Some Thoughts About Art
There is no way to explain what any work of art means. Lots can be said, but the work itself will always be utterly other than any explanation or supposed meaning. Approaching a work of art we may begin with a title and some thoughts, but these must be worn away until only our vision of the work remains. Then we can begin to see.
We may not realize how strange a work of art is. If it dropped fully formed from a space ship we might think: “How different”, “How unknowable.” In fact, a finished work of art exists just like this, fully formed, unchanging, like magic. It has nothing to do with time or words. It is simply present. We don't need aliens to bring us something strange.
If a work of art does not appear strange, unknown and unknowable, we are missing what is visible before us. The thing itself should be difficult to grasp, and it should remain beyond our grasp for a long time.
Everything that makes a work of art familiar deprives us of this sense of strangeness. Any story we tell ourselves about the work or about the artist or about art history or anything else undermines the strangeness and originality of the work. Any story the artist tells undermines the reality of what they have done.
Can we become familiar with the reality of the work? We can simply take it on its own terms. If it is visual, take it with vision. If it is silent, take it in silence. If it is wordless, take it without words. If it does not change, take it out of time. If it will be what it is for a hundred years, take it without hurry. If it can be seen by itself, take it without comparison.
An important thing about a work of art: there is no fantasy, it's a settled thing. The artist can't fool anyone who is looking at the art. Don't look at the artist or at anyone else. Look at the art. This should be a relief for everyone.
Art is not competition. Competition is a perversion of the whole process of making and seeing art. It is an intrusion of someone else's agenda that has nothing to do with art. An “art competition” is an insult to artists, designed to put them in their place.
Until a work of art has changed you, it doesn't matter at all. Until then it's just amusement, distraction, and entertainment. And, of course, it won't change you until you do the work necessary to know it.
Bad art will change you too, if you take it in. Some art you should avoid or ignore. Some will be worth a few minutes or hours. You will want to choose carefully the works that you want to affect your experience of being alive in the world.
Looking at a sculpture for a few minutes is like reading a book's table of contents; It's just enough to let you know that it's there in case you decide to get to know it.
Some carp about “plop art,” but the problem is the plopping, not the art. Every work has its correct scale and its correct place. Art is not decoration, but carelessly placed, that is what it becomes: an expensive bauble barely noticed in passing.
What's wrong with sculpture? Everything. In Winter it's out in the snow. In Summer it's out in the heat. Or it's in a museum somewhere. It doesn't do anything. It doesn't tell stories or make noise. It's not amusing. It doesn't jiggle or move.* It doesn't reduce hunger or violence or other social problems. There is no end to what it doesn't do. It just sits there forever, ready for someone to find it and take the trouble to pay attention with their eyes. [* Of course there is art that does such things, but I avert my gaze.]
The thing must attract us at the same time that we accept it as utterly strange, an unknowable thing. A great work may stop us in our tracks and wipe our cluttered minds clean.
Some good news about art. (1) You don't have to look at it. There is no obligation or necessity to do this, or to go to a museum or gallery. This freedom is essential in order to see. (2) If you do look, you don't have to know about it, think about it, talk about it, decide if it's good or bad, or anything else. You do not need to do anything. Doing nothing helps when you are trying to see. (3) You don't need to feel something, learn something, get cultured, or become a better person. Visual art is meant to be seen, not used for self-improvement. (4) Art, unless it is mixed up with some sort of propaganda, is not meant to fix the world. It is quite separate from daily events. This is another freedom essential to seeing.
Art is not the embodiment to some pre-existing feeling or concept or anything else: this is a common misunderstanding. Art is the making of a thing. For example, the label “Abstract Expressionism” suggests a misunderstanding of what art is. The artists were not illustrating (“expressing”) something that already existed, they were creating new things.
Because art allows the manipulation of materials, an artist can make something that exceeds what they knew or felt or experienced before. The artist learns what they have done by looking at the work, by seeing a thing that has never existed before.
Another appalling example of this misunderstanding: “the purpose of art is to express yourself.”
The artist and their art have the right to be left alone, to be what they are without being saddled with someone else's agenda. The history of art in service to something else is long and unrelenting: this is art as propaganda. The same needy supplicants and tyrants show up at art's door again and again: personal vanity, religion, politics, war, story telling, ideas and prejudices of every sort, all longing to be made to look good. Lots of great art, and even more terrible art, has been made despite toting such burdens, but it's useful to distinguish the mule from the load.
We know neither what the universe is nor what we are. All that we do reveals, in greater or lesser themes and with greater or lesser scope and ability, something of what these are. Everything we make changes our experience of the universe. We are making our home, or our hell, depending on what we are making.
It is our good fortune that we are unknown and unknowable. We are as strange as the strangest thing we can make, and as wonderful or terrible.
There are forms that we find pleasing, or meaningful, or beautiful, and we might wonder why. Why are cave paintings from 15,000 years ago still beautiful to us? What accounts for this consistency that so far exceeds every influence of culture, history, religion, or any of the other influences that so often occupy our attention?
The work of an artist is to create, from and infinity of possibilities, a work that is visually significant. This significance has to be seen, and it cannot be accurately named or explained. A good work reveals what has visual significance for the mind of the artist, and when we respond to it, our own mind is revealed. "What am I? What is this mind? Oh, there it is!" We are finding what we are.
Art reveals the mind, from its most superficial and tedious to its most perceptive, profound, and creative. A good work of art is so in accord with the mind that it is as timeless as the mind itself. It will never be out of date. Its significance, or beauty, or whatever we call it, will never diminish.
Our relationship with art is not based on some average of our reactions to all the art we've seen. It is based on our most profound response to the best work we have ever seen. Short of that ideal experience, we can practice a more modest appreciation, say, for a painter's use of red, or for the way a delicate pencil line disappears into nothing, or for the stillness of a particular landscape. This sort of practice will prepare us for the work that will someday stop us in our tracks.
Thoreau pointed out that great literature requires great readers. It's the same with any art. The greater the art, the greater the demands on the one who tries to experience it. Let's get over the idea that seeing visual art is easy, or fun, or entertaining, or educational, or fast. Let's consider the possibility that seeing visual art is an effort of repeated and sustained attention.
An exercise: find a work of art you are interested in. If you don't know who the artist is, don't find out. Don't listen to a recorded talk. Don't go on a museum tour. Don't try to see other stuff. Try to forget anything you know about the work and whatever else you now about anything. Forget what you're planning to do next. Don't pay attention to your thoughts. Forget who you think you are and where you are. Look at lines, planes, masses, and color. Look at whatever is there. Let your eyes do the work. While your eyes are doing the work, you can relax. No need to figure anything out. No need to do anything. No need to talk. Get your eyes aimed at the work and drop the reins. Pay relaxed attention for as long as you want to, then go home. One thing is enough.
It's an odd sort of magic that an object, a work of art perhaps, can affect how life feels.
If the art has not changed you, either it isn't good art, it isn't the art you need to be seeing, or you haven't stayed with it long enough. Of course such changes will be subtle and may take place over years and do not need to be noticed or identified. Understanding what art does is not the same as allowing art to do what it does. It is no more possible to understand what art does than it is to understand what the work of art is.
We are considering civilization here, the making of the species, the one-shot experiment to see if we can reform our brutal nature before we kill everything. This experiment is not the sole property of the moralists, self-improvement specialists, and politicians who tell us how to live. I suspect, with reference to 70,000 years of evidence, that art is also essential in our long and unresolved struggle.
Thoreau went to the woods to discover for himself what life is, to find and face life's characteristics in his own way. Each of us has to undertake or avoid this same challenge. We each need to go somewhere, to experience something, and to end up with some sense of what life is. As Thoreau went to the woods, an artist might go to their studio to undertake the same lifelong task.
The universe does not have meaning. Meaning is what we create. This is what art attempts to do: it is not decoration or entertainment, it is created meaning or it is nothing at all.
Art is not personal. It is not “self-expression.” Everything personal is pared away until there is only its peculiar impersonal significance left.
The work isn't about anything. It isn't about death, or life, or people, or places. It isn't about our endless dramas. It is not about money. It isn't about something, or like something. It is something.
It's not about you [any viewer], and it's not about me [any artist]. It's not about what we think, or feel, or know, or like, or understand, or wonder about, or anything else. We need to get out of the way and see what the work is, without all our personal stuff confusing the picture. Everything personal is in the way of seeing and of being affected by what we are seeing.
Art does not amuse. The things that entertain, amuse, and distract us do this by literally “passing the time” for us. They show us time passing in others, while we are engrossed in the spectacle and distracted from our own time passing. The visual arts are singularly bereft of such fantastic benefits. The visual arts have nothing to do with fictitious time and we are left with no sense of time except our own. This is not entertaining or comforting. It is no surprise that Holly wood produces movies instead of paintings and sculptures.
Amusement is done to us, whether on a screen or in an amusement park, where we may be literally picked up and amused bodily. This is exactly what the traditional arts do not do. The art object is simply there and it will not jiggle us at all. We have to make the effort. There is no relief from the real time it takes. There is no artificial beginning or end to the event: the object will be there unchanged forever. The flavor of that absence of relief is an acquired taste necessary for seeing.
There is no reason to expect the creation of a significant thing to take less than a lifetime of effort.
You may not feel the feeling.
It will not arrive like a pack of excited dogs.
It may be subtle enough,
it may be light enough,
it may be strange enough.
Nothing you can name.
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