Existentialism in art...

As part of my investigation into human existence and my life I have researched existentialism, one website had the history and the formation of existentialism but this is the summary:

"Existentialism is not a philosophy so much as a protest against certain features of contemporary life. God has disappeared. Nature is governed by abstract laws. Man himself has dwindled to a statistic in the state bureaucracy; even his inmost thoughts and feelings are matters of psychology, physiology, ultimately of chemistry. Man's dethronement has been going on for three hundred years ago, ever since the advent of science in the seventeenth century, but it has taken this century's wars, depressions, concentration camps and wholesale state engineering to bring matters to a head. Existentialism champions what has been overlooked in man's one-sided desire to intellectually comprehend and to control the uniqueness of human life: its variety, its need for personal validation. Hence the irrationalism of the movement, its partisan nature, its willingness to dispense with reason or close argumentation, even to denigrate custom and logic as fiction.

We lose ourselves in universal objective systems, said Kierkegaard, and are less than men if we submit to the fear of being different, claimed Nietzsche. To confront the absurdities of existence is to know anxiety, dread and ambiguity, but dread is also "the dizziness of freedom which gazes down into its own possibilities, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself."

Because it stresses the individual, and has an ecstatic quality, recognizing the temporal and the historical context, existentialism has been attractive to the arts. Many of its philosophers were indeed excellent writers, Nietzsche and Sartre in particular. But the artist who reads existentialist philosophy to understand more clearly what his work is attempting to achieve will generally be disappointed. Contrary to popular claims, the existentialist view is not liberating. Nor does it champion the aesthetic outlook: it uses that outlook to examine various contemporary issues that defy reasoning. So much the better say its advocates. Not philosophy at all, say its critics, but an investigation better served by other disciplines — sociology, politics, literary theory, aesthetics in general. "

The second paragraph of this statement sums up how I feel about this project, I like to think I work hard and complete a lot of work for my projects but that usually happens later on. I always struggle to come up with an initial theme for a project as the freedom of choices to pick from seems daunting and, like this website describes, it's almost dizzying. To get a focus in that wide choice takes time for me but once I get excited or interesting in the theme things start to roll. It's probably just an excuse, but at least this project is already making me be honest about it!


What was most interesting about this definition was the third paragraph, or more precisely the sentence 'But the artist who reads existentialist philosophy to understand more clearly what his work is attempting to achieve will generally be disappointed.' I chose existentialism to research as inspiration for the investigation into my own life and work, however I still think it'd be useful to investigate further how some artists have used existentialism in their art to see what I can gain from it rather than using it as a tool to get a greater understanding of my own work.


Sometimes my best work comes from going off on a slight tangent, so I shouldn't worry too much about changing direction. I just need to keep in mind that this project started with looking at human existence and my (almost) 20 years of being alive.