Art as a black hole

Barnett Newman: Untitled (The void), 1946

In 2009 the BBC aired a series called School Of Saatchi.  Several young artists competed in default reality tv style to win an exhibition in the Hermitage curated by art patron and advertising mogul Charles Saatchi.

One of the jurors, art critic Matthew Collings, spoke about the difficulty that the general public still had with modern art, especially with the techniques used today: ready mades, found objects, installations, video. “Get used to it, it’s here to stay”, he said.

Whenever a football coach gets the full support of the management of the club, he usually gets fired the next day.

I stopped being an artist now more than ten years ago. Apart from severe doubts about my own ability to make art with an impact, I got severe doubts about the ability of today’s art itself to make an impact. I am talking about the visual arts, the stuff that you find in museums.
I was never only in the art world. I met many well educated and intelligent people who knew nothing about art. Now that I am outside the art world, I can understand why: if you don’t actively go out to find art, it does not find you. A Dutch stand up comedian, Theo Maassen said: “I know a 1000 tunes from commercials, but I can’t quote a single philosopher”. The same goes for art: at this moment the trickle down effect of art is about zero.

I think it’s a horrible fashionable word, meme, but I’ll use it anyway. Meme: ideas or beliefs that are transmitted from one person or group of people to another.  Contemporary art fails to create memes that spread outside the artworld itself.

So the problem of contemporary art is that its impact outside the artworld itself is extremely limited, and this goes against the public nature of art. There must be so many  young, enthusiastic, inventive people with nice and strange ideas who start a career as artist only to find themselves marginalized in a marginalized world ten years later.  And if successful, they are successful in that marginalized world.

 

Art as a black hole: art itself

Part 2 in the series Art as a black hole.

I visit a museum less often than I used to. When I do, I feel not much has changed in the past 20 years and that the art world is struggling to keep up with the times. Video’s, installations, an occasional flare up of painting. Still lots of irony, and every few years a new fashion. Dinner parties as art, stuffed animals, the artist as scientist to name a few.

When Matthew Collings spoke of the modern art routine as something that was here to stay, I felt the opposite. I deliberately twisted Collings words a bit to use the word modern art routine: what was once a search for new means of expression is now a routine. On the one hand new techniques and materials are limitless. On the other hand I feel that the modern art routine has exhausted itself.
When watching School Of Saatchi I saw some nice bright young people scavenging a once fertile terrain for the last scraps of food. I felt a little bit sorry for them.

I feel it is time for a change in contemporary art. I have no idea how or what it would look like, otherwise I would still be an artist. I have some vague ideas: less conceptual, less contrived, a re-evaluation of the term beauty, rawer, more compact and more efficient.
Efficient? What a horrible business term to use for art! But I see so much art where effort and sheer volume are not in relation to the impact. It’s saddening to think of the warehouses full of installations not on display. A good painting in storage is still a good painting, an installation in storage is just stuff.
And one more thing, now that I seem to be ordering a new art: could this new art be less noisy, literally? On my latest visit to the SMAK in Gent, Belgium, I really could have used some earplugs.

Talk about memes. Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Indiana, Keith Haring.

I think Roy Lichtenstein -such a small step from Superman to Mondrian-, Robert Indiana and Keith Haring really helped in making art accessible. But I have noticed that Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol are not household names outside the art world. In the end the flirtation with pop culture, the blurring of the distinction between high and low art has not helped art to escape its gravity field.
Think of high art as a geostationary satellite. Way out there it can send back its observations. But when it comes too close it just gets pulled in and crashes into banality.

By its nature, modern art is experimental and therefore difficult to understand. It is not the lack of communication for me that is often a problem in appreciating today’s art, it is the failed attempt at communication. Someone is trying to tell me something, but I don’t know what, and in the meantime I can’t get lost in my own thoughts because someone is shouting at me.
In a previous post I wrote that artists are too eager to explain their art. Art as a means to convey something to the public that the artist already knows or thinks. Matthew Collings is not a bad critic at all, he wrote a very good article about meaninglessness in art: http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/32421/the-known-unknowns/

So, paradoxically, for me art communicates better when it tries not to.

Art as a black hole: the artist

Part 3 in the series Art as a black hole.

There is a passage in Frank Zappa’s Roxy and Elsewhere, where Zappa introduces percussionist Ruth Underwood: “Ladies and Gentlemen, watch Ruth. Right now Ruth is thinking what she can possibly do that will amaze the audience”.
Ruth Underwood was amazing, but I often think about this passage when I look at art.

The world expects artists to be visionaries and a semi magicians, but the search for the best one can do as an artist is agonizing and comes with many insecurities and failures.
An artist should not even think about what he can possibly do that will amaze the audience. To quote Philip Guston again: “I wanted to amaze myself”. One of the best quotes of an artist I ever read. It’s one of the best attitudes an artist can have.

But the artist can talk and write, and should do that a lot. Not to explain his art, but to carve out the areas that can be put into words, ideas that don’t need to become art. Artists should talk and write to get feedback, and to reach outside the art world. I don’t believe in the artist who only has his art as a means of expression. If that was true, there would be a lot of paintings of shopping lists.

Monet as a problem?

Claude Monet: Waterlilies, Green Reflection, Left Part 1916-1923; Orangerie, Paris

Monet as a problem? How can the most sunny, most painterly painter of all painters be a problem?

In the past decades philosophers have had a big influence in the art world as curators or as writers about art. Artists with a strong connection to philosophy were hot, and emerging artists started to use words like identity and sublime in their interviews and writings.
Google “Philisophy” and “art” and the typical philosophers artists will appear: Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, René Margritte, Joseph Kosuth. What binds artists like Warhol and Duchamp is that they are nice empty shells to project your own philosophical views upon. Margrittes “ceci n’est pas une pipe” represents the art that makes you think about art and reality.

Monets work is nearly a 100% visual. It’s colourful, tactile, painterly. There is nothing that makes you think.  If anything, you stop thinking. Yet I would not qualify Monet’s work as shallow. The moment that you stop thinking while looking at a Monet is more the moment that you think you stop thinking. It’s just your brain that says “I need some time alone” to your consciousness and wanders off. When it comes back it has met some other people and has new stories to tell.

I feel that visual, tactile art like Monets work is a problem for philosophers, and the reason why they concentrate on the very literal works of art. The word literal here is literally literal, as philosophers often favour art that contains text. I know this is a very broad statement, but in the end this conceptual approach to art has led to musea full of works that are maybe intellectually challenging, but are visually uninteresting. A  party without invitations.

I think there is a more powerful force at work when we are using our eyes, the visual is not a language with precise grammar and meaning. It can be -think of traffic signs- but art can go way beyond that. I miss that in art nowadays. The artists themselves are too eager to tell what their work is about, they want to show the public this or that. Well, write it down if you want to convince somebody.

When Philip Guston broke with already traditional abstract expressionism he said: “I wanted to amaze myself”. Every artist should want to amaze himself. If they succeed -it takes courage- they will also amaze the audience. Specific subject matter does not have to be a hindrance in this: think of Gustons Ku Klux Klan drawings and paintings. Still amazing works in my opinion.

Art is free. Art has the power to open up a freedom in the mind, let it wander. Art that tells one what to see or think is not art, it’s advertising. The artwork should not be the view in the artists mind, it should be a thick wall of reinforced concrete between the artist and the viewer. At the same time it should break down walls in the head of the artist and of the viewer.

Philip Guston, Jail, 1969

Géricault

I found some images from paintings and drawings by Géricault in my images folder. His “The raft of the Medusa” (1818-1819) is a painting that is often on my mind. It is not in my top ten list of most beautiful paintings, and technically it is a bit of a failure because Géricault used bitumen that is slowly turning the colors black.

So why is the painting so often in my mind?

On july 2 1816 the french frigate Méduse with 400 men and woman on board, ran aground about 90 kilometres off the coast of Mauretania. The 6 longboats of the Méduse could only carry 250 people. On july the 5th 147 peole were put on a makeshift raft in an attempt to reach the shore. The longboats would tow the raft, but soon they cut the lines when the raft partially submerged.

On July 17, 1816, the raft was rescued by the Argus, wich was part of the convoy the Medusa belonged to. Only 15 people had survived. The news of the shipwreck caused a scandal in France. The captain of the Medusa was inexperienced and incompetent, and had got his assignment for political reasons.

Today, when we see a painter depicted in a movie, he has wild eyes, full of concentration. Nothing can stop him from his urge to paint, the emotion is slapped onto the canvas without intervention.

So there is Géricault -no movies yet- maybe truly outraged at the scandal, maybe truly driven by the desire to make a name for himself with a scandalous painting on a scandal. His approach to his subject was meticulous. He spoke with survivors, made a scale model of the raft, and went to the morgue to study corpses and limbs. Before he started the final painting of about 5 x 7 metres Géricault made numerous studies and drawings .

There is no slapping of emotions on the canvas here. How can you stay truly angry and outraged for more than 1 1/2 years? In the end, everything must have turned into a formal problem to solve. How to draw attention to that tiny spot that is the Argus? Where to leave that body and does it look dead enough?

And yet the painting IS dramatic, is doesn’t take much effort to become moved by it nearly 200 years later.  At the same time you can enjoy the cool, intelligent approach to the painting.

Géricault is not the wild eyed artist from the movies. Had he lived today, he may have been the director of one.  His version of Titanic I would have loved to see.

Good photography

I saw the work of photographer Hans Wilschut in museum Boymans. He has made a series of photographs of urban landscapes. 

I must admit that it has been a long time since I found myself really immersed in contemporary art, using my eyes and thinking of things that were not necessarily meant by the artist. 

Good stuff at http://hanswilschut.com/