Learning to Look
I’ve been living with Beth Dow’s series Ruins for the past six weeks and the time has come for us to move onto the next show. When I first encountered the work I soaked it up, let the quiet sunlight sneaking through the clouds in, gazed at the absurdity and chance of the images and decided that I liked it. I decided that I would be more than content to be accompanied in the Gallery for a month and a half by these photographs because of the tactile quality and weight that they held, how the grey-sepia made me feel nostalgic for old photographs, the social commentary it was making but most importantly the second look nature of the images that made me notice something new every time I walked into the Gallery. I took the opportunity to take a critical eye to the series and made and aesthetic decision about the images. A decision that not only related to myself but also what these images meant in the greater discourse of society. How often are people doing this in today’s culture?
Recently, on several occasions, I’ve been confronted with the idea that art criticism doesn’t exist anymore—at least in the effective medium it used to be. At the Affordable Art Fair I attended Artlog’s Panel discussion (featuring Ms. Jen Bekman) I heard that art criticism has been replaced with the instant gratification of having your name mentioned or not; In a recent interview, Boris Groys, Professor of Aesthetics, Art History, and Media Theory at the Centre for Art and Media, said “People are not so interested in why they should look at it; they’re interested in the question of whether they should look at it at all…the classical critic believed that his failure would be a failure of mankind. And he had a responsibility for something bigger than himself. I don’t think the contemporary critic believes in that”; but most significantly Art Fag City presented us yesterday with Eight Fallacies About Contemporary Art which included “I don’t know enough about art to talk about it.”
These three instances have brought to the forefront of my mind the idea that either art is no longer accessible to the audience it is intended for but more likely is the thought that we just aren’t looking in the right way. How are we going to get it back?
Nick wrote a blog post the other day posing the question “What is American art?” I’m going to give his question one possible answer, in the words of Nicholas Bourriaud “Art is a state of encounter”. In the words of that ridiculous GM commercial, ‘come on America, lets put on our rally caps’, We need to revitalize this state of encounter, but not just so that the viewer is receiving what he or she wants from a piece of art work (another problem we are faced with) but rather in a sense-of-self altering way, a thought changing way. So that in turn we can learn how to look at art work and form our own opinions on how it relates to the larger cultural dialogue what it means for the future of humanity.
May 15th, 2009 at 11:46 am
Hi – I think that art, whatever kind of art, is always accessible to the audience it is intended for, I guess, a point can be argued that explaining specific works of art to family or friends may create a new appreciation of their value, but what is their value? It’s a sticky question.
Partly I think that ‘bridging that gap’ is sometimes a separate art altogether, the classic critic (I’m thinking stalwarts like Clement Greenberg, or more romantic ones like Roger Fry) believed in something larger than themselves, but their time is also a time of cultural absolutes, post impressionist french art, post war america. It’s hard to conceive of a figure like that in our current diversified global culture. The challenge being how to articulate an American art of to-day without inevitably falling into elitist traps, or even cultural discrimination. Can art be articulated as an open ended question?