Art with non-art materials: The Gimmick Danger

I use so many non-art materials in my drawing and installations -- the material(s) have identities separate from art and I am interested in pushing them away from and perhaps nudging them back toward those identities, both as units and as parts of larger migrating pieces. For example, how little or much can one change a form and keep the form's original identity present? Each of us changes every moment, really, in some way, yet basically, we are who we are and were yesterday.

Because I am drawn to playing with non-art materials, I often worry about work being mere gimmick -- its impression unable to extend beyond the supposed newness that it's made of something perhaps unexpected by some viewers looking the artwork.

Such newness is illusory. Artists paint on all kinds of surfaces; found material becomes "art" in all kinds of ways. An artist can have "success" working with non-art materials -- there's Lego art, post-it note art, etc. A look through the website for Artprize 2010 -- face out of corks, giant penny out of pennies, Hokusai's wave out of recycled plastic, etc. -- confirms the fact that there is nothing particularly novel or unusual about repurposing materials into "art": lots of artists use non-art materials. Even the "new" becomes old hat.

I went to an Open Crit at the Hyde Park Art Center. Kerry James Marshall commented that a painting by an artist on a street sign, which juxtaposed the symbol in the sign with a realistic figure painted on the surface of the sign, looked like it was "trying to be art" or what art was supposed to be too much. I'm paraphrasing -- this is the way his comment stuck in my mind. One can see that working in this mode could produce some strong work through contradictory images, but is at substantial risk of being dismissed as a gimmick, as overdone, as "too" incongruous (or pushed another way, potentially too "clever" or congruous); a sign is a sign is always a sign.

In the end, it's what the use of materials embodies.

I'm drawn to the lace wheelbarrows and shovels by one Artprize artist, Cal Lane -- the contradiction between the hard material and the fragility of lace, and they maintain their wheelbarrow and shovel identity. It's clever, but more than clever; the visual and conceptual impressions endure. Makes me crave a plasma cutter -- and skill and appropriate space in which to use one -- and start playing with slicing through metal.