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Sunday, January 29, 2017

art’s tension -- communication vs hiding

"Artists Are People Driven by the Tension Between the Desire to Communicate and the Desire to Hide" 
Don’t know who said it, doesn’t matter, sure sums it up. Yes, that’s the high wire, the razor’s edge to negotiate if you want to make art, and it’s something to keep in mind if you care to understand it. Art addresses a built in human dilemma made particularly intense in impersonal contemporary times. To ‘communicate’ as an artist requires a willingness to become vulnerable, to reveal the inner self, something most folks wouldn’t consider doing in public. Turns out there are ways to work around the embarrassing part if everyone pulls together, an excuse to hide behind the art.

The period immediately following WWII witnessed art veering harshly to the right, into a radical fundamentalism called ‘abstract expressionism’ which banned depiction of anything, pissed on art history, and generally made a mess, so daring. The quite mature artist in John Fowles story ‘Ebony Tower,’ called it a failure of nerve after the great human trauma of the war, a decision by art, and the culture behind it, to hide its face. The image, the conduit of thought and feeling, the vehicle of visual communication, was lost. Much of abstract art reveals the artist only by default, in the blankness of its form, the featureless green panel of Elsworth Kelly and the opaque and hidden mentality behind it.


The conspiracy involved a motley crew of self-perpetuating government agencies and slightly shady commercial opportunists. The notion that representational art is ‘simply copying nature’ has been infinitely repeated in campus rookeries where legions of artists have been hiding out for decades comfortable with benefits, don’t rock the boat. Up from bible door to door in alligator shoes to the heavyweight uptown galleries tourists never see, the salesman of the mystic ‘intangible’ is a wizard of human insecurities, pleased to sell you your own tie. Mostly we’ve been living in a society willing to hardly notice abstract art in motel lobbies, in board rooms, anywhere a point of view of any persuasion would be avoided. We’ve become distracted.


At some point there’s an awakening, folks rub their eyes and want to see what’s there, suddenly more interested in their own everyday experience, and art that confronts it. The artist willing to let you decide if this painting they’ve made reminds you of something you’ve seen before is taking a big chance in the first place. Oh they may say they don’t care, but that would make them just an illustrator, and they have way more invested. Acknowledging that vulnerability, and how well they’ve earned your trust in return, is the first line of you talking back. This is a conversation that takes courage both ways. In the end it isn’t the artists who make this decision but the culture itself which turns all of its heads as one, and chooses a new vision and an evolving art that communicates frankly and directly what they see and how they feel about themselves.  

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