I am NOT an artist!
- November 17th, 2009
- Posted in Creativity
- Write comment
Stelarc has come into Second Life. Hugely significant, I think. He is a breaker of taboos, a master of the art of pulling the cute little rug of complacency out from under people’s feet. And, from where I am standing, our little world needs some serious breaking of taboos and a thorough dishevelment of complacency.
Not the many people who unassumingly pursue their individual paths of playful creativity by taking SL photographs to post on Flickr or building their own personal toys. Or the many merchants providing an endless procession of ingenious artifacts for them to utilize in their quest. They most certainly do not need any shaking up and bringing to their senses. Those people, at least in my book, are the persona grata, if not indeed the lifeblood of the metaverse. They are what makes Second Life into a builder’s world. They sustain it, and in more ways than one at that. Their combined endeavor is well on its way to creating its own distinctive genre, a type of 21st century folk art, and I have a hunch that in decades to come art historians as well as anthropologists will be writing many a ponderous tome on what they are embroiled in today, under our very noses. Their emergence is something that Roy predicted all the way back in the 1960’s when he was building the cybernetic art matrix and spoke of an entirely novel user group of art domains:
“The new leisured class can be expected to swell in numbers as automation becomes more totally applied to society’s productive activities. The main body of this class will comprise workers, employed in industry, commerce, and other services on a part-time rotational basis, doing about three five-hour days’ of work per week in the short term, and probably even less at a later stage, as W. Gordon has suggested. The opportunity for “creative play” will consequently be considerable, although the demand for it may not be very noticeable initially. We can expect a continuance at first of the present trend towards “recreational buying”—the consumption of goods for the activity and pleasure of buying—and the use of established commercial forms of entertainment. But there will be a growing need for amenities that provide for social and intimate participation in creative activities of new and stimulating kinds.” (Ascott, 1966)
So I will take this opportunity to bow to their combined creative endeavor, consumer and merchant alike, and proceed to sink my teeth into the crowd that I think does need some very serious whacking on the head.
Of course it isn’t SL, it is actually RL. That is where the original malaise comes from. And slowly but surely it is casting its insalubrious odor into the metaverse as well. Has been doing so ever since I signed up, in fact. Has horrified me from the get-go. And, Stelarc or no Stelarc, it will win anyway (just as it has done in RL) through the sheer fact of there being huge strengths in numbers, in other words the existence of an awful lot of self-important people with remarkably over-inflated estimations of their own abilities combined with a very low opinion of what “art” may actually be all about. Were you to ask them, by the way, of course Art is their God, their one and only raison d’etre or some other such unctuous malarkey. Ask me – they actually have the audacity to think that art is a simple enough endeavor to be tackled by all and sundry – including them! hhh – and I really mean hhh this time…
Art is about asking the question that is unutterable in words, that has no answer, for which there is no outcome. It is about laying bare the horrifying uncertainty of the human condition. It is torturous and tortured by nature in that it is an attempt to articulate the in-articulate. That is what it has always been about. No wonder then that for millenia it placed itself in the service of religion; because religion, at its finest moments addresses the same dilemma. Who are we? Why are we? Where are we?
But somewhere along the line we lost religion. The torture however remained, to be briefly picked up by the avantgarde of the early 20th century. People like Duchamp and Ernst. And yes, also Picasso. Please do not tell me that Demoiselles is about something else? And here we are, still grappling with the same unutterable void – these days on psychiatrist’s couches and feel-good seminars. It has become trivialized, it has become banal – but it is still there, nonetheless. How many “artists” over the past 30 years have asked it? Have made it the business of their lives and of their work to ask the unutterable question to which there is no answer?
And how many of those that did, have had the stamina to look things straight in the eye and admit despair? How many have pulled it off without falling into endless pits of banality? With no melodrama, no cheap histrionics? My colleague Selim Birsel (above, 1993) is one of them.
And Stelarc is most certainly one such as well. And like the thoroughbred that he is, his work is hard to take. It is a punch in the gut. It tears into your soul, by tearing into his flesh. I am wondering what he will do here, in SL. Whatever it will be, it will not be predictable. Again, thoroughbred that he is, he sits in a twilight zone of his own creation. Hard to classify, hard to categorize, hard to second-guess, hard to write clever little critiques over. No wonder that he is so well hated.
But again, I am wondering what he will do in SL. “The body is obsolete” he screams on his website. Is SL the place that his agony has brought him? To the place of the non-physical, where there is no more physical pain? Where the flesh can no longer be tormented? Stelarc, for me, is all about the flesh. The utter helplessness of our decaying physical being, of our self inflicted torture, of our endurance in the face of the unknowable.
…
So, I am not an artist. I do not have the stamina, or the means to ask questions to which there are no answers. I build play islands, like doll’s houses they are… And I also make nice little clothes. Weird clothes, but at the end of the day – clothes… I am a designer. I obsess over appearance and function. Or non-function – as the case may be. But my path is defined, it is predictable. I am a very good designer, yes – but this is not to be confused with “art”. “Art” is a huge mouthful. My mouth is simply not large enough for the word. Really, it isn’t.
You academics! How you love to define things. I won’t stoop so low as to quote “eye” and “beholder” stuff, but if art is about intentional expression, then many of your creations are that. If art is about pleasing or stirring an emotion in others, your creations have accomplished that. We use the term “wearable art.” Your fashions are that. So… you also play. At least you aren’t one of these tortured artists!
I am not any kind of artist Bettina, I am a designer. The very absence of “torture” sees to that: No matter how you slice it, art and torture are very closely wed. I honestly do not think you can have one without the other. Art without torture, that is. In some cases it is very obvious in the output, as is the case in Selim’s work which I am showing above. In other cases, let us say Selavy’s work, it is far more concealed. However, it is still there in the questioning of temporality, in the frozen moment… It is what differentiates it from countless others that “look” sort of similar but simply do not have the substance. And that substance goes beyond form (although it requires an utter perfection of form in the very formulation of its query) – it becomes a huge and unanswerable question. And therein lies the torture.
And this isn’t me talking as an academic. I would never ever have the nerve to write like this if this were an academic text. They would pelt me with rotten eggs if I did. This is me writing very much from the gut.
:-)
Insalubrious. What an absolutely wonderful word. I will be saying it now for days just to hear the rhythm of it. I agree with Bettina on this one particularly regarding your designs.
For me art is a continuum and can and should express every dimension of the human condition. I even find some industrial designs such as tools and things could be considered art. I like to recall Lenny Bruce’s line “Now that’s art, and I’ll buy that”.
I hadn’t heard of Stelarc until reading your post. Thank you Alpha for exposing me to his work.
And hello again Bettina!
;-)
from where I look into what I do, what we do and what people I love looking at do, all I can truly think is a sentence: “semantics won’t do”. definitions are unnecessary. maybe I am just stupidly confused or I am a humble coward in defining things, categorizing them, putting them into little boxes and tagging them. I don’t really know what is art, or god or love or hate or whatever (I know what “design” is though :) ) and I think I really don’t care. great post by the way, made me question my thoughts once again.
Great post!
The medium of VR worlds and likewise the communities that surround them are so ephemeral, will there be anything left for people to study in the future? And what will survive may not be truly representative of what is being done now by residents around the net.
What fascinates me are avatars. Why do people choose what they choose? I find a certain amount of pathos in the fact that almost everyone (including myself) want to be thin beauties. Someone, at some time will address the insecurities inherent in avatar creation, their weaknesses and finite nature. Because, yes, I believe they have their lifespan and it isn’t a singularity.
I can’t wait to see an artist address that subject.
Bettina, one more thing – Stirring emotions: Design does that par excellence, in fact it is the job of design to evoke emotion. That is how advertisers pull in the dough you know…
Naz: Better start thinking about the definition of art then. Like pronto pronto! As in now! I will be asking you about it on Tuesday! In fact, it looks like you have opened up a wonderful can of worms here: Let me run and shoot off an email to all of you so that we can discuss it as a group. And yes, shying away from thinking is cowardly: We may not like what we find, it may be discomfiting and unwelcome. Defining and categorizing – what you are so glibly casting aside there – those are the tools of science without which we would have no civilization? ;-)
Monerda: Design output can be highly aesthetic, of course. Again, it is it’s job to be so. But it ain’t art, its premise is entirely different. Really and truly, it is… Design output is an “answer”. It provides a solution to a “problem”. Beautiful, stunning, highly creative, ingenious, intelligent – design at its best can be all of those things and more. However, with all of its wonderful attributes it still does not address the un-solvable/un-knowable in any way…
Melponeme: There are two artists (that I know of) that do: MosMax Hax and Gazira Babeli. Their work is about avatars. And stunning in both cases.
There’s anorher question comes around of civilization is included in this subject we talk about. Is art civilized? Does it need to be?
what we all try is to bring order into our world, to make sense of our perceptions, to give a meaning to our past and our memories. even if you’re not consciously aware of it, your brain is doing it, that is, you are doing it on a subpersonal level. if these mechanisms don’t work any more, your subjective world breaks apart.
it is difficult to say anything about “art” that would not be fiercely denied by someone else. but personally i think that good art very often takes us to that border between order and chaos that we normally try to avoid; it opens a window to show the fragility of the “human condition”, as alpha proposes in her excellent post. this does not mean that it has to be tragedy, not at all. humour can do it, too.
In this period of man, after philosophy and religion, art may possibly be one endeavor that fulfills what another age might have called “man’s spiritual needs.”
Joseph Kosuth, Art After Philosophy (1969)
Selavy! God bless you for this – with an addition, however:
We all try to make sense of it all, on a subconscious level. Yes. However, when it comes to a conscious facing up to who we are, why we are and where we are, to try to go to the place between order and chaos – I would say that very very few of us have the guts, the persistence and indeed (dare I say it?) the intellectual ability to linger there. And of those very few, even fewer have the talent and the ability to translate that state of existence into a language of metaphors, be they visual, sonic or written.
I know that what I am saying is highly contentious, politically incorrect, if not downright rude even. But, so be it: I believe in equal opportunity, equal health care, equal votes, an equal distribution of resources – and that is as far as my idea of democracy goes. Really, no further. We are not all endowed with the same stuff… I certainly know in myself that I do not have what it takes to be in the no-man’s-land of the unutterable question on a persistently conscious level. To “live” there to the extent where I can bring it to bear the fruit of “art”. I may occasionally catch a glimpse of it – and that is as far as I can go. Ever will go.
And YES!!!
Humor does it just as well – and oftentimes better! And is even harder to attain! Humor is genius!
Long ago I gave up on finding a definition for art because I found out that it is artists’ job to override whatever definition there is for it. I think of art as a highly mutable virus and its definitions as the vaccines we try to develop after each new mutation; there isn’t any final vaccine.
Design, however, is much more prone to definition, although I’ve recently expressed my doubts on those definitions as well on my blog (as some of you know).
“Design is the act of neatly folding a pile of freshly washed laundry. Art is the freedom to get them all dirty again.” – from John Maeda’s twitter page (I’m not sure if these are his words.)
People are always questioning what art is and what it is not. May I suggest that one definition of art lies in what art means to you?
In other words, art is a subjective word for an evocative state of being that some person or some thing or some process or some situation has set up inside you that changes your world view in some way. Art has a beauty that has not to do with appearances, but with some quality that moves one to a different place in one’s psyche than one was before one encountered/ experienced it. There is a (personal) sense of truth, a driving force in it, an energy. Some (especially poets) might call it an erotic force, others might call it spiritual, and still others might call it a blow to the side of the head. And some would call it whatever perfectly matches their aspirations, tastes, decor, outfit, or political interests at a moment in time (ref. the history of Chinese art). There are some whose only measure would be pleasure (a concept with its own difficult, divisive and timebound connotations); and others who would run with tradition, or with innovation. Who is to say which of these is correct? Do history and reason and scholarship and market and elitism have anything to say about what is art? Or only about what art says about them (the looking glass standard)?
And that’s not even going into such problematic but related concepts as intention, instinct, excitement, suffering, and storytelling.
Art asks and answers, and asks more questions of those who respond. It tickles the ticklish (which btw for some is torture). You are an artist.
:)
hmmm… The virus immune to vaccines (much as I love the metaphor itself), Maeda’s dirty laundry and the personal approach… All of them make me somewhat nervous to be honest. I hear a lot about subjectivity and personal truth/definition from my own students in defense of thoroughly shallow work for instance. The license to “do your own thing” in other words. Artists have not been at liberty to “do their own thing” for millenia until the advent of modernism. And yet art flourished throughout the ages. And even during the early days of modernism into the first quarter of the 20th century: Were artists really “doing their own thing” then? Or were they pursuing a series of formal/contextual queries that dealt with human perception and also integrating the findings of psychoanalysis into the language of art? With much peer pressure and peer critique along the way? Somehow I cannot really picture Picabia telling Hans Arp and Breton that he was “doing his own thing” you know? It seems to me that leaving the definition in a subjective state (something humanity has only been doing for the past few decades of a very long art historic tradition) is what is leading us down a very steep slippery slope at the end of which lies the quagmire we call the contemporary art scene.
Sorry people. I know I am being really nasty here. But what I see around me points at a state of high red alarm where some serious toughening up and saying a firm “no” seems to me to be called for, is long overdue in fact: The proliferation of horrifyingly banal “art” work, quite a bit of it presented at prestigious, juried, curated international art events.
Something is seriously out of kilter here. Yes? No? Is everyone happy with what they are being subjected to under the name of “contemporary art”?
I only subject myself to what I want as far as art goes and I don’t worry about the rest. I know it’s different for one who is teaching others, with a responsibility to criticize, or in a position to be judged. I like to think I make a tiny bit of difference in the way art swerves over time, within the limited sphere of my influence. The flapping of the butterfly wings and all that. Life is short, art is long. A word of encouragement and a compass can mean the world to someone who is struggling and lost. It’s so easy to be overwhelmed when things look to be a quagmire.
When students defend their shallow work with indefensible ideas, perhaps it has something to do with the fact they are early yet in their trajectory as artists? They are students in the process of learning, after all?
Seriously doubt it Mab… The bulk of the 20th century avantgarde artists produced their most stunning work in their early twenties. The students I am talking about are roughly that age. And it isn’t only my students either: I have colleagues all over the globe who are desperate in the face of what they encounter.
It is a different mindset brought about by a politically correct milieu in which anything goes, nothing ever gets questioned, everything does in fact “get encouraged”, the word “genius” is anathema. I know I am sounding old enough to be my own great-grandmother but I honestly think that we are in very serious trouble, have been since the mid 1980’s, with things rapidly worsening throughout the ’90’s and the last decade. And we now seem to have reached a point of no return: A sinking into the mediocre, the banal, the cliche, well-worn ideas borrowed from here and there, some shrouded under a cloak of “social awareness” no less, clumsily cobbled together – at a scale probably never before seen in the entire history of art.
:-\
“I honestly think that we are in very serious trouble, have been since the mid 1980’s, with things rapidly worsening throughout the ’90’s and the last decade. And we now seem to have reached a point of no return: A sinking into the mediocre, the banal, the cliche, well-worn ideas borrowed from here and there, some shrouded under a cloak of “social awareness” no less, clumsily cobbled together – at a scale probably never before seen in the entire history of art.”
Bravo! Yes, I believe that as well. And its not only fine art that is suffering from this mediocrity. Its all the arts, the performing arts as well.
We have scrubbed out the people who take chances. Everything has to be a money maker. Its more too, education methods are different.
I don’t have the talent or the inclination to make the blind leap on a sustained basis for art. But its so wonderful to watch someone with real genius do it. I’m just worried that I’ll never see it. Especially with reports that the young generation coming up don’t seem to be self motivated, that they want pre-made narratives for life.