How does one define what art is?
There are as many definitions of art as there are people. I would say art is the desire to live a dream while awake.
Art is creating a space where the individual can feel safe in situations where life leaves the line of meaning and justice.
Freud interprets the fantasies and waking dreams of unhappy people as a desire to change or correct an unsatisfactory reality.
Emotions put to sleep in the real universe are revealed in our subconscious through symbols and rise to the level of language.
Sometimes symbols, such as an inexplicable dream, do not have a logical explanation.
For this reason, works of art can appear absurd, grotesque, strange, insensitive, not allowing the viewer to establish any warm connection with himself, strange or contradictory.
By getting rid of the tides between reality and fiction, the artist realizes the metaphysical world he has built. It reflects the symbols he created in his subconscious and his relationship with dreams.
And how does justice fit within this context?
We human beings have faced a number of difficult questions for millions - hundreds of thousands of years - with the desire for meaning and justice, the two fundamental pillars of our existence, since the day we first appeared on earth.
And we have spent a significant part of our existence trying to better understand and analyze ourselves and the universe we live in.
We have tried to analyze the systematic structure that directs our current attitudes and behaviors and provides all this interaction, and we have explained the parts that we cannot get out of with ambiguous concepts.
While adapting ourselves to the environment in which we exist, we have also examined the basic features that will enable us to live in harmony with other beings.
We have examined the answers to mysterious questions such as memory, identity, origin, our physiological structure, and emotional connections, death, and life after death based on our current experiences and scientific findings.
As we became more informed, we gained awareness, and as we gained awareness, we became taller. We had the opportunity to see far away better; we were able to reach information about the future by asking questions about our past and origins.
Mysterious subjects from the past to the present, a Perfect universe of ideas, transmigration of souls, ghosts, mythological beings, icons, relics, sacred body parts, tragedies, life-death analyses of eros and Thanatos, restless, painful and alarming stories of civilizations that have existed and disappeared experiences, such as the lifestyles of civilizations that have passed away, have transformed and reached us through works we call artifacts.
Through works of art, we also find the opportunity to be included in this passing time. In fact, reading this passing time through works of art is like a way to bring back the time that has passed.
How in the world where literacy was little or not known, it was quite normal for art and writing to fulfill the function of transmission and archive. Art bequeathed the record of the present to the future and thus made the past known.
In short, art also writes history. It also conveys details that we cannot find in history books.
As a matter of fact, it is not a coincidence that the goddess who is at the source of art in Ancient Greek mythology is 'Mnemosyne' (Memory). Memory, the mother of the Muses, the muses of the arts, thus renewed the social memory in every work of art.
The artist was the one who created and/or refreshed the memory. But this process was not as simple as it seemed. But we should know that every remembering and reminding process is also a forgetting and forgetting process.
When it comes to art and memory, Aby Warburg defines works of art as a tool and product of overcoming depression in social memory. So art was born of suffering and pain.
Uwe Fleckner said, "Man's treasury of suffering becomes man's wealth."
Thus, the work of art is a document in the archive of humanity's experience of suffering. Therefore, understanding art means traversing the nodes of the past, like the seismograph.
In short, art means transforming a painful life into a joyful work of art and thus performing the art of living.
The person we call an artist has been a witness and victim of their own age. For this reason, we cannot examine these works of art with today's values by looking at today's conditions of works of art belonging to the past.
That work was shaped semantically with the thought of that age, in the conditions of that day, and was presented to humanity in the most appropriate form by gaining content. Being able to read these works frees us from being imprisoned in the current situation we live in
Until we lose ourselves, we should not run away from ourselves but seek the meanings that these works leave us until we find ourselves.
Because the so-called artist can take on the social and collective problems that exist outside of themself, belonging to someone else, as if they are their own problems, and make them the reason for the production of their work. In this way, it makes the connections in our corridors visible. It helps us find answers to questions about what we are and what we will be.
By embodying the realities of the art period, it enables us to build a bridge between the past and the future. Art allows us to look at ourselves from afar. It eases the burden of communities and large masses of people.
Art elevates us above the anxieties of everyday life and the usual existing realities. We can even say that art is a kind of healing tool that reveals the elements that we human beings suppress in our subconscious.
Or it takes us deep into the structure we call being and takes us to the core. It provides a safe shelter with the perception of existence.
Ernest Fisher said that art is magic, that dreams envelop us like we are in a dream, like a boundless, dimensionless and sheltered home.
For example, Van Gogh looked at the sun in his magnificent solitude at the expense of the sun's scorching light and actually painted by changing the world he perceived. He showed us the shining stars of the night, their swirling lights, in a way that no one else could see.
He had looked at a truth that no one had seen until his eyes went blind.
He had reached a completely different truth with his eyes, and finally, he was martyred with works that could be considered revolutions.
While living alone, the artists told us about the world they created within themselves by communicating with us from their alien and lonely world, which the others were not aware of, by using their intelligence backward as well as forwards.
They convey their worries, plans, what has happened, and what will happen by seeing and hearing them through the window illuminated by their existence. Art, in general, is the ability of man to build new universes by going beyond the limits of the material world.
Because although art contains ethical and aesthetic issues, it is something that is beyond the good, bad, and ugly.
The past is able to reproduce itself in the present, thanks to the subconscious mind, which functions as a kind of hearing, perception, infiltration, regulation, coding, and hiding, which is seen, heard, thought, and felt.
Art tries to recreate and convey a meaning or meaninglessness that existed in the past in different ways. It is to evaluate the past with today's perception and to gain new meaning as a result.
A true work of art is one that manages to go beyond even the invisibility of the frame; that is, they open the door to a universe created by imagination beyond the visible aspects of life.
With the meaning it carries beyond that window, it spreads to all areas of life and, turning into work, preserves its meaning and importance for hundreds of years while gaining wider meanings.