Hello, World! I am writing this latest instalment from sunny Whanganui, which I am visiting as part of a road-trip around New Zealand. I thought initially to take a break from blogging but a trip to the Sargent Gallery, Wanganui’s cultural centre, changed my mind. If this post seems looser than usual, it is because I am not in my usual context.
When I began writing this treatise, I indicated that I would discuss all the arts. However, I have so far restricted myself to discussing literature and film. I always intended to talk about poetry and music, and shall at some point, but thought I would probably not speak at all about the visual arts – by which I mean painting, photography and sculpture. These ‘static’ arts I put in the ‘too hard’ category. I thought I lacked the requisite aesthetic sensibility to speak authoritatively about them. I thought I might flounder.
My uncertainty about how to proceed is in fact symptomatic of a malaise afflicting both the art-world and the criticism that surrounds it. The art-world is in crisis and has been for a long time. The audience for visual art has lost its ability to judge good work from bad, and this has led to the ascension of the gimmicky and the pretentious, the trivially scandalous. As was pointed out to me yesterday, television commercials are aimed at nine year olds; the art-world celebrates work that is likewise aimed at the lowest common denominator. This crisis in the art-world is partly cause and partly effect of a failure to theorists to speak effectively about the nature of art. I did some some reading into aesthetic theory some time ago; my impression of it as this distance is that the theorists divided into two camps, the idealist and the cynics. The idealists believe that aesthetic appreciation and art in general has a ineffeable quality. You either get it or you don’t. You’re either “one of us” or just another member of the herd. The cynical view, presented in the essay “The Art World” (by, I think, Howard S. Becker), is that art is whatever the community of artists, curators and critics say is art. Both views suggest a snobbery pervading the art-world. Could this snobbery be a kind of defensive posturing to avoid self-doubt?
I have tended to side with the cynics in supposing that there is no intrinsic way to define the nature of art or the aesthetic experience. However, my trip to the Sargent Gallery has persuaded me that it might yet be possible. The Sergent, a fantastic gallery that I visit it every time I come to Whanganui, I enjoy far more than I do the Auckland Art Gallery: perhaps this is because the Sargent is remote from the centres of the New Zealand art-world and can take a more independent attitude. When wandering through the rooms, I felt completely absorbed in the works I was observing, so much so that when I stepped outside, I felt the real world, which had been held in abeyance, descend like a sudden burden. My postive experience makes me feel I might have something to say about the visual arts after all.
Visual art consists of a subject and its representation (I have discussed this before with relation to literature). A gap, however, exists between the form and the content; when we look at a painting, even of the most realistic sort, we are aware that it has been created, that every effect is the result of a number of brush strokes. This gap transforms the work into a kind of communicative act; we concern ourselves not so much with the topic of the painting but at the way it has been rendered, the artist’s technical mastery. Prior to the advent of photography much painting aimed at realism; yet even the most realistic painting was still a painting and of a different ontological status to the thing depicted. The impressionists widened the gap between the subject and its representation so that viewing a work became a kind of interpretation. The Impressionist does not show the World, nor even does he show an impression of the World. In fact we do not see the world this way at all. He alienates the viewer from the world, introducing a layer of artifice between the viewer and the scene portrayed. The viewer must overcome this gap and in the process of overcoming experiences aesthetic pleasure.
Great art steers a course between the two extremes of revealing and concealing, creating a tension between form and content. Where art has gone wrong in the twentieth century, is that it has failed to maintain this tension. Some art, such as the work of Kandinsky and Mondrian, of Jackson Pollack, has abandoned representation entirely, opting instead for pure form. Perhaps a viewer can enjoy these works, but only by projecting onto them the content they lack , by interpreting them in terms of abstract rules, and this requires extensive training. On the other hand, we have ‘ready-made’ art such as Duchamp’s “Fountain”. In these cases, content has obliterated form almost entirely; we are not longer interested in the thing, only in the artist’s decision to present it. The object itself has been rendered irrelevant.
It is unsurprising that among the general public Impressionist art is the most popular.
These thoughts are provisional at the moment. I am aware, for instance, that I have not discussed ‘the aura’ of the artwork at all. I need to do some more reading and, more importantly, view more art. Hopefully, I will be able to expand and sharpen these thoughts at a later date.