SIGNAL TO NOISE 5

V : Intents And Purposes

'Chimp loves yes adores his Chimp paints and Chimp brushes with all his Chimp heart and Chimp soul and any Thing or any Human that gets in Chimp way really fucking piss Chimp off!'
Congo

When someone is so passionate, cares so much about what they make, for the simple act of making it, the results will inevitably resonate with significance. And it's then and only then that factors such as technique, or applied transparent concessions, can be considered. This is because all output is primarily filtered through the prism of intent (compare Stanislavski's stage term super-objective). That's why it's so important to ask oneself what intent does The Invisible Man (i.e. the artist) have?

Common themes of impure intent (representing the vast majority of adult human creativity):
- I do it for money (for greed, to pay bills, for drugs/booze, for my family, for other projects)
- I do it for the celebrity
- I do it to be like someone else
- I do it to help me get laid
- I do it because others pressure me
- I do it for attention
- I do it as a way of compensating (for shyness, for having been bullied, for lack of success, for revenge)
- I don't know what else to do with my life
- I do it to be liked

All these examples are compromised to hell because the focus is towards some thing outwith the art itself. Ars non artis. Conversely, artists whose intent is one of devotion to a god, an ideal or belief system, a lover or a hero, are not. The focus in this latter group requires the same degree of passion, commitment, and sacrifice for the art itself as Congo's does, and sometimes even more. I'll be blunt, the vast majority of human artistic intent is utterly and irredeemably untrustworthy. I don't give a damn how well-produced, glossy, limited edition, catchy, professional, proficient (or not) it is, because those qualities are secondary to what counts. Congo's wonderful soulful work beats all that crap hands down. That's why artistic geniuses are inimitable, because the epigones imitate the visible parts that don't matter. That's why scratchy lo-fi recordings of Robert Johnson will comprehensively blow away almost any latter-day blues guitarist, good and bad. Other examples are surely already occurring to you.

It's worth adding that intent isn't static and can radically change throughout an artist's life. It's all too common for initial integrity of purpose to be soon and forever corrupted.

continue to part 6