Italian architect, Renzo Piano, was Charlie Rose' guest on May 20. I watched the re-run yesterday afternoon at lunch. You can watch the interview on http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/10318
Charlie asked Renzo what qualities he saw among the architects he admired. Renzo dodged the question. For him an architect was many things and has to be many things to be an architect. "An architect," Renzo said, "is ideally someone with the capacity to make things." To make things you have to put on different hats. "At nine you have to be is a builder; at ten, you have to be a poet; and at eleven o'clock, you have to be a humanist. You have to be able to move from all those different things."
An architect has to dream but he must be a pragmatist, someone who knows how to do things. "Fantasy is very important but "it's a bit like marmalade. It's good only little by little. And especially good when you spread it on a good piece of bread."
He referred to "the pure force of necessity." Necessity "gives you strength, the force and the energy to invent."
Enzo comes from a family of builders but early in his life he thought he was limited just being a builder. His father couldn't understand his choice to become an architect. "My father watched me and said, why you can be a builder, why do want to be just an architect."
I thought the conversation between the two had as much to do with any kind of "builder." An artist is a builder, a graphic designer is a builder, a filmmaker is a builder. They create things. An artist is an artisan. Both words derive from the Latin root ars or art. What might distinguish an artist from other artisans is the breadth of his vision and his genius for surprising conjunctions. I remember in a theology class in college being told God alone is creator. All others are artificer producing artifacts. We make things from what God provided those first six days of creation. An artist is simply someone who has access to those building blocks and intuitively and skillfully puts them together in such a way as to make the old new.
Plato, of course, had a similar take. For him the truly real are the Forms of which manifestations derive. What we see, hear, taste—what we experience—already existed from beginningless time. If we can envision ourselves as a dot in the vastness of cosmic space, what we experience is that tiny bit of the universe caught in the cross-hair of that dot. We are "creatures" and while we can't create anything new we can "make" something that "appears" new from the infinite array of Forms already potentially present in time. Being creatures we live in space and time. We would not experience Space unless there was some "thing" in it. To make such a thing we mimic God's act of creation. Who knows, maybe Yahweh too was nothing but an artificer. It seems to me this quality of the Source of All Things was at the heart of Masonic beliefs. A mason is a builder.
An artist makes. At a more fundamental level, human beings make. Even when we are doing "nothing" we are doing no "thing". The artist is one who conscious of this deliberately shapes and fashions what he makes with ideas of beauty but the essential idea is this: we make. We can think all we want but it's just marmalade. We need the bread.
Rene Descartes in Discourse on Method wrote, cogito ergo sum. Usually translated as, I think, therefore I exist, a less ambiguous translation might be, I am thinking, therefore I exist. Consciousness gives us existence but making things makes us human. An artist is a craftsman. He both thinks and makes.
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