Experience and Intellect

Squaring experience with intellectual exercise is a challenge. Recall of experience is inaccurate and biased and exercise of the intellect can be faulty and short circuited. Back and forth between the two is needed to show the holes in one and to ground the other. We can deconstruct and logically deprive experience of meaning, and yet, most of us will still feel that there is meaning. Tools of deconstruction apply to reconstructions as well -- anything can be reduced to nothing. No one likes a vacuum -- the vacuum either will be filled by constructs of faith, which concede they must be accepted despite illogic -- or dissembled by a better understanding of the premises and utility of tools of deconstruction and the manner of their application.

Playing In The Box: Working on a Two Dimensional Surface

For me, drawing and painting are intellectual exercises as much as transformative engagements of material. Having broken out of the picture plane, I sometimes forget that one really can do what feels like infinite amount of thinking laying out an image inside the four corners (eight if you count the ground plane) of the picture box, and have endless fun and engagement watching interactions between lines, shapes, colors, complexes and seeing the depth of captured space vacillate with each new marking while predicting what each mark will do to the spatial balance. Three vectors set up the space (at least one can be imaginary or zero, and if one thinks in terms of the mark as figure and the background as ground, only one actual mark is needed). After that, there's freedom within the constraint of the edges.

Deconstructing Deconstruction

"The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say, without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work." - Derrida (emphasis added)

We ought to think about the utility of the tools of deconstruction as applied and whether the leveling of all necessarily leaves a fertile field that can bear fruit capable of withstanding deconstruction or, instead, leaves barren ground. Yes, this involves value judgments, but the concerted, and perhaps illusory, effort to absent any value judgment is in itself a judgment of value.

(Re)Treading Old Ground

Judgments about Identity are influenced by context, in large measure because of expectations. Context then helps define identity? Does sticking a frame around something transform the something from what it was into Art? Plenty of artists, critics, etc., would think it silly to still be asking. Didn't we settle this -- art is Art so long as the artist intends it to be Art?

Empty frames hanging on the wall may offer the illusion of art on the wall: the visual impression plays with long ingrained expectations; if it's inside a frame, it's art. But it's an illusion. Beyond the initial play on expectations, the section of the wall inside the frame offers no more to viewers than the section of wall outside the frame.

A vase on a table in a house is taken as a container for water and flowers, although a particularly elegant, distorted or otherwise visually interesting vase will also feel like Art, or at least, Decor. A vase under lights on a pedestal in a gallery is taken as art. It helps if the vase looks more than functional, that is, if the form is either elegant or distorted or otherwise visually interesting. Simply setting an ordinary object inside a gallery or museum space with a clever or not so clever label conveys the expectation of art but it does not transform the ordinary object. On the other hand, an object or objects can be the "materials" for art and set in a way that transform the whole into something that offers more than functional objects.

Pic-a-Day: Patterns

Does All Art Illustrate?

Can, and if so, when does art evoke rather than illustrate? Is it either or? Do we fool ourselves into thinking we are doing more than illustrating? How does an artist not illustrate -- illustrate a narrative, illustrate a concept, illustrate a feeling or emotion, illustrate a formal idea or theory?

Perhaps we evoke something in ourselves as the viewer of our own work in progress, with us the maker as the proxy for them the viewer whom we are trying to reach? Even through the lens of the viewer, are we doing more than reading the illustration?

Visual Art: Architectural Servant?

I recently heard a caution that visual art not return to the role of a servant to architecture ... it had taken long enough to break painting (and perhaps sculpture) free from architecture ... and that installation in a sense locks these mediums back into serving architecture.

The comment had more to do with art history and the church (followed by merchant patrons, etc) as historical patron of art, a time when the artist was a servant to the patron's tastes. But the comment made me think about how the objects -- paintings and sculptures -- did gain greater freedom as expressions for their own sake, a painting as a painting, a sculpture as a sculpture, both in making and appreciation, regardless of whether they fit into a larger context of display. So too, artifacts from days past, e.g. ruins, are displayed in museums, etc., regardless of whether they fit the context of display. The fact of such severed display however does not eliminate the relevance that spatial context has on the viewer's reception and perception of the work.

Sculpture and painting, while becoming distinct mediums of there own right, and breaking free of being relegated to decorating and serving architectural space, can never really break free of the context in which they are shown. Installation, or mindfulness of the ultimate display context, by acknowledging the relevance of context, does not make the object or the space the servant; rather, it integrates the two.

Perhaps we've gone a bit silly on the other end, turning buildings into sculptural forms rather than functional spaces.