Social Realism -- the sequel

I wrote earlier about how Social Realism, a powerful art genre in the first part of the 20th Century, has done a vanishing act, at least from the standpoint of painting.  The role of depicting the poor and other marginal groups in society has passed to photography, both still and video.

You name the fringe group, there's a photographer who has documented it.  For instance, teenage drug addicts in Tulsa, Oklahoma -- Larry Clark (below).

LGBT -- Catherine Opie (below).

Workers in third world countries -- Sebastião Salgado (below).

Turkish transvestite prostitutes -- Kutlug Ataman (below). Although I neither know nor care much about Turkish transvestites, I confess to having sat for well over an hour transfixed by this video, which went on much longer.

Amputees from Colombian drug wars -- Miguel Angel Rojas (below).

There's obviously no dearth of art photography documenting the ragged edges of society, and if we're unaware of either the art or the reality, it's not for lack of somebody trying to enlighten us.  But the preferred form changes with the times.

So imagine my surprise as I was googling away to find paintings made in this very decade in the good old Social Realism style.

Max Ginsburg, Foreclosure, 2011

Had the man worn work clothes and the little girl a raggedy cotton dress, nothing in this scene would distinguish it from a painting of the 30s.  "I choose to paint realistically because I believe realism is truth and truth is beauty," Ginsburg writes on his website. "I believe that realism can communicate ideas strongly."

Although this approach is out of fashion, the desire of the artist to document the situations of the non-elite clearly continues.  It will be interesting to see whether photography in its turn will become old-fashioned as a means to accomplish this, and if so, what genre will take its place.

Whatever happened to social realism?

My art book group was reading about Ben Shahn, the great Social Realism artist of the mid-20th Century, and the question came up, is there any Social Realism in today's art world?  That movement, you will recall, pictures ordinary people, especially the poor and downtrodden of the world, and implicitly criticizes the power structures that keep them down.  It includes a lot of great art.

George Luks, St. Botolph St., 1922

Ben Shahn, Demonstration, 1933

Edward Hopper, Nighthawks, 1942

One of the most enduring projects of Social Realism was the monumental effort by the U.S. Farm Security Administration to document poverty during the Depression.  Many unemployed artists, including Ben Shahn, worked for the FSA and produced photos that we all recognize.

Ben Shahn, Boone County, Arkansas, 1935 

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, 1936

















The poor we still have with us, but at least within the realm of painting, there seems to be little interest in High Art lately in documenting their lives.

What happened to Social Realism after its heyday?  We thought of several factors.  First, photography seemed to be a much better way of depicting the details of real life, and proving that extreme conditions aren't just a figment of the artist's imagination.  The FSA photos themselves were Exhibit A for that argument.

Second, Abstract Expressionism made realistic painting seem so old-fashioned.  And subsequent trends in art -- Pop, Conceptual, Minimalist, whatever -- seemed equally bent on distancing themselves from anything from previous generations.  Painters who did stick with the old traditions, such as Andrew Wyeth, may have been popular with the public but were never fully accepted by High Art.

Third, irony came to rule American culture, making it terminally uncool to be earnest or sincere.

Enough for one day; I'll write more later about what Social Realism has become in the 21st Century, as far as I can figure out.

Art reader's digest

"The Painted Word", by Tom Wolfe, 1975, is a delightful short book that should be read by anybody who's studied or read about the theories of modern and contemporary art -- I guarantee, you'll understand more from reading this book than you did from your art history teacher or from reading (or reading about) Clement Greenberg.  Yes, the references are 35 years out of date, but it is still TRUE!!  And funny.

Here's an excerpt:

The notion that the public accepts or rejects anything in Modern Art, the notion that the public scorns, ignores, fails to comprehend, allows to wither, crushes the spirit of, or commits any other crime against Art or any individual artist is merely a romantic fiction, a bittersweet Trilby sentiment.  The game is completed and the trophies distributes long before the public knows what has happened.  The public that buys books in hardcover and paperback by the millions, the public that buys records by the billions and fills stadiums for concerts, the public that spends $100 million on a single movie -- this public affects taste, theory, and artistic outlook in literature, music, and drama, even though courtly elites hand on somewhat desperately in each field.  The same has never been true in art.  The public whose glorious numbers are recorded in the annual reports of the museums, all those students and bus tours and moms and dads and random intellectuals ... are merely tourists, autograph seekers, gawkers, parade watchers, so far as the game of Success in Art is concerned.  The public is presented with a fait accompli and the aforementioned printed announcement, usually in the form of a story or a spread of color pictures in the back pages of Time.  An announcement, as I say.  Not even the most powerful organs of the press, including Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times, can discover a new artist or certify his worth and make it stick.  They can only bring you the news, tell you which artists the beau hamlet, Cultureburg, has discovered and certified.  They can only bring you the scores.

Cultural identity -- an afterthought

Yesterday I wrote about cultural identity and speculated that a large portion of the United States -- the conservative, unsophisticated, flyover-state folks -- is suspicious and disapproving of mainstream High Art.  If you still need convincing, here's Exhibit A, from this week's Apartment 3-G comic.

Notice how the guy not embarrassed but proud of being a troglodyte.  That's what I was talking about yesterday.

But here's the best part -- in the next day's comic, it turns out that the art ignoramus is the governor.  I wonder if he will be persuaded that Pollock is art by the end of the adventure.

Back in school -- cultural identity in art

This week in art history class we read about cultural identity and how artists in the third world may have a hard time deciding which elements to incorporate into art.  Should they use their traditional religious or tribal symbols or the more recent historical artifacts and political ideas that stem from colonial or post-colonial days?  In a world of global connections and universal communication, it's hard to separate out what the artist wants to say about his own culture from the influence of other cultures.

Coco Fusco, a Cuban-American artist and scholar, wrote, "In such a state of things, the very notion of cultural purity can seem like something of a nostalgic fantasy...  No longer bound to a sense of having to restrict one's focus, materials, or genre, many contemporary artists of color move back and forth between past and present, between history and fiction, between art and ritual, between high art and popular culture, and between Western and non-Western influence.  In doing so, they participate in multiple communities."

I am not a person of color, but it occurs to me that the same observations apply as I think about my own cultural heritage -- white flyover-state Protestant -- and how it affects my art.  And one of the things I wonder about is how rarely I see that cultural heritage expressed by contemporary artists in non-ironic terms.

Hundreds of artists have sneered or laughed at the white-bread American culture; almost the entire genre of Pop Art in the United States is based on simultaneous fascination with and disdain for the familiar stuff of our childhoods.

Tom Wesselmann, Still Life #35, 1963

But do any artists deal with this material in earnest?  In the 1930s Grant Wood, Thomas Hart Benton and other Regionalist artists did, depicting small-town scenes and heartland values, but Regionalism went out of fashion after World War II.

Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930














(When American Gothic was first exhibited, some big-city critics assumed it was meant as a satire of narrow-minded rustics, but Wood said it wasn't.)

Norman Rockwell, Teacher's Birthday, 1956













More recently, we can point to Norman Rockwell and Andrew Wyeth, but neither of them were totally embraced by the High Art establishment.  Rockwell was generally dismissed as an illustrator, and Wyeth because he seemed dangerously close to illustration.  And of course who can forget Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light, who became fabulously rich and later went bankrupt producing sappy scenes of little cottages in the woods, sold through franchised galleries.  I'm not sure there's anybody more despised and reviled by the art establishment.

And yet, if High Art frowns on earnest depictions of heartland America, heartland America returns the favor.  Another of the scholars we read this week observed that the concept of art as a self-sufficient activity based on aesthetics is peculiar to Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.  In other cultures, the visual tradition is determined by religion, commemoration, representation and other factors.  I would argue that heartland America is more this way than it is like Europe in terms of art.

In heartland America there is some reverence for the pretty landscape painting, the picture of Jesus, the wedding photos and the family portraits, but a great deal of suspicion of Artists and Art.  Those artists aren't decent guys like us -- they smoke dope and have nude models!  Hey, my kid could paint that!  Heartland culture never did embrace abstraction, thus skipping the large part of 20th-century art, and is even less accepting of performance art, conceptual art and other recent genres.  Do you remember the hysteria 20 years ago over Karen Finley's nude performances or Robert Mapplethorpe's photos?

There are a gazillion artists who grew up in heartland America, couldn't wait to move to the big city and put that white-bread world behind them, and became famous and successful after their escape.  Many of them used their native culture as grounds for irony or condemnation.  But I wonder whether that culture will produce any artists who will become part of the global High Art world by using the heartland culture in earnest -- or even any who aspire to do so.

What do you think?  Opinions from those of heartland heritage especially welcome.

Back in school -- theory

Almost done with the semester, and I realize that throughout the course I have been wrestling with the question "what does this mean to me?"

First of all, who is me?  Although I am intrigued by the complexities and subtleties of theory, and enjoy reading art criticism, my primary self-identification is as a working artist, a maker.  And I have not yet seen much overlap between the theory and the practice of art.

In the history of high art, there have been plenty of theory-driven movements, many with their own manifestos, clubhouses and secret handshakes.  More recently, since the definition of art has broadened, there are identifiable groupings of certain practices and approaches -- conceptual art, performance art, earth art.  But I wonder how many of the artists whose work can be validly described by a certain theory actually woke up in the morning and said "I need to make something post-structural."   I suspect the inspiration came from some other thought process, and the theory was put on after the fact by outside obervers.

Even within the famously labeled movements such as Abstract Expressionism or Minimalism, many of the alleged participants have resisted the label.  And once you drop down the food chain, to the everyday artists whose work is not found in MOMA or written up in Artforum, I suspect that theory almost disappears.

I suppose there are everyday artists who choose their formats, mediums, subjects and viewpoints from a starting point of theory.  I could envision, for instance, that committed Marxists or feminists might choose to act out their political imperatives through art rather than through community organization, writing, academic scholarship or seeking elective office.  I know that in some repressive regimes, art (visual or literary) is one of the few vehicles available to express opposition and individuality.

Ai Weiwei, Sunflower Seeds -- 100 million hand-painted ceramic seeds, installation at Tate Modern, 2010













But I suspect these overtly political artists are vastly outnumbered by artists who determine their work from other starting points.  Some may be attracted to art because of an early-discovered facility in drawing, or the inspiration of a favorite teacher or mentor.  Some may come to it as a hobby and only later become more serious about it.  Some may come to it as a job, such as illustration, advertising or fashion design, and only later decide to practice it without benefit of clients.

As I think through the roster of working artists whom I know personally, which must number at least a hundred, I can't think of any who start with theory.  Many of them not only refuse to ground their work in theory but resist assigning any meaning to it.  If pressed, they might say "I make it because I want to," or "because I have to," or "because I can make whatever I want," or "because I like the way it looks."  Many artists who strive to sell their work will say "I want to make art that's beautiful" or "that people like" or "that people will buy."

And I won't say they're wrong.  In fact, I have a hard time thinking how a working knowledge of theory makes a better artist.  I have been asking myself as I read Barthes and Baudrillard and the other intellectuals whether anything I've learned has anything to do with people who make art, or whether theory is solely the province of people who talk about art.

So far I have come up with two possible trains of thought that might take me from the station of theory and let me off in my studio.

The first is that by learning about various theories I might come up with ideas that could influence my own art.

The second is that I need to carefully examine the messages that I am sending in my art.  Perhaps there aren't many people out there who want to receive them, or who are equipped to decode them, but on the off-chance there is somebody, I want to make sure that person will get the right idea.

I'm still skeptical about the role of theory in my life as a working artist, or the lives of my everyday artist friends.  But I'm thinking hard.


What do you think?  Does art theory enter into your work?

Back in school -- reflections on feminist art

Another paper written for my art history class:

OK, I’m going to show my age. I was there for the dawning of the Second Wave of feminism, raised in the postwar age of stay-at-home moms doing housework in high heels and pearls, hitting the workforce and marriage just about when women were starting to question their cultural expectations and limitations. I was just as mad as anybody at the dawning realization that the status quo just wasn’t fair.

But I never thought – and to this day, do not think – that the way to protest maltreatment at the hands of the chauvinist pig male establishment is to maltreat yourself.

In many cases, early feminist artists took this maltreatment quite literally. Valie Export walked down the street in different kinds of creative undress, inviting people to feel her up. Marina Abramovic invited spectators to savage her with knives, thorns and loaded guns while she sat motionless for six hours, and they took her up on it.  Yoko Ono allowed spectators to cut her clothing off while she too knelt motionless.

Marina Abramovic, Rhythm 0



















In other cases, feminist artists settled for simulated maltreatment. Ana Mendieta reenacted a brutal rape of a woman in her community, and made numerous photo images of herself, both clothed and nude, covered in blood (at least the blood was not her own). Carolee Schneemann allowed snakes to crawl over her naked body.

Ana Mendieta, Body Tracks



















And many feminist artists simply offered their own naked bodies in provocative contexts to challenge the traditional view of the passive female nude, laid out for the pleasure of the male viewer/consumer. Some upped the ante by featuring female genitalia in prominent roles, either their own or false, For instance, Hannah Wilke made little genitalia out of bubble gum and stuck them to artworks on paper or to her own face and body. Francesca Woodman stuck masks and photos between her naked, spread legs. Carolee Schneemann extracted a long scroll from her vagina during a performance.

Hannah Wilke, SOS Scarification Object Series

Francesca Woodman















While agreeing totally with the feminist perspective that the art world has historically given women the short end of the stick, and something should be done to challenge this practice, I have a hard time understanding the concept behind giving yourself the short end of the stick in protest.

By contrast, I feel a great deal of sympathy for feminist artists who try to put the show on the other foot, by giving men a frisson of what it might be like to be seen voyeuristically as a sex object. Artists such as Joan Semmel and Anita Steckel painted heterosexual sex from a female perspective, celebrating the activity but presenting it for the benefit and pleasure of the woman, not the man. Perhaps male viewers felt a bit uncomfortable at their depictions of erections and penises, and if so, that was exactly what the artists wanted to accomplish.

But I confess to bewilderment over how putting your body forth as a sexual display to shock, disturb and titillate viewers is a large qualitative improvement over allowing some male artist or pimp to do the same. (I had a hard time finding images to illustrate this post that were at least sort of fit for public consumption.  A half hour on google with the artists I have mentioned will probably be plenty to ruin your breakfast.)

Artists of both genders have always felt free to use shock value as a step toward acceptance (or at least recognition) by the art establishment, and the greater the public outrage, the greater the artist’s satisfaction, emotional if not financial.  I can also see the temptation on the part of young, good-looking women to capitalize on their looks; if over the centuries men have made money off the nubile bodies of women, it’s nice for women to bypass the exploiters and make the money themselves, especially if that also provides a ticket to the higher levels of the art world. But as a card-carrying feminist I wish these artists had chosen a mode of expression that could stick it to the man without treating themselves as meat for the man’s gaze.

Back in school -- liberated from history

This week in art history class we read about the dividing line between "modern" art and "contemporary" art.  It falls somewhere around 1970 and its distinguishing feature is that contemporary art, unlike modern art and all earlier movements and genres, is not part of a continuing narrative of art history, not part of a grand trajectory of styles that change over the centuries, each one emanating from the ones before.

Instead, contemporary art has been liberated from art history.  Contemporary artists can do any damn thing they please, borrowing from any source they wish and combining ideas and motifs from many different periods, styles and sources.  They have also been liberated from those pesky concepts of standards and criteria for judging value.  Where once it was legitimate and appropriate for critics to identify "good art" or "bad art," that's no longer true.

My paper this week reflects on what has been lost in the crossing from the old world of formal standards into the anything-goes world of contemporary art.  If there are no commonly accepted standards of what constitutes art, let alone what constitutes good or bad art, then the only mechanism that can fill the vacuum is the marketplace.

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild (detail) -- sold in October for $34 million, the most ever paid at auction for work by a living artist.  The painting had extra cachet because the seller was rock star Eric Clapton.

I find it ironic that the (usually French) philosophers who hold capitalism in such passionate contempt are complicit in this abdication of value to the crass philistines of the big-time art market. The philosophers apparently like to think of contemporary art as being untethered from daily life, gloriously liberated from the stultifying traditions and history of art, able to do whatever it wants without consequence.  Yet no human endeavor is truly separable from life.  If artists wish to be supermen soaring above petty rules and regulations, they will be disappointed when it's time to pay the rent.  Those who glory in the freedom to appropriate from all sources, to give new meaning to established images, may be rudely awakened when they are sued by the makers or corporate owners of those images.

In flushing the concept of standards down the drain, the philosopher-kings of contemporary art may face unintended consequences.  If the art world is to exist without standards, what will be taught in schools of art; and if schools of art wither away, what will become the feeder system for the pro leagues of the big-time gallery/market complex?  Perhaps Yale will offer a joint MFA/MBA to reflect the realities of art production.

With no standards and criteria to be learned, who will staff the galleries and museums?  Perhaps the ideal gallerist or curator will no longer be an art history major but a marketer fresh from an apprenticeship at Disneyland.  This is already happening in the museum world, with its emphasis on blockbuster shows, but at least so far the blockbuster is seen as the necessary cash cow to support the other elevated (and worthier) missions of the institution.  In the absence of standards and traditions of high art, perhaps the cash cow will take over and the other shows and objects will be divested as hamburger.

With no standards and criteria emanating from the art world, how will galleries, collectors and auctioneers decide what is valuable?  Instead of the educated taste of a community of artists and art connoisseurs, we will have only the trendy taste of rich people for luxury goods.  Perhaps Gagosian will be acquired by LVMH, with the Hirsts displayed and marketed alongside cognac, champagne and luggage.

In inventing and/or identifying a world freed from the burden of standards, the champions of contemporary art may find themselves regretting what they wished for.

Back in school -- originality

Here's the paper I wrote recently for my art history class:

After spending a day reading about originality, I reflect on Shakespeare's title/phrase: "Much Ado About Nothing."  The critics point out that art (or by extension, any aspect of thought or science) comes either from emulating existing knowledge or practice, or from some alteration or re-direction of existing knowledge or practice.  Or perhaps both.

Either the artist works from his own self-image, his own feelings, his own experience, or he channels the ancients, reworking communal themes and images.  Or perhaps both.

This is hard to argue with.  What are my other choices?

First I reflect on the possibility that anybody can work entirely from his own self.  Once you get to kindergarten, you have already internalized a body of knowledge that comes from others.  By age five you have learned a language, and a sub-language that marks your ethnic origins and your socioeconomic status.  You have learned a family history, perhaps complex: sisters, half-sisters, stepsisters; relatives by blood vs. those by marriage; which ones you like, which ones you stay far away from.

By age five you have learned a culture.  Within your family, you know that everybody comes to the table at dinnertime, or gathers around the TV, or fends for himself; that you go to church on Sunday or root for Michigan State; that you read books or have dogs or wash the car every weekend.  Within your community, you already know whether people in the neighborhood are friendly with one another and are welcome in each other's homes; whether they go to work faithfully, are unemployed, or play tennis every day; whether they demand that their children do homework and get good grades; whether they respect or fear the police.

If you were to drop out of kindergarten and move to a cave, you would still be marked with those early exposures to culture and history, and no matter how religiously you were to pursue artistic originality, you could never escape those memes.  And every year that you stick with the program, learning more facts about your history and becoming more nuanced in your culture, reduces the possibilities that you could be totally original as an artist.

If freedom from history and culture is the hallmark of the "modern" artist, then it seems that the only true "modern" artists are those who were raised by wolves or those who are profoundly retarded.  Perhaps the most well-known example is the late Judith Scott, who was deaf and mute and had Down syndrome, and made "art" by obsessively wrapping yarn and fabric strips into bundles.  She was embraced by the art world as an outsider artist and her work sold for as much as $15,000 and is found in the permanent collections of many prominent museums.

Judith Scott

The rest of us have no choice but to bring our culture and history to our artmaking.

If nobody comes to the studio without history and culture, then where can true originality come from?  Artists can copy others and/or, having come up with some idea that works, copy and repeat themselves.  This is no different than it was 500 years ago, but today, artists are made to feel inferior if they are not "original," whatever that means.

One of the nastiest remarks one can make about art is that it's "derivative."  The frequent response, it seems to me, is to say "I didn't want to be original, so there."  Call it appropriation, call it sampling, call it quotation -- it's a preemptive defense against accusations of lack of originality.

In the end, I believe artists must walk a fine line between being influenced by their surroundings, their culture, their history (otherwise they would be brain dead) and outright plagiarism.  Too far over the line and they may find themselves in court, but currently it's a lot more difficult to be found guilty in the public opinion of the art world.

Andy Warhol, Flowers, 1964 -- Patricia Caulfield, who made the original photo, sued and won a settlement

Richard Prince, Canal Zone (right) -- Patrick Cariou, who made the original photo (left), sued and won in federal court; all of Prince's images had to be destroyed

Shepard Fairey, Hope -- Mannie Garcia, who made the original photo, sued and won a settlement; Fairey pled guilty to contempt of court in the case and was fined

Back in school

I'm auditing an art history class this semester, my first time back in a formal classroom in several decades.  Although I've taken a lot of workshops in the last decade, many of them quite rigorous in terms of workload, expectations and critique, these have all been studio courses, so to speak.  This one is pure academic, complete with assigned readings and weekly papers.

I told my son recently that it seemed a lot different than the last time around, in particular that I found it more difficult to concentrate.  He said he thought it would be the other way around, that my more aged mature self would be better at such tasks.  I speculate that something about computers has altered my brainwaves.  (A much more comforting diagnosis than early dementia.)  I know that even when I'm engaged in something interesting and engrossing, such as writing my blog or reading a thriller, I'm likely to switch over, at the least provocation or maybe no provocation at all, on an expedition to the kitchen or laundry room or to check my email.

So imagine my potential for distraction when reading such sentences as "The work of art as a sinthôme on the other hand, is a unique response, that contains the enigma it corresponds to and, that brings it about, an enigma that resonates a lacuna of quite different status in the Symbolic; it does not correspond to lacks defined by the phallic mechanism of castration but to whatever is not there, to what is yet to come, to what resists the Symbolic and to the mysterious and fascinating territory of that which is not yet even unconscious or to what is impossible for cognition."  Don't you need some microwave popcorn right about now?

I have taken to rating the assigned readings along the lines of the Michelin Guide, except where Michelin awards stars for culinary excellence, I am awarding dictionaries.  (A five-dictionary article means I had to consult the dictionary five times.)

But enough snark.  Although art critics and scholars seem to have taken a sacred oath never to say "originality" when you could say "originariness," never to say "essence" when you could say "quiddity," they do have some interesting things to say once you decode the messages.  I'll let you know when I learn anything worth passing on.  I have a fine teacher who can effortlessly translate artspeak into English, and between his slides and Google Images I'm getting to look at a lot of art, some of it familiar, some of it new.

One of our first week's readings featured Titian and his "Venus of Urbino."  Today, we may yawn, because we've seen the reclining nude a bazillion times, but in 1538 this was hot stuff.  In a subsequent post I'll give you the ten-cent version of the paper I wrote about it.

Art education -- a discouraging glimpse

I found myself on the premises of a university art school right as the semester was changing, and the halls were crowded with big trash bins full of stuff that students and teachers had pitched on their way to freedom.  I rescued some nice blank drawing paper and looseleaf binders, and last night I went through my haul, throwing out the stuff I didn't want and sorting the stuff I did.

One of the binders contained curriculum notes and handouts for art education, a class to prepare elementary school art teachers.  We all know that elementary school art teachers are an endangered species in our brave new budget-cutting world, but as I read through these notes I decided maybe we can all do without elementary school art education without any bad consequences at all.

Let's not linger on the fact that whoever prepared the class notes was severely challenged in terms of both logic and English.  But in passing, note that, for instance, "Curved lines change directions to form spirals and connecting to become shapes," and "Vertical lines move straight up and down or standing upright."

But here's a page that really yanked my chain.  It's called "Ten Lessons the Arts Teach" and I dare you to defend more than one or two of them as reasonable claims.  Perhaps the author knew what he was talking about, but in the Reader's Digest version presented to our future teachers your guess is as good as mine.

"The arts teach children to make good judgments about qualitative relationships."  I guess a qualitative relationship is like "A is better than B," but unless third-graders are doing critique sessions I wonder how they're learning to make these good judgments.

"The arts teach children that problems can have more than one solution and that questions can have more than one answer."  That is, if they haven't learned that already from math, literature and history.

"The arts celebrate multiple perspectives."  Great slogan for a T-shirt, but what does it mean?  It's OK to make blue grass, or red sky?  It's OK to make cubist drawings showing both front and back of the house?  Is that really what the third-graders are learning?

"The arts teach children that in complex forms of problem solving purposes are seldom fixed."  I wonder how much complex problem solving the kids get in elementary school art.  And I wonder how they figure out about fixed purposes.  What are fixed purposes anyway?

"The arts make vivid the fact that neither words in their literal form nor numbers exhaust what we can know."  Ah, the Zen master speaks!  This happens in elementary school?

"The arts teach students that small differences can have large effects."  Science, math, history and physical education, among others, also teach this.  Probably more so than the arts do.

"The arts teach students to think through and within a material."  Hmmm.  Zen master, are the third-graders really learning to think within the paper? 

"The arts help children learn to say what cannot be said."  I'll go along with this one; having kids draw what happens in their family is one classic way of detecting emotional trauma.  But do the kids actually realize they're saying these things?  And if no trained observer is there to interpret what the child cannot say, does it in fact help children learn that when they say what cannot be said, it's just like not saying it?

"The arts enable us to have experience we can have from no other source."  And math enables us to have experience we can have from no other source, as does reading, and learning Spanish, and digging in the dirt, and being homeless and going to jail.

"The arts (sic) position in the school curriculum symbolizes to the young what adults believe is important."  Ah, this one is true.  Yes, kids, adults believe art is marginal, not even worth being on the test, but feel free to do it in your spare time if you get cut from the sports team.

This rant may be a cheap shot.  I don't know how this particular page of pap fits into the curriculum for the future art teachers; perhaps it was provided for them to kick holes in.  But in my crabby mood, brought on in no small part this week by the antics of our know-nothing Congress, this list sums up what's wrong with the way we educate teachers.  Feed them full of mushy platitudes that sound profound for at least two seconds but make them feel good about themselves.  And hope they can magically transcend this training to do something worthwhile with our children.  Good luck.

Becoming an artist

Chrismac56 left a comment on my recent post about “what is an art quilt?”

She said, “my quilt buddies were shocked when I signed up for a two-year Art Foundation course and have virtually stopped quilting. I wanted to create more artistically but did not know where to start. I am getting a thorough understanding of creating art - moving right out of my comfort zone learning to draw and paint and loving nearly every moment of it. Hopefully at the end of the two years I will return to quilting with a new vision that will move me in new directions.”

To her, I say congratulations, good luck, go for it! How wonderful to be able to explore something you are intrigued by at length and in depth. But her comment made me think how different her road to art learning is from my own.

I came from a family that was absolutely crazy about art; my father worked in the visual realm all his life (typography, graphic arts) and did calligraphy and a little watercolor. We went to museums, we bought art by the truckload, we talked about art and type at the dinner table. Dad was the arbiter of art, and he defined art as accurate representation, aka drawing. So when it turned out that I could not draw, he officially classified me as “not an artist.” This occurred about the time I hit kindergarten.

That was fine with me; I had lots of other things to do. As far as art was concerned, it was an important part of my life, but since I was “not an artist” I had to be a patron of the arts. I spent a lot of time looking at and acquiring other people’s art, but my education and career went in other directions.

Meanwhile I learned to sew, on a strictly utilitarian footing; made all my own clothes, did drapes and pillows and reupholstery for decades; and early on, fell in love with quilts and figured out how to make them. In time, when I had made baby quilts for everybody I knew, and we didn’t yet have grandchildren who needed baby quilts, my quilts came off the bed and went on the wall and even into some small shows. But I still thought of them as home dec; in my head the A word referred to paintings and prints, not to quilts.

One day at the advanced age of about 50, I was sitting at my sewing machine working on a quilt, when the voice inside my head clearly announced, “This could be art!” With barely a pause, the voice then said, “I could be an artist!” and with barely another pause, the voice said, “I WILL be an artist!”

Of course I didn’t have a clue at the time about what being an artist meant. And unlike my blog reader quoted above, I did not decide to take art classes. I had a fulltime job that took 60 hours a week and lots of travel. I figured if I wanted to be an artist I’d better get on with it, and to save time I’d better just use the tools and skills I had already mastered, i.e. quilting.

Since then I’ve learned a lot about art and being an artist, through three different means.

First, I have taken a lot of workshops from quilt and fiber artists. Some of them focused narrowly on technical skills, but the best ones were broader, teaching about art, design, composition and color. Nancy Crow was my most important teacher and mentor and she has described her master composition classes as the moral equivalent of graduate art courses. Without her keen eye and firm guidance, it would have taken me much longer to get where I am today, if I could have gotten there at all.

Second, I have embarked on a self-guided attempt to make up for the art history classes I never took. I have always been a denizen of museums, and by age 12 could pick out a Pollock from a Miro without looking at the labels, but I started reading books about artists and art movements and have learned a lot. I have read “Art in America” for several years to learn about the contemporary art scene.

Third, I have learned from my own work how to be serious about making art. I believe in critically evaluating my own work and using that knowledge to determine what to make next. I believe in working in series, to fully explore an idea before moving on to another one; rather than flitting about and making a whole lot of unrelated pieces. And I believe in setting objectives for myself, so I don’t so easily get lured into activities that don’t support my serious work.

Maybe I’ll go to art school some day. I’m sure I would love it, and I’m sure I would learn a lot. But for now, I’m on my own – well, just me and my dozens of wonderful, supportive artist friends, some of them in person, some of them via the internet, who are helping me become a better artist.