FABRICATED TRUTH

Yoko Ono, we are told, did the following:

“…she invoked the concept of ‘fabricated truth,’ meaning that the stuff we make up in our heads…is as much our reality as the chair we are sitting in. ‘I think it is possible to see the chair as it is,’ she explained. ‘But when you burn the chair, you suddenly realize the the chair in our mind did not burn or disappear.’  What Ono was doing was conceptual art.” 1 

Fabricated Truth?  Conceptual art?   

What Ono was really addressing was what has consumed philosophers for thousands of years.  This is the question of how we knowledge form.  Is the phenomenon primarily
-external (via sensory input) or is it
-internal (the pure form only exists in the mind)?
It’s the age old mind / body problem.  It is the question of mind and matter.  

To some, there is nothing fabricated about what exists in our heads.  Socrates said that we are born with forms in our head.  Michangelo insisted that external forms were mere imperfect copies of the mental images in his mind.  While others, such as Nitzsche, said that truth of exterior form is futile.  In one sense, these philosophers and artists were “doing conceptual art.” 
 
Over the years, Transparent Drawing has attempted to track the external / internal dichotomy.  The page titled The Argument Over Natural Forms tries to provide this meta view of the problem. 

All art terms, such as Conceptual Art and Fabricated Truth, are mere lingual strings, which don’t mean much.  Forget all these terms as they are mere Bricks in the Wall.   The Transparent Drawing answer, of course, is to draw holistic forms, Real Forms, on a piece of paper.  If nothing else, it stops you from even more lingual babble, and instead fosters a visual connection between your external world and the one that is in your head.   

1.  Menard, Louis.  “The Grapefruit Artist.”  The New Yorker.  June 20, 2022.  Print.  27. 

These are the two Source Images that I used for the geometry for my drawing above. They are both from the archetype Round (Going). The Form Combine employed orange lines for the left image, and black lines for the right. The ink was drawn on wet paper, for a more diffused line quality. For my resolved, and real, form, I tried to delineate this curved space form.