Artistic License
ELEPHANT IN THE DARK, version One
At some point in your art career you will hear,” You are an artist? How lucky!” This sentiment may be expressed in the same week that you get a look of suspicion or even revulsion from someone else who finds out what you do. Both reactions are usually out of line with the reality. The revulsion is often prompted by suspicions you are a parasite living off the resources of the hard-working populace. Or at the very least a drug addict and degenerate. If not that, then are you really an artist? Must be a fake or a wannabe.
Those who revere the status of artist and think you very fortunate imagine studio time spent in creative bliss, punctuated by epiphanies of Nature or the soul. Studio practice in my experience is hard work and you have to get used to many detours and destinations far away from what you originally wanted to create.
Painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, on-site installation art, assemblage, video, multi media are all different enough to require specific skills and not an automatically transferable familiarity with materials.
With painting, for example, you have to let go of the copying bug. Many people think painting is a form of copying, so their standard is the degree to which the painted object matches the real object. But what a camera sees, for example, is not necessarily what the human eye sees. More to the point, the reality of an object is not just its shape and colour. The spirit of an object, its essence, is just as much a part of its reality as are its dimensions. Van Gogh’s paintings of shoes comes to mind.
What artists do is to let you see something you would not normally see. That something should not be less than the reality a camera shows. The work of art is always referential to something physical, but the art piece may not be about that object. Instead, the painting may track the attitudes or poses concerning the object.
For example, Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, Number 2” caused a sensation when it was first shown at the Armoury Show in New York 1913. It had previously been shown in Paris and Barcelona. But it was in New York when Duchamp showed the art public that the abstract motions of descent and the various surfaces of the human body could be rendered in such a way as to exclude the history of nudes as a reference system and also the conventional view of female nudes as primarily an erotic response.
In fact, the social and cultural associations of nudes were replaced by mathematics, physics, and the humorous wit wrought through juxtaposition.
The wager made by artists is that the chances taken reveal something worthwhile that would otherwise not be apparent, leading to astonishment and a heightened feeling of aliveness. Not all wagers work out of course, but even the process of conceptualizing and crafting the piece is worth the gamble and occasional “failure” of completion.
