Page 127 - Fernando Sinaga. Ideas K

On Art as Resistance
Defending art as a further expression of reality and not as its representation amounts to defining its very structural unity and its autonomy, for there is more to artistic creation than merely illustrating ideas or capturing the sociological essence of the moment with varying degrees of success. Once again, our actions are a further expression of life itself, and the often debated problem of the relationship between art and society is a further aspect of the eternal problem of communication.
Every event has an appropriate place and time and to position ourselves where this happens is to be in sync with the real happen- ing.This is now a question of attitude, risk and positioning.
Reality manifests itself simultaneously on each of its different planes and so a totality is shaken in each instant and place. Listening to its resonances and allowing them to arise without leaving anything out, with the awareness of being reality, is one of the eventful features of artistic activity.
The current fragmentation of our thought, feelings and will causes us, having lost individual structural unity, to cease to exist as such and become a defenceless and affirmative alien- ation, and it is because of this loss in the field of decision- making that only from autonomous critical spaces and specific places can dissidence now be defined.
Art as a totality continues to be one of the permanent witnesses to this unity in crisis and its sensitive awareness still preserves the potential to warn of advances and losses.
[127]
Written in Salamanca, December 1989.
First published in exh. cat. Agua Amarga, Fundació Pilar i Joan Miró, Palma de Mallorca, 1996.