Tuesday 30 November 2010

Art and Communication

 David Hamilton (December 2010)

There is confusion about what art is. Distinctions and classifications are needed to clarify it. First, the qualities that make something art are intrinsic, not external. It is in the artifice, the organising of elements, perspective, choice of colour etc that makes it art because the result is obtained by transforming reality and thus nature, through human imagination and realised by skill and technique.
An example of the difference between nature and art is when I point my camera and record natural phenomena. If I take a sunset it is reproducing nature and is not art but nature. But if I then use the zoom function, it has the effect of condensing the distance and thereby magnifying the gold or red which is moving from nature to art.
The contemporary age is one of excess of technique but lacks deep emotion and transcendent vision. Jeff Robb, who has a permanent exhibition at the Victoria and Albert, uses a method of lenticular sheets which are only sold by one firm which is in Switzerland. This is very clever and often fascinating but the subject matter is ordinary – nudes. His art is the cleverness of what he does with the subject but he does not transform the actual subject. Far from just pointing a lens at landscapes and urbiscapes Jeff needs specific equipment and ink cartridges to produce his results. Technique is important but should be guided by the vision not for its own sake or it becomes empty form.
The qualities that qualify a work as art are intrinsic to art in general but Art with a capital "A" has an elevated, sublime, purpose and is only realised by a high quality of conception and execution. A visual object or experience created through an expression of skill or imagination. The term art covers various media: painting, sculpture, printmaking, drawing, decorative arts, photography, and installation. The various visual arts exist within a continuum that ranges from prompting deep feeling or transcendent emotion and great skill to reproducing figures or landscape which have a mood and also prompt thought or feelings.
Technique or genius; skill or a knack.
English philosopher Michael Oakeshott in discussing rationalism in politics, made a distinction between learning technique and what he called traditional knowledge. The second is instinct and intuition. In this case we would describe it as talent or genius relayed through skill. Oakeshott describes two sorts of knowledge:
“The first sort of knowledge I will call technical knowledge or knowledge of technique. In every art and science, and in every practical activity, a technique is involved. In many activities this practical knowledge is formulated into rules which are, or may be, deliberately learned, remembered, and, as we say, put into practice; but whether or not it is, or has been, precisely formulated, its chief characteristic is that it is susceptible of precise formulation, although special skill and insight.

The second sort of knowledge I will call practical, because it exists only in use, is not reflective and(unlike technique) can not be formulated in rules... In every activity this sort of knowledge is also involved; the mastery of any skill, the pursuit of any concrete activity is impossible without it.”(1)
In art, this equates to the distinction between natural talent or genius and the skill and technique which realises the vision and meaning. Soccer players show a high degree of skill and to great players it is natural but developed by coaching and practice, but there is no high conception.
Everyday art fills our ordinary lives with meaning and provides different feelings as they have different purposes. At Kimbolton school the murals on walls and ceilings by Pellegrini give a sense of grandeur and seriousness and create a suitable frame of mind for study. On occasion there are external factors that help prompt the feelings.

A Liverpool pub, The Jacaranda, has a mural in the downstairs bar which John Lennon, and Stuart Sutcliffe, had a hand in painting when he was an art student, and this creates fascination and joy at the thought of someone so famous being part of it. The painting is well executed but not devoted to a high purpose, but conveys feelings because we know who was involved. In my last essay I referred to a strange painting on the inside of a cupboard in The Nags Head in Shrewsbury which, though not great art nonetheless produced feelings other than shock. A pub in Liverpool, the Peter Kavanagh has a very delightful mural based on Dickens characters in the snug-bar. The story is that an artist who was a regular customer in the 1930s could not afford to pay his tab for drinks on account, so painted the mural. It is delightful: it produces delight and merryment adds to the pubs character and raises it above the ordinary. (2)
The modern understanding of art derived from Abbe Batteux in the 1740s who regarded the essence as an “imitation of nature” and, principally, that it caused pleasure. They cause various mental states in the beholder. He defined these mental states as pleasure and the experience of beauty. Prior to this, individual modes of art were attached to various sciences like music to mathmatics but this is the skill not the purposeKant promoted a universal criteria to decide if something was Art. He used a geometric idea of patterns of shapes and lines. In The Critique of Judgement he developed the notion of beauty as the cause of the the mental state.
In the 20th century art lost its meaning and the confusion over what art is arose. Dada artist Marcel Duchamp implied that it is enough for an artist to deem something "art" and put it in a publicly accepted venue. It does not matter where you stick a urinal it is always a urinal with a specific non-artistic purpose. To say something becomes art because you put it in a gallery is very muddled thinking. I had an experience in the Ikon gallery in Birmingham. The only objects with artistic qualities were the water closets and washroom taps which had pleasing curves and smooth surfaces but were not art but objects for specific non artistic purposes.
It is not the context of underpasses and bus shelters that makes or unmakes British street artist Banksy's work as art or otherwise: it has no artistic subject matter and is just technique. Artistic subject matter is realised through qualities of artifice and held together by purpose which concentrates the artifice and technique to the goal of producing art. (3)
George Dickie and Arthur Danto held that works of art are objects connected to various social practices. This again turns on beauty as some objects like the taps or a motor car can be beautiful but because they are not linked to the art world are not art whereas a painting, say, is. This is to define art by social function. To Dickie its about being self-assigned but you can put a car where you like it is always a car and its function is different from a work of art even if it is beautifully designed. When artists begin to create they have a purpose in mind and to bring this into being they use appropriate technique. They do not take into account aerodynamics, say, or how fast water pours out or precisely where its trajectory will take it as these are not part of the purpose. Though they are to engineers and designers of those functional objects.
I noted in my last essay how Damian Hirst's pickled shark was meaningless out of context because being dead it had lost its being which was when it was alive and swam and hunted in its natural habitat: in a glass tank it is out of context. The sea is a natural not artificial context.
This is the institutional theory of art which is a theory about the nature of art that holds that an object can only be art in the context of "the artworld". Danto wrote in: The Artworld: “To see something as art requires something the eye cannot descry—an atmosphere of artistic theory, a knowledge of the history of art: an art world.” That has nothing to do with the work itself but where it is.
Nothing can make Duchamps "readymades" art because they were made for a specific non-artistic purpose. The theory does not change a pile of Brillo cartons in a supermarket into art, yet Danto thought if it was put in a gallery a substantive transformation took place. Andy Warhols pretentious Brillo Boxes (a pile of Brillo carton replicas, actually so they are doubley pretentious) are a pile of unartistic Brillo boxes wherever they are put.
Dickie's institutional theory can be assessed from the definition in Aesthetics: An Introduction: "A work of art in the classificatory sense is 1) an artifact 2) upon which some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld) has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation.” What makes something art is the intention of producing traditional art through artifice and technique.
Tracey Emin and Damian Hirst have both declared works to be art because they say it is. They were promoted and financed by Saatchi who first declared their works art but he is not an artist. It is critics and elite art buyers who decide what is art and usually because of its commercial value but that is external to the work not intrinsic. They are right about the commercial value of objects but not about its classification as art because designating something as art because it has commercial value is to apply external or non intrinsic criteria as the standard of judgement. Many people are supposed to think they are Napoleon or important people but does that make them so?
This takes us back to Duchamps folly. This argument is that because he placed it in a gallery it became art. It is not assignation that makes art but the artifice guided by the purpose that is used to realise the vision and its meaning -it is intrinsic: it is in the finished work. Many works still fail to reach that goal. Picasso and Matisse also wanted to change art as they inherited it. Picasso: "Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs.” Well, alright he has dismissed proportion but that is only one possible component.
When he became a Christian, Salvador Dali found an artistic subject and the inherent spirtuality of the subject gave him a fuller, more elevated vision and he painted the masterpieces of the twentieth century. He was a skilled draftsman who developed his skills of realisation by studying Renaissance masters. Much criticism of Dali was because he supported General Franco rather than the fashionable armchair Marxism of the orthodox Surrealists and art critics. Breton banned Dali from The Surrealist movement in 1941 and tried to ban his "Sistine Madonna" from the International Surrealism Exhibition in New York in 1960.
His fascination with the hypercube a four-dimensional cube and unfolding of a hypercube is featured in "Corpus Hypercubus" which changes the traditional form but it is still recognisable and we know what it represents. His "Last Supper" and "The Christ of St.John of the Cross" (left) are the masterpieces of the twentieth century. This brings us to the essence of great Art: genius and inspiration.
Contemporary painters and makers of installations show contempt for the audience and do not work for the public good. They seek a response but it is a negative response. They are not geniuses and have to shock to get noticed. In fact they are not really artists – but purveyors of clever tricks without deep meaning. Art is communication but contemporary art fails to communicate because of a disjuncture between subject and beholder, form and purpose.
Thomas Carlyle's famous remark utilised by egalitarians that “Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains” is that capacity is attendent upon genius to realise the vision but not the imagination which is the creator of the vision. The taking of pains follows the original impulse.

The indefinable knack which is intuitive practice called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one just knows instinctively what to put or where. This knack is the artistic eye, artistic judgement and it is a non rational process – it is intuition or instinct and it is this that trained and developed technique realises.”
I think John Dryden captures it :”But genius must be born, and never can be taught.” It is the technique that is taught not the genius which is inborn as the qualities that make a work art are intrinsic to the work, not external nor contingent on where the work is put. 
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Sunday 14 November 2010

Meaning and Disjuncture in Art

November 2010 New English Review


A significant difference between contemporary art and traditional art is the split between form and meaning. This is a manifestation of the all pervasive Cartesian duality: the split between mind and body, subject and form. This split is in all the various forms and styles of the respective High Art forms. Contemporary artists try to destroy the forms. This practice in architecture makes contemporary buildings look silly. The buildings all look like objects they are not and usually something comic which is why they get nicknames like The Gerkhin or The Cheesegrater.

Traditional art develops within traditional forms and also develops the forms. In his Christian paintings of the fifties Dali adapted forms to his individual vision but they are recognisably traditional. Dali was a genius – contemporary artists are not. They have talent but need to shock to get recognition. Real Art grows out of tradition and provides sustenance, spiritual or worldly, for people rather than negative emotions like shock or offence.

To say something like Damian Hirst's pickled shark is important is pretentious. It is supposed to make us think, to arrest us but by taking the shark out of context (the sea) it is rendered meaningless because it is deprived of its being which is its life, and its functions. Context however, does not confer the status of art on objects: Duchamps urinal is still a urinal wherever it is put. It might have pleasing curves but can only be admired for its design and not as an artistic object because it prompts no depth of feeling. Duchamp called it Fountain and straight away there are splits between the function of the object and its setting.

Neither context nor reasons make a work art. Art is defined by its intrinsic qualities and the artifice used. That last is: development from nature through human imagination and technical ability. The technical ability must be with the imagination or it is only skill. The artists organises the components to suggest meaning: the placing of the figures and their gestures say; this occurs in some photography like fashion photography but the disqualification of the latter as art is its shallowness: there is no deep or moving emotion conveyed.

Trying to shock people is petty and there are more important feelings and emotions to prompt. That is where the pretentiousness lies. The stated aim is to shock but that is a means to their end of making themselves rich because the elites reward these attacks on our culture. Its like having a brief to undermine our artistic traditions. They have minor imaginations which prompt only single responses whereas a work by a major artist like Dali prompts a sequence of emotional responses.

Avant-garde art begun around 1850 with the 
Realism of Gustave Courbet, who was influenced by early socialist ideas. This was followed by the successive anti-tradition movements of modern art and was synonymous with modern, but is now rather quaint.

There is a phenomenon in English art: a seven year-old boy Kieron Williamson. (1) He has an indefinable knack that is called genius. This is artistic judgement in the practice of painting when one just knows instinctively what to put or where. He has several natural qualities: perspective and “choice of colours.” He has them automatically but perspective is a technique for realising the vision and choice of colours is part of the expression of the vision.

This knack is the artistic eye, artistic judgement and it is a non rational process – it is intuition or instinct and it is this that technique realises. In Kieron's case it was triggered by the Devon and Cornwall landscape and “sprung full-born into life” like Athena from Zeus's head. It recalls Plato's idea of all knowledge being born with the human mind: this was instantly realised, not slowly educed.


Splodgeness Abounds
Commercial galleries need to appeal to a buying public and be more popular than avante gard painters yet they follow the fad of impressionistic landscapes that lose their meaning by a overusing technique over imaginative vision: the scene is obscured by splodges of paint! This obtrudes between the scene depicted and the viewer and causes a disjuncture in the meaning. This is technique over intuition or skill over the knack. By contrast the camera can elevate the knack over technique as one makes an artistic judgement on what to photograph. It gives a clear reproduction of the scene not splodgy brush strokes that could be anything from a cloud or wave or a sunbeam to just a slip of the brush. These smears festoon every commercial gallery in the country. The people who work in these commercial galleries keep drawing one's attention to them. This effect is demonstrated by comparing these with photographs.

I recently took several photos of a sunrise in Penzance bay in the English county of Cornwall and sunset at Brighton. There is little technique involved and as long as you point the camera at the right thing you are away. The camera is recording natural phenomena but a meaning is conveyed from photographer to viewer. In the above examples it is natural beauty. When you look at a photograph of a landscape a chain of thought is triggered which moves from the inherent emotional state conveyed to personal and often unconscious thoughts and feelings.


A great paradox - modern music

Music was suffering the same culture war as painting but was saved from an unexpected quarter. What we know as the culture wars, political correctness etc, could not have made such progress if it had not been adopted by the great burgeoning of talent in popular music of the 1960s. For example, the words to The Beatles hit Get Back were developed from a spoof of British politician Enoch Powell's Rivers of Blood speech that Paul McCartney later turned into a more conventional rock song.
Conversely, McCartney and John Lennon wrote deeply moving melodies and through harmony revived tonal music after modernists began destroying the traditional classical music with atonal, as composers Schoenburg and Stockhausen did and produced water gurgling down a drain noises. The Beatles natural musical genius was realised through the technique of their producer George Martin and they used harmony to create different moods. British composer Peter Maxwell Davies compares McCartney with Schubert as one of the great songwriters.
The paradox is that McCartney and Lennon revived the tonal tradition even though politically they supported the New Left. In fact McCartney had a single banned by the BBC for apparently supporting the IRA and Lennon was figurehead of the New Left-Politically Correct movement and his records especially the album “Sometime in New York City" promoted it.
Like artists, composers disdained their audiences. It was Lennon and McCartney who brought them back together by using classical techniques in pop songs through classically trained record producer George Martin. Martin's skill at realising their meaning added to the realisation of the whole. That is the oblique meaning of the music helped the direct meaning of the words and triumphed over the split between form and meaning in contemporary music like the aforementioned “water gurgling down drain noises.”
Most of The Beatles' orchestral arrangements and instrumentation were written or performed by Martin in collaboration with them. For example it was Martin's idea to put a string quartet on "Yesterday". To press his point he played the song in the style of Bach to show what type of “voicings” could be used. To realise "Penny Lane" McCartney hummed the melody he wanted, and Martin wrote it down in music notation and David Mason, the classically trained trumpeter played it in a piccolo trumpet solo. Eleanor Rigby was heightened byMartin who wrote and conducted a strings-only accompaniment inspired by Bernard Hermann's score for Alfred Hitchcock's film Psycho.
For "Strawberry Fields Forever", Martin combined two different takes into one. For I Am the Walrus he provided an original arrangement for brass, violins, cellos, and vocal ensemble. He worked closely with McCartney to develop the orchestral 'climax' in A Day In the Life.
Bob Dylan was another paradox. An integral part of and spokesman for the 1960s American Civil Rights movement his songs used traditional folk forms to carry his contemporary message. His outstanding “A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall” from 1962 used the structure of traditional Scottish Border Ballad "Lord Randall" to organise his anti nuclear-war message. His anthem for the new movement "The Times They Are A-Changin'" used the tune of "Irish Rover" to carry the message. He did more to revive British folk tradition and diction than anyone in Britain.


Public Art
Statues are stylised and used to convey various human qualities. Military heroes say, were shown in proud and honourable poses that suggested authority, fortitude, steadfastness. Lord Hill's column in Shrewsbury is a case. He had been number two to the Duke of Wellington and his statue shows strength and authority. As do Nelson's more famous column in Trafalgar Square and other authoritative figures along Whitehall. They were cast in forms that conveyed meaning but contemporary public art fails in that elementary intention and the meaning is disjunctured.

Shrewsbury has honoured its world famous local Charles Darwin by “public art” but does it succeed in its purpose? One known as Quantum Leap is dissociated meaning as the form is not directly linked to the subject so there is no representation. The title Quantum Leapactually refers to something in physics not evolutionary biology which was Darwin's study. It is probably the contemporary informal term for making a major leap forward but applied to something celebrating Darwin confuses rather than elucidates. These contemporary artefacts arouse no curiosity and one does not feel inclined to enquire about them. They cannot be taken seriously as there is no spirit of genius behind them; rather, a commercial motive which are part of contemporary popular fashion and do not gain gravity from tradition. Quantum Leap looks like an armadillo crossed with a pack of cards and seems to be influenced by popular film Jurrasic Park rather than show the idiosyncracy and non-conformity of genius nor does it exemplify something from Darwin 
The Darwin Gate when seen from a particular viewpoint, three separate structures combine to create an apparently solid structure. What does it mean? How does the form convey its import? The design of the sculpture apparently combines the form of a Saxon helmet with a Norman window which was inspired by features of St Mary's Church which was attended by Charles Darwin as a boy. The sculpture uses "parallax phenomenon" as it appears as a single solid structure when seen from a certain angle. They claim that as darkness descends defused light shines through the columns suggesting stained glass windows and the tops of the posts mimic ecclesiastical arches. Although the elements of the structure never change, it looks different from every angle and when it all comes together it shows the shape of a church window. The connection with Darwin is tangential and the transmission of meaning to the public is split. It looks like The Eggbeater and conveys no meaning about Darwin.
Even ordinary works can, if in surprising places, prompt a myriad of responses. The historic Nags Head (2) pub on Wyle Cop, Shrewsbury has an unusual and mystifying painting in that no one knows what it is or where it comes from and it has an unusual context in being on the inside door of a cupboard in an upstairs room above the pub. Russell Preece, the landlord, is sometimes encouraged to take one to see it. There is a strange atmosphere up there in this legendary, haunted pub, where the temperature can plummet in seconds. Some think the painting depicts Neptune, others, the devil. It is thought to have been done by a prisoner of war during World War II. Even staff at the local Rowley's House museum purvey a mystic tale but no accurate record. One told me it is of a woman who committed suicide by jumping from an upstairs window. In this legend it is said that the female figure will return if painted over. There is an ambiguity about the figure which has feminine legs which are disproportionately long and thick, with a short body. This painting prompts wonder, amusement, mystification, delight.

Rowley's House museum holds the excellent Morning View of Coalbrookdale by William Williamse. (3) An important function of both painting and photography is to reflection a way of life or, as in this case, a defining historical era. There is too little representation of ways of life in contemporary art and fiction and people need this affirmation of themselves.These engaging paintings convey a powerful impression of the impact of early industrialisation on a still natural landscape. There are many forms of art which convey something important to people and prompt a variety of responses. Shock is just one: it is negative and it is unimportant.

Saint Alkmonds church in Shrewsbury has a beautiful and moving stained glass in the east window. This is The Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Francis Egington. In this the Virgin Mary at the end of her journey through life and about to ascend to heaven. She is standing on the firm ground of the cross; with the Bible as the word of god for guidance and the sacraments represented by the chalice. The struggles of life are symbolised by thistles on the path. She is looking up in faith at the symbolic crown with her arms outstretched and open to heavenly influence as if she were asking and waiting to be uplifted back home to heaven. These were developments by Egington the artist who based the work on The Assumption of Saint Mary by Guido Remi of 1638 which is a more conventional Assumption painting and has Mary being lifted by Cherubim.

As you enter the church you are transfixed by it and as you walk towards it in awe looking up it immediately begins to form an emotional response and the feeling of awe grows as you advance. This is not an intellectual proposition but a deep feeling, the stirring of noble emotions. This, like great art, operates on a deep level. It also opens the imagination transmitting holy or noble feelings in contrast to the degenerate contemporary art which spreads negative and evil thoughts. Old works have a quiet authority and the viewer is aware of being in the presence of the past and pauses to contemplate it with respect and, as when looking at old gravestones, to recreate the departed. This development of traditional form links us with our roots.
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http://www.magnoliabox.com/art/96482/Morning_view_of_Coalbrookdale_1777
Williams is of particular interest to Americans as he wrote the earliest surviving novel written in America. The man who painted the first picture of the Iron Bridge should also have started the tradition of novels which include Moby Dick and The Great Gatsby.
In Philadelphia Williams was the first teacher of Benjamin West, the most famous American artist of the 18th century and a future president of the Royal Academy. He later painted two views of Coalbrookdale in 1777 depicting a morning scene in the valley, the other in the afternoon.
 
http://www.birminghampost.net/life-leisure-birmingham-guide/birmingham-culture/birmingham-art/2009/04/28/bridging-some-historical-gaps-65233-23493823/#ixzz13i5tZA3z