I’ve been thinking about ideas. Ideas are strange things. We think of them as solid, immutable things that we get totally. Something a lot like this
That once Leonardo had the image of the flying machine in his head he’d be able to see it clearly as we see it here. And once he had the idea it would stay like that forever. But it’s not like that. Ideas aren’t fixed. They’re never fixed. I’ve become very aware of this making my own animated projects. I’ll take notes for what I want to do in the future. Then days or even weeks later I’ll look at my notes and have no idea why I chose to write that down or it that way. But I’ll stick to the plan and normally it will work out fine I went into this is in excruciating detail in a previous post, ‘Making Art” https://johnhawk.art.blog/2019/11/06/making-art/
But let me make a new proposition.
Ideas don’t just fade over time. They start decomposing the second they are conceived. They have a half-life.
A Half-life is a term in physics referring to the period an object remains radioactive. Normally an isotope or some other object that generates radiation rather than simply receives it (At least if I remember right). It’s also the name of the best video game ever made. But that’s another story. A half-life is so named because from the second the object has been made radioactive that radioactive state starts decaying. It’s like heat. Heat goes away. A stone doesn’t vanish unless something makes it. But radiation only exists for so long.
I submit that ideas also have a half-life. That once they are brought into existence they start decaying immediately. This is why note taking matters obviously. But even the best notes will only give you 98% of what was there. The human mind is always in the process of losing information. You probably don’t remember what you had for lunch yesterday. But you can be reminded. If you were shown a photo of yourself eating lunch two days ago it would come back to you and you’d go “Oh yeah. That! It was a little undercooked that day”. As it is with memories. So it is with ideas. You may have a thought that seemed amazing. Lose it. And then it comes back later. Almost certainly not exactly the same. But pretty close. Far better than nothing. But in time, that idea will mutate and decay down into nothing. Just as some memories do seem to seep into the ether, like when you’re shown a photograph from years ago and can’t remember the story behind it, many of your ideas will vanish into the void if not looked after or recorded. But even so they will mutate and change. The remembrance changing things and the notes being a very, very imperfect hook.
In time it is the hook you are remembering. Not the idea.
And the hook in itself will mutate the idea. You never truly have the same idea twice.
But that’s a simple point to make. Not that different to what I mentioned in my “Making Art” Journal.
No. I bring this up to show that ideas, concepts if you will, cannot be art. Or at least cannot be experienced as art.
If an idea starts decaying the second it is convinced then any gap between its inception and note-taking is time in which the idea has started warping and decaying. No presentation of
I was motivated to start thinking about this when painting over drawings I’d made. Even though I made the drawings and they were right in front of me the second I had painted over them I was already forgetting what the drawing looked like. Only able to make an approximation of the original. Sometimes a good approximation, but an imperfect recreation nonetheless. Given I can spend a long time getting the details right this is very annoying. It’s fascinating if terrifying just how ephemeral ideas are. Even when they are ideas or ideas about things that we spent ages creating.
Given the transians of ideas it is tempting to say that there are no real ideas. Only many idea fragments that come in such speed that they seem continuous, like frames in a film.
Maybe they exist as a whole somewhere in the subconscious. But we still only get bits of them per millisecond.
There’s a lot that could be taken away from this. But for me the biggest one is I think I may have disproven the validity of conceptual art.
Hear me out. The point of conceptual art is that the thing in the museum is not the artwork. It idea it point to is. But if I am right ideas cannot be art.
Firstly because the original idea the that artist had that first inspired it will have decayed and been replaced by hooks and stand-ins many times over. And that possibly there was no real first idea at all.
And given ideas cannot be transferred person-to-person the stand-in is all the viewer will ever observe. The artwork, if it ever existed at all. Must die with the artist.
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