The Prosthetic Temple
I propose that one attribute of the production of those makers we call artists, historically and culturally, constitutes a kind of prosthetic activity to address an unforgettable and irreconcilable absence. To forget would be to surrender to incompleteness, an untenable and intolerable state. This production, the work of the artist, is intended to, however imperfectly, reestablish completeness. This leads to the consideration of cultural, psychic, intellectual and/or spiritual categories of the prosthetic construct.
The cultural behavior called “the arts” could be characterized as the manufacture of interrelated tokens alluding to or articulating prosthetic constructs of a collective nature, not to address issues of mobility or appearance as with a bodily prosthesis but rather to intervene on a number of levels in the very human predicament of what is collectively missing needing to be acknowledged and reconfigured, with the understanding that just like the missing extremity, what is missing is not an experienced recollection, but a gnawing presence. The sculpture titled The Prosthetic Temple constitutes a prosthetic expression of all that I didn’t know was missing, thus far.
The cultural behavior called “the arts” could be characterized as the manufacture of interrelated tokens alluding to or articulating prosthetic constructs of a collective nature, not to address issues of mobility or appearance as with a bodily prosthesis but rather to intervene on a number of levels in the very human predicament of what is collectively missing needing to be acknowledged and reconfigured, with the understanding that just like the missing extremity, what is missing is not an experienced recollection, but a gnawing presence. The sculpture titled The Prosthetic Temple constitutes a prosthetic expression of all that I didn’t know was missing, thus far.