some way out of here -- painted doorways

To utilize art, to make it pay back, to find its function in daily life it’s necessary to consider our own limitations and the barriers we have built-in. We’re prone to habit, actually it’s worse than that. Anything we come across goes through an extensive recognition process shuffling through stacks of images stored in memory to match up with what we’re seeing and give it a name. In familiar territory the sorting goes by too quickly to notice, but as a tourist in a strange environment it’s occasionally possible to witness a lag time figuring out the scene in front of you. Your search function has had to reach further to find comparative information, and sad to say, if no matches are found you’re not seeing it.

This might sound strange but examples abound. The old line coach sees things on a football field the average fan never considers and a horse breeder appraises characteristics of a horse no one else notices. It sure seems the world around us is as broad as our own experience, a box that’s only as big as the places we’ve been, and most who travel say they see more when they get home. If it turns out our minds really work this way, only recognizing what’s been seen before, then how do we expand our field of vision and become more aware of the texture and detail in daily life? This becomes an increasingly pertinent question these days with a population enthralled in transitory screen images, which, along with the monotony of rush hour traffic and the uniformity of many abodes, flattens experience and limits the range of our perception.

Art extends vision and depth of awareness by stretching what the mind accepts as truth, or at least by posing the question. Strolling in the museum a particularly powerful painting can produce a sense of vertigo as the senses recalibrate to accommodate its bold assertions, and chances are the sky will seem bluer and birds will be singing out in the parking lot. Most art doesn’t work so quickly, but people have it around because it enhances their ability to see everything else. At this particular time especially, art is an escape hatch from the sense-narrowing mass-media world we inhabit, and an artist’s vision hanging on the wall reminds us of how much there is to see.

old art, new art -- saying hello

from cnn, jan 13   A warty pig painted on a cave wall 45,500 years ago is the world's oldest depiction of an animal
It's now thought that the capability to create figurative art -- that references the real world -- either emerged before Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa and headed for Europe and Asia more than 60,000 years ago or that it emerged more than once as humans spread around the globe.
 
That’s a very old picture of a pig and it raises some interesting questions. More than tools or weapons, art reveals a higher consciousness, and this pig provides a point of connection, mind to mind, across the ages. Since we’re the first to see it, it must have been meant for us and even though we’re modern people with cars and telephones, we still see a pig. That says a lot about being human since any animal, bat or bear, that wandered into that cave since didn’t see anything at all.

This picture doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know already about warty pigs, they haven’t gone extinct, but it’s remarkably revealing about our distant ancestors, artists long before they made pots or wove cloth. Not just that. If some modern artist made a picture of a cow and time traveled back, these cave dwelling people would recognize it right away. This form of expression and even communication seems right for us since in our natural state we’re ‘sighted’ animals, with half our brain devoted to deciphering what we see. Very recently mass communication and its sidekick crass commercialism have made most of us more comfortable but also cheapened and diminished our lives, and loyalty to the home team has replaced more individual responses to our very complex existence.

It’s a freaky fact that humans didn’t lose the ability to create and understand figurative art until the twentieth century when a new regime of non-objectivity took over. Referential art of any sort was derided all the way back to the pig, and Simon Schama, knighted and renowned art authority, remarked that it was ‘such a feeble idea, to go around copying the world.’ Well he’s a heavyweight, he weighs down wikipedia, but wait a minute. This notion of accessing higher realms by abstractly applying paint in your own unique way sounds pretty feeble all on its own and its product isn’t real compelling. Maybe it wasn’t such a breakthrough after all.

The fact remains that a picture of anything isn’t likely to impart any new information about its subject, but through the act of depicting the world the artist is revealed. It’s not mysterious. The viewer compares their own experience with what the artist has painted and a conversation takes place. An example of a first line might be: I made a picture of a pig so that you could see it forty five thousand years from now and know that I existed. It’s not about the pig. Isn’t it remarkable that after mountains, seas, and deserts, civilizations come and gone, after forty-five millennia representational art still ends up saying essentially the same thing?

art recovers -- was never really sick

Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP) is a mental health problem in which a caregiver makes up or causes an illness or injury in a person under his or her care, such as a child, an elderly adult, or a person who has a disability. Because vulnerable people are the victims, MSBP is a form of child abuse or elder abuse.

It’s a matter of incentives and which side of your bread the butter is on. The US has a huge budget for art with tier upon tier of agency support and tax-funded ‘nonprofits’ in every community. Subsidized art is a major industry with blocks of real estate on college campus dedicated to a preparatory program that leads essentially nowhere. This entire bureaucratic dynasty is based on the lack of appeal of art to the masses, those duds who support uncounted careers in art, most without making any. Something fishy here, some element seems to be clogging the works, and it's almost like there’s an incentive to support an art that’s grossly unpalatable to average people, and desperately in need of life support in every little town.

For art to thrive there only needs to be two kinds of people, the people who make it and the people who buy and live with it. Agents who facilitate this exchange should get a taste of a self-sustaining, economically viable cottage industry and a clean contributor to community prosperity and well being. It should be clear that every person who draws a tax-funded paycheck to promote and support art has a vested interest in keeping art scrawny and underfed, ugly and unappealing, and they do what they can to keep those first two types apart. They’ll freeze out independent artists and flood their tax-supported galleries with a conceptual obscurity only a complicit insider could love. They justify their parking spots this way.

Their entire enterprise is sustained by the aspiration of average people for some form of honest self-expression and they step on the product and drain its nutritional content. I feel as much sympathy for them as they’ve shown artists who might have had a following in their own hometowns but for them, and for the society they’ve impoverished. Perhaps this is harsh. There’s not much you can do with an art degree in the real world and finding a regular paycheck from some arts agency is so much easier than trying to make art in a town where no one looks at art. Still, full recovery requires budget cuts and that means mass layoffs of people without real training and a purge of state agencies whose main institutional imperative has simply been self-perpetuation, so sad.

Art in communities everywhere is about to pull out the tubes and rise from ICU care, ripping back the curtains to feel some sunshine with feet on the floor and art up on the wall in houses all across town. There’s two or three artists around here, wherever you are, who are pretty talented and they’d get better with more time in the studio. If you bought a piece yourself you could follow their progress and maybe talk to them at an opening, on a studio tour, or when you purchase another piece directly. Art which couldn’t exist without government subsidies probably shouldn’t, and art that broadens and deepens your perceptions and makes you think is all around.