The Town Herald

The netpaper about Elftowners, by Elftowners, for Elftowners.

In Defense of Art

By [iippo]

This article hopes to be the “other side of the coin” or a response to the Herald article TH 12 Article - Modern Art, published in the last issue of The Town Herald. It wishes to shine an art-educated point of view on the question of “is modern art ‘worthy’?” It is simply the other way of seeing things, not an attack of any kind. It wishes to allow people to think about art and make their opinion while being shown all the sides.

Firstly, lets get our names right. There are really many isms out there, so we want to make sure we use the correct one. The movement “modernism” sprouted after romanticism in all possible aspects of life – literature, art, architecture, philosophy, politics, everything. The message it sent was “old ways out, new ways in”, it emphasized the personal experience, the individual. As it is so wide, the term shouldn’t be used beyond World War 2, which really ended a lot of things (lives, political movements, innocence, feeling of security, etc). From the 50s onwards to the present day, it is better to use the term post-modernism (which simply means after modernism), and as such, any other ism can’t really be applied to any work done today. No matter how much a painting done today would look impressionist, it still would be post-modern.

Another point I'd like to make about names is the word art. I will use it to mean fine art: painting, sculpture, printing, installation, video, etc… As opposed to other forms of visual arts, like illustration, design, entertainment, craft, surface decoration, textiles, ceramics and so on. I’m not saying they are “lesser” from art, but they are different. And the difference comes from the fact that all of those have a use. Fine art can’t be used as an everyday object: it serves no purpose, other than the intellectual one. As a side-note, I’d like to point out that most of the work in Elfwood is illustration: a visual aide to something that was first described in text, with the purpose of making a clear visual image of the text.

The dangerous comment to make when seeing (abstract) fine art is the “anyone could do that.” No. First of all, the question is would you think of doing it? No, you wouldn’t, because the artist thought of it first, not you. When he does it, it’s original. It has meaning, which can either be read from the image, or from the artist’s statement. Anyone who imitates it for the sake of making something look the same, is not an artist and that work doesn’t have that meaning. Secondly, even if it looks simple, you probably couldn’t do it anyway. You couldn’t pull it off. Jackson Pollock’s work looks like it’s just paint splattered everywhere, but it looks exactly the way he wanted it to. He knows his medium, he knows his meaning, he has a vision. And when people look at his work, they also see his meaning (if they give the art the chance). Now, if anyone else did art the Pollock-way, as wanting to prove that they can do it, they’d end up wasting a lot of paint, some fairly good canvasses and a LOT of time. And in the end, any art-educated person could look at that painting and see the difference between it and Pollock’s.

Looking at art takes time. Much longer than you’d think. On average, you should look at a painting for a minimum of FIVE minutes (sculpture even longer because you’d need to move around), before the image begins to open up in anyway. The eye has to travel the picture, read the strong points and highlights before any meaning can be derived, because the viewer’s memory needs to work with the image in order for it to begin opening. Before you have looked at the painting like this, you shouldn’t read the description or the artist’s statement. You shouldn’t even read the title. Go on. I dare you. Look at this image (that was an example in the earlier article) for FIVE minutes. Time yourself. I will hand cookies to anyone who actually does look at it for this long.
http://www.thecityreview.com/s03cimpb.jpg

Did you do it? Liar. :P The fact is that you get bored at looking at something around after 30 seconds. It is even worse online. If you really watched it that long, what did you see? Did you see a glass of water on the window frame when sun shines outside? Did you see a person? Did you see a street? Did you see sex? Did you see racism? Did you see a phallus? How did you find the rhythm: very fast, very slow, poetic, smooth, jerky? What about all the lines? What do you think it means that the horizontal lines get thicker when moving up (usually things get thinner or smaller when moving up on a painting, to show distance)? How about the vertical lines? Did it bother you that the two main ones weren’t in the very middle, did you feel like fixing it, moving it to be symmetrical? What about that little vertical line on the left? What did you think of that? Did you feel like you’d like to colour some more squares in the painting? What do you think yellow and blue mean? Royalty? Sky and sun? Sweden? Does the white background mean death, purity or happiness to you, or something else? What about black on white, it’s often seen as truth, the written word, etc… And the name is Composition in blue, white and yellow. Does that mean that the background of the image is actually black? So it’s white, blue and yellow on black and that there really are no lines at all? All these things are in the painting, waiting to be thought about by the viewer. And I’m not even mentioning narrative: what if the blue and yellow symbolize something? There is always a story behind a painting, and you just need to be literate enough to read it.

I’m not making this up, I’m not over-interpreting; this is how art is supposed to be seen and read. The artist, I’m sure, would be interested to hear what you thought of it and compare it to what he felt like when doing it and what he thinks it means. But the thought process isn’t through. You need to put the painting into context: it was done in 1936. Does that change your view on it? Does it picture the Great Depression? Does the painting convey the losses of World War 1? What about the Roaring Twenties? Can you see the effect? Ah, another useful piece of information: the painter was Dutch. The art of the nation he grew up to were Rembrandt, van Gogh, Vermeer… Can you see their influence? Or is the painting fighting the norms, the canon, wanting to show the audience something new, something they haven’t seen before?


When speaking of the “value of art”, you need to take into account quite a few facts:
-time. When was the painting done? Was it revolutionary for its time? Was it new or conformist? Who influenced the artist, what books had he read, what political movement did he live in?
-maker. Obviously less-famous, less-successful works of any famous artist sells. Just as someone might want to buy a bed sheet that John Lennon once used: it’s the personal feel of it that appeals. Less known works of an artist also shine interesting light to their personality as well as the process of their works. If you would be very interested in Salvador Dali, you shouldn’t look at his paintings: look at his etchings, look at his drawings; the sketchbook of the artist is the most interesting thing he ever makes.
-meaning. The thing that separates fine art from (most) other forms of visual arts: the meaning, the thought, the feeling the work wants to evoke, the experience of the art. This is the thing that is wanted to be evident in the works that win the Turner-prize. They need to have a new outlook on things.

As you can see, method or medium is not mentioned in the list. An installation of a light bulb switching on and off in an empty room is likely to have more meaning than a portrait drawn on white paper, although it seemingly might take less talent. It will also be more original, because every student in a fine art course will be able to draw a portrait of a person: yet not all of them do. Why? Because anyone can do it. The person installing the light bulb will also have the talent to make a lifelike portrait, but he doesn’t see any meaning in doing something that’s been done for hundreds of years already. They might want to do something that has a meaning that people can relate to while being unique. People say “there’s nothing new under the Sun”; but that shouldn’t stop anyone from trying. Also the cost of material rarely influences the prize of the art work, because huge loads of materials have been used to everything done before the work in question was possible: sketches, maquettes, rough drafts, different versions. To every one successful masterpiece, there is 10 lesser ones lying in the corners of the studio, 10 “less successful” ones that map out the road that leads to that one good painting. From quantity eventually comes quality: the more often you free-hand draw a circle, the better you get at it.

But in the end, what is the point of any art? Wouldn’t it be more sensible for everybody to have jobs that really make the world go round? Shouldn’t everyone be plumbers or builders, shouldn’t everyone offer some kind of services that would be useful to other people? And if you find yourself agreeing, then how about a step further: what’s the use of books, especially fiction? What’s the use of fantasy? How can you learn from anything that isn’t real? How could you enjoy art that doesn’t picture something real?

In the previous article this was all mentioned in one short paragraph followed by a bold statement “do not expect to be paid thousands of pounds for it!” The artists don’t. No one is in this for the money. The chances of one individual unknown artist to become huge and well-paid are incredibly slim. The Turner-prize helps a little, it is the chance for anyone with a newer look, with a new thought or expression. And it’s great that someone gets that money, that recognition. But the competition is tough and mere talent won’t get them through. It is not an illustration contest. And the artists who don’t get short-listed for the prize, what do they do? They continue doing their art, sell where they can for what little they can get, perhaps have another job, perhaps manage to have an artist’s residency somewhere… in other words: they get by. They’ll wait and see the next year, and the next year and the next year, whether they’d get that break, get recognition, get some attention so they could share their view with the world. Seriously: no one is in it for the money, and all artists have relatives that find it appropriate to tell them to “get a proper job”. Do we? Or do we continue our chosen way, in the hope of reaching that star and ignoring this materialistic world?

All art is valuable, but no one individual can like everything, just as no one person can like every other person in the world (not even the ones in Elftown!)




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