thought or thing -- art’s skitz

Conceptual thinking transformed art, but not everyone made the turn. There are still those who think of art as an object created by an artist to be bought, owned, and lived with forever. That’s them left standing on the platform as modern art left the station some hundred years back, and that’s them again first in line when the train comes around this time.

Let’s review. The acknowledged inauguration of ‘modern art,’ the famous Duchamp ‘readymade’ urinal exhibited in independent artist’s exhibit of 1917, was an act of genius only in art books, seminal only for scholars. Submitted by a less worldly and obviously superior person, he was theatrically aloof, it might have been called an adolescent prank by a mediocre artist, making the major pillar of modern art, and indeed conceptual art’s very conception, only a porcelain hood ornament on the limo of sour grapes.

After early notoriety Duchamp became more and more enigmatic, critics and scholars pretending he was Einstein and they the interpreters of relativity. Oh really? What legitimacy declares someone’s else's work your own just by signing it, the way ragtag explorers used to claim whole continents on the authority of the squirrelly little pope? Experts said sure, it’s appropriate, and a new art became sanctified, essentially the formalistic dismantling of any former pretense to art, a gigantic breakthrough to be sure but the thrill is gone.

Sol LeWitt in 1967...... “In conceptual art the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work,” LeWitt wrote. “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair.”

That’s thin ice. Conceiving of a great bridge across a mighty river is a heroic chunk of thinking, but just making an offhand sketch won’t get anyone across. Retrograde? immensely, but the average person thinks this way. When they become interested in art they want to see accomplishment, and are less interested in the fetish objects in art magazines, the dialogue of fashion.

Average people have been interested in art all along, curious about artists, respectful of the art, but have felt pushed aside by a smirking condescending skybox of sycophants cornering the market on sophistication. Well it’s all over now, baby blue. The calf floating in a tank of formaldehyde, four vacuum cleaners in a glass box, the chrome cartoon character twelve feet high made in a shop somewhere will all at once seem pointless, and close to worthless, once the long deprived culture begins to assert itself.

The good news is that user-friendly art is available, a balm to the disenchanted, a solace for the disenfranchised, a compensation for the less than obscenely wealthy, and the culture, all directions, is waking up to it about now. More art to be seen begets more seeing, and more seeing begets buying and owning, which is bound to make more and better art available, round and round.

unlearning history -- forgetting art

lexington herald-leader aug 11 -- New 21c public artwork addresses race, Confederate statue debate
The history of the civil war and its aftermath are good to know, but removing statues won’t change it, won’t turn it back or wash out a line. As a fact, erasing history for the sake of psychic comfort can have unfortunate consequences, such as leaving folks defenseless when it comes around again, but manipulating civic symbols isn’t our beat.

For the purposes of art, I’ve forgotten who John Hunt Morgan was, some rich kid with a feather in his hat. His daddy bought him a uniform and a few extra muskets, and he and his boys raided around the edges of a the civil war without affecting the outcome. Long gone, still I’ve seen him sitting on his horse pretty much every day for more than three decades. It’s a tidy piece of work, his statue, a big casting with all those cuts, all that detail, and would be a handsome accomplishment even today done with modern equipment, pushbutton hoists and electric furnaces.

Maybe you see a symbol of racial oppression, but I see six months in a studio working everyday, all day and into the night, hand-forming not just the likeness of John’s face, but his tunic with buttons, his holster and livery, everything correct, and this ain’t no ‘cut and paste‘ operation. After that I see a black smoky foundry with a crew of thick muscular men with black fingernails, burn scars on their arms and chests, working within inches of truly horrible death pouring the molten metal, filling the voids, temperature and speed and years of experience, and feel with them the pride when the mold was broken and pulled away, shoulder slaps and handshakes -- a piece of metal worthy of lasting a thousand years. They didn’t give a damn about John Hunt either. 

Turns out the symbol, the meaning, even the subject matter whatever it is, was never the main event anyway. We judge ancient peoples by their artwork almost entirely, the symbolic meanings lost in time, and don’t seem to have much problem agreeing on which were the more advanced. In those terms John doesn’t rank up with the Parthenon, but he’s way too good to be thrown away.

whistling in the wind -- unrequited commentaries

Is there an audience for this point of view? I don’t know. Owning art is unscientific, unverified, a leap of faith since none of its theories have to date been clinically tested. OA stands in opposition to the current art establishment as exclusionary and aloof, with velvet rope access, and shoulder to shoulder with a lot of people who have never thought much about art, didn’t think it applied to them, and who don’t much seem to care. It’s an awkward place to start.

Still society is in dynamic turmoil, tooling around on a revolutionary roundabout, and no one sure what street we drive out on. The economic calamity about a decade back had its sobering effect on the ‘just give me more’ mentality, and engendered reevaluations all around. Increasingly our lives are populated by robots replicated by other robots, turns out almost everything is soluble in digital, and cars are going to drive themselves. We be at a crossroads.

There’s a pile of humanity in art. As a fact it’s a refuge. In most other areas there’s nothing you can do a bot can’t do better. They can drive a train better than a sleepy engineer, prepare dinner without burning anything, even let you win at chess, but they can’t make art. They were manufactured, have no life experience, and it would never occur to them to make art. Now it is the case that a computer can be programed to make stuff that looks like art, just as occasionally humans will do this just to make money, but creating actual art is not among their vast capabilities.

So, let’s suppose ordinary folks somehow start being curious about art, perhaps as a result of huge shifts in societal perspective beyond their awareness the way they sometimes do. If they once discover the potency of art to alter and aerate their low-oxygen living spaces, see in it a magnet for memories and a unique signifier of home, and come to think of art a stable and enduring object worthy of respect, something singular from a living hand, then maybe they’ll want to buy some and take it home. They are the phantom audience, the potential avid readers of my encouragement and exhortations but not quite ready, behind a partition, although in the end it won’t matter. Art will change as people change their minds, and it will be art that helps them think those new thoughts.

personal verification -- shared insights

Contemporary art could be anything, it’s like their motto, and uncle Aristotle explained there might not be much traction there. Owning art has always been fond of painting, a thirty thousand year tradition, and its uncanny ability to communicate mind to mind. Painting isn’t the only art form, but is itself broad and deep enough to be considered separately, and its unique physical properties make it conveniently portable and easily owned.

All paintings are a design in color on a flat surface. The artist sometimes arranges the colors in a clever way that somehow reminds the viewer of something they’ve seen before, a smiling lady, a placid lake, a pot of flowers, but no one is ever fooled. That isn’t the point. In making the painting the artist encodes enough of their character and singular point of view to make each painting a perpetual conversation, constantly engaging the viewer’s attention. Better art does this better and has more to say.

For example -- if you’ve never been to the southern rim of the grand canyon all grand canyon paintings will look pretty much alike to you, just vertical stacks of horizontal bands, nothing special. If you’ve stood at the lookout for a while, sunlight and shadow, crisp clear air, an hour’s movement of the sun among the silhouettes, you’re probably ready to head up to Taos to crawl the galleries. Lots of paintings of the grand canyon, lots, but in front of one you feel the vertical rush of air against your face as you stare out into that fat slice of eternity, registering just the slightest tinge of vertigo. This is the one to take back to Indiana.

Real life and art aren’t separate but play against each other, inform each other, embrace and enhance each other, and if an artist nails you with some deep down response to something you both have seen, maybe even finds a place inside you didn’t know was there, something will click in your head and painting, the whole business, will make suddenly make sense to you.

tuning receivers -- touching the dials

We each exist in a perceptual net, sound, sight, and smell forming the world around us, forming us. More than just passive receivers, we quite intentionally tune our personal antennae for levels and distinctions we’re already used to and have come to expect, the ‘rut‘ of daily living. Art is our handle on a chaotic reality allowing us adjustments and recalibrations, opening the portals to fresh experience, and keeping the whole business pliable and able to change. As a fact, art has always been mankind’s mental control panel, the hidden dashboard, the key to altering the code that determines what’s real, and museums reveal how succeeding epics went about it.
 
We humans inhabit an ever-morphing reality not easy to pin down. Is the planet thousands or billions of years old, is there an afterlife and what are its conditions, such as that, and dynasties use art to construct the field of play, to determine the rules and boundaries, and to make sure they stay on top. Aware of art’s influence, these days it falls on the individual to find the art that enhances their own place on the planet, that helps them see better days and do better things. There’s a vast array out there.

A lot of the art we encounter, art in this case meaning any created version of reality, the pickup moving a mountain, a pain medication bestowing bliss, is unavoidable really, from billboards to popups. We are free to choose, however, the art on our own walls, and that has its influence on how we see the world as well, how we process new facts, how aware we are of our immediate environment, how seriously we see ourselves when we glance in the mirror. That’s a lot to ask but art is powerful stuff, just ask the Egyptians, the Mayans, any monolithic culture that maintained its total world order by controlling art, and we have the evidence on hand. 

An art that transports would probably be a dangerous thing, and since the middle ages we’ve become harder to impress, but a little painting for the kitchen, maybe a bigger one over a couch, nudging us awake, adding a little flavor and coaxing us to notice just a little more, is not that hard to find.