Artsy Stuff
I have an entry in the works about the 24 hour theatre, but I need a little more time. So for any of y’all who are interested, here is the paper that I wrote about the crazy calculator piece of “modern art” that y’all helped me create. One of my terms when I asked for input was that I would post the finished paper, so here it is. It isn’t an amazing piece of writing by any means, but what can I say – it’s a first year course. (Actually, having just re-read it for the first time since I wrote it, I’m actually pretty pleased with it.)
The objective was to make a piece of art, and then justify why it’s contemporary. I’m betting this is pretty much what they’re after.
Enjoy! (If possible!)
(Oh yeah – and here is what’s written on the back of the artwork that I submitted:
What can I say, I am incapable of just saying something without trying to make it funny. You should see the tags on my Christmas gifts. I once gave a gift to my mother that required two or three tags so that I could write: “From: Cass, To: Mamaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa, ooooooooooooooooh!!!! Didn’t mean to make you cry, if I’m not back again this time tomorrow, carry oooon, carry ooooon….”)
Contemporary art is so known for its embodiment of, and its construal through, contemporary ideas about society and art. In this sense, a work of art such as a painting could adhere to 18th century design concepts but still be appreciated as contemporary art, simply because it is read in contemporary terms by the contributors to the field. Contemporary artists have at their disposal a wide variety of critical approaches to the understanding of art; for the past forty years, postmodernist ideas about society have come to the forefront of Western thought, and so are reflected in many contemporary art pieces. No longer bound to “depict the realistic beauty of nature or the joy of leisurely living,” contemporary artists “break with tradition and custom” (Hopwood, 1971: 122). The role of authorship in art has, in particular, been broken down by the work of artists such as Andy Warhol, whose work suggests that anything can become art, so long as it is positioned as such (122). In a postmodern tradition, then, I have created a work of art that toys with traditional ideas of authorship and subjectivity, as well as critiquing the notion of class and peer acceptance in the creation of art. The resulting work can thus be read as being wholly contemporary, answering to and questioning long-held ideals in Western society and the Western art world.
Defining what is a work of art has become increasingly difficult, particularly in the past century of artistic experimentation. John Carey argues that the difficulty arises not in deciding what is a work of art, but “what is not a work of art? What cannot be? For unless we draw a boundary around what art is not we cannot draw a boundary around what it is” (2005: 4, emphasis in original). Carey goes on to list several examples that stretch the definition of art, not simply through the final product but also in toying with the necessity of authorship and even artistic talent, such as “Dadaists like Jean Arp, who tore up and dropped scraps of paper, fixing them where they fell” (5). Charting the main philosophical arguments that have been undertaken since the time of Kant, Carey finally attributes critic Arthur C. Danto with a definition of art that seems to be all-encompassing: “Anything, Danto concluded, could be a work of art. […] What could make it a work of art was nothing in its physical make-up but how it was regarded, how it was thought of” (17). In fact, this conclusion was too far-reaching for Danto, who attempted to qualify it by asserting that an artist intended a “correct” and “particular meaning” to a work, and that only someone who “belong[s] to the ‘art-world’” is qualified to understand and interpret it (19).
My artwork, which is untitled, challenges both of Danto’s qualifications as to what can constitute a work of art. The piece was created when I was testing a new scanner for my computer; the nearest object was a calculator, which I placed on the scanning surface with no intention other than to ensure that the full face of it would be scanned. While I technically did create the piece myself, I did not have any particular meaning for it, nor did I intend for it to be art – I simply found the result of the scan to be somewhat aesthetically pleasing. Rather than an author, I have functioned more as a graphic artist for this project, laying the pieces together in what is hopefully an aesthetically pleasing fashion, but making no attempt to attribute any particular meaning to the piece myself. In this sense, the work would not fit into Danto’s more limited definition of art; I suggest instead that art indeed becomes art when it is simply appreciated as such.
In developing the piece for this assignment I took this critique of authorship further by asking other people to title the work for me. These titles have been incorporated into the final work, surrounding it on the canvas. Each title presents a different “read” of the work; their inclusion in the final work highlights the unique experience and point of view – in short, subjectivity – that any viewer brings to a given work of art. Further, in opening up the titling of the work to others, particularly in an open forum such as the internet, I had no control over the respondents’ choices apart from general directions regarding format. This may have led to titles that I did not feel were appropriate, but in attempting to distance myself from any particular meaning for the work, I would have had to include them. This can be read in similar terms of the far more radical work of Marina Abramovic, who literally submitted herself to her gallery guests, presenting them “with an assortment of weapons… and invit[ing] them to do what they wanted to her” (Marsh, 1993: 98-99). Abramovic’s work puts the viewer in control not only of the artwork, but of the artist who is performing as artwork. Both her performance and my art piece do involve a similar submission to the authorship of the viewer, however, inverting the traditional author/viewer relationship and presenting a contemporary, postmodern conception of subjectivity.
I am not a visual artist; as such, this piece was created in a somewhat isolated fashion, unlikely to be apprehended and conceived of as a work of art by those in the field of visual arts. Similarly, the contributing authors of the work are not visual artists. In Danto’s terms, then, this cannot be a work of art. However, I would argue that a modern conception of subjectivity, as I have described it above, does not allow for a piece to be summarily denied the status of a work of art. If anonymous contributors are capable of authoring a piece of art, surely they are capable of accepting a work as being a piece of art. The peer-approved acceptance of a piece of art into a canon of “great” work, in fact, shores up very old, traditional ideas about art which are by necessity wrapped up in issues of class. In order to critique this notion I have taken an irreverent approach to the piece, listing its components as “cheap glue” and “nifty two-headed Sharpie,” even including a check-list of blood, sweat, tears, and other bodily discharge. This offers a humorous but theoretically sound questioning of the role of tradition and class in contemporary art.
If it can be said that contemporary art has one single unifying factor, this factor may be a questioning of existing ideas and ideals, both in the world of art and society at large. Even if a work of art is made with no underlying message or meaning, viewers will bring meaning and subjectivity to the work, and in so doing become complicit in its reception as a piece of contemporary art. The assumption that society as a whole is undertaking a particular and unified course – a humanist idea often referred to as the “March to Freedom” – is utterly rejected in this postmodern view of the world (Fuery and Manfield, 1997: 137). The individual is instead conceived as a mutable and powerful entity, an author in his or her own right. I have intended for my untitled work to embody these principles – but then again, I am little more than a participant in its creation, so its intent and its reception are both out of my hands.
Bibliography
Carey, J (2005) ‘What is a work of Art?’ in What Good Are the Arts? London: Faber and Faber.
Fuery, P and Manfield, N (1997) ‘Contextuality: Postmodernism’ in Cultural Studies and the New Humanities. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hopwood, G (1971) Handbook of Art. Victoria: Graham Hopwood.
Marsh, A (1993) ‘Body Art, Shamanism and Western Ritual’ in Body and Self: Performance Art in Australia: 1969-92. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.
