In comments to a recent post, There May Come a Moment, Dr. C asked a series of questions. I’d like to answer them here.
Dr. C: In all your multiple posts about who is an artist, and what an artist does, I keep wondering about the boundary between us mere mortals and you, the artist. There are two aspects to this boundary: the technical and the imaginative.
If I take a technically superb photograph, yet have not imagination (or some secret mental alchemy) am I, for that one shining moment, still an artist? But if I have all the ideological prerequisites (and only the guild can tell me what they are) and have not technique, you will say my photograph is a fraud. That I am not an artist. Just lucky.
Me: I can’t really understand that one. Either a picture communicates effectively or it doesn’t. Technique has to have something to act upon. It’s not an end. If the picture is good, it is good and it can’t be good merely because it is technically correct.
Dr. C: What if I take a technically awful photo but patch it up with Photoshop? Who determines the aesthetic and how? I suppose that it is, again, the guild. Can I be blackballed from the guild?
Me: Photoshop is not somehow separate. When you are making something, there aren’t rules that say “this part is real and this part isn’t.” Photoshop or whatever other means you use to reach your end result is just — how you reach your end result.
The photographer, like the writer, or painter or sculptor or whatever other sort of artist is interpreting the world. This bit from Annie Dillard’s book, Living By Fiction, may help:
If science will not seek human meaning, and if interpreters (critics, anthropologists, etc.) study human events and human artifacts only, then who will tell us the meaning of the raw universe?
… The writer … is the world’s interpreter. The writer is certainly interested in the art of fiction, but perhaps less so than the critic is. The critic is interested in the novel; the novelist is interested in his neighbors. Perhaps even more than in his own techniques, then, the writer is interested in knowing the world in order to make real and honest sense of it. He worries the world and probes it; he collects the world and collates it.
Anybody reading or viewing or otherwise partaking of art can be a “critic.” Anybody attempting to interpret “the raw universe” is a budding artist. For example, we have Dr. C himself, posting this text along with some very nice photographs of the yew trees near his home:
I have been fascinated by this tree since I moved in 9 years ago and it is like an old and steady friend. One of the aspects of yews is that they are exceedingly geometrically complex and, in spite of that, the branches rarely touch. One can think of a zillion human situations for which this could be a metaphor, including aspect of the brain. Fascinating.
It’s not the technique that matters in that interpretation (photographs and text) of yew trees. It’s simply an attempt “to make real and honest sense” of “the raw universe” — by whatever means.
There is one last question to answer:
Dr. C: Are there secret rituals that one must undergo to be accepted into the clan? Handshakes in the darkroom? Once in, is every photo I take somehow imbued with an intangible aura (an Ansel Adams aura) so that no matter what I do it is considered art?
Me: That goes to art marketing. Yes, there are gate-keepers and bottle-necks and all sorts of hoop-jumping. See, for example, this post by Ed Winkleman.
On the other hand, you could skip the gallery scene and get an Art-O-Mat.
-Julie
Dr. C: Are there secret rituals that one must undergo to be accepted into the clan?
I can’t help feeling this way too. The following is emphatically not a reactionary comment about modern art. But nevertheless the situation exists where I know full well that if I, say, hired the vilage hall to show a table full of this collection of ketchup bottles I failed to empty and stuffed to the back of the cupboard until Clare shamed me by discovering them, I’d be viewed as stupid/deranged, and I could do that kind of thing for the rest of my life and never have anyone view it as anything but an aberration; yet there are Artists who could do the same and it would automatically be considered worthy of consideration as significant art. There is the appearance of some arcane aspect (beyond the obvious credentials like having attended art school) that distinguishes the two scenarios.
Comment by Ray Girvan — May 24, 2009 @ 5:35 pm
Framing and context always matter, in art as in everything else. The ketchup bottles aren’t anything until and unless you (1) find some meaning in what they are or could be made to be, and (2) find a way to convey whatever it is that you have found. In your description, you have something (a bunch of bottles) but you don’t say whether or if they do anything for you.
(And I think those are magnificent ketchup bottles; were they in my cupboard, I would be taking pictures of them right this minute.)
Comment by unrealnature — May 24, 2009 @ 6:49 pm
you don’t say whether or if they do anything for you
I’ll leave that to my publicist. Current options are:
1) The artist, the self-styled Lord Kitschener, is devoted to exploring the aesthetic potential of the mundane objects of the kitchen, as a rejection of High Art. Like the previous Mayonnaise 47 and Mustard 23, the new Ketchup 53, showing an identical array of modern discarded leftovers, is intended as an ironic disruption of the convention of “still life” representing an assemblage of diverse and idealised traditional foods.
2) The Glasgow-born Jimmy Shugg is a confirmed Marxist, and Sauce is a protest against the worldwide exploitation of agricultural communities. “Each bottle,” he says, “represents the blood of the Third World tomato farmers who died in the month prior to the sell-by date. Every time we splash ketchup, a Western convenience food, over imported produce, we should consider the similar splashing of the Western cultural hegemony over the people who grow that food.”
3) The artist Balbus is an intensely private person who lives and works in seclusion in rural Devon, and he never gives interviews. His manifesto states a commitment to post-modern principles: “The Artist, like the Author, is dead”, and so he rejects any demands for commentary, since it is not the role of artists to impose a preferred interpretation on the work’s viewers.
Comment by Ray Girvan — May 24, 2009 @ 8:28 pm
I could like all three, depending on execution (the last one, depending entirely on execution, of course). Seriously.
If, if, if the artists have built up trust, belief and therefore interest in what they have to “say” (via whatever means), then they will command an audience. But all those “ifs” don’t happen overnight. The current show may seem absurd until you find out about the ten, twenty, thirty years of background and foundational work that are behind them.
There are books, there are movies, there is theater, there is music (lot’s of music) that seems entirely absurd to someone not familiar with the genre or style or whatever.
Comment by unrealnature — May 25, 2009 @ 7:22 am
this collection of ketchup bottles is impressive.
“unless you (1) find some meaning in what they are or could be made to be..”- yet: “Anybody attempting to interpret “the raw universe” is a budding artist.”
Reminding us of something even more interesting: “A white gentlemen’s urinal has been named the most influential modern art work of all time.” (of course this is ambigious and should have been called a “white procelain gentleman’s urinal” to be politically correct. Naughty, that BBC, at times.)
I would say a signature on the ketchup bottle might bring them across the line.
(BTW, it should be Ketchup 57, since this would bring in references to the Heinz bottle specifically, which would allude to Mrs. John Kerry which would, like another Godwin’s law, lead back to Dick Cheney.)
And, I apologize for being snarky. But, the more fuel to the flames the more interesting the discussion. It is refreshing to find someone sticking to their principles in this cynical age. [<-- not snark]
Comment by Dr. C. — May 25, 2009 @ 12:12 pm
Believe it or not, that’s not snarky. Your and Ray’s ideas are not that different from the germs from which art might spring. Art does humor; art does satire; art does spoofiness. If that’s what you find in ketchup bottles, then there you go. You gotta admit, they are doing something to you.
Comment by unrealnature — May 25, 2009 @ 12:24 pm
Art does humor; art does satire; art does spoofiness.
That possibly is my trouble; I lean strongly in that direction myself, and when you’re strongly aware of the relative ease of spoofing artistic stances, it makes you only half-believe them when you see them elsewhere. And actually I do believe that many are constructs that the system forces artists to produce; a couple of years back the Exeter Phoenix had an open exhibition, and first thing on the entry form was a large space for “artist’s statement”.
Comment by Ray Girvan — May 28, 2009 @ 6:14 pm