For Everyone and No One
It's Unintentional but Intentional
It's Private but Public
These are the catch phrases that apparently I used last night that undermined and confused my final panel.
In short, the panel didn't know what to say, if they were adding anything to the pot, how to approach my piece, and, most important of all, if I was even listening to them.
Most of the questions asked to me during the process of my box of drawings didn't come up at all. A few did like the big sheet of paper idea. In my defence, I answered with a similar answer to what I wrote when they were asked before. I thought I had a solid case. Didn't turn out that way. In retrospect, it was probably my condescending tone of voice.
I spent the rest of the night observing with both bitter jealousy and a depressed frustration as the critiques of others were going so well, with new responses to the world and even laughs being shared. The entire night, I kept thinking "what did I do wrong with my drawings? With my project? What didn't I do that everyone else did so damn well?"
Apparently, I was wearing my heart on my sleeve that night, as I was pulled aside by a concerned classmate who tried his damnest to make me feel better. In so many words, he pretty much said the exact same thing as the panel did. I need to open up more and stop being a closed door.
A question came up that never really came up before despite what one of my teachers said about it always coming up: Am I doing this as a hobby or as a career move?
If I'm doing this as a hobby, then I should just quit. I'm wasting both time and money. Let me rephrase that, I've wasted both time and money if this is nothing but a hobby for me. If I'm serious about wanting to make art for a living, then at this point, I'm no better at it than when I was starting out at Watkins. One panelist said that she didn't even see my drawing as executing the fundamentals of a Drawing 1 class.
No question about what artist I've been looking at, even though I was ready with those answer. No question about if I've been reading any theory. No real questions at all other than the implied--or perhaps underscored--question of "What are you trying to do?"
With the piece shown for the first time to a group of people who have no idea as to the process and the logical thinking behind it... minus one person, you would think I would have had the ideal situation to see if my piece could stand up to the regular gallery trollers who go into every gallery in the city looking for something new and engaging. In some respects, I did. The response was less than ideal, which was expected. What I didn't expect was how harsh it actually was for me.
I had a lot of knee-jerk reactions to what was going on in my head, creating pieces most of which involved a ceremonial and artistic version of sepuku. I was even wondering how a gallery full of people would react to witnessing the act of suicide under the guise of a performance. That's right, I was seriously thinking about taking a shot gun to my head in a gallery of people looking at me similar to the monk to set himself on fire in front of his brothers and the entire village below their temple. Thankfully, I threw that idea out after realizing how stupid it would be to kill myself and call it art.
From there, my mind landed on this thought. The positive support I got from this idea was all online. It was all text based. Nobody saw the pieces until last night. Nobody that was keeping tabs on the project, that is. And yet, people were excited by it. It makes me wonder what was the actual piece: the drawings or the words describing the drawings?
From there, I began to wonder how both I and others would react to a gallery space where all you had to go on was a single line of text printed on a wall or on a pedestal saying something like "imagine this wall covered with cartoon drawings that make no sense and are in no way connected to each other" or "imagine a statue of a man being assaulted by bullets that are shaped to read as the word WORD." My immediate reaction to this is what in art history would I be using as a launching point and who in contemporary art history is doing something similar today? The only ones I'm familiar with using text in their work is Jenny Holzer, and the only thing I can come up with that I've been exposed to as far as a launching point are those pieces of a chair next to a photograph of a chair next to the printed definition of a chair. And that's not including the This is Not A Pipe painting.
When I run the question that Jason and others have asked about this project, I don't know how I feel about it. On one hand, I'm forcing the viewer to be the artist. Something very conceptual, but at the same time insulting to anyone who doesn't have formal art education in the same sense that they know more than just Picasso from a face-value point of view. The piece would read as snarky too, mostly towards the art community itself. Because I'm forcing the viewer to be the artist and imagine a wall of drawings or a statue on an empty pedestal, I don't have to actually physically produce anything other than the text. And even the, producing a line of text isn't that hard. How many lines have I produced just now in this entry alone? I mean, hell, I technically made two pieces with this concept already. But I'd still be insulting someone, be it my viewer or the art community, by putting just those line of text on a wall and calling it art.
It only feels ironic to me that I don't even know what to produce when I have an idea for an actual visual product in the fine art sense. It's almost as if I'm giving into the notion of "If you think you can do it better, then do it for me."
Did I mention that the show's post card would be constructed in a similar fashion with the words "imagine an example of a graduating art college student's work on this post card?" That makes three pieces.
2 comments:
Jon,
I like your catch phrases and they immediately caused me to write a haiku:
For all and no one,
both with and without purpose,
private but public.
The first thing that struck me about your report is your self-description of having a "condescending tone of voice." That might be true, since I haven't hear you speak, but it don't get that idea from reading your words.
"Those others" may not have done anything as well as you did, they may only have done what their questioners expected. Only producing what is expected is craft, not art.
I don't think that doing art as a career versus as a hobby has anything to do with producing "real art." The question is whether one produces something that elicits an emotional response in others. After all Charles Ives kept his job in the insurance industry while he was composing all those radically different musical scores that are now considered to be ground-breaking works of a century ago.
I didn't know what sepuku was. See, you are causing me to learn new things. Isn't that a hallmark of an artist? We don't want to see your blood and guts literally but maybe there is an artistic version of that which you can execute.
I like your idea of a space with a single line of text or a pedestal with a single word. And the idea of that word or words being focused on "WORD" itself is intriguing. Some people might associate it with "In the beginning was the word..." and others might associate it with the Greek concepts of ideals.
But the most wonderful of all you have written is that "the show's post card would be constructed in a similar fashion with the words 'imagine an example of a graduating art college student's work on this post card?'" Now that is brilliant.
After Jason comments, I may have more to say.
Robert
For my seminar 2 class I spent my semester creating five very large paintings - larger than life. They each displayed a nude man performing a repetitve act: one was hammering a nail, one was turning a screw, one was placing beads on string, one was filling balloons with helium, and one was filling little glass jars with pebbles. Some of these paintings are on my website - they are six feet tall and four feet wide. One of them is seven feet long.
In addition to the display of these monumentalized actions, I installed in front of each of the paintings the resulting mass of the activity. In the room with the balloon painting I displayed an actual helium tank and hundreds of balloons filling the ceiling, just above head-height. In front of the screw painting I had a square piece of wood in which I had screwed hundreds and hundreds of screws so that the wood was barely visible anymore. In front of the hammer painting I had hundreds of little wooden blocks that each sported a single nail. In the room with the bottle/pebbles I presented hundreds of little 2 oz bottles half filled with little bits of pea-gravel. And in front of the bead painting I installed an elaborate net of twine decorated with hundreds of olive-sized beads.
I put tons of effort into this project, hours and hours of time, and no less than $1,000.
My artist statement talked about my experience coming to terms with my sexuality and the frustration of being bound to unwanted sexual desires, ultimately realizing that when all other philosophies are stripped away, the only purpose in life is the act of procreation. For men this is simply stimulating the penis to the point of ejaculation. Alone, with a woman, with a man, with whomever, it matters not. Regardless of sexuality, love, intellect, spirituality, morality, etc, it all comes down to fulfilling the desire to get off. And there is no completion to this desire - it is temporarily satiated but returns again and again and again.
In front of the panel I tried to justify the parallel between the objects I was presenting, and my philosophy of "sexistentialism" as I was calling it at the time. I was amazed at their response. They asked all sorts of questions that I felt were irrelevent to my vision. It was as if they didn't understand what I wanted to do. I was so frustrated. I felt shame.
Mostly I was confused, because I had presented exactly what I thought they would like. They like installations - and my paintings incorporated installation. They liked concept, and these activities - nailing, screwing, filling, inflating, and inserting - all seemed to demonstrate my whole sexistential ideas. What else did they want from me?
Post a Comment