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FRANCIS ANKYIAH - Philosophy, psychology, political and social artist

by FRANCIS ANKYIAH
(GHANA, KUMASI)

In reality, human beings comprised a rich, messy mixed of drives and desires; and these, together with the world in which they operate, ensure that human well-being can only ever be, at best, a fragile and temporary achievement.

I seek to depict world in which things go wrong, in which chance and necessity play prominent and often devastating roles in the shaping of human lives, chance, abject and formless show us aspects of a world that is, in reality, our world, the world in which we must live as best we can. Chance shows us lives blighted by accidents of character, by chance combinations of circumstance whose consequences unfold inexorably, by features of the human condition that are both necessary to it and, on occasion, profoundly damaging to it.

“The law of chance,” which comprises all other laws and surpasses our understanding (like the primal cause from which all life arises), can be experienced only in a total surrender to the unconscious. If, on the other hand, like Nietzsche, one thinks that human nature is worldly through and through, one is likely to think that the tragic aspect of life, because real and unavoidable, had better be acknowledged and, to whatever extent possible, come to terms with. One will also be likely to think that one should live in some such way as to register that acknowledgement.

The work seeks to reject logic and rationality as Arp and his fellow Dadaists linked this concept to the violence and corruption of World War II.
Jean Dubuffet set out to repudiate received notions of taste, value, and beauty, proposing instead an art free of all conventions.

Arp declared: “The chaos of our era is the result of that overestimating of reason”. As he assert of the Dadaists: “We rejected all mimesis and description, giving free rein to the Elementary and the Spontaneous”.
I declared that these works were selected and arranged “according to the laws of chance,” as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order.