If you, too, are baffled by what is art and what is not, how do you decide?
Are there works of art that, at first, you didn't consider worthy of the designation? If you later changed your mind, what led to seeing those works as art after all?
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This past weekend, I had the opportunity to view lots of new art. Artist Judith Selby-Lang generously sent me a complimentary ticket, courtesy of SF ElectricWorks, to artMRKT San Francisco, a contemporary and modern art fair. Held on the edge of the bay at Ft. Mason, with a grand view of the Golden Gate Bridge, this event exhibited the work of artists represented by 70 galleries. Though most of the galleries are located on the west coast, others are scattered across North America and even as far away as London and Tel Aviv. As I walked around, stopping at one display after another, I found myself wondering again, How do we decide what is art? While there were not a lot of items I would consider placing in my home or studio, I couldn't help but be impressed by the innovative use of non-traditional sources: matchboxes, marine vinyl, video technology, recycled circuit boards, hay, even gun parts and bullets. I have to admit that I also was downright puzzled by the artistic merit of work I saw people exclaiming over. I won't make pronouncements here about what I valued or found questionable. An apt French expression is the best I can come up with: chacun à son goût--to each, his/her own taste or preference. Still, I couldn't help pondering, Who says what art is? And why is that a question so fraught with ambiguity? One of the significant changes to emerge from the major art movements of the 20th century is that nowadays anything goes in art, especially because every kind of material and medium is employed to convey an emotion, a political message, or other kind of statement. If you can exhibit outsized soup cans in a museum, then what can't you display as art? It's not like in the olden days, when the reigning academy classically set the rules and made the judgments. There's no longer a central authority that dictates what is art and what is not. Modern artists rebelled and broke out of that restrictive box. Isn't that what creativity is all about anyway? According to French artist Philippe Petit, it most certainly is. For those who were around in 1974, you might remember that he walked a high-wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, for which he was immediately arrested. In a Wall Street Journal article citing his new book, Creativity: The Perfect Crime, he tells Barbara Chai, "You should learn the rules to be able to forget the rules...Unless you break those rules you’re not really going to create." So maybe the many items that confounded my aesthetic sensibility are simply examples of art that has gone beyond any earlier rules. I am reminded again of what has become a cliched expression, but still rings true: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. So is art, with a slight twist: Art is in the mind of the beholder. Questions and Comments:
If you, too, are baffled by what is art and what is not, how do you decide? Are there works of art that, at first, you didn't consider worthy of the designation? If you later changed your mind, what led to seeing those works as art after all?
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When you look at a work of art, do you find yourself being pulled in, even enveloped by it? Or do you sense that it allows you separate space, while still inviting you in? This is a question about a certain intention artists have. Although it has come up before in my readings, it didn't register the way it does now. When viewing art, I move back and forth, closer and farther away, to get a different perspective or to observe more details. But I don't have a precise memory of whether I felt something particular from how the work was placed. Next time, I will keep in mind what several artists have clearly articulated about space around their work. "My aim is that the pieces not intrude on you, but that they give you time to come to them," Canadian-American sculptor Jackie Winsor (1941- ) told John Gruen, in 1978, in The Artist Observed. "They don't bother you until you want to have an exchange with them. My rope pieces, for example, create a kind of stillness, yet contain an emotion within them. The emotion is activated or becomes apparent the moment you seek it out. That's when communication takes place." Dorothea Rockburne (1932- ), a Canadian abstract painter, stated something similar to Gruen in 1986: I didn't want my work to "move." I wanted it to sit back on the wall, with a distance between me and it. I did not want my work to be an intrusion into anybody's space or life. I didn't want it to blast. I wanted it to sit and beckon. According to Gruen, this desire arose in the early 1970s, when she was experimenting with painted structures and decided to create them in a manner "that would not eliminate the space between the work and the viewer." After looking at and admiring Ad Reinhardt (1913-1967) and Mark Rothko (1903-1970), she came away feeling "their paintings tended to enfold the viewer, both through color and intent." Rockburne wanted to avoid that. But that's exactly what Rothko wanted. Some critics thought he was obsessed with how to hang his work. In 1954, he gave specific details to ensure that viewers stand near it: I...hang the largest pictures so that they must be first encountered at close quarters, so that the first experience is to be within the picture. This may well give the key to the observer of the ideal relationship between himself and the rest of the pictures. I also hang the pictures low rather than high, and particularly in the case of the largest ones, often as close to the floor as is feasible, for that is the way they are painted. And last, it may be worthwhile trying to hang something beyond the partial wall because some of the pictures do very well in a confined space. I have on occasion successfully dealt with [the] problem [of immense and formidable museum walls] by tending to crowd the show rather than making it spare. By saturating the room with the feeling of the work, the walls are defeated and the poignancy of each single work...become[s] more visible. [quotation courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago] Rothko probably would have been horrified and vituperative had he been at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco for "Beyond Belief: 100 Years of the Spiritual in Modern Art, Highlights from SFMOMA's collection June 28–October 27, 2013." When I walked into a large room, I noticed that one of his "red" paintings took up most of a wall. Still, many other artists had work on display in the rest of the gallery. A group of people clustered in front of the Rothko, listening to a talk about the paintingt and the artist. Was it an intimate experience, as Rothko wished? I don't know, for I couldn't get close! Surprisingly, for Rothko, huge paintings were not something grandiose or pompous, but rather intimate and human. However, not everyone thought so. As John Golding concludes in Paths to the Absolute: Mondrian, Malevich, Kandinsky, Pollock, Newman, Rothko, and Still, a large format was essential to the most celebrated American abstract painters, yet there was also something unfortunate about it. He suggests that they "cannibalized" vast exhibition spaces, both public and private. Questions and Comments:
What do you notice when viewing artwork: Are you gently beckoned to come closer or powerfully sucked in? Which do you prefer? Are small paintings intimate and large paintings overwhelming simply because of their size? Or does something else make a difference? How would you describe that something else? Although I originally intended, in this post, to explore the pursuit of perfection in art, I realized that first I need to reflect on the role of beauty. Beauty gives pleasure to the senses. Beauty can elevate or elate the mind or spirit as well. The word is derived from the Latin bellus, pretty, but it's also akin to bonus, good. So it's not simply about physical loveliness. The difficulty with beauty is, who decides what is beautiful? Someone or something may seem attractive, even exquisite, to one person, yet not to another. Take eminent British art critic John Ruskin. He threw verbal darts at American-born British-based James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) when he left realism behind for more abstract paintings. Whistler called these departures "nocturnes," a term he borrowed from his friend French composer Achille-Claude Debussy (1862-1918). Ruskin described Whistler's new work as "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued for libel. Clearly, Ruskin found no beauty in abstraction. Some people still don't. Why is beauty so debatable? Canadian-American abstract painter Agnes Bernice Martin (1912-2004) said: Beauty...is not in the eye, it is in the mind. What our eyes see is just what's there--shapes, colors, lines--without judgment. Then our mind deems it beautiful or plain or downright ugly. In my last post, on Art and Chaos, I referred to two collections of interviews with artists. The following excerpt is from ART TALK. In this conversation between Cindy Nemser and contemporary American Realist painter Janet Fish (1938- ), they discuss how what we see can appear one way and then, astoundingly, another. Nemser: I think your work is very affirmative because you take ordinary things that are part of our world and find beauty in them. You use small common objects like honey jars or inexpensive glasses and use them to tell a great deal about the world we live in. That gives your work a universality. Fish: My favorite subject of all was the vinegar bottles, which were bland forms that change incredibly if you move them even half an inch. Nemser: Your using of common glass is a rebellious act then...you take that very banal glass and make it beautiful. It loses its banality when your sunlit strokes define it.
For Czech-Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980), both wonder and understanding change our perception. In the dialogue Edouard Roditi had with him, the artist commented: It is most important that an artist should always face what he depicts, at least in the beginning, with a sense of sheer wonder. However ugly a face may be, we can discover some beauty in it if we first experience wonder before it and then begin to understand it too. Just because we don't see beauty in something does not automatically mean that it doesn't exist there. Roditi adds that even portraits of inmates in an insane asylum can be transformed from something frightening or horrible into something beautiful. He cites those created by French painter and lithographer Jean Louis Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). If everyone took a lesson from these artists, maybe the world would be a different place, maybe we'd all see each other as beautiful.
Questions and Comments: If you have found yourself considering something or someone beautiful, though previously you did not, what made the difference? Is there art you once disliked and now are attracted to? How did that change of perception come about? |
Mirka KnasterI am a fiber/mixed-media artist with a decades-long career as a writer. Working with textiles and handmade paper from around the world and exploring the heart of art evoke my joy daily. *Blog continues on my website. Click link below for my recent posts.
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