I was recently interviewed about my artwork and I found myself grappling with a concept about artwork that was dormant in my mind for a while.
I have always had a weakness for trying to find meaning in art and I strive to find and sometimes interpret meanings that the artist would not have even remotely thought of… This is a good thing as it is with reflection and thinking that we attain a deeper understanding of the forces that we encounter in today’s world.
My approach to looking or developing artwork, involves asking the following questions:
— Does the artwork evoke an emotional response in the onlooker at this point in time?
— How would a person interacting with the same at least 200 to 300 years from now perceive it and would it still carry at least some portion of its original emotional import?
This is the litmus that I use to view work and gauge its significance. Now I understand that very few of us can predict what our future generations would have in their minds with respect to aesthetic sensibilities, but putting on this lens is one way I tend to weed out the mountains of artwork that is churned out by thousands of artists all over the world these days.
I know a lot of you would not subscribe to my old fashioned, outmoded views, but I would very much be interested in learning about criteria that you consciously or unconsciously employ in gauging the significance of artwork that you behold.
Sunil,
I don’t find your view old fashioned or outmoded, but I do find the questions difficult to apply.
Emotional responses are, generally speaking, more personal than universal. I am often puzzled by the art that evokes emotional responses in my friends, although I can probably predict dismay and disgust pretty well. (Wasn’t there a recent article on “universal” responses? My brain says yes but won’t go any further. Disgust, as I remember it, was an easy emotion to evoke.)
Anyway, I don’t think much of the art that I make provokes a strong emotional response in you, just looking at the art that you do and that seems to speak to you. And while I admire your art, I don’t feel a strong emotional response to it, although I’m only speaking through web imagery. In other words, I somewhat distrust the criteria of emotional response, although I don’t have a good substitute for it. I suppose what I would say is that at best it has to be a cautious element in evaluating art.
And to carry this through to 200 –300 years is all the more complicated and unlikely to be sorted through. Along with the personal responses, you have the cultural influences that add to the mix of responses.
Now I can see _you_ saying, “do I have a strong emotional response to this work?” and if the answer is “yes” then it goes on your list of art/artist that you want to return to and think about and recommend to your friends and keep an eye on in the future and, if you are in position to do so, collect and protect and cherish.
And if you can comprehend your emotional response with a somewhat objective eye, you might be able to make some guesses about how the art will be received in 200 years — that is, if your response is to a particular color that you hate because your mother made you eat spinach every day, it’s unlikely, even with a strong emotional response, that the color green will evoke similar responses in 200 years.
No, your “litmus” isn’t old-fashioned or outmoded so much as it seems to be naive. I read it like I read what the abstract expressionists thought (in some cases, at least) the universals were in the art they were making — universal philosphical statements, not universal visuals.
Sunil,
I wouldn’t call it a weakness to try to find meaning in an artwork: it’s natural and appropriate. In fact, I would say that if neither you nor most other people can find some meaning in a work, then it is not great art. However, I’m not sure I buy the test-of-time criterion. Art that does meet it could perhaps be called great, but it seems also possible for a great work to be so much of its time that it just doesn’t have much impact after 200 years of cultural change. Anyway, how can we judge what will last 200-300 years?
The early Impressionists, the Fauves, van Gogh; all famous examples of evoking negative emotional reactions in viewers who believed their art would not last a year, let alone two hundred.
It’s admirable to want to create works that stand the test of time but that is in the hands of time, not us.
I also think that while emotional reaction to art is important for personal growth and understanding, it’s also important to balance emotion with an objectivity that comes from an intellectual understanding of the piece and its place in art history.
June,
I guess it is naive of me to have expectations of artworks that we see here today lasting and effecting people two to three centuries from today, but I think that core emotional manifestations like love, beauty, hatred, malice, hunger etc will resonate with human beings until we are extinguished from this earth. Art that exemplifies these ideals and informs us about states of these manifestations would last, inform and live in the minds of the peoples. I am nowhere near creating art like the kind described above, but it is an ideal that I will strive for.
It is funny, the reporter who was interviewing me told me immediately that my point of view was an egotistical one…
Naivety and egotism… hmmm
Steve,
It is a difficult question that I ask. I am not too sure how we would be able to judge these feelings centuries from now, but balancing my self on the somewhat slippery slope of the lowest common denominators in emotional manifestations might be a baby step for my deeper understanding around this theme.
Tree,
Well said. Emotional depth + objectivity.
Might I might add ‘relevance’?
Maybe we can come up with a list of criteria that in our opinion will hold good for the foreseeable future and we can judge artworks based on the set of commonly developed benchmarks… Well, I guess that might take the magic out of ‘art’ and introduce objectivity stifling free expression and creativity. Oops, here I go, rambling…
Jay, where are you?
My personal criteria for significance has been my excitement for the artwork at the moment. I function like a spoiled child–whining and bored more often than happy and fulfilled. I make work that is relevant to me that I totally get into for a period of time (often no more than a month) and then I’m hunting for my next fix. I’m addicted to significance. when my personal interest has been exhausted (because I do work very hard when I’m in the moment), I feel like I must move on. So for me, significance is only momentary.
hmm, Jeffrey, perhaps your comment captures what I was trying to say to Sunil. “So for me, significance is only momentary.”
It’s hard to argue that the basic emotions that Sunil describes aren’t, well, basic. But “meaning” for me has a different level, more shallow, perhaps. And so I know that the significance I find in work is bound to be changed by time and by my own state of mind. But hunger, it seems, is both universal and eternal — or as eternal as living human beings.
I waver but never far from a sense of Integrity.
Sunil:
I’m here.
Would laughter be considered an emotional response? I do my fair share of that.
For me anything that suggests a danger to one’s person will get my complete attention. Was it El Greco who did the painting of the giant chewing on a decapitated and badly mangled was-human? The surreal film (Dali?) where an eye gets slit by a razor. Until we become so disassociated from our bodies that such stuff is met with dispassion, we will continue to react with emotion – old reptilian emotion, but valid nevertheless.
On a higher scale I would hark back to the Pickett’s Charge Cyclorama, painted by P.D. Phillipoteaux. I saw it in Gettysburg and was almost in tears. You would think that something made for the market would be somewhat wooden, but it carries a sense of ardent desperation and death like nothing else I’ve seen. It is being carefully preserved and two hundred years from now, someone may stand before it and break down in tears. It is also a wonderful example of impressionist -tinged realism with a great sense of a summer day. This adds to the impact. By the way, my great grandmother sat on the banks of the Susquehanna River and listened to the far-off battle as it was fought.
There’s more along those lines: depictions of interpersonal relationships, a WWII memorial in Moscow if I were Russian. One of my books contains an x-ray of Hitler’s head taken in 1944. It is one of the most hauntingly spooky things I have ever seen. Many of these things, charged with universal and affective themes will last.
Having said that, significance, for me, starts with a compelling hold on my attention. I look, I look again, I want to go back. Then it might become a touchstone for me. Can’t say I’m a big fan and do little consciously to emulate him, but I do think about Brice Marden sometimes when painting certain things. I compare many of my efforts to a kind of Frank Stella template screwed into my head. so, a large part of significance comes from how an artist or work moves into my working life.
Abstract shapes and colors will grip me, but I can’t characterize the emotions I feel.
Anselm Kiefer gets my goat and will continue to do so two hundred years from now.
Tree and D. both allude to something I’ve been thinking, which is that you might be able to esteem a work of art as great — or at least very good — even if it doesn’t grab you personally in an emotional way. For example, neither El Greco nor Goya (I think that’s who you mean, Jay, but I haven’t checked) has been so compelling for me, and yet I would readily admit their art has integrity and could be judged great. Closer to our time, the Robert Irwin I’ve read about (not the garden yet) is fascinating and I’m sure deserves a place as important art, but also hasn’t gripped me.
Perhaps the appeal of some art can be understood intellectually even if it isn’t emotionally. That would probably require, as Tree says, some knowledge of art history.
Steve:
It was Goya. Thanks for gently squeezing that in.
Maybe we are emotionally grabbed and also limited by the imprintings we’ve had, but we also understand, because we are empathetic beings, that art that doesn’t grab us can grab others. We understand intellectually that others are moved by, say, Byzantine icons, although they may not move us.
I like Scully better than Stella (although I like Stella’s writings a whole lot more). And Irwin’s working with transparent materials feels like it would grab me, although it’s hard to tell since only the ones that violate his principles of total immersion in the experience (ie, only those that are visible and therefore not transparent) can be photographed.
Goya. Saturn Devouring His Children. Fresco which Goya painted in his dining room. I’m sure that made for interesting dinner conversation.
June:
I have never looked closely at the Stella template in my head as it isn’t all that conscious. But I am taken by his easy relationship with the wall. His more recent work could bound off and be walk-around, but the things I’ve seen front the wall and seem to be the stronger for that self-imposed limitation.
Maybe I’ve been Irwined. Driving around L.A. at night a few years back and saw a store front whose window was a blank rectangle of glowing color. no fanfare – nothing – just that thing there. Old Irwin’s back in town? Or another hopelessly reaching L.A.-ism.
Tree:
Shall we say that Goya dined al fresco?