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11/28/2005: "The Hard Work" by Walter King
I have always found it interesting that science fiction seems to forecast certain scientific discoveries. When Mary Shelley invented Frankenstein she, and to this day a lot of others, believe she was writing a gothic horror… a ghost story. In fact she'd written perhaps the first true science fiction novel that explored the beginnings of new advances in technology predicting as it were what we accept today as common place…that is, bringing people back to life with the aid of electrical charges. “Clear” is such a common command that we know exactly what is happening even if we only hear it shouted from the TV while in the kitchen making sandwiches during a segment of “ER”. She also made some pretty serious comments on the consequences of the Romantic Movement, the ethical foundations of medical and technological research and the dilemmas of the human spirit with commentary on man‘s relation to God, much of which we still grapple with today.
And all this came from hearing of Calvani’s experiments with electric shocks to make dead frogs' muscles twitch. Not bad for an 18 year old girl. But the fact is she had no formal education. “She was left to educate herself amongst her father's intellectual circle that included the critic Hazlitt, the essayist Lamb, the poets Coleridge and Shelley during the early 1800‘s.”(http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/mshelley.htm)
Her father was the writer and political journalist William Godwin . She was most likely also aware of her mother’s writings about feminist issues. Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the first feminist writers in England after the French revolution. Her mother’s friends included the painter Henry Fuseli, Erasmus Darwin, Charles's grandfather, and William Blake, who illustrated an edition of her book, Original Stories from Real Life. I’m sure those after dinner discussions at the Godwin house were heady and engrossing conversations for a young person to be part of with at least a somewhat more than average intelligence . And of course Mary ran away with and later married Percy Shelley the Romantic poet. I mention Mary Shelley and her first book essentially to make some connections between the rigors of art and science and to set the tone for the subject of this blog.
I recently read that they’ve announced the new Nobel Prize winners in Physics. One of the winners said something like this:"in Science all the easy stuff has already been discovered."
I assume that he was suggesting that only the really hard, tedious and deeper work is yet to be accomplished. And I think that is probably true. Da Vinci invented just about every major mechanical device now known to man at one point including machine guns, bicycles, flying machines, various winches, catapults and cranes and still managed to make some great art. Edison in the same vein invented the light bulb, phonograph, telephone, even made some of the first animated films including a version of Frankenstein which is now lost. But these early artist/scientists were working on a Newtonian model of physics. I mean figuring something out about gravity by watching an apple fall is one thing but finding a planet with an Earth like atmosphere circling a sun on the other side of the Galaxy or plotting a new sub-atomic particle/energy relationship is quite another. I’m probably selling Newton short. But he was able to deduce most of his ideas through simple thought experiments and direct visual observation. But the deeper our science became the more complicated. To actually ‘see’ beyond the ubiquity of the life around us has become essential. In fact we seem to have come up against a new wall that may make the next important steps quite nearly impossible…the fact that at certain sub-atomic levels our very intent to observe seems to interfere with what we are observing which makes the standard scientific method and the accompanying verifiable experiments appear iffy at best.
Both science and art require, it seems to me, a certain rigor, a dedication not only to ones craft but to the intellectual preparation, emotional discipline and volitional personality traits and practices required to achieve at a high level. Given the statement about the easy discoveries in science mentioned above I wonder if we aren’t at the same place in the arts. Has the easy stuff already been done? And do we still ask as much of our artists in terms of originality and rigor as we once did? Can we even act directly upon any given idea or is our ability to do something direct now skewed by some unconscious response that slips around the corner every time we reach out to seize it… like an earthworm slipping from between our fingers back into its hole.
So let's go at it straight on. Is there any reason why an artist should be more lax than a physicist? During the renaissance it is said that artists finally rose above the blue collar guilds that controlled artistic commerce and achieved at the level of statesmen, philosophers, scientists, mathematicians and writers of great poetry and literature. After being considered equal to craftsmen, or what we might consider the upper end of the blue collar trades today, they often entered the cadre of the intellectual and became movers and shakers. Are we still achieving at that level? Or do we even believe this is still important, or even a good thing at all? Isn’t it better to be gifted and dumb? Do we now believe that art should not pursue lofty goals but simply make us feel good? Feeling good is ok isn’t it? Is it enough that an artist simply express themselves? Or is that little more than when the body expels excess fluids? Is easy art great art? Let me rephrase that…is spontaneity the key to making great art or does it require an artist who is so good that it makes art look easy? Is it enough to make art for ourselves and hope someone will like it or should we go off in search of great patrons who will fund higher and loftier projects…or is that just another form of commercialism and therefore prostitution? And maybe the most controversial question might be “is there any original thinking out there at all anymore?”
Einstein, it is said, once told his son “You are not thinking, you are merely being logical.” In effect he was explaining that simply thinking in a logical straight line is not enough. Some lateral leaps may be needed, non-linear boundaries between one field and another might need to be bridged or at least better defined to see where bridges may occur naturally. I have come to understand that our logic is both incomplete and therefore often misguided due to our temporal position in the universe. In other words because we are limited by time and space we simply don’t know a lot of things and therefore the results of our logic is incomplete however carefully we apply it. As they often say in both Maine and Pittsburg “you can’t get there from here.”
In fact, maybe Einstein’s question might be turned on its ear for the artist ..."you're not communicating, you're merely being expressive." I've said this time and again to students who have lots to say and the desire to express it but have avoided the disciplines required to communicate those desires and ideas. You may think I was being oppressive, too academic or even elitist. But to me it is like when a child cries. You know it is trying to tell you something but you must do all the work to understand what it is because children don‘t yet have the language to communicate more than their discomfort or the opposite. And I promise ambiguity is not nearly as interesting as the well crafted intent to seduce someone to see something they may not want to see without giving away the punch line too soon…to bring someone to an epiphany without them realizing that’s where you were taking them.
And it is one thing to simply express oneself. It is another to have something profound to express in an original and unique way that also happens to open up new doors in any given form or genre. Whether through formal education or life’s lessons aren’t we expecting something from our art and our artists that shed light on, pronounce the wisdom of and connect us to something about life that we recognize or learn to recognize in one form or another? Isn’t this the basis of our first artistic ‘aha’ moment when we see a painting that is so realistic that we gasp ‘it’s just like a photograph’? But of course a photograph is not life itself, just another copy, an illusion, a mechanical abstraction on two dimensions. But we admire the overwhelming skill and discipline, the rigor of the artist’s effort with which it was accomplished as if it had something terribly important to say… whether or not it really does isn’t any longer as important as the visual stimuli. For most of us this kind of photo realism is the entry into a search for skill. And for many of us once the skills are learned it is also the end of the search and the beginning of a new search. Realism often becomes the holy grail of art for many young artists…to make a thing look so real as to fool the eye. The French called it trompe-l'oeil (to fool the eye). But French aesthetics relegated trompe-loeil painting to a lower shelf than other kinds of painting and subject matter because it was simply a trick and had little to say beyond the visual effect of the trick (with maybe a few exceptions.) Plato had suggested that this kind of painting made liars of artists and that neither they nor their art should be trusted.
But still it represents, for many of us, a deeper desire for that rigor that maybe we have lost in much of our art. Ok so you probably think I am now advocating photo realism as the only important artistic form. Not so fast. I can hold two contrasting ideas in my mind at once. Willem de Kooning could also work as a realist yet pushed on to create a very abstract form of painting that also took both rigor and vigor to create. In his case it came from a deep understanding of abstraction after years of studying cubism and the color and forms of Matisse.
There has been a controversy over form and content for the last 100 years or so that is deeply intellectual and vigorous…although at times becoming political and fundamentalist, one side swearing that all art should be this way or that way. I am not joining either side here. My issue is with rigor not the politics of which art form is right or wrong. Besides much of this debate is really more marketing than anything else.
Rigor implies rules and standards. Today I hear the statement that art is subjective so often that I’ve almost come to believe it myself. But the truth is that art is both objective and subjective… without some objective aspects no one but the artist could possibly understand what was going on at all. Let me give you a few of my own principles concerning visual art…
--Before I call a work visual it must have something visually stimulating besides the fact of being visible. Just showing an object or objects in a gallery or museum does not make it a visual work of art.
--An expression of a concept is not by itself a work of visual art. An artist must manipulate the plastic medium in some materially transforming fashion. This material transformation also suggests a spiritual transformation. It is the peak behind the curtain that is for me the beginning.
--I’m always looking for images and symbols that rise above themselves…that in some way become more because I’ve had a hand in drawing them, cutting them, sculpting them and then organizing them two or three dimensionally. While ‘found’ objects may suggest something on their own, they are not mine until I use them or modify them in some way as to say something more than their original suggestion.
--A visual form should become self defining. Upon beginning a work all aspects of that work must eventually come to represent some aspect of or support for the idea of the basic visual form of that work.
These principles are what constitute ‘making’ for me. Of course I have lots of other rules, standards and strategies. But I think the above are the core of my intentions.
Whether an artist is working within a tradition or not he or she applies rules, standards, principles signs and cues that guide, restrict and move their ideas forward. Even if one is trying to blur or explode known boundaries into something totally new one must know the boundaries so as to contradict them in some fashion. New rules, standards and principles, signs and cues are formed. Ultimately these help define style, voice, direction, intention… Suffice to say that without banks a river becomes a swamp… beautiful to see at first but eventually what grows in abundance also begins to decay, putrefy and stink.
