dia.logue: Grant Kester quotes Walter Benjamine

"... the experience of 'shock' becomes the catalytic agent for a 'heightened presence of mind'..."

Grant H. Kester, Conversation Pieces: Community and Communication in Modern art, p. 84

My Philosophy of Art-Making

Having studied science and engineering for several years, I am an advocate of “causality.” I am convinced that everything exists for another thing, i.e. to serve another thing, and that the idea of one thing existing in isolation and for its own sake, in my opinion, makes no real sense. Speaking of causality in this sense, I think, art as a ‘thing’ (art as a human-constructed concept; art as a cultural activity) therefore exists to serve something other than itself: it has been constructed by human to address human-related issues (such as religion, politics, culture, or whatever else that may affect human’s life in a certain way)... I have begun to undertake an anthropological approach to art, that is, to consider art as a socially-engaged praxis; to perceive art as a “socially-functional process or product” (Tom Anderson, 1995) which should be understood not only for what it is -- the art object per se -- but more critically, for what it does or what it is capable of doing in a social context.