What is it that makes a martial art an artform? I'm not a student of fine arts (at least in the traditional sense) but I've thought about this question for a long, long time and I've come to the conclusion that what makes a martial art a kind of fine art is abstraction. You see, in any artform there is abstraction. The artist is taking some aspect of reality and representing it through his medium with a certain degree of abstraction. It is the management of that abstraction and the medium that makes an art.
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Take, for example, sculpture. The most amazing, lifelike sculpture I have ever seen was a baroque bust of a lady wearing a veil. The sculpture was so masterful that it gave the illusion of a translucent veil over a face. But even if the artist has near god-like skill, a sculpture will still not be the same as the model. There is an artistic management of the distortion created by the translation of reality into stone..
As another example, consider photography. A good picture is not a representation of what is really there. There is distortion. What the lens sees and records on the film is different from what is really there, the light, color, the composition of what is in the frame, etc... Same goes for videography.
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So, a martial art is a representation of reality (combat, conflict, violence) through the medium of human motion. How the artist decides to manage the distortion inherent in that representation is what makes it an artform..
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But does the fact that there is distortion make the artform unrealistic? No, absolutely not. Have you ever heard the axiom that a great novel can be more real than the truth itself? Through the distortion of the artistic process, the artist brings emphasis and focus onto some aspect of interest. Have you ever noticed that you can often learn more from a line drawing than from a photo of an action?.
So, do any of y'all have any good examples of how your martial art is abstracted from real combat without becoming unrealistic?
