civilized ku # 550 ~ is all good art about nothing?
Monday, June 28, 2010 at 12:00PM 
Under the big top ~ Plattsburgh, NY • click to embiggenIn the book Aesthetics and Its Discontents, it is opined that ....
... The social function of Art is to not have one ... The work that desires nothing, the work without any point of view, which conveys no message and has no care either for democracy or for anti-democracy, this work is 'egalitarian' by dint of its very indifference, by which it suspends all preference, all hierarchy.
By that measure, the tv show Seinfeld - "a show about nothing" that celebrates the minutiae of everyday life (aka, the nothingness of everyday life) with no particular POV or message - is good art. However, in books like Seinfeld and Philosophy "nothingness" is connected to deep wide-ranging questions and considerations about existence itself, aka - "the meaning of life".
Now it seems rather obvious to me that making the leap from watching "a tv show about nothing" or looking at "indifferent" and "egalitarian" pictures (work without any overtly obvious POV / message) to questions and considerations about the meaning of life requires a considerable amount of effort in the exercise of the art of interpretation. In other words, delving into the realm of the content, aka - the connoted meaning(s) to be found in a work of art work.
But, hey, wait just a minute here - that said, Susan Sontag, in her 1964 essay Against Interpretation, opined that "interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art". Sontag's point is that too many "art lovers" and, in particular, art critics have over-intellectualized the concept of content - the meaning(s) to found (or, in her opinion, fabricated out of thin air) in art.
Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all ... (the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are).
[AN ASIDE - I have written about the idea of finding the "maximum amount of content in a work of art" vs. the idea of "seeing the thing" HERE.]
So, you might ask / wonder, what's my point with all of this? Well, as is much of my rantings, ravings, and ramblings here on The Landscapist, it's all just part of me trying to get my art / picturing making shit together. To come to grips with exactly what it is I am doing and maybe, in the process, come to a better understanding of why I am doing it.
And, FYI, I think that I am getting pretty close to getting it together and understanding exactly what I am doing - celebrating the minutiae of everyday life by making pictures that "appear to be about nothing". Not only do they appear to be about nothing, they also appear to be "work without any point of view" that also, by their appearance of having been made with a rather casual "indifference", "convey no message".
The point of all of that is to make pictures that do, in fact, illustrate "the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are." They are an attempt to stand in defiance of (as Sontag states in her essay) "the conflicting tastes and odors and sights of the urban environment that bombard our senses ... a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result [of which] is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience" because "[W]hat is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more."
In order to "learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more", the aim of my picture making is to make works of art (and, by analogy, our own experience) that are more, rather than less, real to us.
ADDENDUM - make no mistake about it, neither Sontag nor I are suggesting that the content / connoted in a work of art is a bad thing or that works of art should be little more than eye candy. But rather, speaking for myself, that a fixation on content / the connoted to the point wherein it is all-important, even to the point of obfuscating or, worse case, obliterating the denoted is contra-sensory / sensual. In fact, this excess promotes hermeneutics, when what we need is an "erotics of art".
Reader Comments (1)
I certainly relate to this - though perhaps I'm not as tortured by the process as you are ;-).
If humans are meant to be creative beings, then we need a way to express ourselves. Creating art (or attempting to) is a way of expressing oneself.
But it's also a way to help us understand our relationship to our environment - by identifying what's important or pleasing to us (or for the negatively minded: what displeases us). And by doing this we also establish our connection to our environment and perhaps derive our meaning / purpose.
It's also an interesting point about how much "meaning" is in an image. I'd suggest the strongest images can be "read" easy and quickly. You shouldn't need "arty-farty" qualifications to understand an image -- that's intellectual fluff concocted by self-appointed art critics.
I like Sontag's quote: "the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are". Sounds like a good definition for Straight Photography?