Art & Perception

I was struck by Sunil’s post about his alteration/destruction of work into which he had put so much effort. In fact, I liked his revised “Palimpsest” very much, although I can see that it doesn’t resemble much of what he has shown us before this.

Because I have so many failed, partly completed, destroyed, altered, and despised pieces sitting around in boxes, baskets, photos and my memory, I thought I’d run through a taxonomy of my bad work and its place in my art-making universe. Ultimately my question is whether I’ve made adequate categories of “failure” or if there are others that could be added; in addition, I wonder if you can suss out what “runs” your failures — what, particularly if it’s not just a problem of quality, causes you to throw up your hands and ditch work.

So here are my categories. There’s work that simply fails — period, full stop. There’s work that gets altered, thus morphing into something else. There are series that come to an abrupt halt. And finally there’s work that’s put on hold.
Failed work has its own subcategories, of course, including failures to work the materials, failures of skill, failures of insight, and failures of resonances within one’s conceptual worlds. more… »

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.