HI EdwardI checked & you were registered (twice!). I think sometimes the
passwords go to spam - that happened to at least one other person. I've reset
your password & I'll send it to you in a minute.This is great -unsurprisingly I
agree with virtually none of it which makes it all the more useful in terms of
ensuring there is a genuine breadth of opinion represented and of course it
being yours it's very well written and cogently argued also! I won't reply on
the site or here ( I don't want to be constantly trying to have any sort of
last word) but we can have a great discussion the next time we have lunch!
Once you've got the password you should be able to get in and wirte a post (
you still won't be able to publish it just to save it as a draft -this is
because the default "role" I've set up is "contributor" in order to avoid
spammers...) If you let me know I can then publish it. Please make sure you end
it with a name and self descriptionEdward Picot, Artist & Writer or some
such...Thanks so much for contributing to the project - if anyone else has got
this far please take it as encouragement to contribute yourself..cheersmichael
From: Edward Picot <[email protected]>
To: netbehaviour <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, May 31, 2015 4:23 PM
Subject: [NetBehaviour] 22 theses on art education
Michael -
I'm having difficulty registering on your site - it doesn't want to send me a
password for some reason - so I thought I'd post my reactions here instead.
Very interesting and provoking, with a slightly embattled feel, and quite a
narrow focus on the relationship between the artist and his/her work. 'We're
not here to teach you how to be commercially successful as an artist, and we're
not here to tell you whether your work is good or bad – in fact we're not
really here to teach you at all; the process is one of enablement. Only you can
decide what kind of art you want to produce, and whether what you produce is
actually art or not, and whether it's actually any good or not. If we were to
tell you to do it this way or that way we'd just be limiting you. And what do
we know? We're essentially in the same boat as you are. It's a journey of
exploration for all of us, and it's not about technical know-how, it's about...
well, we don't really know what it's about. You tell us. As for making a living
out of your art, we'll leave that question to one side. Courses which try to
teach people how to make money out of their art just end up encouraging them to
produce marketable crap.'
When I was at university we were encouraged to read a book by M H Abrams
called The Mirror and the Lamp. I don't think it was actually on the syllabus,
but we all read it anyway. He was an American, and I just learnt by looking him
up on Wikipedia that he only died in April this year, at the age of 102.
Anyway, it's a great book, and in brief it's argument is that up until the
Romantics all theoretical discussion about art started from the idea that it's
first function is mimesis – to hold up a mirror to the world in which we find
ourselves. So art was always discussed in terms of its mimetic qualities, and
if you wanted to say that a work of art was good you had to argue along those
lines. Some of the arguments got pretty far-fetched – it's actually very
difficult to argue that Homer's value lies in his accurate representation of
the objective world, for example; and it's even more problematic to talk about
the mimetic qualities of music – but nevertheless that was the accepted norm of
artistic theory.
Then along came the Romantics, and proposed a different idea entirely: that
art represented the world as illuminated by the lamp-like genius or
imagination of the artist. What lay behind this, of course, was a breakdown of
faith in the external world as the embodiment of a fixed reality, which would
be perceived the same by everyone who wasn't mad. The Romantics were fascinated
by madness, drug-taking, heightened awareness, visionary disorders of the
senses and so forth, because all of these things were closely linked to
artistic inspiration and the power of the imagination to transform the mundane
into the transcendent. They saw the external world not as a fixed reality that
was agreed upon by all civilised and reasonable people, but as something more
disputed: in fact they tended to regard the 'conventional' view of external
reality as a monstrous illusion which hid the truth from view, but which could
be punctured by artists and other visionaries by virtue of their imaginative
powers.
Abrams draws a diagram with the work of art at the centre, and the Universe,
the Audience and the Artist arranged round it in a triangle. He argues that
different artistic theories place the emphasis on different corners of this
triangle, and point up the relationship between art and one of the 'outer'
elements at the expense of the other two. Mimetic Theories are interested in
the relationship between the Work and the Universe; Pragmatic Theories are
interested in the relationship between the Work and the Audience; and
Expressive Theories are interested in the relationship between the Work and the
Artist. He actually adds a fourth category, Objective Theories, which are just
interested in close reading of the Work. To me, the triangle looks short of at
least one 'outer' element – the Medium – which would help us to account for
Modernism and Structuralism; but it's a useful piece of analysis all the same,
because it gives us a chance to get some perspective on different artistic
theories, what they're emphasising and what they might be missing.
Now, to apply all this to your 22 Theses, it seems to me that their emphasis
is very much on the relationship between the artist and the work of art, with a
kind of back-door acknowledgement that the external world might be important,
via the statement that 'a keen interest in the world' is 'helpful more often
than not'; but a firm slamming of the door on the relationship between artist
and audience, in the shape of Thesis 18 - 'Self-imposed, and/or market-imposed
narrowness or homogeneity of output is, generally, not finding a voice but
voluntarily relinquishing one.'
(I'm not sure I agree with Thesis 18, by the way. For one thing it seems to
contradict Thesis 12 - 'Work made under constraints of time, materials, theme,
constitutes the artist’s five finger exercises.' Surely working within the
constraints of a particular genre, or with a particular audience in mind –
let's say the under-5s – might be a productive constraint too? I can also think
of examples that contradict the thesis – lots of examples in the shape of
children's picture-books, stop-frame animations, Shakespeare's Macbeth (which
was written because James I had just come to the throne, and he was interested
in witches and his own genealogy), sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin movies, or, let's
say, Herriman's Krazy Kat cartoon-strip.)
In some way the most interesting Thesis in the collection is No 3 - 'When
we’re presented with a piece of work that seems banal, clichéd, badly executed,
overly sentimental, gratuitously unpleasant, that makes our hackles rise, that
seems like an affront to everything we value, it’s at that moment we should
most entertain the possibility that we might be mistaken. This will be an
occasion to identify some common first principles and to work slowly and
carefully forwards from them.' - which could be paraphrased as 'Don't go round
criticising other people's work, because the chances are your criticism says
more about your own narrowness of outlook than it does about the piece under
discussion'.
Well, maybe. For one thing, what would your reaction be if you were presented
with a piece of work that was openly anti-Semitic, or that represented
wife-beating or female genital mutilation in a favourable light? Would your
first reaction be to 'entertain the possibility that you might be mistaken'? I
can think of various works of art that have obnoxious attitudes or values in
them, but which nevertheless remain valuable as works of art – Conrad's Heart
of Darkness, for example, which is regarded by some critics as racist; Eliot's
Gerontion, which has a couple of anti-Semitic lines; or Nabokov's Lolita, which
can be regarded as paedophile. The relationship between a work of art and the
moral, social or political values it embodies is often a complex one, and
there are no simple answers, but as a teacher, if one of your students presents
you with an extremely well-executed and artistically powerful poster or video
which incites the audience to murder all unbelievers, I'm not sure that your
first duty would be to entertain the possibility that you might be mistaken in
your moral repugnance.
But for another thing, I don't think that negative criticism is necessarily a
bad thing. It's a commonplace, when discussing this point, to make a
distinction between 'constructive criticism' and mere 'trashing' or
'rubbishing'. Constructive criticism is okay – 'I like this bit but I think you
could have used a more emphatic shade of green over here' – whereas just
slagging off someone else's work is unacceptable – 'This is so awful that it
makes me want to vomit just thinking about it'. I do agree with this in
principle, but from my own personal experience, as someone whose work has been
roundly slagged off in various forums over the years, I have to say that a good
slagging-off can be quite bracing now and again. It makes you think to yourself
'Am I really just producing a load of rubbish, or is there some value in what
I'm doing?' - and if you come through that process convinced that what you're
doing is genuinely worthwhile, you actually feel better than you did before. In
some ways the most unhelpful feedback is the really positive stuff – 'This is
brilliant! I love it!' - because it confuses your own internal critic, your
awareness that there are actually flaws in the piece that other people are
lavishing with praise; and it also makes you feel reluctant to produce
something radically different, in case the people who liked your earlier work
feel disappointed.
Thirdly, criticism of other people's work is an important aspect of your
development as an artist. You often define your direction of travel as an
artist by identifying flaws in the work of other artists and deciding that you
want to avoid them in your own. The Beatles' A Hard Day's Night, for example,
came out as a mock-documentary partly because John Lennon and Richard Lester
were determined not to produce the boy-meets-girl and
let's-do-the-show-right-here cliches of the Elvis and Cliff Richard films.
Imagist poetry was partly defined by its reaction against the vagueness of
imagery in Symbolism. Wordworth's desire to use 'the language of common men' in
his poetry was explicitly contrasted with the artificial diction employed by
Augustans such as Pope and Dryden. Et cetera and so forth.
Which isn't to say that art classes ought to be a free-for-all, with
everybody having a go at everybody else's work. But going back to my
University days, one of the most interesting exercises we did as students was
to bring what we regarded as bad poems to a class and try to explain what we
thought was bad about them. We spent most of our time talking about 'great'
literature and what was supposed to be great about it – doing the opposite was
unexpectedly challenging, and unexpectedly good for us.
Anyway, very interesting theses; but those, for what they're worth, are my
thoughts.
- Edward
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