I have never thought myself as an 'artistic' person. To me, art equates to beauty, splendor, and intellectual sophistication; All of these which had little room in my crass and pragmatic way of living. However, I recently discovered that art can be seen as an expression of self, a process of creation, and with that I became her ally.
This post is a sharing from my encounter with a certain someone who delves in the world of 'art', which acts as a reconciliation of the basics he taught me. As of today, he is the only Indonesian art collector who reads proper 'Art Theory', or so he said. Regardless of the truth of the previous statement, what he shared you might find useful should you ever find yourself trapped in intellectual cocktail parties. Enjoy.
So he began from the latest two eras of art: The era of modern art (20th century) and the era of contemporary art (21st century, the present).
I fathom that novices in the art world, very much like myself, are stuck with the modern era definition of 'art'. Originality was emphasized, art served to please the eyes, and form triumphed over content. Modernists strived to be an
avant garde in their works which meant looking backwards was frowned upon. As such, incorporating culture and tradition into their creation was a taboo. This led to the abandonment of old identities and the embrace of universalism. In the spirit of modernism, the works of a French painter should not be culturally distinct from the works of a Japanese, they only need to be different, to be original, without a single trace of the past. It was not unlike a horse wearing blinkers, tunneling their vision to the roads straight upfront.
Therefore the birth of very distinct, very original, but 'formful' styles of art in this era, such as Picasso's Cubism and Van Gogh's Expressionism. The latter artist's works are supposedly able to transfer and wholly convey their painter's feelings to their viewer, as in the ecstasy of Sunflower painting and the stressfulness of the Scream painting. In other words, seeing the Sunflower somehow should make us feel bubbly, while seeing the Scream would somehow make us feel Van Gogh's stress.
Moreover, there are several additional rules that make an art acknowledged as a modern art. Firstly, there is formalism, which dictates that a good modern art must have a significant form, like proper brush strokes or befitting colour combinations. The bad ones don't follow these 'forms'. Then there is medium specificity, where a two-dimensional modern art must be a painting on a canvass while a three-dimensional modern art must be a sculpture. Another sentence to emphasis on the word 'must'. Finally, a modern art needs to be something distant from everyday experience, that is to say, something as quotidian as a Campbell tomato soup can was never accepted as an artwork in the modern era of art.
Thenceforth, a modern artwork has a duty to depict beauty with whatever means the artist had: lines, colour, texture, space, composition, et cetera; to the extent that visuals are what is important, neither the message of the artist that he wished to convey nor the context of the production of the artwork. Once again, modern art is always form over content.
Things did get rather interesting in the 1960s, a transitionary era of art, where brilliant artisans such as Robert Rauschenberg tested the waters of the modern art. He created something that is in between a sculpture and a painting, something that can be described as a three-dimensional canvass. These are definitely aesthetically pleasing, but these do not conform to modern art's rigid rule of medium specificity. People began to rethink their definitions of art, an artistic renaissance was set in motion, and contemporary art was born.
The art critique Arthur C. Datho wrote in his famous essay, 'The End of Art', that in contemporary art, an artwork and a non artwork are visually indistinguishable. Take Andy Warhol's Brillo Box exhibition which depicted consumerism, for instance. Datho found that the Brillo boxes in Warhol's exhibitions are exact copies of their cousins found in the next door supermarket. So as our minds converge with Arthur Datho's back then, a crucial question pops up in our heads: What then, is the thing that distinguishes an artwork from an ordinary, mundane, quotidian object?
It is not the fact that the artwork is produced by the artists themselves. It is neither the fact that the artwork is exhibited in art galleries or museums. Andy Warhol went as far as to introduce his artworks as 'products' produced by his 'workers' in his 'factory', intently avoiding the word 'studio' or 'gallery', as he tried to underscore what makes a contemporary artwork an artwork.
The answer lies in, as some of you should have inferred by now, the content that the art piece carries, or the context under which it was constructed. In the contemporary era, art is no longer a slave to the eyes of the seekers of beauty. Thus, form is mostly, if not all, obsolete in contemporary art. Less stress is placed on originality and innovation as well. It is, therefore, content over form. The more thought provoking, the more artistic.
Of course, some themes are more popular than the rest. In the era of extreme mobility, identity and culture becomes something very elusive. Ideas, concepts, and beliefs get transferred from one to another and mixed without mercy, forming a vague concoction of lifestyle that we claim as our own. Thus, a lot of contemporary masterpieces seek to embody our struggles in the formation of our identity, retaining some and letting go of some, while evening out the odd. Take a look in the Jacuzzi in Japan's Naoshima Island, which is an art labeled by its creator as a 'cultural melting bath'. Visitors from different corners of the earth meet as they bath, and as they interact, they share whatever cultures they carry with them. Thus a brilliant form of art, which is not passively and voyeuristically enjoyed, but experienced. The visitor becomes part of the artist's masterpiece.
Thus, in these contemporary times, there are no boundaries left. Everything can be an art. Even that chained-on-the-wall and starved-to-death dog or that exhibition of painted red squares.
You're welcome.
Truly Indonesia's Finest.
