Blog: Beyond Men’s Will

 Featured image: Be Curious

To make art – does it go beyond “men’s will” as the German art school of Staatliches Bauhaus taught? Does art and the “scaffolded skills associated with art; 1. The existentialism of not knowing reality, 2. The leap of faith which is a belief in the process of making and doing, 3. The critical thinking that results in the kind of thinking that transforms both material and artist,” as Douglas Rosenberg Chair of UW-Madison Art Department states. Does art really go beyond “men’s will?”

What is existentialism if it is not reality and how we as an agent react to it through our own will? If existentialism is not knowing – how can one even describe their own will to go beyond?

We do know and can know our own will, to go beyond men’s will is to find self not in others but in ourselves. If that is the beyond of the Bauhaus then I agree with Rosenberg’s statement, but I do not that is the will he was alluding to. Rather the scaffolding of skills, the leap of faith and belief in the process of making and doing is not something mystical caused by a leap of faith and belief, skills are a foundation one builds upon to know and understand life, reality, self. That critical thinking that transforms both material and artist is again no something mystical, to go beyond it is the reality of finding the self in amongst the dogma of what is being taught and what is political.

One cannot say I don’t want to discuss politics – that is not recognizing the life around one’s self. One, the artist in this case, needs to recognize it, and discuss it – react to it according to one’s self not to how another tells them how to react or do. We do know our will, we need to recognize it. Our will is the yes, yes, yes of ourselves. It is the yes, yes, yes of the rising sun and the beginning of a new day. It is the glory of the suns light filling us. It is the ability within ourselves to see it and allow it to fill us with yeses. We can go and be curious, explore, discover and find our own inner wild. This inner winner is not beyond our will.