Prelude ======= I'm an art student, and in April Thyagi asked me some questions about art. I have spent considerable time thinking about these issues, but all I could come up with was cliches, and foggy ideas that there must be some meaning to art, or I wouldn't do it. Finally, a few days ago a Norwegian on irc asked me the question: What is occultism good for?, which cleared my mind in one sweep. (Thanks oi, if you read this.) I've written this under the premise that the reader knows as much about the history of art as I do, and added footnotes at the end of the text to make it more comprehensible to people unfamiliar with European art history. Questions and answers ===================== This was written in March -93 by Thyagi (thyagi@houseofkaos.abyss.com) to Daniel Roy: > Let us take the Van Gogh example further. What was the original > artist's 'goal'? To make the painting? I doubt it, frankly, but > this seems to be what you are implying. As there is entirely too > little discussion regarding art in this newsgroup I'd like to press > this further... Vincent probably had multiple goals. To name a few likely ones: to show people (Gaugin, the public, Theo (1) etc) that he could do it, to earn money, and to express himself. But when taking a close look (literally) at the paintings, I don't think Vincent painted to "produce a painting". It could be the case with some of his floral art, like his cherry twigs, but my foremost impression is that he painted out of compulsion. When you see his ouevre (2) as a whole, you will notice how varied it is, and I think the reason for this was that he painted what he saw around him, simply because he had to. I think many artists, including me, sometimes get this urge to record, to document our environment, to make other people see the same things we see. Take for instance Vincent's boats. They're so bright, as is the beach, the sea and the sky. When I see this series of pictures, I get the impression that what Vincent really wanted, was to communicate, to make me understand what he saw, to reach out and be touched. The same goes for most of his pictures; the shocking misery of the potato- eaters (3), the whirlyness of the sky in some of his landscapes, and the ominous crows in one of his last paintings of a field of grain, ripe for harvesting. This motivation makes his unhappy life (See below.) all the more clearer, and the tragedy of it all the more devastating to behold. Vincent was a very lonely man, I think. > CAN we be told how he painted his masterpiece? Will we be given the > brushstrokes and the color-tinting and the shading skills and that's > it? I.e. are we only dealing here with simple technics? What about > his inner process? To a limit, yes. You can study Vincent's technique, or Gaugin's or most any painter's, and you can, with _much_ practice and previous knowledge and skill, make very good fakes (4). What you get out of it, is, on the other hand, questionable at best. A lot of rationalisations probably. If people would like it and buy it? Yes, probably. Even if you're honest, and tell people that you are painting "in the style of Vincent", or whoever, and sign the paintings with your own name. That's probably the difference between people who buy pretty pictures, and people who buy a piece of communication, something with a meaning beyond the mundane, saying something that can't be said in words, not because it would sound silly, but because there aren't any words for it. I do wonder what drives a person who tries to paint in the style of someone else, though. Curiosity if it can be done, is certainly one possibility, as is the need for appreciation from others, and money. I doubt that it is communication of something that _could_ not be communicated in words, though. > What about his struggle to resolve some inner dilemma between the > space of the canvas and the color of the brush-strokes? What about > the fights he was having with his lovers and the eclairs he was > eating each morning during his work? Obviosly the life you lead will affect what and how you paint. Just to name one example, women generally tend to paint smaller paintings than men. The reasons for this are manyfold, some of them are obvious, for instance, many women don't have a room of their own where they can paint, or if they have, it's usally quite small (Cf. Virgina Wolf's essay "A room of one's own"). But what you eat, what your lover says to you at breakfast, all these things, affect us, and because artists ideally communicate their soul, mundane things like diet, illness and hurt will affect their art. The connection doesn't have to be straightforward, though. To take the example of Vincent again, he was a very lonely man, who could not support himself, and who was totally at a loss as to how to be a lover. You would think that his miserable life, including the bad food he ate, would make him paint miserable paintings, but in fact, he rarely does. When Vincent paints misery, he paints the misery of other people -- not his own. Instead his paintings are usually _very_ happy in colour aswell as in technique, some of them are even bordering on being manic (5), I would say. My guess is that Vincent was happy when he was painting, and that that was one of the reasons he painted at all. Again, I think that he felt that he was reaching through, communicating something. The exception to this in Vincent's work, are the very last pictures, which have an ominous quality to them, a hint of foreboding, of doom. > (I have absolutely NO knowledge regarding this man, apart from some > mention of a sliced-off ear offered to a lover - perhaps a legend.) > The point is that his painting came from a process itself (a human > being). This was no mechanically-derived, mass-production item set > out for public consumption. It was a child of the art; a baby, > borne from the artist's experience. Yes, his goal must not have > been to replicate, and neither is it that of most artists, but was > his goal to create? I think that it could be to replicate, in the sense of documenting what he saw the way he saw it. Actually, I doubt that his goal was to create, just because of this reason. This also rhymes with my own experience. I mainly paint (in water-colours), but I've worked with sculpting, too, and my experience of these two techniques was that they were very different. When painting, you know you can't reproduce reality. You have only two dimensions to work with, so you will have to limit yourself to reproduce your _impression_ of reality (if you have an exterior motif). In sculpting, you work with three dimensions, which changes what you do very much. The process is entirely different, not only from a technique point of view, but also from the experience point of view. A common fault with sculpting beginners is that they under- estimate the depth, the one dimension not accessible to painters, and create sculptures bordering on the two-dimensional. My point here, is that art, to me, isn't really about creating, but about communicating. That you are creating something in the process matters, and how you do it affects what you communicate, but the communication is the important element, and the process is part of the communication. (This is muddy.) > Why not to 'destroy the space of the canvass'? I suppose that there are some painters who approach their work in this fashion, but I can't relate to it. The empty sheet is beautiful, the half-finished painting is beautiful, the finished painting is beautiful; what is there to destroy? On second thought, I also think that a major step in my artistic expression, would be to overcome this attitude of clinging to beauty. > Why not to watch his genius express itself exquisitely as his mind > bent to the task of Conversation? What is art? My notion of art has a lot to do with knowledge and communication. I see art as a way of communicating in which you often don't know whom you are communicating with. It could be yourself, it could be "the general public", it could be your mother, or maybe even noone, or perhaps a deity. You just don't know. Or sometimes you do know. You can paint a picture, like you write a note. Some times. Seing art as a form of communication limits what I think is art in a way that I find acceptable. In my opinion, the idea that everything is art, just doesn't hold, and what's more important, it makes the word art meaningless, and therefor useless. For me, a definition that is too wide is just as useless as one that is too narrow. So what does this definition encompass, and what is left out? Vincent's boats are definitely art by my definition, because they communicate something to me that is very hard to say in words. Massproduced pictures of crying children don't fit the bill, because they don't communicate anything that is hard to convey with language. In fact their message is quite easily transcribed: "I, the seller of this product, want to make money, fast, and I don't care whose emotions I trample in the process." Now, this is an easy test, because I chose extreme examples. Had the definition failed at this stage already, it would have been useless. On the other hand, analysing the answers we got, does point out one weakness in it: it is purely subjective. This if fine with me, but it does mean that one person's art is the other person's utter crap. In my opinion, that's good, because that's how it is in Real Life(tm). > What is the value of the process? What is the value of the product? > Whom does it serve? What is the value of value? Just as Thyagi implies, I think we have to distinguish between art, seen as the finished product, and art seen as the process of creating or assembling this product. The art critic usually sees art as the finished product. This often results in strange ideas about art as a process. Some art critics mystify the process of making art to no end. Often when reading these critics I think that they are on to something, but they never seem to be able to grip it and tell the rest of us what it was. Other art critics see art as the process as pure assembly of various things, be they paint from tubes or bicycle parts (6). They usually make me think of swollen egos. So what is the difference between art as a product, and art as a process? I think that the process is only accessible to bystanders who have a lot of experience from their own artistic processes. Other people will just see a person painting. Basically, art as a process is a participant process, you have to do it to understand what it is. You won't be able to read in a book what the difference in process between painting in oil and painting in water-colours means to the artist using these mediums. You have to do it yourself, or you won't know. Some people might hate the expression, but this is "tacit knowledge". Art as a product can be appreciated by the person who made it aswell as "innocent bystanders" (this is getting a bit dry, isn't it?), but often they come out with very different experiences. There's nothing wrong with that, because artistic objects don't have one correct interpretation, just as our sensitive input doesn't have one correct interpretation. Often you do get a deeper, or at least different understanding of the product, if you talk to the person who made it. They can explain symbolism that is peculiar to them, and maybe hint at what they wanted to express with the object. Finale ====== For me art is part of my interest in occultism. It is one way of gaining knowledge and communicating without language and words and attention spans hampering. It can also be a way of expressing something I could have said in a language that the recipient wouldn't understand, in colour, texture and tone that the recipient does understand, at least vaguely or intuitively. Maybe it can even be a way of communicating with other people's or my own Younger Self. In this respect, occultism is a kind of culture, just as art is. --Ceci Footnotes ========= (1) Gaugin is another famous painter in France who was a friend of Vincent van Gogh's. He later went to Tahiti and painted happy Polynesians, in a way that _I_ think is kitsch. Theo van Gogh was the younger brother of Vincent. He was assistant to an art dealer. He tried to sell Vincent's work, but couldn't, and he supported Vincent for most of his life. They had a peculiar relationship that might not have been altogether healthy. (2) Oeuvre is French and means "collected works" in an art historic context. (3) Vincent was originally Flemish and worked as a Christian lay priest among miners in the Belgian mountains. This is where he painted "The Potato Eaters", a picture of utter hopeless misery. He was chased away by clergy from neighboring parishes because they felt he tried to make them revolt. (4) There was this extremely skillful forger in England who had even fooled museum experts. Unfortunately I can't recall his name right now. I think that he fell ill and confessed, but was released from jail because of his illness. It was in the eighties. Anyone remember this chap? He has even made some educational videos about how to paint just like Degas etc. (5) Vincent spent time in mental hospitals on several occassions, and not always willingly. (6) Picasso made a bull's head out of bicycle parts casted in bronze.