ART: REVISITED

I have been thinking about art a lot as of late – not just my own work, but art in general. More specifically, what is art? Or at perhaps why art? These questions came up quite a few times on the campus visit; my recent re-examination of one of my favorite pieces of art has had me thinking of it; even the novel I am currently reading poses the questions to me. In Amsterdam Ian McEwan’s offers the following thoughts for his composer Clive Linley:

The old guard of modernism had imprisoned music in the academy, where it was jealously professionalized, isolated, and rendered sterile, its vital covenant with a general public arrogantly broken.

It was time to recapture music from the commissars, and it was time to reassert music’s essential communicativeness, for it was forged, in Europe, in a humanistic tradition that had always acknowledged the enigma of human nature; it was time to accept that public performance was “a secular communion”…

These thoughts rang an impressive series of discordant bells in my pretty little head. I find myself both associating with and railing against its sentiments, so much so that I hardly know where to begin. So… I’ll start with a little background.

To start, if you are here reading my blog, I assume you have seen at least I little of my work – if not just jump on over to fourinchesofego.com. I do not think making things is enough to be art; art must be more than intent and it must be more than aesthetics. I have to believe this; I have to hold on to the premise that art has a broader purpose than being seen and larger than explaining itself as art; I cannot think of art as not having a communicative purpose, a social engagement, a larger cultural role. Art – at least once it is displayed – has a responsibility to speak, preferably well.

This position – I have found – often earns me a reputation of being overly academic, demanding even. I am frequently asked, “What about expression?” Which is followed by a purportedly humanistic position, that art is about expressing, that it is personal, an examination of subjectivity. Further, what about craft or outsider art? I am often accused of rejecting all that which comes from outside the academic art structure. Perhaps I do. At least as Art – please note the capital A. I wonder if the word art has been required to become too big, to encompass too much. Do the paint-by-numbers I purchase in thrift stores fit into the same word as what I try to teach my students? I do not believe that because I want to separate these forms that I am inherently devaluing the things we all make. Just because I don’t call them art does not mean those paint-by-numbers did not have value to those who painted them, the families that framed and displayed them; they have value, but I cannot call them art.

Thus I am dubbed an elitist, but it gets more complicated. I refuse to sell my work. Even further, I am extremely reluctant to show my work in galleries, even online sanctioning bodies of the artistic variety. I am largely committed to the public nature of art, of its ability to speak to larger audience rather than a self-selecting minority. I am suspicious of the isolation and sterility conferred by the white walls of the art gallery, the distance and even obstruction that those walls produce. I find myself as both one of the “commissars” and one clamoring for that “secular communion.” I demand a more rigorous examination of what art can be, how it can function, a more critical investigation of why art, but I don’t equate this with sterility. I guess that is what most disturbs me about much of my field: this false-dichotomy between intellect and expression, communication and subjectivity.

I want it all. I look for art to touch me and engage me, to dazzle my senses and stretch my intellect, to make me care rather than assume I will. I still think art should be smart – there is nothing to be ashamed of there. I want it to ask more of me at the same time that I demand more from it. I do not need another pretty picture – the world supplies a whole lot of pretty [and ugly]. I do not need to be told another time to look at something from another angle – didn’t Dead Poets’ Society finish that thought off for us. I do not long to be shocked yet another time – Matthew Barney will you please stop already.

I just want art to be more. I want it to be more than I can describe, something beyond what I could possibly define. I love the potential contradictions in my attempts at definition [even though I don’t see them as contradictory]. Art should be brilliant and accessible, awe-inspiringly beautiful even if it doesn’t look like much, I should grasp it in a moment and keep it with me forever. I want art to be free but be worth defending, seen by everyone but never the same twice. I want art to matter, be vital to each of us in at least some little way, but I still want it to be Art, not just what we like.

It keeps coming back to that – I don’t want art to ever be just what we like, but I so often disagree with those who decide what is good. Perhaps what I really crave is for all of us to just become a bit smarter, more astute, more involved. Until then, I keep hoping art will at least try to lead the way, to become more than what it is, to look beyond what works to what might.

It is not that I think I am the exemplar of great art; I get it right – even in a limited sense – only every once in a while. Mostly I make crap – and perhaps that is just the nature of art. If so then we need to start doing a better job of admitting it, to set the standards higher. Perhaps I am holding this word – Art – up way to high. Maybe moderately interesting is good enough, perhaps pretty is indeed pretty good, possibly I should leave well enough alone. But I can’t. And I don’t want to either.

Thus I will keep demanding more, calling 98 percent of the art I see crap, and hold out for those pieces and those moments that demand and offer more. I’ll also keep struggling toward a definition that I already know probably isn’t there. If along the way I tick off a few of my colleagues – a painter or two here or there – so be it.

Although perhaps I should try to remember all those etiquette lessons before talking to other artists from now on; it might make my life a little easier.