Being, if not backwards, then a little unconventional, I’ve elected to undertake the first year of my Creative Arts degree in reverse order. So now, in October 2020, I am starting the introductory module ‘Creative Arts Today’, having already completed Script Writing 1 and having started Moving Image 1.
PROJECT 1: ART AND IDEAS
Exercise 1: Fountain
My response to Duchamp’s Fountain, a ‘readymade’ artwork from 1950, a replica of the 1917 original, is as follows:
It seems to me the the artist was trying to provoke the viewer to look at an object that they would barely have glanced at in its normal context (a men’s toilet). It seems that the aesthetic qualities of the object itself may not be, here, so important as the response to it. The object is mundane, the title is what gives it something new. Is it art? That, for me, depends on how the viewer sees the purpose of art if, indeed, it needs to have a purpose at all. For myself, its context makes it art, and that leads me to the next exercise, the definition of art.
Exercise 2: What is art?
My personal definition of art is:
Art is the artist’s creative interpretation of their emotional or rational response to a stimulus. That response may or may not have a physical form, such as a painting, sculpture, film, photographic image or textile, but may be abstract, such as a piece of music or dance, or performance art. Sometimes the artist will actually make the object or piece. At other times they will make the interpretation through a found or repurposed object by changing its context.
This leads me to question: does art exist in its creation or in the experience of it? One person’s experience of a dance performance, for example, will not be identical either to the experience of others in the same space – or even of their own at a different performance of the same work. Is each new performance, or each new encounter of a work of art a unique piece of art? Likewise, is a sunset a piece of art, as there is no artist? It may solicit all of the same reactions in the observer as a piece of created art. Is art found in the response rather than in the deliberate creation?
So many questions, so many ways to look at art. Is art, in fact, a series of questions rather than a series of answers? As a writer and composer, I see my task more as one of asking questions to provoke thoughts and feelings in the recipient than one of providing answers. This is because my art exists to stimulate a response (including my own).
Exercise 3: reading about art
From reading the extract from Art history; The Basics (2008, Abingdon: Routledge), I notice a distinction in the ways art is viewed. The Greek word ‘Techne’ (from which words like ‘technical’ are derived) gives credence to technical skill – how skillfully has this work been executed? This, I think, is a hugely prevalent approach amongst the general public, from responses I hear in galleries and in conversations heard. Moreover, where a piece of (particularly) modern art appears not to demonstrate technical skill, it is often derided. I am mindful of reactions to artists like Monet and Picasso (in his cubist period) which, apparently, were similar, as they defied popular understanding of what is acceptable. And yet these, derided works are now seen as masters and sell for millions (giving a reflection of their perceived value to society) – art seems to have had this relationship with acceptance, or the lack of it, as it tries to do something new, to say something original.
Exercise 4: looking at context
Damien Hirst’s work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (also known as ‘The Shark‘), is one of those interesting pieces of modern art that people still remember, years after it first appeared. This must have more to do with the general response to it (inasmuch as it was something quite new to be seen in a gallery and labelled as art) than with the piece itself. If it had been displayed in a Natural History museum, I doubt if it would have garnered such reactions of shock and polar opposites of opinions. My reactions are (given that I’ve been familiar with this work since it first made the news):
1 My first reaction to this piece was in the 1990s and I remember the amount of discussion it provoked. I listened with interest as I wasn’t sure whether this was art or not, but I also wondered how Hirst performed the technical challenge of suspending a heavy shark in a tank.
2 My own emotional response now has more to do with an environmental theme than it would have thirty years ago – this is because of a change in me, not in the piece.
3 The work takes something familiar and yet also something that provokes a range of responses (feelings for the shark, feelings about the shark, learned attitudes since the Spielberg film Jaws was released in 1975). In me, it prompts me to think about a single life, suspended in time, yet by necessity, dead.
3 Given the title, I think it’s a provocation to think about this as an example of a creature so associated with vital life and also the bringer of death – it therefore asks questions about our feelings about life and death, and that we can only have these thoughts as those who have experience of only one of these states.
With the 17th Century Vanitas painting by Edwaert Collier, my responses are:
1 At first glance this looks like a demonstration of technical competence by the painter – a somewhat passive, still life with a pleasing display of the artist’s understanding of light and shade, as well as how to represent texture, colour and composition in paint.
2 For me, the emotional response comes more slowly than with the shark. On closer inspection, themes begin to emerge and the work appears much darker in tone than at first glance. Was this provoking similar questions to the piece by Hirst, albeit 300 years earlier?
3 The painting represents common pursuits in life (at the time), maybe representing the stuff of life itself, but at the same time pointing to the inevitability of death, the hour glass showing the transition from one to the other. The fruit is fresh, showing life to be present, but the skull is a widely understood representation of mortality.
4 The title places direct importance on the volume, displayed on its title page. In a busy still life, this is picked out as being significant. The poem it shows is on the theme of mortality, so this point is being made in plain view. I also notice the biblical quote about all being vanity, so this could be seen as a moral tale in a painting.
Exercise 5: Finding out more
I have chosen the image above as the artist takes a classic still life compositional form and uses photography as her medium. In pre-photographic days this would have been painted, typically in oils, to be as faithful to real life as possible. Nowadays, even the photograph can ‘lie’, as digital photography can be manipulated, however this does not appear to be the case here. The expertise used is not with a paint brush but with the camera, lighting and composition.
I’ve chosen this second piece, by Georges Braque, as he seems more interested in the shapes and colours, almost as abstract forms, than in the realistic portrayal of what he sees. This is a departure from the type of realism portrayed in past centuries.
The advent of photography negated the requirement to use paint as a means of recording, accurately, a likeness. I think this freed artists to experiment more with the representation of images and, ultimately, dispensing with representation altogether in abstract art.
Simon Elvin Creative Arts Today 