An open question on art dualities and how they might be broken.

 

Below is a part of an email I wrote this morning, so it's an open question now.

I think there is something interesting in the blurred boundaries between what is marked as art and what is effectively the same thing but not marked as such. About a year or so ago I was really hooked on seeing the "art object" (even if that were an intangible thing) as least problematic when it was simply the by-product of a creative action that had another ends. So doing something with paint on canvas in order to understand something about space would result in something called art, or digging a trench in the earth to resolve a practical problem of drainage would also be called art. Whether it was good or bad art was another issue, neither wholly relativist nor objective. Some "works" having much more going on in them generally, a lot more movement and difference, but a subjective response still being vital.

I still hang onto some of this definition of art objects, but I've realised a bit more about how problematic it is in itself. There is a bit of the old heroic individualism in it, because it implies artists as people who just go an engage with the world and all we see are the relics of where they have been. I think this is a problem because it becomes primarily about that narrative, or the artist (images of an shirtless and ancient Picasso in his studio, self mythologising quotes becoming truisms). So the conflict I'm stuck on now is that on one hand I still don't want to present itself direct to an audience, but on the other I want the artist to be open for dialogue, and to make a statement on what they believe in and be prepared to discuss (and potentially defend or even alter) their position.

I think perhaps it is a pair of defence mechanisms that make it hard for us to have both. If we do something personal we try to avoid discussing it, and if we have to discuss something we try to avoid it being personal. The mode of modern art (and society?) also works very well to enforce a bifurcation between these two modes Artist/Critic Subjective/Objective Image/object feeling/thinking emotion/politic painter/sculptor. I don't think these distinctions exist in actuality any more than I think there is a split in the universe which divides me from everything else. However, there still remains the question for me of how to have art which we can think about in terms of the Deleuze & Guattari / Spinozan Plane of Immanence (everything as one overall ontological field, self included with degrees of intensity in different areas rather than hard edged idealised distinctions).

So not art for a rarefied generality of society and an Ideology, but equally not the rarefied narrative of an angry and emotional young white man who is somehow elevated above everyone else (which itself another Ideology)!

I think this does occur, work that avoids getting trapped in one of the two channels. I think some of it is a matter of perception but some of it is a matter of the work and the artist. I don't there there is a system for making more of this occur either but there might be situations that could encourage it and that's something I have been starting to think about, including perhaps the role collaboration strategies or “non-art agendas” might have to play in this.

This is a bit of a rant, but it would be great to know what you think about any of these ideas, where the gaps are or whether there is something else going on that I'm overlooking.

All the best

ralph