Dormition

...Am I cold to wish for a speedy

painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays,

that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly funcion?

W H Auden

My Current Series

I've been working on a series of paintings, of which hese are the first.

It is a foot by a foot; a size I like here because of its anthopomorphic connotations. The series uses as its starting point various texts, largely either Bach cantatas or poems by W H Auden. The composition is determined by anylising the phonetic structure of the words, and thinking about their semantic meanings. The aim is to apply my own semantic response through the painting of what Deleuze calls percepts and affects.

Another From the Same Series

Another painting from the same series.

Considering what I claim about horizontal lines equating to horizons, it is not surprising that these paintings read as landscapes.But there is no specific imagery intended in them. Rather, the idea is analogous to Bach's dance suites: they are certainly in dance form, but certainly not intended to be danced to, except perhaps with one's mind.

A Painting About Horizontals

Here is one of my paintings. What is it? Rather, what is it about?

My basic intention was to do a series of paintings of horizontal stripes.

One of my teachers once said to me: "In sculpture, there are basically two motifs. Verticals are standing figures and horizontals are reclining figures."

I think this is pretty true. Extending the notion: I think that verticals represent the human struggle to live; horizontals suggest rest or death, or subsidence into the infinite horizon.

technorati tags:JonathanChristie, Painting, Expressionism, Heidegger

"I'm sorry, but putting a pile of used cigarettes on a gallery floor might be art to some people, but it isn't to me."

That's and old question: what is art? It's always been one that has no clear answer.

Until a century or so ago, it was a question that didn't come up much. Even if we couldn't define what art was, we pretty much knew it when we saw it. A painting in a frame, of a person or forest; a cathedral, a poem by Shakespeare: all these things were indisputably art.

But about a century ago, European artists started to be strongly influenced by artifacts from other cultures; things like straw and wood masks that did not at all fit in with European conceptions of what art should be. Painters like Matisse started using gaudy colours, forms in painting became 'abstract' and Cubism was born, and, infamously, Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in a gallery.

And then came Pop Art - Andy Warhol.

And popular movies.

Go to a major gallery these days and you are likely to be confronted with a plethora of forms; a bewildering array, all claiming to be valuable and high art.

Ask a person on the street "What is art?". Likely she will have trouble saying what it is, but equally likely she will have an opinion on what it is not.

"I'm sorry, but putting a pile of used cigarettes on a gallery floor might be art to some people, but it isn't to me. In fact, I don't think it is art at all."

Fair enough. The woman is really saying: what the canon of art is a cultural 'narrative', determined by an elite group of people who have little in common with me, and who are playing a game that has become so obtuse and metaphysical that it is absurd. Develop that line of thought systematically and you may have a very valid argument.

So, if the 'artworld' (Arthur Danto's term) of self-referencing artists, curators and critics is not going to determine what art is, then who does the job fall to?

Press the poor woman on the street with the point that the fact that all these urinals and blobs of paint do fill our art galleries, and she is as likely as not to say:

"Well, art is whatever you say it is, I guess."

Is that a valid argument. Well, it is, but it isn't a very useful one, for it is too inclusive. We don't want to consider everything in the universe as potential art, because that devalues what 'art' means as a term to describe and classify things. Take an analogy. Let's replace the word 'art' with 'cuisine'. By the same line of thought, we'd be saying that anything you can eat is cuisine. OK, so I can barely boil an egg, and I always burn the toast, and that's all I can cook. Is what I serve up to you really on par with what is presented in a top notch restaurant? Is fast food on par with it either? Surely not.

Similarly, if everything is art, then let's say that everything that has colour is grey. I look around the room: everything is grey, I have to say. But I feel a need to classify and distinguish. I have to say: my sofa is orangish-grey, my carpet is greenish-grey, and the wallet on the coffee table is blackish-grey. Why not just use the terms: orange, green, and black? By being too inclusive, 'grey' becomes meaningless. And so it is when we say that anything is art, if we want to call it that. We can say that, but it is not productive, it makes the word 'art' pretty useless in language, and we are still going to retain opinions about particular examples or categories of art.

So, what is art?

Rather than say that, I'm going to suggest that a more useful question is: What does art do for us?

Blogged with Flock