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04/24/2008: "LET’S DO AWAY WITH “ART” -- Or I’ve got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts." by Walter King
ART:1: skill acquired by experience, study, or observation
synonyms art, skill, cunning, artifice, craft mean the faculty of executing well what one has devised. Art implies a personal, unanalyzable creative power
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary
Art is the product of aesthetic human creativity as we artists use the term most generally. But I’m sure someone will argue with that statement. There is a group of anti-aestheticists out there who disagree with the term beauty. I have a favorite button I sometimes wear to openings that says “Art? Why not Bob or George?”
So why don’t we just quit using the word art altogether? I mean why have categories for anything for that matter? Don’t they just get in the way of progress, of beauty, of art? I mean why even have a category for certain kinds of human endeavor at all? To put something in this category or that category…well doesn’t it hinder us from seeing that perhaps the same item could also fit into another category just as easily? Why pigeon hole such an important idea as art?
I mean, suppose we put an ice cream cone in the category of deserts. That would seem appropriate wouldn’t it? But someone might come along and say “but it is also generally a food and should fit into that category.” Yes. This is true. And someone else might come along and suggest that an ice cream cone might also fit into that category of tools with handles since the cone is really a delivery device to get ice cream from the counter to ones mouth. Also true I respond. While someone else comes along and suggests that it fits also in the category of something cold. Someone else might complain that we must define cones as those with and without ice cream in them. I suppose so. And then those categories in which the cone carries one, two or even three scoops of Ice cream. And those categories that are commercially packaged against those that are hand scooped from behind the counter or from the container straight out of the ice box at home. In fact someone else might categorize an ice cream cone as one of those foods that are not healthy due to the amount of fat and sugar and excess calories. While another might categorize it by it’s favorable adjectives, tasty, yummy, creamy…or those of higher income might say that only the best ice cream is really the only ice cream. Those other, cheap, tasteless brands are not really ice cream at all. Certainly sherbert falls into another category wouldn’t you say? Only the best ice cream is ice cream.
Ultimately it is all of the above. And we can simplify our discussion of categories by simply stating that ice cream is a food defined by the category desert. From there it has many aspects that fall into other categories with differing qualities and we can agree with all of these while still calling ice cream a desert food. After that and depending on the context of discussion we can use any of the more specific or collateral definitions and categorizations that fit. They all hold true given their context.
Now the human brain naturally and intuitively recognizes and uses categories. It is simply part of the pattern recognition ability that in part drives how we know what we know and the words we use for categories help us communicate our ideas. For instance we know that some things are poisonous to eat and other things are good for us to eat. These are two categories no one wants to blur for the sake of their health and safety (although I‘ll say more about this later). Our pattern recognition ability is naturally pre-wired into our DNA but can be enhanced and made more sophisticated, more articulated, using logical assumptions and some training. We do this in elementary school when we show students a fork, a hammer, a shovel, a cup and a coconut. The teacher asks which of these does not belong with this group? Of course the answer is the coconut because even though all of the above are manipulated by hands only the coconut does not have a handle and is not man made. It also is the only one in the list that belongs to another category called food.
However I could invent a category in which a food might belong to the category mentioned above. Let’s say the group is made of a fork, a shovel, a ball and an ice cream cone (single dip). Now the food item does in fact belong to the group of tools with handles since the cone itself is a kind of handle ( and is also made by humans by the way.) While the ball, although made by humans and manipulated by hands does not have a handle itself nor is it a tool for moving or containing and in fact falls into quite another category altogether…toys. Therefore the ball does not fit into the category. On the other hand the ball and the coco nut might belong together in a category called Spherical things without handles including balls of twine or yarn, certain fruits and vegetables, sporting balls of various sorts and any other kind of ball that is spherical in design. You see a thing can be in many categories at once. And it is not really very hard for the human mind to make the fine distinctions between several categories selecting those items that belong in this one or that one or both without much trouble. Funny…we are not confused by this sort of complex interchange of categories and are capable of holding more than one idea in our heads at the same time in doing so.
So it seems to me that we have tried very hard to undo the meaning of the word art. Or perhaps it is that we have tried very hard to enlarge its meaning to include almost anything if not everything…to the point that the word seems to have no meaning at all. Kind of the opposite of the 400 mythical Inuit words for snow.
( www.mendosa.com/snow )
Now remember that meaning is something we humans ascribe to a thing or an idea via words. When I use the word ice cream everyone who knows what that word means in English understands what I am talking about at least to a general degree. But apparently when someone uses the word art it becomes highly debatable what the word actually or even generally means. And if I say this or that is art someone will undoubtedly say no it isn’t and give reason why. Or if I say this or that is not art someone will say of course it is and give their reasons. Now the reasons may or may not have much to do with either the general or specific use or meaning of the word art. But that doesn’t stop them.
For instance : It would not be logical to say “just because you say a ball does not fit into the category of tools with handles doesn’t mean balls do not have the right to call themselves tools with handles. You know a ball is a tool in various games in which hands are used. Everyone has the democratic right to freedom of speech so a ball could call itself a tool with a handle if it wanted to.” Or “Your definition of the distinction of those items as tools with a handle does not include items that are also manipulated by hand and at least in spirit could be said to be handled. So you are wrong.” Or “ Some of the best tools never got handles, some baskets don’t have handles for instance, or sunglasses which have nothing specifically designed to be held by the hands but rather by the ears… so what do you call those long things on either side: eardles? And what about ear phones for that matter?”
A composer, a playwrite, a novelist, a musician, an actor… none of these artists are expected to do anything but what they do. If in fact they do some other art form it is celebrated. But visual artists…painters for instance are challenged when they are in college, especially most grad programs to push into some other area…installation, word art, conceptual art or possibly video. I’ve heard all sorts of statements from faculty from other colleges about how painting is passe, out of fashion, dead. My experience is nothing ever dies. On the other hand there is a large sense of confusion about what painting is, in part because there was a season when photographers wanted the same status as painters and actively lobbied gallerists and museum curators to see the semblance. The blurring of borders between one category and another had begun. And while there is still some good that comes from this kind of experiment it is reactionary and needs a catalyst or establishment against which to react or to focus its attention. The blurred border movement needs clear borders to blurr. Anti-aesthetes need a philosophy of aesthetics to be contrary. And Post-Modernists need tradition, history and formalism to deconstruct. Without their doppelgangers these movements have no momentum…they have no positive core concept of their own. They are simple criticisms, sarcasms and cynicisms.
Avant Guarde once meant to advance. We really no longer speak of advancing, or stretching the envelope, or the cutting edge…today being cutting edge means your work ‘looks’ contemporary, or whatever term is the most up to date…I thought it was honest for a little while when I heard the word ‘dodgy’ being passed around in New York circles to describe young artists who were trying to thread their way through the ideas of the day. Between not looking like some other artist doing something similar, changing the words to the manifesto so that another version seems more original, pretending not to be original on the one hand while trying desperately to do something no one else is doing, this dance of the origins is more like a game of dodge ball.
We seem to be circling around something rather than moving that something forward.
But remember that the ball and the coconut belong together in a category called spherical things without handles.
