Can Art be a Goal or is Art what we call Work that Sustains our Interest?

[mizore]

<p>Thinking about this overnight, I think the thing that Patrick does with traditional music, blues, and jazz is what cultures that have a community art tradition do -- they start kids early and the recruitment base is very large. People are better or worse than other people, some people quit playing as soon as they discover sports (it's mostly a male tradition though some families of blues players have women who play the guitar); other play professionally or semi-professionally (people who only play in the area will be semi-pro). So if someone has innate talent compared to others, the person has a more thorough grounding in technique before hitting age 12, and many of the people listening to him know what they're listening to.</p>

<p>A kid with a talent for visual arts there (and I knew of one with a marked ability) isn't going to get training early or even training in high school, much less an educated audience, and to continue in his practice and find an audience receptive to what he was doing, an audience that knew something about color handling in modern art, he would have had to have left the county. He quit showing work to people locally because nobody got it and people asked him to paint other things. Last time I heard anything about him, he ran a sawmill.</p>

<p>Compare the way Europe teaches foreign languages and the way the US teaches foreign languages. </p>

<p>Also, in the US, there's a strong commercial pressure to make fewer art/entertainment products and sell them to more people -- television, movies, Harry Potter. If people are entertaining their own communities with locally produced work, Big Entertainment suffers.</p>

<p>Academia also has economic motives to want lots of people to take cases to support teachers, but not to create lots of competition for teaching jobs. </p>

<p>Patrick County's music wasn't my preferred music, but I could hear that they did it well and the local radio stations in that culture tended to not play Big Hat Nashville country and often played local music tapes in with people like the Statler Brothers (who stayed in an area where the music tradition is still alive rather than move to Nashville or New York or LA).</p>

<p>One of the reason a lot of us spent time in NYC or SF (and I spent time in both) is that there are communities in those places that value art and are sophisticated viewers/listeners/readers. But it's identity art, defines us as not general population, rather than community art, which has almost vanished outside the entertainment industry's offerings. Nobody in PC thought they were special for listening to country music. It just was there. In NYC, listening to country music, bluegrass, is identity music, set the listeners off from the community around them.</p>

<p>The academic art world is definitely identity art -- and I think that's why something that was another community's identity art sat so badly with them, though people who actually were good writers tended to be able to recognize good writers in other communities. Best jazz players can hear what's good about Hank Williams. African musicians can apprehend Western music when to average non-playing Africans, it sounds like noise.</p>

<p>I don't know if I picked up this idea about arts being community or identity from anywhere in a codified form, or if I derived it from some things in W.H. Auden.</p>

<p>Maybe a sign of a thing being identity art is the artist placeholder. The sign of something being community art is the placeholder that refers to the technical way the art object is produced -- fiddler, mandolin player, photographer, painter.</p>

<p>Nothing wrong with either -- most of what I've done has been identity art of various kinds -- s.f. particularly so, and neither focus guarantees excellence. And the same music or art that's community art in its community can be identity art elsewhere or elsewhen -- bluegrass, Central American textiles, church frescos, Elizabethan plays.</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p><strong>Rebecca--</strong></p>

<p>What do you want to accomplish and what process for yourself are you interested in and/or moved by regarding your own photographs. How does photographing make you feel, or what are you trying to express or communicate, or can you give something to a community or the world or yourself with your vision? What motivates you? Are you "looking" for something? </p>

[mizore]

<p>Right now, I'm still figuring out the tools I have. I have a vague sense of the work that exists if I work toward it. I want to keep a sense of play in the work, a sense of the comic, use the sharpness my current suite of cameras and lenses give me for some purpose I'm getting possible glimmers of.</p>

<p>I need to take photographs now, which does not oblige other people to look at them. I love learning new things.</p>

<p>I also want to step away from the solemnness of much of what I see that's done as art (for me, not a goal that I think everyone should have). To do the work without thinking about the work as I'm doing it, put all the energy in execution, prepare the eye before hand but have the knowledge work itself into instinct. </p>

<p>And it may be that I'm just taking a break from writing. I often got balled up with commercial/non-commercial, critical success/critical failure invidious comparisons and when I didn't get an unequivocal answer to the latter, I got frustrated. Playing in another medium is a relief from that. I don't know if I'll move completely over to photography in my old age, but if I can do work and learn not to worry about how successful it is other than I learned something from it, then I'd have gotten something useful out of photography.</p>

<p>What I'm going to do next (in the next day or so) is some still lifes under lights. I've got a drawing manikin, a stuffed toy dog, and a Korean stone pot. Theme and variations. </p>

<p>And I may be applying for a seasonal job shooting baby pictures if I can afford it. I've had two earlier occasions where I almost did that, and didn't, one at 19, another in my late 20s.</p>

<p>For me, I think the "I am an artist" identity is a distraction. I would waste energy worrying rather than concentrating on the work. That's for me, not for everyone. If people do better work identifying themselves as artists, then they should do that.</p>

<p>"I'm creative" or "I can be creative" frames things differently. I can be creative, I think. </p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>Hi again, I'm sorry to say this but I think you are procrastinating and if I put my professor hat on I'd say you are going through stages of getting ready for a burst of work. It is my experience, watching students over many years, that almost everybody has some form of process that they go through before they start something, even on a daily basis it was intersting to see one person have 2 cups of coffee, another go round the studio seeing if they could help someone else, and so on.</p>

<p>You are trying to form a thesis, and I get the feeling that you want to win the argument that probably underpins the actions you are about take. Sadly it is just one of the many reasonable propositions, no more right or wrong than the others, so my advice is to settle for it being quite reasonable, potentially very productive and something that will only play-out through doing.</p>

[mizore]

<p>Are you the Australian Clive-Murray White who does sculpture? (I like to put the work to the name -- some folks don't have any up on Photo.net). </p>

<p> I've been through this before when I switched from poetry to fiction, and I suspect I'll survive whatever comes. Keep in mind I'm 61, not 21. :). </p>

<p> </p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>Yes that's me, 63.</p>

<p>My guess is you'll thrive on it. you've probably found my web site, this where I post photos</p>

<p> <a href="http://halfa.smugmug.com">http://halfa.smugmug.com</a>. </p>

<p>As I said somewhere before, my art is my sculpture, but I have fun taking snaps.</p>

<p>All the best Clive</p>

<p> </p>

[luis_g]

<p>Rebecca, it's normal to think about the nomenclature, feel some trepidation, and ponder your personal vectors. Call yourself and your work whatever you want, as long as it aids and abets you. Let go of the things that interfere with creative energies flowing through you & the work getting done. I agree with Clive that you're nearing the end of a gestation period. One can feel the energy welling up through you.</p>

<p> </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I like what Clive and Luis have said and I appreciate Rebecca's openness and approach to this whole topic. I've gotten a lot both out of listening and out of thinking how all of this relates to me.</p>

[mizore]

<p>It's been fun. I've read through it a couple of times. Fred, why don't you post something on seeing. </p>

<p> </p>

[jtk]

<p>Rebecca, I don't have any advice for you, particularly about how you should feel or what you should ponder. Maybe that has to do with my appreciation for wimmen :-)</p>

<p>Your use of "?" is meaningful... the question form suggests honesty, actually indicates it in your case. </p>

<p>Posts without "?" often indicate strutting, don't you think ? :-)</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>I still need to read through this, after returning to the forum after a several week absence. So, you might excuse my lack of information in regard to points made in the discussion.</p>

<p>But taking simply the end sentence of the OP, "Is trying to write Literature or make Art over all other considerations useful? Why?" I would say that nobody should make an apology for having artistic ambitions or objectives. It is a very worthwhile pursuit, even if one other major consideration may be as, if not more, important, or "useful" - that of putting food on the table and a shelter overhead.</p>

<p>Otherwise, go for it - the mind of man requires the challenges of the unknown, of the difficult to understand and the need for beauty, knowledge, friendship, wisdom and fulfillment in the all too short residency we have in this world.</p>

<p>If art as an objective inspires you, and allows you that adventure, or a significant part of it,...great!</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Reading through of what's been written by Rebecca, for me the link with existentialism is quickly made. Existentialism had and continues to have a profound impact on anything art, in particular literature. However, existentialism isn't a literary movement, that would be ignoring its foundation as a philosophy. But the main motive I see running through Rebecca's posts is that of responsibility, being responsible for the choices we're NOT making just as much as being responsible for the choices we are making.</p>

<p>If art is a goal, and art is about the artist, about the individual breaking free from the pack, the herd, <em>the others</em>, about cutting loose in a way to find ones own voice ( not only creatively, but also socially,... ), than with that goal comes a significant choice. And taking responsibility for that choice, having the intention to fully embrace it. It only takes a cliff and the willingness to jump to transform into an artist. To transform into an <em>artist of life, </em>not only being a painter, sculptor, writer,...<br /> If we see and practice art as work that sustains our interest ( just like a job that we accept to do for a living ?), and practiced in the context of the community rather then the individual then that's a choice we're making, but to me, there's more a lack of choice in that choice. It's choosing not to choose, which is fine as long as one takes responsibility for that.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>Too often the intention of the self-declared artist is to be superior to some group of other people by being different</p>

</blockquote>

<p>I see that the intention of the artist ( <em>the artist of life</em> ) is not to be superior but to embrace the possibility of choice, of freedom. And taking responsibility for the choice being made. That's the main intention right there and it's the only thing that seperates the artist from other people, or from the group that takes the artist to be superior. If the group is taking the artist to be superior, than the group is not taking the responsibility for <em>their choice</em>. The individuals belonging to "the group" are dwelling in their unwillingness to choose. But there's no magic in being an artist or not being one. All it takes is a cliff. And sooner or later everyone stands before one.</p>

[jtk]

<p><strong>"If the group is taking the artist to be superior, than the group is not taking the responsibility for <em>their choice</em>. "</strong></p>

<p>That seems an Ayn Rand perspective...not incorrect so much as a politically utilitarian pointed finger...the view Ayn Rand's fictional architect held.</p>

<p>I think the opposite is more relevant to the OT: The imagined "group" recognizes that the "artist" is in fact <em>not</em> superior, is tired of his pleas for recognition as a exceptional person, apart, with no group responsibility. The narcissism that often characterises "artists" is not similar to the power that is experienced with "real" artists (think Picasso, Stieglitz).</p>

<p>This suggests the imagined group's challenge is to <strong>take less for granted</strong> on the basis of handy labels: Is the work of the fellow with the beret compelling, or merely pleasing, for example? Perhaps that group could be more demanding of "art", rather than less so?</p>

<p>Let's not take existential thought too lightly. <strong>Sartre</strong> struggled with both individual and group responsibility... a French Communist Party Member (not just "fellow traveler") as well as individual existentialist: the paradox created his significance.</p>

<p>The easy self-satisfaction of identifying oneself as a "this" or "that" seems counter to an existential awareness, just as would labeling Sartre "a literary artist" or "philosopher".</p>

[fate_faith_change_chains]

<p>Being indecisive is like disappearing slowly. Even making the wrong choice then is more useful then indecisiveness. We can choose to feel this way or that way and act upon that feeling and face the consequence. I think art deals with this a lot also, both from the perspective of the one experiencing it and from the one creating. And in the end, if there's a fault, whose fault is it ? </p>

<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFWsGa88APM">Nobody's fault but my own...</a></p>

 

[mizore]

<p>Today's experiments with shop lights, Korean stone cooking pot, Chinese Canonical paintbrush, and a stuffed dog are up on my gallery. </p>

<p>I think that what I do is learn as much about how the medium works as I understand it (and I'll see things differently at different stages of development). If I try to be unique, different, I'll end up doing something that's colored by word-based ideas of what's unique, or something like that. If I try to do things that intrigue me, then I'll do the work that's mine to be done. If I have it in me to be original, that's just going to happen as a by-product of trying do work that intrigues me.</p>

<p>I like the physicality of photography, the real and changing objects of camera, lens, lights, gobo, reflector, film or storage card. Writing is, by comparision, way up in my head. Concepts like Art and Literature live way way up in my head, too.</p>

<p>I'm still learning how to do photography, to know intuitively how to set the lights, what each lens does best (zooms seems to be too useful, too easy not to pay attention to what the lens does, at least for me now). Photography seems like a partnership with the people who made the tools and the tools themselves. Putting too much emphasis on the tools betrays the people who made them to take photographs. Putting too little is also a problem. The only way to take pictures (or the raw materials for photographic collages) is through a camera.</p>

<p>Whatever. I like taking pictures. I want to learn more about how photograhy works, how my eye and the camera work together to snatch that light and shadow out of time.</p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>What troubles me the most is gap between what is said and what is done, it is very easy to use words like freedom but it is almost sacriligeous to ask if artists have used their imagined freedom well, wasted it or preferred a wimpy acquiescent attitude to the prevailing set of approved attitudes as outlined by the central committee/artworld/academy/ghetto.</p>

<p>Is advanced, difficult or serious art as difficult, advanced or serious as it claims? How new is new? Is there any connection between new and good? again, the trouble is a habitual reliance on a technique of making an initial statement that most people would find reasonable and then following it up with exaggerations that follow in a logical way but wind up producing rediculously flawed statements, which, because of the structure of their making, force people to accept.</p>

<p>The lack of rigorous critical thinking means that all too often people neglect to say to themselves, "first statement fine, I'll go along with that, but where the writer draws an all too long bow, that verges on looney". </p>

<p>One of the core skills of becoming an artist is to sign up to the club that thinks that insulting the public is their duty.</p>

<p>Where did this tradition come from?</p>

<p>My view is that it grew out of the legitimate old impressionist battle with the academy which they considered as having bourgeois values, the original fight was with the academy, never the general public.</p>

<p>It seems a futile activity as the public are numb to it now.</p>

<p>Certain values become almost sacrosanct and nobody appears to have the nerve to criticise them. I suppose the punishments metered out by the academy are so draconian that you'd have to be a fool to try.</p>

<p> </p>

[mizore]

<p>John Kelly, the group in Patrick County made musicians out of people who in other environments would be struggling to play a tune. It did not make a painter out of someone who had innate natural ability as good as any 17 year old I've ever seen because the group had no painting traditional equivalent to its music tradition. Groups that are educated in the craft/art are generally how we become artists/writers/photographers. Sometimes, the group is two people (Emily Dickinson and the woman who said Dickinson was cheating her time not to publish); sometimes, it's the group of kids who hit the right big city or the right university or college at the same time. </p>

<p>I'm now looking at photographs taken by three of the people active in Northern California during the first half of the 20th Century. They all knew each other, looked at each other's work, had friends in common. Did they need each other? I suspect that they did.</p>

<p>Craft and inspiration; inspiration and communication. Maybe the most compelling work needs those tensions?</p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>Rebecca re:<br>

<em>If I have it in me to be original, that's just going to happen as a by-product of trying do work that intrigues me.</em><br>

<em></em><br>

You are unique, which means your are original, the easiest way to ensure that you make original work is to attempt to capture what <strong>you </strong>consider/feel beauty to be. no stereotypes allowed. What happens when you do this is that you are actually considering all of the values that are important to you - no 2 people have exactly the same idea of what beauty is.</p>

<p>Clive</p>

[aplumpton]

<p>Groups are a "cul de sac". The thinking artist needs only his own imagination and his preferred tools to express it. Money is important only to continue to live, and to live is to create. The best of them couldn't care less what others think of their art.</p>

<p> </p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>Arthur,</p>

<p>I wish you were right but sadly you describe an ideal. Many of the best of them certainly do care, at least, about what their peers and the power brokers think about their art.</p>

<p>In reality the you've-got-to-be-in-it-to-win-it rule applies</p>

[mizore]

<p>Clive, I think for poets, the ones who interest me the most are the ones who didn't get the university gig right out of school, and who didn't get the MFA Iowa or such. Princeton tells its baby writers to get a job on a newspaper; UPenn warns them that MFA programs without the work won't qualify them for anything other than adjunct work.</p>

<p>I think some of the sequestering from the general public is that we don't have, as Patrick County had, viable art traditions. So to decide to do art, be a painter, be a poet, even be a science fiction writer, is not like becoming the local studio portrait photographer or newspaper reporter. So in this culture and probably in yours, people need a safe place for developing those skills. It's often the university; it can be bohemia. Bohemia teaches that what one thought one had to have to live successfully is exaggerated. You can drive an old Suburu and live in a mill village four room house in Kannapolis, NC, and heat with wood and have furniture your ancestors made, like my brother does, and teach part-time in local community centers and have an MBA rather than an MFA, and dress like a hunter rather than an artist.<br>

Most academics I knew if reduced to that would feel extremely sorry for themselves, some Naropa adjuncts being the exception.</p>

<p>Too many of these people traded Bohemia, with its real lessons, for security. Once you have tenure, you don't really have to do anything. You've been crowned poet, artist. Bohemia at its wonkiest doesn't allow anyone to walk on water for the rest of their lives.</p>

<p>Lew Sloan's lesson to my brother was "Don't bite the people who buy your work, and it's easier than you think if you keep working." </p>

<p> </p>

[mizore]

<p>Arthur, local tradition in Boston among some of the writers is that Emily Dickinson tried like a m........ to publish her work. Nobody really understood it. She had enough of an audience that sort of got it that she kept sending those people samples. If what someone does it incomprehensible to everyone else, it's not likely that anyone will preserve the work into times where more people might understand it better.</p>

[clive_murray_white]

<p>Rebecca,</p>

<p>Yep that's pretty much how it works here but we have huge Federal and State Arts councils that provide all sort grants.</p>

<p>Sadly in recent times the Universities have culled many positions. I always used to think that providing many teaching jobs was one of the best ways to support the arts particularly in the non-metropolitan areas, artists invariably invest their salaries in their art.</p>

<p>The "don't bite" etc line is so very true.</p>

<p>Time changes many things - I used to be a pretty handy steel sculptor with what is usually called a reputation - but when I first started making these stone sculptures everybody -artists, galleries, critics etc - thought I'd gone completely mad, which was hard to take - it has also been very rewarding to see the doubters change their minds.</p>

<p>I feel most for the younger gnerations because they simply do not get anything like the opportunites that I got. - Clive</p>

 

[mizore]

<p>Clive, people don't like rearranging their bounding boxes that much.<br>

We don't have arts grants that work year in, year out for people. You can't get National Endowment for the Arts grants more than once a decade if that, and regional arts grants tend to be along the same lines. When I visited a poet in Canada, I was amazed that artists and writers who got on the Canadian grant system were carried year to year absent problems (like not doing work). I understand European arts grants work very much the same way. Charlotte, NC, on the other hand, had grants for theatre administration but not for salaries for performers. </p>

 

[aplumpton]

<p>Clive and Rebecca, as a research engineer during my first career, I know and have been a part of the university, industry and learned society milieu(s) that award prizes and other accolades to their fellows, who support their creativity and contribute to their success, so I do know how it works in making ones way in a specific field that is very like that of the academic or professional artists. </p>

<p>During the past 7 years, our seasonal contemporary art gallery (an adjunct to my photography activity) has promoted both "in" and "not in" artists and photographers. I was initially surprised, but not any more, that the high ranking "in" artists (members of the Quebec City art elite, fine art schools and local movements) have sold much less of their work than those "not in" artists (essentially self taught) or those artists not known to local clientele (being the cases of three of our well-trained artists from Toronto, Montreal and New York).</p>

<p>Which suggests that the public (...admittedly a small part thereof, in the case of contemporary art) is the final arbiter in the support of an artist. Often, those photographers who have made their way to international fame, and Ed Burtynsky of Ontario may well be a good example here, have (as I understand it) done so primarily on the basis of their photographic approach and their perseverence in following a specific theme. The "in" group artists are often found speaking only to themselves, or in seeking and obtaining government council awards to produce work that finally few will buy (thus recognize) in most cases.</p>

<p>He might feel somewhat estranged within our material world, but the Greek philosopher Epicurus, in considering what is necessary and not necessary to our desires or needs, would probably still maintain that what are neither natural or necessary to that end are fame and power. When those are the driving forces of those producing art, the result is likely to be mediocre or artificial.</p>