In Defense of Seeing Art Differently For some time now, we have been living with the notion, primarily championed in the academy, that art, and by that I mean an “approved” art – art that carries the cultural imprimatur, is, and ought to be, theory driven, i.e. that there should be a defensible system of thought that promulgates the work. Whether through our willing engagement with post-structuralism, semiotics, identity politics, feminism/post-feminism, post-colonialism, social justice theory, or just a closer reading of Nietzsche, Freud, and the Marquis de Sade, we’ve arrived at a time where theory pretends to drive (the most important) art. This avenue, though, might best be left to the curatorial/academic side of the equation, because without an artist’s engagement with aesthetics and emotion, the art that gets produced is often limp, presumptuous, and pedantic. Pretensions to smartness, I like to think it. When exactly did we give up expecting a visceral reaction when making and viewing art? At what point did we stop pursuing poetry, and texture, and visual delight, and even things like shame and fear in our art production in favor of theory? Or did we? Every once and awhile (and more often recently), I like to think back on a particular artist’s work I stumbled across in a gallery in L.A. back in 1985/86. The artist was unfamiliar to me, and her work (I remember only a singular piece in the show) was a sound sculpture that was composed of lashed together bamboo, in a lattice-like tower which held suspended an inverted pyramid of ice which encapsulated small pebbles. As the ice melted slowly, the occasional pebble would be released from its frozen grasp, it would bounce somewhat noisily through the bamboo structure before landing in a collecting pool at the base of the sculpture. It was the best kind of art. It was poetry made visible. (Through the wonders of Google’s search engine some 28 years later, the artist is Mineko (Watanabe) Grimmer.) Much could be said about that piece in relation to all kinds of theoretical import, but what hit me most, what continues to impress me all these years later, was the visceral reaction to the piece itself – the beauty of the materials, the simplicity of means, the connection to our human senses, an ability to open a world of thought through an economy of gesture. No text was required reading before appreciating the artwork. I am forever grateful to encounter artwork such as this. Which gets me thinking, who do we, as artists, make work for? We can kid ourselves that we are making work for an appreciative audience (current or future as the case may be, and incredibly small), but I suspect that we primarily make work to please ourselves and perhaps other artists. Artists, I believe, would say that they wish to communicate with/through their work, but the avenue of engagement most sought is with our own psyche. When we say that we are in pursuit of the truth, it is not a pedantic truth we are after, but a human truth – our own. I leave it to you to decide who among our exalted and not so exalted artistic elite fulfills the role well. It seems to me that anyone who wishes to claim the mantle of artist has to claim the history of art that comes with it. Theory is nice, and there is room to accommodate it, but art without the aesthetic impulse is just a visual essay waiting for a reader. A shame since our eyes and senses allow for so much more.
Posted on: Thu, 19 Sep 2013 04:35:43 +0000