What does it mean to be visual, as in ‘visual art’? Means almost anything these days, no, more than that. Visual art can be anything you want it to be, and doesn’t have to look like much. About a hundred years ago give or take, the newly defined mission of the artist became simply to shock the middle class, violate accepted norms, and ride that wave of controversy to the top. The urban chic love putting artificial distance between themselves and the workaday types who contribute to their swell lifestyles, and any affront to their sensibility makes the grade, cheap, tawdry, easy, and dumb they like special. This is said with confidence, evidence abounds.
Back in the seventies Tom Wolfe asserted that the real change in art was from a visual form to a literary one, and as a fact Clement Greenberg, titan theorist of abstract expressionism, came to art after having tried literary criticism. With bunches of words you can weave some scintillating tapestries, but they’re just going to lay there on the page in rows, sucked up in linear sequence to be reconstructed by you -- pure abstraction. Visual art isn’t like that. It’s so much more ‘real.’ Looking at a picture happens all over all at once, but it enters the brain slowly, sinking in like water in a flower pot. Verifying this assertion will require the participation of the reader willing to stand in one place in the museum long enough for a painting to have its say. Walk away with your windows defogged a little.
What we have here is a traffic jam of words about art, and the road doesn’t go through, anyway. Visual art occupies a territory past the jurisdiction of words, and it can be talked about but not captured by anything said. Using visual art to illustrate a relevant, timely, important social cause is really just another form of advertising, while the art has merit, if any, solely in visual terms. This is the gauntlet -- have something interesting to say visually, or call it something else. Conceptualists, homestead new ground, blow minds and call into question over on your own lot, and leave visual artists to paint their pictures, to sing their songs in the mind’s eye.
Back in the seventies Tom Wolfe asserted that the real change in art was from a visual form to a literary one, and as a fact Clement Greenberg, titan theorist of abstract expressionism, came to art after having tried literary criticism. With bunches of words you can weave some scintillating tapestries, but they’re just going to lay there on the page in rows, sucked up in linear sequence to be reconstructed by you -- pure abstraction. Visual art isn’t like that. It’s so much more ‘real.’ Looking at a picture happens all over all at once, but it enters the brain slowly, sinking in like water in a flower pot. Verifying this assertion will require the participation of the reader willing to stand in one place in the museum long enough for a painting to have its say. Walk away with your windows defogged a little.
What we have here is a traffic jam of words about art, and the road doesn’t go through, anyway. Visual art occupies a territory past the jurisdiction of words, and it can be talked about but not captured by anything said. Using visual art to illustrate a relevant, timely, important social cause is really just another form of advertising, while the art has merit, if any, solely in visual terms. This is the gauntlet -- have something interesting to say visually, or call it something else. Conceptualists, homestead new ground, blow minds and call into question over on your own lot, and leave visual artists to paint their pictures, to sing their songs in the mind’s eye.
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