Towards A Mystical Reality: A Documentation of Jointly Initiated Experiences

[...] The desire on our part to reject ‘formal-esthetic’ considerations in our scheme of things must also be attributed to our belief that what is needed in modern art in the 70s is not so much an involvement with techniques and styles, but rather a new way of confronting reality that is not hampered by purely ‘artistic’ considerations dependent on formalistic and aesthetic criteria. Very simply, the crucial issue in modern art today is not so much the problem of how we ‘see’ things (visual/retinal) but how we ‘conceive’ reality (conceptual). This new attitude in art today demands that we re-question the very validity of a codified Art Criticism, which has so far been founded upon aesthetic and formalistic criteria. That the validity of a schematised art criticism founded on an objective methodology is today being attacked by younger artists points to a deliberate desire on the part of the serious artist of the 70s to view aspects of reality without the limitations of certain ‘relationships’ of codified data, which are based upon the art historian’s form-inspired view of art. There is today a deliberate desire on the part of the most serious artists to understand ‘phenomenal’ processes via dialectics and this seems to have brought the artist to a position that is akin to that of the philosopher’s! The deliberate attempt to reject the myth of the ‘unique artistic soul’ and with it, the notion of the artistic experience as being an interplay of esoteric circumstances between the ‘artist/creator’ and his ‘stimuli’ has in fact been motivated by a new respect for the spectator’s ability to confront reality directly. This new reconsideration of the spectator’s relevance in the whole scheme of things has in fact resulted in a reconsideration of the very purpose of art itself.

THAT ART IS BECOMING A VERY DIALECTICAL AND CONCEPTUAL ACTIVITY TODAY IS INDICATIVE OF A NEW STATE OF AFFAIRS, WHICH SUPPOSEDLY ‘MODERN’ ASIAN ARTISTS ARE YET TO BECOME AWARE OF! Aesthetic and formalistic influences then become quite irrelevant and obsolete in the new scheme of things, for they are essentially founded on the notion of art as something that is ‘created’ out of the manipulation and organising of the various elements of design (i.e. line, shape, colour, texture, form, surface, design, etc…). Very clearly, the modern art commitment today is pointing to an involvement that transcends preoccupation with the manipulation of materials and styles and finding its raison d'être in a dialectical reconsideration of phenomenal processes that exist outside a ‘form-oriented’ notion of art. The artist has, as a result, been forced to re-question: the nature of his idioms.

The notion of art as conceptual and dialectical activity then demands that the artist equip himself with the means to undertake such a complex activity dealing with the world of pure ideas! He has, as a result, been forced to look beyond technical skills and equip himself with some semblance of awareness of such diverse areas of knowledge as philosophy, linguistics, psychology, sociology, physics, mass-communication and even mathematics! The effectiveness of any serious artist of the future therefore will depend on his ability to think and function beyond the confines of ‘traditional’ notions of art itself. The best modern artists of the 70s are very clearly no longer makers of artifacts but rather thinkers and theoreticians, and this fact must surely place their contributions on the same level as those of the most creative and influential minds of our epoch. Art is finally shedding its somewhat traditional function and acquiring a new significance that places upon the serious artist of the 1970s a whole new challenge [...]

Kuala Lumpur June/July 1974

Excerpt from the exhibition cataologue of Towards a Mystical Reality (1974) by Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa. Read the extended catalogue here.