I used to think the major utility of visual art was in the realm of general perception, the individual’s interface with the world. Early on I began to notice that looking at english landscapes at the museum seemed to enhance the depth and detail of what I saw on drives around here, but didn’t know why. Wondered if it has something to do with the nature of painting, itself, since everything in a painting is noticed and accounted for. When taking a picture of a cow by a fence with your digital, the clouds in the sky, the willows down by the creek, every small detail just comes along, but the painter’s been everywhere, seeing and translating into ‘flat’ the field, the fence, the cow. The evocative painting helps you to notice stuff you’ve just been sloughing aside, if only by example. The actual experience is an increasing appetite for more detail in everyday surroundings, and a deepening of atmospheric awareness. Your spectacles are gradually becoming cleaner, but you won’t know why. That painting from the pawn shop with the unreadable signature, it’s worthless, hanging over the mantle, behind the couch, maybe in the kitchen could be having an influence. Even totally abstract art can have this effect, raising to awareness the pattern in a wooden door or shadows in a shaft of light, the texture of the driveway or coherent design in nature.
The notion that art has utility at all isn’t really part of any conversation I hear, so I make these assertions in a vacuum, or maybe on an island. Now and again I might contend that contemporary art is over my head, but it isn’t really. I just don’t want to play, but this isn’t about what I want, there’s lot’s of us. I understand entrenched cadres of arts professionals come to quick consensus when an artist has ‘matured’ enough to receive grant aid and official recognition. They embrace obscurity and are really just agents of the state, self-perpetuating drones from the bureau of silly walks, so sad. So instead of all that, I’m saying art is the bracing you install at home to keep the collapsing walls from squeezing you down into your iphone. Original art can be a wormhole portage back to fresh air and sunshine, a pan-pipe beckoning back to direct sensual experience. Could turn out, these days, visual art communicates even more than that.
The young today are very entrepreneurial, making ice cream and brewing beer, but mostly searching for the app that will earn money while they go off sight-seeing, good luck. As bulkheads begin to buckle, long-term security doesn’t seem as secure anymore, and independence and personal freedom have been gaining in popularity. Original art is a projection of that as well. The independent artist is a person who decided to make a stand against gigantic odds, a pugnacious shrew challenging a mostly indifferent rhino society, and they leave a trail, a testament to their insight or rage, all informed by their outsider, free-range existence, odd jobs and social experimentation. How that level of information comes across in a picture of anything, sailing ship or sunny meadow, I don’t know. Like the pheromone in the air you respond to but can’t smell, there must be some faculty in your brain, might be dusty, that recognizes and responds to the declaration of personal freedom the artist unconsciously put there while rendering a pot of flowers or a portrait of your aunt. As the world melts down in digital and is built back up with 3-D printing, original art is the one element that can’t be reduced, that won’t be censored or commercially compromised, and that one day soon could be valued for just existing at all.
No comments:
Post a Comment