I don't much care to speak of my paintings. I know very few artists that do. I guess it is because after wrestling with our thoughts and ideas, we finally create an object that stands in the world alone. We hope that these objects will speak for themselves. And anyway, we may not be so good with words. However, it has been my experience that many young students sometimes take our reticence as mute testimony for the lack of thought. This is rarely the case. So, here, I will speak about some of the ideas I struggle with that help define my work. I have prepared my remarks so that I will say exactly what I intend. I hope you will indulge me the presentation of this paper, and will bear with me.

I

When viewers encounter my paintings, they may get an immediate sense of what I did to make the painting. The thing there on the wall is a document of some of my physical activity. But, I didn't intend my works to simply be a history of my manipulation of paint. Some younger students or the uninitiated might consider the technique or skill to be the prime raison d'etre of the work. However, this is not the case. There is something more to my painting than the thing itself. Even the most casual viewer will comprehend an image. And from the image, they may be led to some sense of narration, and then to some underlying idea. The works, therefore, can be viewed as documents of an aspect of my thought as much as they are records of my activity; but for the most part, the works contain and exist for ideas.

If I were to reveal my intentions, one would find that my thought was of greater importance to the outcome of the work than what I physically did to make the painting. I don't mean to suggest that the painting as a thing is unimportant. Without its objectness it would not be there.

In fact, every thought and idea that is to be communicated must be cast into some kind of medium if it is to be communicated. And the manner in which that medium is handled is critical to the final meaning of the expressed idea. Let me put this another way: there must always be a consistency between the idea and the form that gives the idea physical expression. The act of making a painting is important to the work, but here I want to focus on the thought processes that lie behind my painting. So, let me turn to the issue of what I intend when I make a painting. In order to do that I suppose that I should tell you something about the history of my intention.

"Casus Error Astudus Est"
(Chance is a cunning illusion)
acrylic and leaf on panel
48" x 49", 1997

II

Let me begin with the caveat that the process through which my work evolved is a lot more complex than anything I will describe here. What I am about to do is to describe one line of thought and its development in my work. It is an important element, but by no means the only thread in the fabric.

As a child I was full of questions. I was very curious. But I grew up in a bicultural home where my father did not read or write English. In fact, he spoke our language very badly. My mother had a most meager education, and was unprepared for my questions. And if that were not enough, I grew up in West Virginia. So, my curiosities were unrequited for what seemed a very long time.

When I could begin to read seriously, I found myself drawn to philosophy, since that branch of human thought seemed to address questions that had been raised in my mind very early on. I want to tell you that I did these studies independently of any class assignments. I was in an art school where such academic studies were not in favor.

In those days, when one began to read philosophy one began with Plato, and that's where I started. I very much liked Plato's notion of "Idea" as the fundamental reality. While I was taken with Plato's notion of Idea, I was disturbed when Plato, in his work "The Republic," called for the exile of all artists. That was what might be called a conundrum for me.

Plato was interested in Truth (with a capital "T"). Pretense, fiction, and illusion were, at best, in Plato's scheme an inhibition to the search for Truth (with a capital "T"). Since art deals with pretense, fiction and illusion that Plato saw as enemies of Truth (with a capital "T"), He asked for artists to be exiled from his utopian community.

Well, here I was, this fellow from West Virginia filled with curiosity, finding some interesting ideas in Plato's work, and then being told I was to be exiled. It seemed that West Virginia had been exile enough. Clearly, I wanted to resolve that dilemma.

Plato felt that the things we see in the world were illusions of a sort. The reality was the Idea behind the thing. There can be thousands of different chairs: each one unique and particular. However, there is only one universal IDEA of chairness. If a thing embodies that universal idea of chairness, it is a chair regardless of its color, size, shape, or material; and for Plato that underlying Idea was the true reality.

Of course, this Platonic concept presupposes that meaning preexists in the world. Plato's view clearly holds that we inherit meaning upon our birth and recognition of language. Since my life and work have spanned much of the modern era and all of the post-modern era, I have been brought to a different conclusion. It seems to me that Plato was about right when he spoke of the reality of Idea. But it also seemed to me (with a great deal of help from Rene Descarte and Emmanual Kant) that the Idea to which Plato referred was not inherited, but created in the mind of the observer. The gods did not give us language (wherein the Platonic Ideal resides), but rather, we invented language. Actually, it is better to say that we are inventing language and Idea even as we speak and listen.

I found it useful to simply assume that what is out there is really out there. The apple on the table is there. However, it is just stuff that might be apprehended. The apple on the table is just a potential for electromagnetic radiation and a quantum flux through time. It is without meaning until it is perceived and considered. It is ourselves that have invented the Idea of "appleness." And it is ourselves that perceive the inflow of information that creates the image of "The Apple." What is out there is an apple only because we call it an apple.

Now, we have a dialectic: there is the world outside of ourselves, and against this is the internal world of our thoughts, dreams, longings, hopes, and, above all, a thirst for meaning. If the content of my work can be summed up in only one simple idea, this is it: the dialectic between the internal and external universes. Of course, anyone familiar with the literature will immediately recognize this as an existential tenet.

At this point, this dual universe poses something of a problem. Which is the real world: the internal world or the external world? The answer must be both of them. I don't mean there are two separate realities. What I do mean is that which we call Reality seems to be the meeting, the interfacing, of these two universes. Without me, my perception of the outer world would not exist. Without the outer world, I would not exist. While these two worlds seem symbiotic, they do come into conflict on a very basic, human level.

The external universe that allows me to come into being also reveals to me that one day I shall not be. This means that I have become aware of my own death. The French Existentialists referred to this awareness as the root of the absurdity of existence.

Well, my early curiosity included questions about death. When my grandfather died, I became fully aware that he had taught me a terrible lesson about the limits of my own existence. That knowledge was a very difficult thing, but it seems I had another characteristic almost as pervasive as curiosity. I liked to pretend. In that world of pretend, the universe could be as I wished it to be. Later in life I came to realize that the urge to pretend is an early impulse in all human psyches, and a fundamental impulse in all of art. My early involvement in picture making was the direct result of my impulse to pretense: the need to pretend seemed linked to the knowledge of my death. I suppose that had I been less shy as a child, I might have taken up performing art. It was obvious, under any circumstance, that my musical talent would not have supported even the most meager effort in that arena.

So, I hid under the dining table and drew pictures. At first, I was drawn to the bizarre and eerie. After all the further from the mundane, external world the better. But that was a childish response. I should note, however, that that very early, childish impulse still rears its head from time to time in my work. As a side note: I have discovered that what ever takes our attention stays with us for life, and this is the very best argument against bad habits.

Later, I came to realize that one couldn't escape that external world. The best that one could do (and this is important) was to hold the external reality in a tension with the internal reality in a manner that would maintain, vividly, the interfacing of these two worlds.

In my more mature condition, I also began to feel that the story of Eden, the expulsion from the garden, was not simply a tale told by ancients, but a model for what happens to each and every one of us.

We are born innocent. We feel the entire universe to be an extension of ourselves. Early on we discover that we are limited to our bodies. Later we discover we must co-exist with others: we become socialized (and the failure to do so produces socio-pathology, a most self-destructive condition). Even with these lessons, we are still immortal. Then, one day, the notion of death takes our minds. We learn that we, too, shall die. At that moment, innocence is gone, and we are expelled from our individual Edens. And that is a bummer.

It is really bad news to learn that we are mortal. But we humans have been working at our mortality for a very long time. We have measures to counter the loss of innocence.

We can pretend. In fact, we must pretend.

When we lost the original innocence that did not demand meaning, and found ourselves in the condition where meaningless was heavy upon us, our response was simply to create meaning. And this was our redemption.

Of course, Plato felt that the gods had posited meaning. If the gods were involved, it seems that they simply created the conditions where we were forced to create meaning. And the creation of meaning is the ultimate pretense, and a major function of art.

So, now you know why the apple is depicted so often in my work. It is the iconographical symbol of the loss of innocence in Eden. It is the symbolic representation of the external world. It is the screen upon which I can cast my desires for meaning and order. And another thing you would not know: the apple is also a nostalgic remnant of my father's little grocery store where he sold apples.

My father's fruit store, 1949

Ironically, though it is not an apple that I paint. I paint paint. It is always a painting. The apple in the painting is most often not an apple. It is almost always paint. It is always a pretense. In those cases where the apple in the work is, in fact, a real apple (or part of an apple), it is to remind the viewer of at least two things. First, there is a difference between the real and the imaged apple, and, second, the real apple fades much more quickly than the painted one.

"Yellow Pepper"
acrylic and leaf on panel
19" x 14", 2001

III

Upon learning of the demands placed on us by the external universe, upon learning of the inevitability of death, we sense a disunity and lack of meaning. This is the existential dilemma. We so desire meaning and a sense of unity that we began to create meaning imbued with unity. This is our greatest and most noble fiction. But then comes the question: can, in fact, pretenses be good? Are there noble pretenses and ignoble pretenses? Are all pretenses ethically equal?

I have come to think of human fabrication as consisting of two bodies: pretense and falsification. Pretense has ethical boundaries. Falsification does not. When something exists within ethical boundaries, it has the potential for being good, while those things outside of ethical boundaries cannot be good.

The origin of any ethical limit, it seems to me, must spring from the thing itself. Externally imposed ethical limits are arbitrary. The arbitrary always invites transgression. The foundation of ethical limits on pretense must spring from the act of pretense itself. It would seem to make sense, then, that any act or thought that undermines the act of pretense is unethical to pretense. It seems axiomatic that ideas that are self-destructive are unethical. Unless, of course, the idea is nihilism, but that is an entirely different story for another paradigm.

Let me see if I can provide an example of what I mean. Suppose that one group of people by acts of decision concluded that another group of people were so inferior that they did not have the right to exist. This is obviously a grotesque pretense. This brutal pretense, if acted on, would bring about what we commonly call genocide. The destruction of a people, along with their ethos, obviously removes their ability to engage in any pretense at all. The suppressed peoples' pretenses have been so assaulted that the very idea of pretense, itself, has been called into question. Therefore, the suppressors' right of pretense could also be called into question. The issue, in such a case, becomes not one of ethical pretense, but one of power over others, and this is, most decidedly, not an ethical position. Pretense that denies pretense is falsification. Falsification seems most often aimed at the acquisition of power over others.

It seems to me that pretense must always be couched in terms that do not demand acceptance. Ethical pretense, as opposed to falsification, must be able to coexist with other pretenses. If the magician attempted to force us to believe that the rabbit was really pulled from the empty hat, he would challenge another set of pretenses: the laws of physics. The result is that the charm of the magic would be lost, and pretense, itself would be undermined. If the actor playing Brutus really stabbed Mark Antony, the play would cease to be believable theater, and art would have become murder.

Falsification recognizes no ethical limits. It is quite willing to undermine its own basis since it strives not for the truth that emerges from the tension between the inner and outer universes, but, rather, it strives for power. Falsification demands total acceptance.

Falsification attempts to hide, while pretense aims to represent. Pretense always represents the eternal tension between the universe and the spirit of the human being, and this is always a creative act. Falsification, on the other hand, simplifies and discolors this complex relationship for its own, and less lofty purposes, no matter what the falsifier says. The contemporary sound bytes, billboards, and most of television are vivid testimony to the powerful interests of falsification in our time. These interests distract and are enemies of individual contemplation.

Falsifiers do not desire contemplation, since such an act enhances the dialogue between the internal and external worlds. Falsification denies or deters the process of contemplation, since reflection would eventually reveal the speciousness of Falsification. Pretense, on the other hand, invites rumination, and Pretense understands that the process of contemplation will enrich the processes of pretense rather than destroy them.

"Libra"
acrylic and leaf on panel
51" x 32", 2001

IV

Finally, pretense is a kind of rebellion. Pretense accepts the universe of sea and stars, while at the same time it rejects the demands made by that terribly exacting universe. The realist painting, as a form of pretense and rebellion, accepts the world in which we find ourselves, and rejects the conditions imposed upon us by that world. This ethic, at once loyal and unsubmissive, is the core of my painting. In this state, I would hope that my work might stand as an ethical model and an existential paradigm for the values of pretense.

Now, I think I have resolved, for myself, that dilemma presented by Plato. Instead of pretense being an act that thwarted the search for Truth (with a capital "T"), I found that truth is situational, and probably does not have a capital "T". This view sees truth emerging from Pretense with the world, and not against the world. Since this view holds that the interface between the external world and internal world of pretense is where meaning is generated, one could not have meaning and order without the necessary pretenses. Rather than exiling all artists, as Plato demanded, the community of humans should to embrace artists for their valorous and defining acts of pretense.

So, these are some of the concerns that surround my work. These concerns are of much greater importance to me than where or how I place a highlight on the peel of an apple. This intellectual sub-stratum of my work guides my painting, and provides the boundaries within which I can function as an artist. I hope that the paintings will reveal, through contemplation, my simultaneous love of the world and the rejection of its harshest terms. The paintings, however visually beguiling they might be, are attempted testimonies to the prerequisites for a proper pretense, bounded by rigorous ethics, which seem to me to be vital to my living condition.

Ben Mahmoud August, 2001

"Allegoria de Temporum Originis"
(Allegory on the Beginning of Time)
acrylic and leaf on panel with glass,
palm leaf, and pins.
59" x 37", 2000