Paul Butzi has a provocative series of posts on Musings, in his typically thoughtful style, about the necessity to seal himself off from influences, particularly the media. I have great respect for his thinking, but I offered a different take in a long comment on his recent post. I’m appropriating myself and posting it here.
Paul,
As I understand you position, you’re saying that in order to protect the integrity of your experience, you have to deliberately isolate yourself from stimulus that might become a mediating influence, because it deters and inhibits the sense of being in the moment.
My retort is twofold, one about artistic influences, and the other about mass media (we won’t talk about the intersection of these two sets, which is an interesting arena that a lot of artists use to make some important work, and always have). I contend that isolating yourself from other artistic influences is a big disservice to one’s own process.
My feeling is, that the more I know about what has gone on before me, the more roots there are to feed my own work. I visit museums and galleries whenever I travel, and I make it a priority. I have arenas of art work that I like to look at and that I respect, and large swaths that I pretty much ignore. But I don’t prohibit it from feeding my process. Even work I argue with grows me.
Allowing Italian Renaissance art into one’s process is one thing. Mass media is harder to defend. But much of the art I adore was the mass media of its era. I am writing this while I am watching my guilty pleasure, “Dancing With The Stars.” I’m working on a dance project. I’m interested in the popular culture take on dance, and I love that this show highlights and rewards a kind of (well, vulgur) virtuosity. Because I make a living from my artistic process, I pay attention to the trends and patterns in how the media mediates our culture back to ourselves.
I don’t like a lot of what I see, of course. That’s beside the point. Anyone with a lick of self respect is going to be majorly frustrated with the culture we live in. The way I inoculate myself from the media onslaught is to pay attention to it. I deconstruct how it works, what it’s trying to say, and the meta messages within it. But sometimes the production values speak to some of the best artistic output of our era. Or at least, it informs me about what is the visual vocabulary of our time.
Doug,
You and Paul live in different worlds. You photograph people in their happiness while Paul gives the appearance of a recluse. You open your heart to people while Paul appears to be not very forgiving of human frailty.
Also, retro appeal may be a factor. I remember Paul writing what interesting life Tracy Helgeson leads a while back when Tracy was describing her daily activities on the farm – tending her animals and garden, backing cookies, and looking after her children. Back to the land!
Paul preaches from his solitude while you engage in the world.
Doug,
My attitude is very much like yours. As I wrote in a previous post in which you participated, Four views of bare limbs, I actively seek out influences I think I can learn from. Attempting to ignore cultural images is somewhat similar to attempting to ignore, say, science (a part of culture, after all) because it might upset your world view or cause you to fail to see the beauty of a rose. To me, it’s all enriching. If I have to struggle to do something original, fine: that struggle is what (hopefully) makes the result of interest. In any case, I enjoy it.
Fundamentally, I don’t believe in unmediated perception of the world; we see with our minds, not our eyes. And our minds are formed by that part of our physical and cultural environment we’ve had to do with. One can attempt to reject further influences shaping the mind, but that only narrows influence without eliminating it. That can be an honorable choice, and will affect the images. I am quite confident that Paul, like you, is completely capable of producing an original and interesting response to a scene in front of him no matter how many images he’s seen. Whether it would be “better” or “worse” for having chosen a degree of insulation is unknowable.
I recently closed a similar chapter in my artistic practice—the issue of mainstream media’s influence on my work. Because my work revolves around American pop culture and media, my comment is a bit more weighted towards the pros of such an influence.
So, I told myself, “it’s perfectly acceptable to be making work about pop culture”. My reason for feeling so defensive was because in art school, it was habitual for my work to be called superficial. My work revolved around my daily life and my interactions with American mainstream culture. At art school, I was a bit of an outsider—but we all know art school operates in a different manner, so being an outsider in art school meant I was a member of the American mainstream culture. I owned an iPod, I listened to Top 40 music, I drank Starbucks mocha frappucinos in class, I shopped at the mall, etc.
To cut it short, I agree with Paul that an artist should “contend with reality directly”. But other than that, I don’t think that ‘an intermediary experience’ is any less valid than a ‘direct experience’. If such was the case, we’d all be conceptual artists using written and spoken words to express our thoughts and ideas. I’m a bit iffy on the idea of Post-Modernism, but isn’t that currently where we are—things simply representing other things, Simulacra, and The Matrix?
I completely feel you, Doug, when you say you “deconstruct how (media) works”. My conclusion is that for ordinary people, it is impossible to see the Real World. It’s an artist’s job to uncover it for them. Unfortunately, I don’t feel your frustration with the culture we live in—I happen to enjoy it very much.
Doug,
Interesting intersection of ideas. I’m with Steve when he says that we see with our minds (in spite of the wonderful title Wechsler title vis-a-vis Robert Irwin: “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing that one sees”)
The real question is, what do we see. There’s far too much stimuli for us to take in most of what’s around us — the scream on the other side of silence would send us bonkers.
So we choose — pop culture, ipods, peonies, naked men, sand dunes. I don’t think that we can avoid “influences” but we can choose which ones we will allow into our consciousnesses.
And Doug,when you say, “Even work I argue with grows me” — I would say for myself, “_particularly_ the work I argue with grows me.”
June,
“So we choose — pop culture, ipods, peonies, naked men, sand dunes. I don’t think that we can avoid “influences” but we can choose which ones we will allow into our consciousnesses.”
Nicely said. I agree. To avoid influences is like swimming against a torrential flood. it is a matter of what you choose to expose yourself to – the uncomfortable influences are soemtiems the strongest.
Doug,
In every beginning drawing, design, painting class I show lots of art to explain concepts, stimulate ideas, start arguments, whatever. I always have at least one student who does not want to look at other artists at all, but wants to do his or her “own thing.” Somehow express themselves with complete originality. I am very skeptical of this, because we are so influenced by our surroundings, even if our surroundings are fields and mountains. Even if the choices we make are to surround ourselves with as little “cultural trappings” as possible. that choice unto itself shows a profound influence of culture on ourselves.
So if students choose not to look at other artists, their default influences are everyday life, pop culture, tv, other classes, etc. Not that any of that is bad, but my point is to expand those influences, get them out of what they know (their notion of “pure original” expression) and get them to try on other ideas for size. I am less worried about them copying or “stealing” ideas than I am about them pretending they are self reliant and can somehow emit originality, free from influence. The copying and emulating other artists will work itself out with their own process and the integrity of their pursuit. If they end up copying their while lives, they lose out, but the way to avoid that is not to NOT expose them to potential influences, but to expose them to as many as possible! As someone who has had some very strong mentors, I had to pick and shoose what I took on as my own and what I discarded. That process is soemthing we do everyday in my opinion, whether consciously or not.
What I don’t want to happen here is a contest between Paul’s and my worldview. He operates on a deep level in his artistic process, and eloquently expresses the important and distracting elements of his process in a way few can and most need to hear. I greatly admire his sensibility.
I’m surprised that no one has yet commented on my status as a commercial artist. It is practically a job requirement that I pay attention to popular culture (with all my work at colleges, I have to stay up on the story arc in Grays Anatomy). There are inevitable compromises and conflicts that one must resolve in that position, about which I’ll write another time.
Doug,
I did not even read Paul’s post yet, so I was just referring to your ideas about influence, just to clarify. I also have nto a lot of research into your profession, so did not know you are a commercial artist. I would be interested in your conflicts and compromises, and also if there are any benefits to paying attention to pop culture. Even if it means rejecting it whole heartedly (maybe you could not reject it as adamantly without knowing anything about it). You may feel that much more strongly about contra dancers after a day of hearing about American Idol!
Bought a digital camera lately. Nice machine – except for one problem: every time I line up a shot and press the button, an ad comes up on the view screen. Yesterday I was going for a once-in-a-lifetime shot of two squirrels and a fire extinguisher when I had to endure a ten second spot about home mortgages. Needless to say, it ended up no sale and a missed opportunity.
For me it’s not mass media as such – some of the best talent and ideas is being poured into it – it’s the relentless drive to corner and subdue the target human. I applaud Mr.Butzi who appears to be one who pushes back. But isolation cannot substitute for inoculation: the one who can face the music might be the better dancer for it. Cut up your credit cards and enjoy the free entertainment.
Whenever people start talking about influence and the anxiety of influence, I always see it more as an issue of cultural taboos, depending on your culture and your era. Back in the days of Shakespeare, taking/stealing from the oldies wasn’t a problem. Romanticism and the cult of the individual made a fetish of individual style and originality that still lingers. Postmodernism allowed for a co-opting of cultural jetsam, but still with the overriding ideal of originality in how that jetsam was pulled together (e.g., it’s not a soup can, it’s a Warhol). Personally, I think that you can’t have enough influences and outside imput richocheting around your cranium, setting off the sparks of creativity. People who claim to have no influences always are deluding themselves to some degree, because working in any medium necessitates following the techniques of those who worked in that medium before, or at least going in the opposite direction of those predecessors, which still counts as “influence” in my book. When I did more creative writing than I do now, I always fought with my influences and got blocked by trying “not to be something” so hard that I failed to be anything. Learning to embrace your influences (like any part of your past, for that matter) is much more liberating.
–Bob (ArtBlogByBob.blogspot.com)
My best works comes from isolation… when I have people on top of me like university and people critizing, all I have left is the feeling that I cannot paint and I am loosing my time…
For more on Paul Butzi’s perspective, you may be interested in a description he wrote of his artistic process, emphasizing direct grappling with, in this case, the reality he finds on a beach. As a result of spending time and photographing there, he has “gotten a better, deeper understanding because the process of photography made me *need* to understand it.”
Although Paul rejects some aspects of contemporary culture, he does enable his understanding to become part of the wider culture when the photographs are shown. Like Piet Mondrian and Wynn Bullock, whom he cites (as influences on his thinking, not necesarily his art), what he wants is “for you to feel that flash of recognition when you looked at their art, and the only way to do that was to work toward understanding and getting that understanding to show in the art.”
From my perspective, I’m very glad to have seen Paul’s photographs, which make me long for the coast I’m far from at present. When I get there again and have a chance to photograph, I am sure that Paul’s images, along with many others, will have some degree of influence on me. Hopefully for the better!