Two ways to talk about art
Ok, so how do we make and talk about art while knowingly accepting the contemporary conditions of doing so?
Step one: Make useful statements
Let’s imagine an unspecified argument about art. “Argument” here meaning “my argument is this” sense, not “disagreement”. If it were possible to know everything about this argument , you could list its significant points, the beliefs they are based upon, and the active parties they relate to. It might be a big list, but if we made it we could then draw a box around that list. If we did this with every argument, we would would see two major directions of argument: those that stay within their box, and those that offer access points to other arguments and ideas.
This is something both incredibly basic and incredibly important that you (should) learn in art school or as a practicing artist – how to talk about art in a way that is useful (or, at the very least, usable) to others, regardless of what art you like or make yourself.
Not useful
“I don’t like it.” “Great colors.” “That looks like a dick.”
Useful
“Your use of color seems different than your earlier work – is there anything to that?” “This part looks like a penis – was that intentional?” “If I’m supposed to see a penis here, it’s not clear to me what that has to do with social justice.”
“Useful” is still up to some debate, as we can’t assume what we say is actually useful, so let’s refine it to “usable”. Then, at the very least we can divide statements about art between those that are usable by the artist or the viewer and those that are not. We will call those that are not self-contained. Usable statements can be taken home and disassembled, augmented, examined, built upon. You can do the same with self-contained statements, but only within or against their terms. You can break open any laptop with the right tools, but some are built for you to modify them while others will resist you at every turn.
Usable statements are how we knowingly accept the conditions of contemporary art
Sometimes, when artists may seem maddeningly vague or noncommittal, they are being so strategically. Honestly, I think most of the time it’s habit, but one formed by a sort of strategy – how to talk about something when everyone is coming at it from a different direction. Rather than saying “it’s all subjective” and walking away, you say “it’s all subjective, so I’m going try to talk in a way that doesn’t require you to see things the same way I do.” If you put that sentence before confusing artspeak, it sometimes makes a lot more sense. Art is not lossless compression of information, so we have to accept that in how we talk about it.
I’d like to take a moment here to invite anyone who isn’t interested in being an artist or an art student to think about all the times they have to talk about something that everyone sees differently while all having strong opinions. Now imagine that there was a way that people could actually get better at doing that, and that this way can be practiced and taught and researched. This, if nothing else, is why “being a better art student” matters even if you’re not interested in making art.
Step two: Make usable art
If we have these two types of arguments – statements really – in a context where one can make statements visually (art, art school), then we can also apply this measure to visual statements. Another word for “visual statements” is “art.” [The ai sees images as the same thing as words so why shouldnt we] So, here too we can go in two two directions with art.
Two examples:
One:
Back in school, a professor once broke down a little after the third or fourth go-round in a crit while trying to get somewhere with a student who kept drawing gladiators. Finally the student said “I just really like gladiators.” To which he replied “Well, I really like cricket, but I don’t make art about it.” There may have been some tears.
Two:
When I used to write dance reviews, I reviewed a show that was part of a residency program that consisted of four different groups doing four different performances. Three groups were contemporary dancers, and the other were clowns. In the fully traditional face-paint-and-big-wigs sense. I don’t like clowns, and I don’t know anything about the tradition of clowning [beyond the egg registry]. My editor felt the same way, and for the clown part of the review, he let me publish something along the lines of “If you’re into clowns, you’ll probably be into this.”
Now, you might say I’m being a snob here. That’s fine. In fact I’m playing that up because I want to really clarify this point. I can be a snob and you can completely disregard my opinion but what the clowns were doing was still conceptually distinct from what the other groups were doing. And not because it had clown content, but because it didn’t use that clown content in a way that could be related to non-clown parts of the world. It was a self-contained experience of clowning (and maybe a pretty good one). Like me, the other dancers in the residency lacked the language to make useful statements about the clowns’ work as clowning, and, according to the dancers I spoke to, the clowns had the same problem talking with them about their work. It would have been easier if the clowns wanted their work to be considered in context of all the perspectives on performance in the program, but they did not. They wanted it to be considered within the ideas of clowning, full stop. Broadly speaking, the contemporary dancers knowingly accepted the multiple perspectives of everyone else in the program and the audience, while the clowns actively denied them.
Importantly, none of this is a statement about the validity of either approach. Clowns should not be stopped from clowning because what they do doesn’t align with the concerns of contemporary dancers. Or vice versa.
But why don’t those concerns align, exactly?
If we go back to our examples, the usable statements are more open-ended, more prepared to be interpreted in more than one way. This is a fundamental strategy of talking about art, and art-making itself.
The difference is in what direction the art is moving. Wwhich fork in the road do you take: Drawings of gladiators that are usable by others, or drawings that are self contained within the interests of people who like gladiators for their gladiator-ness or clowns for their clown-ness? You don’t have to prefer either to recognize that these are fundamentally different directions.
Note that this is not the same as authorial intention, in the sense of an artist intending a specific message or meaning to be communicated clearly through their work. In fact many strategies on the usable branch involve resisting that sort of intention to instead present artwork that the viewer can bring multiple interpretations to.
Yes yes postmodernism yes yes anything can be reintepreted, recontextualized. That’s why I’m hedging this in terms of “directions” – my only assertion is that you can plot two directions of work. There is one which consciously invites or is at least not opposed to reinterpretation and critical viewing. The other, demanded by the the popular antipathy to Critical Anything Theory, expressly rejects opportunities to be critically examined. The clowns and the gladiators did not want to be critically examined. In these cases, recontextualization and extraction of meaning beyond what the artists said their art was about is up to the viewer, and not accounted for in the art.
Put this way, it seems simple to categorize types of art, but we know it is not. I wish I could give you a conclusion now, but we have to zoom back out one more time.
How to mess it up in both ways at once
Oftentimes, work that sets out in one direction keeps looking over its shoulder in the other direction, and the things we say about art in these situations, in my opinion, satisfy no one.
On the Contemporary Art side, we get heady or expansive, conceptually-rich work, hemmed in by statements that demand that you agree that it is not just usable but very specifically useful. This work reinterprets BLANK or by BLANK this work BLANKS the concept of BLANK all which does more to signal its openness to interpretation rather than actually opening up the interpretation. Some art really benefits from being on a white wall so that you’re not distracted from the work itself, but sometimes the aesthetics of the white cube gallery shout “this is art” so loudly that the art gets drowned out. If we remove obstacles according to dogma rather than the specific needs of the journey we want to take, we’re just making a new maze.
Framing something too aggressively as Contemporary Art can be a catch-22, even for interested and informed viewers. It’s like trying to get off your phone by downloading an app about getting off your phone. Maybe it has good ideas, like going to the park, but unless it just bricks your phone, the steps to engage with that app are in the opposite direction of just going to the park.
Confusingly, this tends to be the same strategy adopted by art and artists that reject the Contemporary Art label and want their work to be interpreted conclusively. In both cases, it is a form of pretentiousness, in the purest sense. Using words to spackle the pretense of an imagined experience over the direct experience of the work. In this case, the intention is that you have a specific experience of the work, but then using words to dress it up as if it were more spacious, more open to the range of experience viewers will inevitably have. This movie should be exciting but it’s really a deep statement on X. This painting of a conventionally beautiful woman was done very skillfully and should be considered a highly desirable luxury item but it symbolizes … I don’t fucking know, youth? The triumph of capital?
We’ve all read writing about art like this. The art world tolerates it for the same reason it tolerates money laundering – it keeps the machine going and sometimes it just happens by accident. I dislike it as much as anyone. I have no excuses for it here. However, it’s useful to look at how it fails. I think broadly the reason artspeak like this fails is that it tries to do both things at once. It pretends to be usable by a plurality of perspectives while restricting interpretations to a self-contained definition of its own value. In that way, I think the failures of artspeak support this idea of the two directions.
A speedbump: Success resembles failure
If we recall our multiverse example, a contradiction emerges. If knowingly accepting the contemporary conditions of making and talking about art means taking specific art seriously on its own terms while remaining open to the many worlds in which it might be situated, and if failure is trying to go in both of those directions at once… well those conditions start to look pretty similar.
That is one of the big reasons that art is hard. You can make something that’s 98% solid but, like a bucket, it doesn’t hold water unless it’s 100%. This is why we’re not convinced or moved by a lot of AI art. It just happens to the be the same reason that we’re not convinced or moved by a lot of human-made art.
I’m using a lot of my own terminology here to skip across the peaks of a century of writing about these same ideas. My hope is to frame the question in a way that you can test for yourself without doing all that reading; when you’re looking at an [opifact] and trying to find some art within it, I hope having these two directions in mind will assist the process.
A stubbornly self-contained will always bring you back to its own idea of the world, or never really leave it in the first place. There is no real escape, and it becomes [art-within bounds.] A truly usable statement or artwork moves freely back and forth between its self-contained universe and the broader one in which many pictures of the world exist.
If you’ll permit me one more term of my own invention, this process is what I call [conceptual labor.] It’s how you cycle between thinking within your own picture of the world, and thinking about how to redefine that picture. It’s a pattern a lot of people end up talking about when they say there’s [an art to something.]
If you’re into this, you’ll be into it
Back to the gladiators. There’s nothing wrong with drawing a bunch of gladiators because you like them. But that’s not what we were doing as art students in a studio based program. We were supposed to be doing conceptual labor. You can draw gladiators in a way that is interesting to people who know nothing about gladiators, or you can draw gladiators in a way that is, generally, about gladiators. Gladiators can be a way to present interesting ideas! Clowns can be too, but you don’t typically hire one for a birthday party to make the children contemplate the Heideggerian concept of dasein.* (If you do, invite me please.)
It’s been more than a century since we could assume that going to art school is about drawing Good Things, in a way that looks Really Good. And yet I can hear some of you starting to tweet/toot at me about how it fucking should be. I blame institutions for the fact that we’re still having this argument, since muddying expectations across these two directions means they can enroll more paying [students]. One of the coolest things about art is that it can be more interesting than a product, but we’re encouraged from all sides to think of it as one.
Our “for you” algorithms are saying “if you’re into this, you’ll be into this.” That is the self-contained direction. We’re starting to see [[ some problems ]] with always seeing the world that way.
We don’t need to figure out how to give people what they’re click on. That’s pretty well addressed. We’re trying to imagine how to make art and talk about art in a world where everyone is an artist and talking about their art in their own way.
This is basically the formula for why art schools exist. If you’re trying to make something conceptually usable to others, in the sense of being of enduring interest to more than a handful of invested parties, there are no guaranteed methods. And if there’s no formula, you have to learn to look closely at every step of the process, every part of the work. This is also why so much of being an art student is learning to talk about or otherwise interrogate art. And, again, is also why making art is hard; one piece can succeed and the next can fail. A successful piece can lose its punch over time, or thrive with some but leave others cold. Art. Is. Hard.
Something like a conclusion
You know what we haven’t talked about at all here? How the art gets made. What it’s made of. This all happens after the art gets made, after you have an art. It applies as much to a drawing as it does a glossy JPEG. If you show up with either of these in hand, all of this applies.
Of course this only matters if we want art with meaning. Not even in the sense of “meaningful” art, but simply art that transmits anything of substance to the viewer.
The free software community has a saying – “free as in kittens.” Sure it’s free, but you have to maintain it. The military has a saying that a wall is only as good as its defenses. Many things we think of as solutions are only the first step in addressing a problem that needs ongoing attention. Hopefully I’ve made the case that to be an artist, or even to put some art out into the world and hope it has meaning is more like cultivating a plant than delivering a package.
Nothing about the process of image generation has changed this. And in fact the structure of the tools themselves and the conversations around them seem to actively discourage this kind of ongoing engagement with art.