13 Jan 09

“The works are all by contemporary artists who drew their inspiration from foreign locations, intriguing destinations, and even daydreams,” said Christine Irvin, co-president of the Stamford Art Association. “It was the encounter with different cultures, and with unconscious places in their own minds, that shaped these artists’ dramatic imagery.” The juror for the show is Tatiana Mori, staff curator at the Bendhelm Gallery, Greenwich Arts Council, in Greenwich, Conn., who will select the winners from among the entries in the show, including paintings, photographs, mixed media, and sculpture. Awards for first, second, and third place and two honorable mentions will be announced at the opening reception on Sunday, July 26, 4 – 6 p.m. The event is free and open to the public. Annual competitions are judged by prominent jurors from art institutions in New York and surrounding areas, including the Whitney Museum, Bruce Museum, and Museum of Modern Art.

“Art flies round the truth, determined not to get burnt” - Franz Kafka (Aphorisms)

My interest and involvement in the making of this film is motivated by my enduring admiration for Kafka as an artist. Because he lived his life wholly through his art (indeed, it was his life’s therapy) and because he never compromised the truth of his vision, I regard him as a true artist - beyond the other appellations of ‘author’ or ‘philosopher’.

His short life was an ongoing battle against depression and self-doubt and his work, through the medium of fiction and parable, examines the deeper themes and archetypes of the human condition. In his writings he assailed the notions of the bourgeoisie by tearing down the images of their comfortable and anecdotal world and replacing them with a series of pictures containing the greater truths inherent to their predicament. These creations were bizarre and illogical. What began and seemed to be an acceptable account of normal experience turned into a very nasty, yet somehow ominous, dream - in fact, a nightmare that projected through its spectral utterances, new and terrifying truths.

Kafka lived through an epoch that saw art triumph though its confrontations with angst and suffering. This was a time when art, philosophy and the newly emerging psychoanalysis, looked deeper than ever into the very essence of man. This was the time when Nietzsche informed us that ‘God is dead!’ and the harbingers of world war haunted the gates of our psyche.

The art of this time encapsulated and expressed this Neurosis. They were termed the Expressionists (as apposed to its preceding school of illusion and idealised banality, the Impressionists) and for me, Kafka is a major artist inextricably linked to these creators. They looked deeply into the anguished soul of man and with the surgical scalpel of creative enquiry, laid bare the falseness and illusions of his state and direction.

In Kafka one may feel the frenetic stare of Van Gogh or glimpse the sharp-featured ‘Watchers’ of Kirschner. One may shrink from the mad grimaces of Ensor or shudder at the ‘Phantasmagorias’ of Redon, but most of all one hears the echo of Munch’s ‘The Scream’.

Kafka was of this school. His art, which adeptly presents and maintains the acceptable and commonplace, twists and fractures his subject into another dimension – another reality – where we may discern dark coloured truths that force us to question more closely this absurd phenomenon called existence.

“Art must always be an answer awaiting its question”.
Morant