The title may appear as something of a contradiction, a social paradox if you prefer, there will be those who engage in violence in their lives, be it out of circumstance, professionally or even as recreation, who can embrace the concept, but for the vast majority there is no such thing. A science, a skill-set, a practice maybe but not an art.
The gun has been perhaps the most fundamentally single invention in the history of man to shift culture at a pace and in directions that the human race would never have considered before or since, the key to a door through a passage to a theatre of war so self-destructive that it would take many many generations of psychological and sociological repair before we can, at least in the sight of history, recover.
The gun is but a mere instrument, that is the colloquial currency of the mainstream modus operandi, the ideology behind the myth empowers governmental bodies throughout the planet to sanction the idea that force is but a final solution in any conflict resolution. Comparable to Schrödinger’s Cat, accepted thinking proposes that the inanimate has no volition of its own, indeed it doesn’t exist. To be more precise, it will not come into existence in a Newtonian reality unless evoked either mentally or physically by man or any other living creature or force. This doesn’t apply to many of man’s other constructs, it doesn’t apply to architecture for example. If a building is made to live and/or work within, the fact that it might be closed, the lights off, the doors locked, none of this affects its received raison d’être, or a car, a crane, a tunnel, a TV, in fact the argument isn’t applied to any artificial creation of mankind, unless it happens to be weaponry technology.
‘Civilised society’ purports that "Nuclear missiles will never be used", they are serve as deterrent, as does chemical and bio-chemical warfare technology, as does the gun, as does the threat of a bullet to the head. Art is a process of creation, the gun is an instrument of destruction, yet in Walton Creel’s work one sees an avenue of thinking, a corridor of perception that precisely and simultaneously cleaves and binds these two aspects of culture, these obsessions of man. Art and war, creation and destruction, false polarities induced by a million years of breeding to form an intellectual architecture that can serve to design weapons and create art. Constructs amongst many designed to do just one thing – allay the inevitable, the deterioration of the body and the mind, or at least the perception of it, to steer thoughts towards capitalist and communal oversight. The bigger picture holds up a mirror to where a collective consciousness can project its wants and desires on to the dream factory, the hi-tech industry, the corporate Zeitgeist and the governments across the world. In return, the lucky ones are fed, clothed, pleasured even pampered, the rest merely rage with envy, subsisting in a mainstream of second hand delights, mass produced and consumed substandard clones of potential, possibility and a decaying notion of true probability. The underclass simply sits by and watches the ‘haves’ or as many will do in many poorer communities, Third World countries, rogue states, pirate economies, take up the gun, optionally carrying the mantle of religious oppression, death is on the menu.
Though the canvas, the artist’s canvas, generally accepted as a perceptual space, a formalism in society that represents both creative endeavour and an emotionally generic medium for self reflection or abstract identity, Walton Creel offers a paradox, a visual conundrum, images of nature, wildlife, formed from bullet holes, created with the aid of a gun.
Deer Hunter comes to mind, the beauty of death, the pain of reality, the insufferance of purpose and existence. Oxymoronic reactions are assured, guaranteed in fact, to those who defer to embrace his imagery on an emotional level. Death is just around the corner, relatively speaking, in the vast scheme of things, the finite cannot exist within the infinite, that is a mathematical improbability, the same odds can be laid on our own existence. In a blink of history’s eye our whole civilisation will be gone, an archeological artefact equatable with Ancient Rome or Ancient Egypt.
Creel’s works have surpassed their initial intent, that being to render the gun impotent, both as instrument and metaphor, his art is a testament to the creation of life through a repetitive sequence, be it DNA, or breeding in general, a race forms through the laborious repetition of a thousand generations. Bullet by bullet, death by death, species by species. Evolution is far more precise than revolution, revolution destroys but it cannot afford to be visionary, that which destroys cannot create, those left standing after a bloody war think more about survival than regeneration, more about fuel than defence, more about food than cultural progression. Evolution repeats itself until resources are plundered, size, shape, strength, intelligence, everything else is spawn of the error, the mistake, the freak chance event that gave man consciousness. The random event that created the universe, the assumption that there is a meaning of life, or death, or even a temporal significance of either.
Visit Walton Creel’s site at www.waltcreel.com to witness more of his destructive creations, or should that be creative destructions?
Tags: art of violence, deer hunter, gun, military art, violence, walton creel, weapon art
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