script:
I went through what some might call "an obsession" with the band The White Stripes. It was not simply an appreciation for the music they made; the White Stripes was not just music - it was an ideology.
The songs were very simple and straightforward. They used minimal amounts of chords and the drumming was intentionally performed with minimal complexity. In fact, it is often noted that Meg White plays the drums like a novice, or a child. This was the bands intention from the get go. It was to limit the technology and instruments used to write music for the sole purpose of forcing the songwriter to create something new and innovative under the confines of limited tools. He believed the enemy of originality and the limiter to creativity was the excess of tools (digital or otherwise). True art, Jack believed, happens under strict self-inflicted rules rather than the absence of them. The soul of the artist too often gets washed away by the layers and layers of processing, auto-tuning, re-recording, etc.
In his work Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets and Philosophers, Leonard Koren juxtaposes Modernism and wabi-sabi thus: modernism implies a logical rational worldview. Wabi-sabi implies and intuitive worldview. Modernism believes in the control of nature. Wabi-sabi in the fundamental uncontrollability of nature. In Modernism, purity makes expression richer. In wabi-sabi, corrosion and contamination make expression richer.
I find myself asking what constitutes "real" as in "authentic" art. I've always wanted to be "real" and "authentic" as an artist. I've consistently pushed myself to embrace and relish in the weird and avant-garde hoping to differentiate myself from others. This reveals much about my enneagram number (4) defined by the Enneagram Institute as "The Sensitive, Withdrawn Type: Expressive, Dramatic, Self-Absorbed, and Temperamental." Part of me recoils at such a suggestion, but is that because someone has put a "definition" on me? Because someone has categorized my personality and somehow I feel that diminishes my "uniqueness"? Perhaps.
Wabi-sabi is a minimalism that embraces the fractured, imperfect, temporal nature of life. It withholds ethical judgement. Life is what it is.
