Can art go beyond mere beauty or pleasure to share new understandings? What kinds of understandings can it share? Most importantly, can artistic expressions help us better discern the meanings of our lives?
Graf believes that the artistic impulse is built into the architecture of the human experience. The taking ‘of Other’ perspectives is vital for growth and learning. Order and disorder, love and hate, beauty and dread, us and them — both views are necessary to develop a more profound sense of the world. Everything that occurs, everything we see, and everything we feel is reflected in this ‘Other,’ which is deeper and more enduring than any one singular view.
In this way, art should never merely offer us what we expect to see. It should help us expand our capacity for pleasure or pain to discover what we haven’t realized is there—things that are yet to be seen as valuable. Its ‘sacred duty’ is to enrage, soothe, or relate in order to transcend into the mysterious, the reverential, or the yet-to-be-known. In essence, it is the embodiment of reflection, and all that connects us to the otherness of the world.
This approach forms the foundation of Michael Graf’s practice and the expressions ‘of Other’ that follow.