The foundations of the rights of all life, don’t lie in first giving or first creating those rights. The foundations of rights are intrinsical to life (in its interconnected and in its individualized condition).

It’s necessary to develop enough will to differentialize on the theoretical and the practical plane, in order to find solutions of how to respect the dimensionality of the inherence of the rights of all life.

Palang Latif

a florae Obscurae, by Farangis Yegane, 1996

The subject of ‘florae Obscurae’ is flowers – though, not in their relation to the culture of ornament or decoration, not as metaphorical entities like for example as vehicles of some unattributable malevolent purposes of fate, like in Baudelaire’s poetical thought-image of the “fleurs du mal”, and they are not taken in terms of their biological botanical classes.

Here instead flowers are visually described as universally and terrestrially contextual-existences, i.e. having own environmental contexts in which we can see them as “floral-sentient” plants.

A new environmental phenomenology is sought to be etched out, the type of natural occurrence that normally gets packed into the complex but one-way idea of “animism” as pantheistic frill. The florae Obsurae are images of a plant world that speaks in a language which is not a floral taxonomy nor a stylist’s taste for a flower bouquet. These flowers are spiky by making up a different habitat (‘nature’).

Plants get categorized in terms of their aesthetics and utility,
animals are defined in terms of cognizance and sense,
and humans, finally, are understood as the civilizatory geniuses of their social and political world which constitutes a beginning and an end in itself.

By a shift in view this cycle is being broken or gains further dimensions.

“A” said: Art is what people consider to be art.
I said that such a statement would not be logical, because, not all isn’t art what people don’t consider to be art.

Also, I said, calling something “art” doesn’t really give any manmade object the privilege associated with something like the exclamation: This is art! Tres bien …

I said the Nazis noticeably used the term “entartete Kunst” so that they would still call the arts they politically hated “arts”, but they added the decisively modifying attribute that marked this type of art (any art they didn’t like, etc.) as “entartet” (highly abberational and due to be rejected, hated and all such stuff).

I think art is something very fundamental, so fundamental that for example religions had a problem and strained relation with arts from early on: because old very ancient artefacts stood always as expressive for ancient beliefs. Arts got tamed. But nevertheless arts became the most decisive means for an intellectual democratisation. Art was also used as a means to promulgate all types of ideology.

Jump, jump, jump.

Also, art is something intimate. But not intimate in the sense of being a tool to discover someone’s own sex-appeal, but intimate in the sense that anybody could, potentially, be conveying something unique by the means of drawing or moulding or etc.

I often stumble across remarkable works of art made by individuals who aren’t professional artists. The types of artistic expression I find with unprofessional arts is often inspiring. I see a lot of originality in such arts, an originality that is not driven by some brute desires for fame or acclaim or money.

But coming back to where I started off: I think everybody can speak the language of arts, actively and passively, as a recipient and as a creator of arts, but I don’t think that art is art simply because one considers it be arts. There is a subtle difference.

I said to “A”: Arts is to me simply a name we give to something, like a frame we set around a star that we see at night in the sky. Nature is arts. Art is like a piece of a huge vegan wedding tart … It’s a word we found for something that is “a-way-of-perceiving-existence”: something very complex, and we can only frame part of this complexity by the term “arts”.

Art is not an idea we created from scratch just by inventing a name or word out of nowhere. Rather we perceive something and we want to communicate something into the unknown, and we use images for that, or, we use a language that has no borders and no limits.

Etc, I know it’s a long subject: What is art?