My point is that when artists, like me, for instance, use a brush to apply oil paint to a prepared canvas, there is an implied recognition that my choice entails a corresponding and ironic affirmation of contradicting painterly practice such as dripping, pouring, rolling, printing, spraying, squeegee-ing, finding, pasting, scraping, sanding, etc. By evoking painting practices that deskill my painting practice, I symbolize the fragility of my imagery despite the assertiveness of my brush and paint practice. I am saying that all artists, all art practice, is in the same position today. No practice is free from a contradicting practice -- from a deskilling alternative -- that has also been affirmed as art by the same processes or institutions or authority that have always affirmed art.
When modernism -- and the Bauhaus idea -- centered on examination and experimentation of materials and processes a tradition of deskilling became the chief pursuit of art and opened up new ways to embody meaning. It's as though the question changed from how to draw according to a model of "good drawing" to what is possible with pencil marks? Or, what is inherent to materials and what concepts do materials engender? Thus the modernist art idea comes from "tomfoolery" with the materials -- or the practice itself -- and is not preconceived in traditional uses of materials. Later modernism, conceptualism, tended to reverse the relation between materials and idea, going back to a classical notion of taking the idea to the materials, but with the difference that the "materials" have been hugely expanded through deskilling of traditional practices. Now anything at all can be "materials" and anything at may be "practice". The question that comes up however asks whether or not art meaning can be embodied by anything at all (the commonplace) or is art meaning necessarily linked to art history, the genealogy of art? My own position right now is that the genealogy of art is necessary to art meaning but it is inescapably ironic since all art practice is now contradicted by deskilled -- validated ahistorical -- practice. This is probably a "conservative" position since the trend seems to be that the genealogy of art is irrelevant to art practices that now engage the broadest array of disciplines and endeavors from anthropology to engineering, from economics to physics. The genealogy of art is the historical discourse of art, as we know it, as we can know it, as we want to know it. Call it the history of world art. It assumes that form and content, as symbol and metaphor, are intrinsic to embodied art meaning. Deskilling is not a bad thing. It's an expansive term, not a signal of decadence, necessarily. wc ----- Original Message ---- From: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> To: [email protected]; [email protected] Sent: Fri, March 12, 2010 9:24:40 AM Subject: Re: Physician, heal thyself In a message dated 3/11/10 11:35:39 PM, [email protected] writes: > No one can paint > > without being aware that the use of a brush to apply paint is > > deskilled. In fact, today, all art processes and skills, and > > practices are deskilled (having been rejected without ending art) > > and thus one can question whether or not they can embody any > > meaning except through irony. > At the risk of asking too many questions without enough thought,Do you mean that using skill or craft in art is necessarily ironic? If irony is a statement whose meaning is conveyed by stating its opposite (skipping out on hy[pocrisy and neglecting deception because you couldn't possibly have meant anything so simplistically literal) how is this done with a brush? And what happens if the brush user's skill is not so good? Kate Sullivan
