Tall Blue, 2011. 58 x 18 in. Oil and Synthetic Polymer Resin on Belgian linen
What is the job of a painting? Does pigment on canvas serve a larger function in the way we look at and understand the world around us, or is it simply another form of gratuitous decoration? Evidently ideas are involved: the bookshelves tremble under the weight of so many artists statements, comparative essays, and all manner of postmodern pontification. Yet so much of this veritable body of literature feels insular and derivative: a game of musical chairs where concepts are changed and interchanged from one text to another, taken apart and reconstituted in such a way that though they take the form of originality, they remain a patchwork of recapitulation. Consider the Arty Bollocks Generator, something of a meme among art school types, with a single click it generates artist statements that are as convincing as they are sardonic. Like all successful satire, the Arty Bollocks Generator is funny because it is based in truth. What it appear to be saying is that much of the language surrounding art is interchangeable and therefore meaningless; that despite the grandiose verbiage involved, artwork itself does not carry enough conceptual specificity to mean or relate to anything in particular. The seemingly good-intentioned humor of the meme betrays what is actually a very serious and complex question: to what extent does art engage in conceptual and intellectual dialog? There are certainly meaningful concepts within art: abstraction, representation, color, the blurred line between the real and mediated, to name a few. But if these concepts are strictly internal, that is to say if they operate only behind the hermetic seal of the arts, then they are not meaningful ideas but industry jargon. The real question is, does art mean anything outside of art? Could art help us to understand a world where art does not exist?
The biggest problem we encounter in trying to answer a question like this is one of range and restriction. Art and language operate in different sorts of contexts with different sorts of boundaries, rules, and conditions. Consider a similar difference between language and math. Both are methods we use make sense of the world around us but both pick out different features of that world. Certainly we can use language to talk about math (and indeed math too can talk about language) but ultimately words cannot sufficiently capture the range, specificity, and function of numbers. Any verbal explanation of a complex mathematic proposition will eventually reach a point where the words begin to fall short. So too with art. When we try to put art into a philosophical or linguistic context, we invariably lose much of that we are trying to describe.
Like language and math, art is a means by which the world around us is made sensible. It lacks the precision of the other two approaches, but of course the world around us (at least from our vantage point) is not always precise. For artistic content to be meaningful it must correlate to reality/experience in a way that is significant and relevant outside of the artwork itself. This is to say it needs to provide a means by which we can understand our lives. Great art needs to do so in a way that does not overlap with other forms of expression (math, language, music, dance, regular visual phenomena, and so on). What this means is that after looking at an artwork we should have a decidedly new approach to something, and, often frustratingly, an approach that should evade our attempts at linguistic expression. Language and art are both tools we use to get at truth, but truth in and of itself is neither linguistic nor artistic. Though art allows us to get at truth, it restricts the range of all possible truth into a smaller range of artistically expressible truth. Language and math restrict (or frame) truth in their own ways as well. Applying language to art is a further restriction still, giving us the putative range of the linguistically expressible truths inside the set of artistically expressible truths. What the Art Bollocks Generator demonstrates then is not only how few linguistic concepts art can describe, but also the reflexive: how few artistic concepts language can describe. The job of a painting is to engage with truth, but in a way outside of other forms of expression.
Tall Blue (detail)
I find both the painting and article particularly evocative. Words and language are innately quite limited, though of course necessary to make sense of and communicate with the world around us. Faulkner, for instance, who possessed one of the most stark gifts of the pen still writes, ' I knew that that word was like the others: just a shape to fill a lack". To the abstract mind this lack permutates the cause and effect logic of language, creating a void of emotion that is searching for connection and transcendence.
ReplyDeleteConsequently, I find myself conquering with Shopenhaur that "Perhaps the reason why common objects in still life seem so transfigured and generally everything painted appears in a supernatural light is that we then no longer look at things in the flux of time and in the connection of cause and effect …. On the contrary, we are snatched out of that eternal flux of all things and removed into a dead and silent eternity. In its individuality the thing itself was determined by time and by the [causal] conditions of the understanding; here we see this connection abolished and only the Platonic Idea is left." But, can this platonic idea be described in words? which seems to be an essential role of the artistic statement you have outlined. I would agree with you and say no, as being merely a spectator I must attest to the all too common experience of being mesmerized by a Rothko into a state of catharsis with blissfully no words to describe this true visceral connection.
cheers and keep painting,
az
I want this painting.
ReplyDeleteAlso, interesting stuffs.
@ AZ: I can see why you might think of this as Platonic, and in some ways it incorporates some of the same ideas. I agree with Plato that we can't really access the ultimate structure of reality, but I don't agree that that structure is mediated and divided into different forms. The thing is just too big, and any words or concepts we apply to it seem to restrict it. This way of thinking is more aligned with someone like Deleuze, or further back, Spinoza.
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