Art & Perception

One of the more valuable (to me) artworks in my studio is a linoleum print made by Dan Cautrell, a artist I admire a lot and know just a bit. The print reads

Statement of Purpose

I do the work because I want to.
I do the work because I like to.
I do the work because I know how.
I do the work to explore myself.
I do the work to engage others with thought, word, and deed.
I do the work because I have something to say.
I do the work because I have seen something beautiful.
I do the work because I have seen something ugly.
I do the work to be the kind of person I want to be.
I do the work to earn money.
I do the work to stay when I must go.

=cautrell

The print hangs right by the studio door, so I can see it and be reminded by it every time I enter or leave the studio.  One of the reasons this is a favorite of mine is that it so neatly captures how our reasons for making art can be different at different times.  You don’t always have to be working on something for the same reason.  I’ll bet I’ve done work for every single one of the reasons Dan has listed; lots of times, I’ve done work for several of these all at once.

I know that, for me, the act of writing things down seems to make them more real.  I’ve often wondered what effect making these prints (mine is numbered 73 of 200) has had on Dan.  It’s an interesting reminder that making art has concrete effects in both the lives of the art-makers and lives of the people who end up living with the art day to day.

Arthur, in the comments to this post, wrote

This is so, I think, because great (or even merely good) art is not primarily concerned with presenting literal truth. (This is more the role of science and philosophy). Rather, the role of art is to present compelling fictions. By “fiction”, I don’t mean necessarily a conventional narrative. I mean that works of art create their own worlds, with their own rules.

Robert Adams expressed some thoughts that I think are related to this in his book Beauty in Photography.  First thought – “The job of the photographer, in my view, is not to catalogue indisputable fact but to try to be coherent about intuition and hope.” And the second thought is “There is always a subjective aspect in landscape art, something in the picture that tells us as much about who is behind the camera as about what is in front of it.”

It seems to me that quite a lot of landscape art (painting, sketching, photography) is not so much about presenting a compelling fictional world, separate from reality.  It’s about presenting a glimpse into how that reality is seen by the artist.

I’m not sure if that’s agreeing with Arthur or not.  But I think Arthur’s got a fascinating insight, and I’d sure like to see more discussion along those lines.

(photograph above not particularly relevant to this discussion.  I just think the blog looks nicer with images embedded in the stream of posts.)

In his book The View from the Studio Door, Ted Orland goes on at length about the function of Art in society.  In particular, this passage caught my attention:

Most historical artwork played a role in society or religion or both.  There’s pretty good evidence that Bach himself understood that to make work that mattered meant addressing art at every level – from the purely technical to the completely profound – simultaneously.  He once composed a set of training pieces whose purpose, he said, was “to glorify God, to edify my neighbor, and to develop a cantabile style of playing in both hands.”

Some version of Bach’s three tiered work order might be a worthwhile guide for artists working today.  Today most artwork is not part of something larger than itself.  It certainly isn’t within the art world, where the embattled but still dominant postmodernist view holds that artists are not even the authors of their own work – that there is no such thing as an ‘original’ piece of art, but rather that we make art by taking things out of their original context (i.e. deconstruct them) and reassemble them in a new context.  The idea that the subject of art is art may be a stimulating intellectual proposition within the art world, but it goes a long way toward explaining why most non-artists find zero connection between their own life and that same art.  How deeply can art matter if the only fitting description of its meaning and purpose is “art for art’s sake”?

I’m highly sympathetic to Orland’s view of things.  What do you think?

I’ve been working on a project.  I’d like folks to look at it and give me feedback.  Apropos of my comment about critiques of single works that need to be seen in a larger context, you have a chance to look at just shy of 90 photos. 

Before you look, some information that may be helpful.  The project is open ended – rather than having a definite goal in mind, it’s loosely organized around several goals.  I’m happy to discuss the goals, but I’d like to get some feedback from you all first.  There’s no significance to the format on my web site other than it’s convenient for me, the pages download in a reasonable time, etc.  Likewise, the order of the images isn’t meaningful to the project; they’re just presented in rough chronological order. 

So I’m interested in having people look at this bolus of photography, and tell me what they think.  Comments on individual photos, comments on the overall collection, comments on the overall direction of the project, or changes in direction you see as you browse through – those are of great interest to me.  Comments like “You should use this cool slideshow flash applet to present the images” are of less interest to me, primarily because the web is a view of the project seen through a glass, darkly.  The real project is a set of prints, 15″ x 20″ image area, intended to be overmatted out to 22″x28″ and then framed. 

One of the things that’s really helpful to me is seeing your questions – any questions. The title of the project, ‘sdg’, is significant but not something I’m prepared to discuss just yet.  Other than that, though, anything is fair game, ranging from technique and technical process all the way through to motivation, goals, whether I’m trying to communicate or not, the technical or artistic quality.

What I’m really hoping for, here, is more than just making this post and getting some comments and having it end with this post; I’d really like to start a conversation with several of you that goes on and on and helps guide the project as it evolves.

The web page of the project is at http://www.butzi.net/galleries/sdg/sdg.htm.

Stephen Dietz is a playwright I admire greatly, not only for his wonderful, beautifully crafted and deeply insightful plays, but also for his incredible attention to process and craft.  Once, after watching Stephen listening intently to an actor reciting lines that Stephen has just revised during a workshop of one of his plays, I asked him why it was so important to him to hear the words read aloud.  He told me he had learned, long ago, that when he was confronted with a choice in his writing between meaning and sound, to go with sound every time.

A few years ago, I had the extraordinary good fortune to hear one of Stephen’s lectures, in which Stephen proposed what he called “The Four Seductions” – pitfalls that ensnare us and seduce us away from the real business of creating art and instead lead us down blind alleys and stymie our growth as artists. 

Stephen’s list of the Four Seductions is:

• Distrust of Beauty 
• Disparagement of Craft 
• Criticism 
• Blaming the Audience 

Distrust of Beauty – In the current art world, it’s fashionable to advance our work by making it ‘edgy’.  There’s a sort of consensus that ‘beauty’ has been done to death, and that if a work is beautiful, then it  must be passé.   There’s a sense that since beauty is a quality that’s awfully hard to pin down, that it  must therefore be unimportant, and that striving for beauty is a fool’s errand.  It’s a whole heck of a lot easier to provoke an emotional response by doing art that’s gratuitously offensive than it is to make art that arouses a passionate response by making something beautiful.  Because of these pressures, it’s often the case that we’re not attentive enough the place of beauty in our art.  And, before we get caught up in the “I don’t want to just make pretty things”, I’d like to quote Eolake Stobblehouse, who wrote that “Note that beautiful does not necessarily mean pretty. Pretty is Beautiful’s popular sister.”

Disparagement of Craft – Likewise, there’s a sense that craft is not what art is about, and therefore it’s unimportant.  Thus we get plays that are poorly structured, with poorly written dialogue and hopeless plotting, offered up with the excuse that because the subject matter of the play is socially relevant and ‘edgy’ (note the implicit disparagement of beauty) we should excuse the poor craft.  Stephen told an anecdote about going to Europe with his family and some friends, and seeing all the glorious sculptures done by Michangelo, Donatello, et al.  He asked his friend (a sculptor, apparently) why no one did representational sculpture any more.  His friend replied “Because, Stephen, it’s Very Hard to Do.”  Craft is sometimes hard, and the temptation to slip one past can be overwhelming. 

Criticism – It’s far easier to criticize than to create.  There are lots of artists in the world who look at work and say “Hey, I could do that, and do it better”.  But somehow, they never seem to get around to doing the work – they’ve been distracted by the flush they get when they elevate themselves above the productive artist by picking apart work that’s actually been done.  Stephen suggested that when you catch yourself engaging in some criticism, that you should look at what you’re thinking/saying.  Are you trying to figure out what went wrong, and what might be done to put it right?  Or are you looking at the work and trying to find ways to run it down so that you feel superior to the artist? 

Blaming the Audience – Finally, when one of our works of art fails, the temptation is to blame the audience.  They aren’t perceptive enough, they aren’t smart enough, they don’t have the right education, or perhaps they simply aren’t sensitive enough to respond correctly to your work (which you feel is absolutely superlative in every respect).  If only we had the RIGHT audience, we assure ourselves, our work would get the recognition and acclaim it (and we) deserves. 

I’m sure I’ve done an inadequate job of trying to capture Stephen’s ideas accurately – for one thing, he advanced all of this in a far more articulate way than I ever could.  But I heard the lecture a couple of years ago, now, and I find that I’m still turning all these ideas over in my head. If you can look past my meager presentation and try to get to Stephen’s ideas, I think there’s a lot there for consideration. 

I recently asked how John Singer Sargent managed to capture the incredible sense of luminosity of the tent in A Tent in the Rockies. I’ve seen the painting in person; trust me, the interior of the tent looks even more luminous in the painting than it does in the web reproduction above.

Karl made two excellent comments about what’s going on, one dealing with contrast of chromaticity and one based on the viewer’s inferences about the tent material. I think those two comments are on the right track, but I also think there’s something else going on – I think Sargent is taking advantage of some quirky properties of the human visual system.

Check out this web page: http://web.mit.edu/persci/gaz/; if you don’t get the pop-up window (I didn’t) click on the ‘click here’ link as directed. Run the little animated demos, which are all about the sort of effect I thinking Sargent is using to good advantage. These demos (and the embedded explanations) are a fascinating exploration of some of the properties of our visual system.

It looks to me like Sargent has cleverly chosen the composition of this work to be similar to the ‘simultaneous contrast’ illusion – the bright, translucent area of the tent is cunningly surrounded by a region of darker ‘shaded’ canvas, so that the central portion seems even brighter.

I’ve found my minimal understanding of some of these effects to be useful when I’m adjusting a photo to be printed. I’d imagine they’d be similarly useful to any visual artist who has to contend with trying to eke out an expanded sense of brightness or darkness from a medium with fairly limited brightness range. Does the painting world know about this stuff and use it on an everyday basis?