition, the struggle for Life necessitates often that we sacrifice our very Notion of Success and "sit patiently with" Failure long enough for Failure to become a new paradigm of Success. The artist must repress the compulsion to prostrate before the old Gods, who become buried in what had hitherto been the muck of the Devils' obscurity. That very mud becomes the dirt that hardens into the conception of a new idol.

Should time prove to negate the value of the new form, affirming the original (and probably socially conditioned) view that the new "pales in comparison" and is "inferior", then one can rest assured that, usually if not always, the Superior form -- the True God -- will again be revealed once the false novelty has been scrubbed away. Yet if this should not be so -- should the Old God have faded totally from memory -- one must accept the triumph of this new form as not tragedy but Evolution.

dm.A.A.