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It is essential for "Gus Leonisky" to see democracy through art and sciences…

 

 

Art is the expression of human deceptions and extrapolations, deliberate or not, that include politics and religious beliefs, while sciences are the seeking of exacting reality from the infinitesimally small up to the details of the greater universe. 

Democracy is about sharing as equally as possible the reality of ideas, including economic ideals with minimal selfishness, so that everyone (most of us) can have a decent (hopefully cultured) life — young and old. Otherwise we would be in a despotic system, with king, queen or dictator. Democracy a big ask. The oldies like me are on the way out, but still trying to stay relevant, upright and political, despite the weather affecting our joints. We’re a mix of selfish self-made little bourgeois and of dudes struggling to pay the bills because the pension sucks. On average, old women seem to get a bigger rough-end of the pineapple. Meanwhile the young are dippy and sunken into their unsmart-phones, thinking that Kim Kardashian is the summit of Kulture. The middle-aged are too busy working, to survive — and they watch entertainment on the box to relax rather than be interested in being bothered by democracy (yeah yeah)— and a few rich geezers play the derivative market. 

Our democracy too often relies on series of knee-jerks, say through a young man voting for Clive Palmer, because he liked yellow since he was a kid, and some bogans from the burbs being influenced by the Murdoch media that tell them, the workers, blue and white collar, their best chance of improving their pay-packets is to vote for the party of those who flog them and destroy the common good… Yep, makes sense. Privatise...

And we have the grocers: the people who count cents to make a living. They hate the workers because they cost money — and hate the rich who don’t even bother to count thousands to make their billions. 

This is why I have brought up many artistic concepts on this site, through visions such as that of Duchamp, Picasso, Dali and Utrillo — and many more. They don’t do much for democratic equality, except increase the cultural baggage in which Democracy can be enriched by ideas. Each artist has their own motivation and many go at it alone, sometimes with the help of friends (or family) alongside. Some artists need patrons, including government handouts, to survive. By showing the way artists think, democratically speaking, should broaden the horizon of individual's survival without having to end up living like Van Gogh… But, why did a poet like Marinetti write the fascist manifesto of Italy? Is this because we are masochists or sadists at heart? Why do we prefer to be ruled by ruthless psychopath rather than be deciding our own future? Is the lure of cash so aspirational that we give up our ethics? Do we pass the buck to god?

Some artists mix with other artists, though it seems that, at the present time, there is a demand for uniqueness, which does not mean selfishness, but the presentation a personal view of the future (or the past). Such a vision is likely to fail nonetheless, as the mechanics of life on earth have their requirements away from human artistic endeavours. Art is a relative diversified activity.


Democracy can learn to be more diverse from it.

It’s daunting. 

I could paint like Ben Quilty when I was ten. I did. I could paint like Michelangelo when I was ten. I did. Vlaminck, I remember, had no secrets. When I was ten, Vlaminck was the easiest artist to copy or emulate, but to me he was emotionless and unimportant… In many ways, it’s often a question of seeing, visualising the tricks and doing. Back then as a kid, I did not like Van Gogh’s life. Too mad. Too easily twisted. No future. I copied skilled illustrators so well, one could hardly notice the difference. I was impressed by the "pompier” art (a Salvador Dali’s expression) of the tray painters who lacquered Monet’s irises… Through friends doing Uni degrees, I became acquainted with the works of “still contemporary” (them old, us young) of artists such as Juan Miro and Paul Klee. 

In our early advertising days, we could not pass the works of Milton Glazer, Mondrian and Andy Warhol. Jackson Pollock had no secrets. Helvetica became our bread and butter, as well as Caslon and other serifs such as Baskerville. Arnold Böcklin was a quiet god of art nouveau typography. We advertised detergents and car-parts nonetheless.

Böcklin exercised an influence on Giorgio de Chirico, and on Surrealist painters like Max Ernst and Salvador Dalí. When asked who was his favourite painter, Marcel Duchamp controversially named Arnold Böcklin as having a major influence on his art. Whether Duchamp was serious in this assertion is still debated.

I can see why people would be sarcastic about Duchamp views of Böcklin. Influenced by Romanticism, Böcklin used mostly mythology, overlapped with the aesthetic of the Pre-Raphaelites to symbolise the human condition. Many of his paintings explore life and mortality in the context of a fantasy world. Duchamp’s Large Glass does an anti-similar non-symbolism in an abstracted monochrome format where the idea, often meaningless, becomes far more important than the image — though the image is integral to the idea… It’s cunning. It needs the expressed idea to describe the work. Arnold’s pictures do not need a narrative. His Island of the Dead is a masterpiece of restrained peacefully contemplative ending of meaninglessness…

So democracy struggles between the goal posts of the media, the governments and Julian Assange. We owe Julian far more than we have realised so far. We owe him more than big, for the truth. Julian is like a modern artist full of ideas with skills in a different medium: encryption. No Leonardo, no Einstein could match his mind.


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Picture at top: the Island of the dead by AB