Well, can art grow out of theory, Jacob?
I certainly hope so.
I only say this because some of my favorite "artists" have created art with theory in mind. However, I have never deeply considered the question of whether the means of art justify the ends as art. Though William Blake is the inspiration to this prompt, and it seems ludicrous to challenge the artistry of his works, the question, no matter how terrifying the implications, is legitimate. In all fairness, I remember once spying a bit of online CG landscaping--projects often undertaken with liberal borrowing from already existing works of art, and perhaps completed only through minimal effort--and raging about how such drivel could not possibly be art. Somewhere, in the dank recesses of my mind, a stifled, angry voice chided me. Then I crushed it with my ego.
Well, that voice is back, and has some more authoratative things to say. First, I must committ heresy, and just for a moment place Blake in the same league as those CG-rearranger landscaper people. Don't both sets of artists employ theory to their ends, and ultimately construct a product that is beautiful? As I argued before in my "Imagination" post, humans don't really spontaneously create anything but rather rearrange ideas into some new kind of whole. Thus, it seems as if Blake is just rearranging stuff using a framework that he himself created: the same technique those CG wizards employ. Don't CG barbers have to use a program to compose their arrangements. Aren't those programs developed through the use of theory? The question of medium, for the moment, is irrelevant to the larger picture, especially since we are talking about art.
What is art by the way? I could show nearly anyone replications of any one of Michelangelo's paintings at the Sistine Chapel and I would bet all of my pennies that he or she would respond in the affirmative. "Sure that's art, you dolt."; "What are you, some kind of iconoclast?"; "Where is the bathroom"--stuff like that. However, if I were to proffer up Dali, the responses would vary. Pollock would suffer even more ambivalent reactions. Even Hendrix would not escape such wash.
I really do want to escape the question "is art relative?" As a person who hails from the land of Anthropology, I must immediately say nay. Art, some anthropologists would argue, requires skill, direction, and ultimately effort. Stuart Plattner argues that "art" is not so much applied aesthetics, but rather "an activity embedded in an art world" (15). Thus, a thing does not exist in and of itself as art without those human relationships. "It is wrong to focus on the unique art object, and ignore the complex set of human relationships which contributed to its creation" continues Plattner. Thanks a lot, anthropologists, for mucking the waters up even more with all of this context crap. Can't we just get to the good stuff?
I don't suppose we can simply get to the good stuff without regarding the muck. The first bit that has to be expunged concerns the lens through which art passes through--according to Plattner, art must be regarded holistically, as any other component of society should be. Otherwise, something gets lost in the meaning.
AH HA! MEANING! That's where I can escape all of this mess and get back to Blake, right? Anthropologists would certainly regard what Blake does as art, even being oriented in theory. His theory is the lens through which he filters his ideas. Can we, then, understand what the hell he is trying to say without taking his theory into consideration? I suppose the answer to that question is "it depends." The casual reader can still get something out of Blake without swallowing his theory, but in order to get at the really good stuff the reader must proscribe to his vision, his world, that he is presenting--the context, as anthropologists would put it. Thus, his means not only assist in producing his art but also define his work as art.
"So now we can't have art without theory? I bet you hate watermelon and think Edward De Vere is Shakespeare."
Despite being related to an art history professor, I do not think that theory must accompany art for art to be art. Theory often gets proscribed on top of stuff without that stuff actually proscribing to it. Rather, I agree with anthropologists in that art needs some kind of context in order for it to say something. Art does not just pop out as something pretty and then we say, in such a reactionary way, "Oooo art!" Blake's theory is an integral part of his context.
I have an insidious, and possibly better, question--Can art stem from anyone but an artist? The easy answer is "nope", or some close variant. We have all of that "context" stuff to protect us now, and it even allows us to stretch our imaginations and definitions. Can we stretch the definition (or do we even have to?) to those CG sorcerers? How about babies? Hey, nature makes some pretty cool stuff that we can instill meaning into. Nature, babies, and sorcerers are the movers; artists are the dreamers that proscribe meaning onto something. Beautiful things can happen and not actually be "art." Art is something that is moved through agency, something that is made, be it beautiful or horrible. Humans don't need to call natural (without human direction) processes and formations "art" in order to appreciate their beauty and/or horror.
"What about those CG artificers?"
I have a rather scientific answer for their case: it depends.
"On what?"
The context!
5 comments:
i really like your closing definition of art, as well as your discussion of art-as-arranged-and-interpreted-pieces rather than art-as-magical-creation-of-new-pieces.
your CG artists analogy immediately made me think of the musical artist Girl Talk, who is currently pretty popular for mixing together samples of various pop songs to make "new" songs out of them. granted, a lot of artists nowadays sample other songs, but Girl Talk is extremely unsubtle about it. so there's this whole genre-bending question of whether taking five other songs and mixing their parts together is art if you haven't actually created the original songs. i'd say yes, and it sounds like you would agree.
your post also reminded me of this section from the first letter of Shelley's from this week's reading: "Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of the void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself".
we're sort of like milton's satan in that way, i guess.
that sounds worse than i meant it to sound.
so i am a dork and accidentally posted my comment for this post on last week's post....so woopsies. i'll blame it on the new computer.
Jacob--great ruminations. I like the way you have little conversations with yourself in these posts. What I'm curious about are examples of successful and unsuccessful CG art from YOUR perspective. (I often think Blake would have been a graphic designer if he'd been born in the 21st-century.)
My brother would approve of your Chaos analogy, and I must admit that I am also attracted to the idea because there is a distinction made between ordered patterns of chaos through agency, and things simply "happening." Art, I suppose, doesn't JUST happen.
As for your comment on remixes, I share a similar ambivalence to them as I do CG rearrangements. Certainly, as in the case with the kinds of CG art that I consider in the post, some remixes are art. I remember a bit that Frank Zappa mixed right before he died; it was composed primarily of excerpts from Tipper Gore's "parental advisory" warning committee meetings. His piece was especially dark, and effective in conveying his dismay at the way music censorship was being handled. I suppose context, again, is everything.
Curses--I am inspired to go exploring Milton.
Whoops--I am not so savvy in getting these things to post where I would like them to. This post regards my third bit of commentary, posted by perhaps.
I think that the most effective types of CG art not only try to say something, but also say it well--something that garners more than a "whoa, pretty" type of reaction. While writing this, I started wondering how I would handle discussing CG art in film. Some of those landscapes/characters/etc. pass by ever so quickly, and viewers are really not afforded much opportunity to soak in the meaning. However, mis en scene is an important component to the message of many films. Nosferatu railroads into my consciousness as an excellent example--stuff is coming from all sorts of wrong angles, buildings are wonky, and the lighting is just bad enough to stress out the audience, all of which tends to fly by without giving anyone much of a chance to absorb the environs (possibly further contributing to the stress of the experience). Such strategies would likely not have been lost on Blake, and I also wonder how his work would have manifested in contemporary mediums.
The inspiration for discussing CG artistry came from something I came across whilst researching for my Simarillion creative writing class this past summer. Normally, Tolkien is very specific in his landscape and architectural descriptions. In this particular case, I was looking for an image of a particular structure. I was unable to find very little professionally illustrated, and what I did find was artfully ambivalent. Eventually, I found a semi-shoddy CG apparition of the very fortress I was searching for. It really didn't look anything like other artists' depictions, and Tolkien's text was also uncharacteristically unhelpful. I am not sure what exactly ultimately convinced me of its validity, but the artist had done SOMETHING to his amateurish characterization that resonated beyond the obviously pixelated construction.
On the other hand, my mind may have been filling in the blanks. I suppose there is significance in having those blanks to fill in any case.
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