We constantly distinguish - right and wrong, sacred and profane, clean and dirty, male and female, young and old, living and dead - and in every case trickster will cross the line and confuse the distinction. Trickster is the creative idiot, therefore, the wise fool, the gray-haired baby, the cross-dresser, the speaker of sacred profanities. Where someone's sense of honorable behavior has left him unable to act, trickster will appear to suggest an amoral action, something right/wrong that will get life going again. Trickster is the mythic embodiment of ambiguity and ambivalence, doubleness and duplicity, contradiction and paradox.
... he [a trickster] needs at least a relationship to other powers, to people and institutions and traditions that can manage the odd double attitude of both insisting that their boundaries be respected and recognizing that in the long run their liveliness depends on having those boundaries regularly disturbed.
When Pablo Picasso says that 'art is a lie that tells the truth,' we are closer to the old trickster spirit. Picasso was out to reshape and revive the world he had been born into. He took this world seriously; then he disrupted it; then he gave it at a new form."
- Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth and Art, by Lewis Hyde
d i s t r u p t i o n . . .
Going back to my Art History class 101, why Pablo Picasso is so significant in understanding the modernization in contemporary art...
He took the life seriously, disrupted the preconceived notions of images and forms, and "gave it at a new form."
Now, that takes some serious thinking and work.
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