Puppet Mural, Free Will and Power

PUPPET MURAL, FREE WILL AND POWER

The End of Pier stop animation company asked me to design and paint a mural for them inside their new studio space in Glasgow. Because their films are stop animation I played around with the idea of puppets and their free will. I designed a doll puppet held up by strings and gave her a life of her own. In her arm is an open birdcage and from the birdcage fly birds out. These birds were also puppets only they have broken free and their strings drag  along the ground. The doll puppet is seen to be pulling down on her own string above her with her other hand in pursuit of what the birds are doing.

What makes us truly human is our free will - it allows us to make a choice and then act upon it. No matter the constraints we can still have this so long as we adapt to the environment we are in - we can choose to get emotional or not and we can choose to fight or not. 

    “This choosing of the self by the self without which free will is impossible, unthinkable...”

We are free when we can make choices.

     “Without that knowledge the mind...would remain prisoner of itself, its reasoning would simply be a form of madness...it is reason which frees us from this. It frees us from ourselves”

(Spoonville, Andre Comte. 2005. The Little Book of Philosophy. London: Vintage).

Free will gives us power. 

I then took the image I designed and re-created it  on the walls of Edinburgh. The First one was done using make-up (thinking on the job!) and the second with a little spray paint.

I love graffiti art because it is an art form that really takes advantage of the world around us by using it as a canvas. It contrasts to the bourgeois galleries and their perfectly hung paintings which may or may not have meant anything to the artist. Graffiti art is not something you just decide to do one afternoon after a cup of tea - it requires planning and execution. The execution of which is tricky because it is illegal. What I am saying is that these artists are passionate about what they do because they make the effort to get their work out there in a way different to a studio artist. These artists are alive and real, living in the now designing and publishing straight away.

Below are pictures of the close in Edinburgh where I did my own graffiti art. The closes in Edinburgh are very old and going down them feels like going back in time. This particular one has been covered in graffiti art.

Banksy is one of my favourite artists because of his designs and his respect for the structures he paints onto. His work states the obvious but an obvious we were not aware of until he points it out. He does this with humour, poking fun at our capitalist tendencies and the power consumerism has over us.

I read a book called 'On Desire, Why We Want What We Want' by Allen Irvine. There is a chapter on Stoicisim which is a Hellenistic school of philosophy. What I love about the Stoics is their attitude to power: they say “Do not seek to have events happen to you as you want them to he declares but instead want them to happen as they do happen” (Irvine 2006). Irvine describes having power as something achievable if we listen to our intellect and don’t give into our desires. What we want and what we need are two different things: we need to stay alive - water, food, shelter? and people (I personally believe) and we want, well many things especially in a day and age where marketing campaigns and advertisements tell us me NEED something we don't. The Stoics are saying that things we want will come to us if they are supposed to.

Below is one of Banksy's images of which I have altered. 

The original looked like the image on the right hand side. I took away the guns and changed the meaning of the image using the quote 'It's so easy to step on roses' as stimulus. It is about the progression of love: the boy and girl hold onto the balloon all the way up the hill until they get to the top and it slips away into the sky. The hill is made of rose petals I have stuck on and up the side is written 'assumptions'. Assumptions can end a relationship and cause the balloon to float away.