I read
this a little while ago, and it stuck with me because I like the last paragraph:
This simple question is very complex. Being an artist today is greatly motivated by an analysis of this question. The answers could seem simple:
Because you can ...
Why not?
Because I like making pictures.
Because I can't think of anything better to do ...
Instead of answering in these obtuse ways, I have gone on a little meander: wondering about art's purpose, tracing the use of art within the landscape of art history.
One, Two, Skip-a-Few, Ninety-Nine, a Hundred ...The first artists
The earliest forms of representation referred to as art are cave paintings: dream-like hieroglyphs of cattle made schematically with purpose-built tools. Were the people who made them spending time just grinding up coloured rocks and acquiring esoteric skills while others were doing the necessary jobs to sustain life?
The cave walls became not windows to the outside world, but some form of testament to the inside one, in both senses of dwelling and mind. These pictures were made to last, made to remember something. The author was making something for the community to use as a thinking space.
Turning their hand to God
As this philosophical space grew, so the community created what might be called gods: "special forces" that explained the presence of certain unfathomable phenomena. These gods needed to find some earthly stasis and certain characters in the community had the provision and vision to create forms that could represent these life-affirming powers. These people were simultaneously in contact with the gods while being servants of the social group - producing objects and images for people to use in the act of worship. History was conceptually initiated and continued, growing in breadth and depth.
The emperor's new painting
Eventually powerful parties in societies started to employ the services of artists to represent not just the gods, but also themselves as some historic marker of their existence. The images of kings, queens and men of the cloth gave way to nobles, lords, barons and businessmen, in fact anyone who had the finances to employ artists to depict the subject of their desires. Artists (as they had begun to be known) were employed to record aspects of the way the world looked and by the middle of the 16th century an art market was in existence.
Art as storytelling (with codes and messages)
Art was not only a space for acting in an objective or political way, but also a means of storytelling in a more passive narrative sense. In 1638 Nicolas Poussin painted The Shepherds of Arcadia as a commission for Cardinal Richelieu. It shows three shepherds standing in a romantic landscape pointing out an old sarcophagus with the Latin inscription "Et in arcadia ego". Even in utopia, death existed. Allegedly the picture also contained secret messages hidden in the composition, so it may serve as a kind of map to those who know how to read it.
The artist paints himself into the picture ...
In 1656 the artist Diego Velázquez painted his masterpiece Las Meninas (the Maids of Honour). In the picture he is in the process of painting a portrait of King Philip IV of Spain and his wife Mariana. Standing beside the artist is the young princess Margarita surrounded by her various servants. In the presence of the work, the audience is flattered to be in the place of the monarchs (reflected in the mirror) as they look up at the painting, but they also find themselves looking at the artist and have to think of his lifestyle and his ego. Art starts to take the audience on some sort of Mobius journey travelling out from and arriving back at the artist.
Social politics
The use of the art platform for social commentary was already an artistic tradition when William Hogarth made his series of eight paintings collectively named A Rake's Progress in 1735. This moralising tale designed to entertain and educate the audience depicted the rich merchant's son, Tom Rakewell, frittering his wealth away in brothels and gambling dens, only to end his days in Bedlam.
The art goes public
Artists were soon being collected like anthropological artefacts from distant lands. Museums and galleries were being constructed and art was becoming public property, causing the audiences for art exhibitions to swell.
Artists who wanted to change the world
In the 1920s a collective group of artists formed and called themselves surrealists. Headed by André Breton, they wrote manifestos claiming that through art a radical shift in political reason could be achieved. Culture was the life-affirming glue between people and art was a major part of its political make up. Like the dada artists (1916-20) before them, who refused all accepted or existent forms of art, the surrealists believed that the truth was to be found in Sigmund Freud's notion of the murkier recesses of the subconscious. Cathartic, freed-up experiences lay in wait for those who came in contact with it, much like a dream being seen as a sorting of unprocessed, unfiled thoughts. The effect these artists had in changing the visual fabric of the western world is still in evidence today, although as usual not perhaps in ways that they intended.
More politics, less dreams
In the 1960s the situationists, another collective of politicised artists, began remixing ideas from dada and surrealism, adding in Karl Marx. For them, art was primarily propaganda: a means of disseminating revolutionary socialist ideas about how to, or how not to, think, which was ironic given the prescriptive art coming out of the Soviet Union at the time. Daily life was a political scenario and so was art. Art was made to express community ideals; it was part of a discussion, which in the case of the situationists revolved around driving a critical wedge into the heart of the bourgeoisie. After meetings in shady cafes or bars in Paris members would jump into cars and drive around defacing posters and advertisements put up in prominent communal sites. By adding or removing bits of material, satirical social comments were inadvertently exposed to the audience in much the same way that some graffiti art functions today.
The artist addresses the audience
By the mid-1970s the notion of a culture travelling full steam ahead for progress started coming up against issues of gender and race. This coupled together with new technologies gave rise to artists choosing to work with new media such as video or film, avoiding the historically male and colonialist forms of painting and sculpture. New forms of democratic art production ensued, most memorably when the artist Joseph Beuys claimed in a 1973 lecture that "civilization is an art work and everybody is an artist".
Colour and marketing
Colour itself has been used to express certain meanings in art. The use of ultramarine blue (lapis lazurite) in religious paintings of the middle ages became synonymous with depictions of the Virgin Mary. It also increased the value and status of the work, as lapis was more expensive than gold at the time. In 1964 Yves Klein created his own blue, which he termed "International Klein Blue" or IKB, making several series of works using the colour as a kind of signature or worldview. In 1961 Johannes Itten wrote The Art of Color: The Subjective Experience and Objective Rationale of Color where he tried to outline how particular colours make people feel.
Art makes you feel better
The simple activity of "creating art" has been understood to have therapeutic properties as seen in institutions using art therapy; this also has roots in outsider art or art brut, a sub-category of art from around the beginning of the last century. One of the earliest and most prolific exponents was the Swiss psychiatric patient Adolf Wölfli who produced over 2,000 super-intricate and elaborate drawings at the beginning of the 20th century.
Art as self expression: the need for originality
A history of expressing ideas and emotions through art is a complex thread culminating in the image of Jackson Pollock wildly and energetically throwing paint onto his canvas to enter the new virgin territory of art as pure emotion.
Knowing your place in the world
The process of making art puts the author in direct contact with the artistic context; art history and cultural background surround the work and all act on it in a discursive way. So new art is always in some form of synergetic relationship with both the past and the present as well as its cultural context. As China opens up its trade routes to the West so Chinese artists are beginning to be able to communicate across cultural boundaries through museums and galleries of the western world.
The last frontier of the real
Recently, art has become a kind of last bastion to the real. Its contemporary status has been cast by former challenges to "the perceived reality of things". Art is always a picture making, once an object is situated in an artistic context it is fated to be an artistic version of its former self, for instance, the cliched image of Fountain, the 1917 sculpture by Marcel Duchamp. But situated in the image-flooded, mass-marketed culture of today, ironically art is probably more than ever a confirmation of time, space and actual object.
Thank You Gavin Turk.
Labels: art, Gavin Turk
I totally forgot about this little known fact. From 1912 till 1948, artists competed in the Olympic Games, same as athletes, same prizes. Read the history of this on Wikipedia. I wander who our national team would be if it continued today. And whether we would prove more successful than our muscly counterparts. After all, we haven't had funding for years...
