The effect of images is related to the way they can help us to write or to see the future. That fantastic power is derived from some sort of clairvoyance that artists have in being able to see something that is beyond our immediate access. Such an example is the German expressionists who at the beginning of the century, by expressing the crisis of their world, were also foreseeing a dark future for their society.
Let’s then think about the power of the artist who physically constructed those pictures. If the person who created the pictures were found, there would be a supposition or an affirmation of a link between him or her and any kind of later happening or “beyond”. Like the Byzantine constructor of icons, while in the middle of a creative trance, who people thought that the “beyond” was overwhelming him, possessing him as the divine permormed the icon through him. This would mean that the creator of the image was then the divine acting directly through the artist’s catharsis. From this idea arises the idea that those images are divine, since their origin is divine, while the artist was just a medium.
But, this magical suspicion can be interpreted the other way around, where the artist’s task is that of being an avant-gaurd that is giving shape to things that are latent in the community, collecting and organizing fragments, driven by their own quests and insecurities. Then, we can also think of the definition of art by Adorno (Adorno, 1999) for whom art’s mission is that of introducing order into chaos and to create and enrich self consciousness.
© Sebastian Guerrini, 2009
