INTRINSIC TO ANY ART Transdisciplinary Based Upon Human Senses

When I talk about integral art production,this is relative to integral artist practice, integral art interpretation, and integral art institutions. These are four inclusive aspects of 'art'. To see these aspects, I use an integral lens to illumine what I call the Integral Stories of Art. These stories aim to take a comprehensive stock of the elements, components, perspectives, and methodologies that make up and inform the act of art creation.

Each aspect is a long story in and of itself, but in a sentence, I would say that integral artwork production incorporates the spectrum of consciousness by the artist, the spectrum of formal methodologies to create material artifacts, and the spectrums of worldviews and audience responses.

With that said, something interesting happens when you start to think along an aperspectival line. You start to realize that Creativity (capital C) knows no medium of art. Creativity knows no level of tactile development. Creativity knows no material form. Creativity knows no specific discipline of formal production. Creativity, far from being interdiscplinary, is in fact transdisciplinary. Creativity, in its deepest sense, shines through from the Void any time in one's life, from the moment of birth to the moment of passing. Creativity is the Moment of our lives.

In one sense, the simple being of life is Creative enough. One can rest in the spacious witness of all of manifest and unmanifest Creativity, as far as one can cognize both. One can always learn about more things, and more perspectives of those things. But the simple appreciation of the Ground Value of things, as emanations from Source which brings forth every thing manifest, is a radically quiet place, and completely beautiful.

In fact what art can do is not make us cognizant of something tangible, but aid us to re-cognize our Source, our Self, our Original Face, before we were born in the manifest world. Those short but unmistakable glimpses of just that recognition is part of why people came back and back again to their favorite artworks.

But back to the Integral production of art...

Creativity, while radically unmanifest in its most resonant and deep sense, of course informs and shapes our physical and mental behaviors as we produce artwork. I produce music compositions. You may produce visual art. Your friend might produce sculptures. All in all, the general stance that takes all of this into account is to say that artists make something. That something is informed by vision, psychological factors and blocks, traumas, glimpses of fine orders, and a whole host of conscious and unconscious rivers. But we all, as artists in the most inclusive sense possible make something.

What other general statements can I make about all artists? What additionally, if anything, unites all artists in a fundamental sense?

An examination of the history of art schools in the West (from Medieval through Renaissance, Baroque, and more contemporary examples) shows that the schools have been arranged in markedly diverse manners. To take the classification of various art disciplines as example, in the 17th century, the following scheme (or taxonomy) for the arts was proposed:

Eloquence
Poetry
Music
Architecture
Painting
Sculpture
Optics
Mechanics

Subsequently, schemes grouped the disciplines in different ways, and in turn added/subtracted disciplines from the list. One list was 'arts whose purpose is pleasure' and that included music, poetry, painting, sculpture, gesture/dance; the complementary list was 'arts whose purpose is both pleasure and use' which included eloquence and architecture.

Zoom to the 20th century, and we find art schools with a list of disciplines that reflects pluralism:

Performance
Video
Film
Photography
Fiber
Weaving
Silkscreen
Ceramics
Interior architecture
Industrial design
Fashion
Artists' books
Printmaking
Kinetic sculpture
Computing
Neon
Holography

And on and on and on. Body art, graphic design and animation, comics, and many more could fill this list. And we haven't even gotten into the art of hair...

The design and nature of an Integral Art School would certainly want to include as many aspects of material creation and disciplines in principle. After all, there is no reason beyond adherance to myth that some disciplines of art are inherantly better than others. Artists don't work that way, and if anything might move even quicker to those disciplines deemed taboo or inferior. "What? You think this is a lower form of art? Well, take a look at this!"

I suggest we take as a given the diversity of material and manifest mediums of art. It would simply be noninclusive to have it any other way. I personally love to see hybridity in artwork, in ways I had never dreamt or imagined. Artists make combinations that all of society and the world can witness and contemplate, love and hate, embrace and run repellant. This is the way of art as it is introduced to culture. That which societies repressed, ignored, or were simply oblivious to 100 years ago is loved, celebrated, and promoted today.

So if we take diversity of media as a given, beyond undue debate, then where does that leave us?

At least we are still faced with the dynamic where Creativity, or Inspiration, flows resonant through artists. Even as traditional mediums mix, bend, alter, and go hybrid (and sometimes organically pure), the fundamental dynamic undeniably occurs in some capacity, along our deepest strings. Creativity informs our actions as artists. Creativity pushes our body-minds towards the new and novel. And our body-minds interpreet and respond to the conscious and unconscious 'inner necessities' and 'inner needs' in ways that if someone on the outside watches, would indeed obserive actual behaviors, and actual actions.

So I ask: What are the fundamental actions and behaviors of artists, no matter what the chosen medium or mediums? What are our root movements?

I offer this list, which likely will change over time (what doesn't?) yet nonetheless I suggest bears a contemplation if you are so inclined.

Artists touch. Artists hear. Artists see. Artists taste. Artists speak.

Yes, artists (like all humans generally speaking) have these sensual capacities. Artists tend to have access to all five senses. Okay, you might think, that is true, but so what?

I'll tell you what the so what might be: if you look at each of these senses, you will see that at least one dominant medium of art has grown around it. See for yourself:

Doesn't touch form the root of sculpture and architecture? Doesn't hearing form the root of music? Doesn't sight form the root of painting? Doesn't taste form the root of cooking? And doesn't speaking form the root of poetry?

Aren't these at least slightly astonishing? Could it signal something deep at the manifest emergence of all Creativity? And could these dynamics form not only the basis for Integral Art, but indeed a school for Integral Art?

Could these intrinsic aspects in fact lie root to every form of art?

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