Reframing Art

 
Reframing Art
Hugh's notes - 2022 August

I was dumping a box of random tiny socks on the Free Table this morning. Someone left a disorderly assortment of toddler clothes yesterday and I put the remains away last night. I didn't want to be awakened at two in the morning by people with no common sense picking through clothes and toys.  Or most disruptive of all, a couple of hipsters talking philosophy with Hello Kitty socks as a prop for their theatrics.

I can fall back to sleep when I hear people lost in confusion, messed up on drugs and trying to find matching pink socks for their sister's baby. That's just sad. But when I hear bad philosophy, stuff that just adds to the confusion in all of our lives, I get angry. The anger will keep me awake as my no-longer-dreaming brain tries to find answers to philosophical questions that were stale a century ago. But there were no debates at the table last night and I slept well and I was in a good mood as I made a tempting pile of socks.

And so was my neighbour, Bryan, even though he was up early and dressed for work in his painter's shirt and pants. He greeted me cheerfully and came over to the table to look at a painting on canvas that had arrived silently in the middle of the night. It was an acrylic or oil portrait of a woman with brown hair, dark eyes, and light skin against a background of nicely diffused pale greenish splotches.

The overall effect, to me, was stiff and staring and the tiniest bit creepy. But that's just my impression. The painting may have once had strong personal meaning to someone, perhaps representing a family member at the height of her mature beauty. Or maybe someone turned it in as a self-portrait assignment for her teacher training, then went on to teach decimal arithmetic to kids for forty years before she retired to Baja California. Or maybe a guy in jail painted it to keep him company.

Bryan held up the 3 foot by 2 foot painting for me to see, and he looked at the writing on the back. I asked him what he had in mind. He said, "It's still a good canvas. And we have lots of gesso to give it a new surface."

I guess he saw the look on my face when I asked "But what about the painting?"

His answer was immediate and pleasant, "I don't really see the painting, just the canvas." And he put the painting in the back of his station wagon and drove off to his job as a set painter for a television series.

So I finished restocking and tidying the table and went back inside. I unloaded the dishwasher as my wife Joan put a couple of eggs on for breakfast. I told her about the painting. She said, "Oh yeah. I think I saw it. There's a beginner's mistake they teach you about in art school. People think of the iris and the pupil as round so they paint big round eyes and the subject of the portrait looks freaky."

I said, "So what about the painting?"

Her answer was as easy and fast as Bryan's, "Somebody probably died. If Bryan or his daughter paints over it at least the canvas won't end up in the landfill."

So I thought about the painting, and about Bryan and about Joan, both artists since childhood, both professionally recognized, both still actively creating new work. Real life artists and their real life approach to art, untroubled at the thought of painting over someone else's work.

And I thought of what I had heard a couple of days ago, where an academic interviewed on CBC said something like, "Art exists to map our intellectual landscape." Or "Artists are the leading edge of social change." Or "Art gives meaning to our lives."

I couldn't remember exactly what the professor said because I have heard and read dozens of generalities like this in the media and in art magazines. And they are all untrue. Art is none of those pretentious and poorly defined activities. And artists are not automatically a source of progressive change.

That's because "art" is a word that goes back to Indo-European through Middle English and Latin, and it originally referred to "skill" or "craft", or "fitting together". But words get repurposed.

Painter Ray Ophoff quotes the legendary Andy Warhol: "How do you know if something is art? When the cheque clears." Warhol simply made up a lot of stuff, including his own fame, but his pragmatic redefinition cuts through the knots of centuries of philosophical discussion about "art".

Following Warhol, I find it most useful to think of fine or commercial "art" as an activity or an object that has value outside its original context. Is a 1957 Chevy, the one with the chrome accented tailfins now a piece of art? A classic 1963 Jaguar XKE? Since people buy them to primarily to display, not just drive, the answer is clearly yes. Art. No doubt.

 How about a Hyundai Pony hatchback or a Chev Celebrity sedan? These are forgotten cars, so they are clearly not "art" unless someone with a hot glue gun covers them with costume jewelry or baby socks. But what about the third generation Ford Taurus wagon, a distinctive ovoid design that resembles a well-used bar of soap? Is it art?

Perhaps. I've looked at cars and car design since I was a preschooler. I knew that the Ford designers had stepped away from the angular functionalism that was once popular, turning the whole car into a unified visual statement in 1986 and pushing the concept even further ten years later. To me, a Ford Taurus was art by the definitions I grew up with. Not good industrial design that I liked, but art for sure. But when my opinion was put to a real life test, I was wrong.

Because three years ago my neighbour Bryan bought a used Taurus wagon to drive him and his painting gear. It was magnificent: a plain silver gray color in perfect condition that displayed every line, like a piece of abstract sculpture with tires. But no one noticed it parked on the street. The hours and hours that the designers put in went unperceived.

But that started to change when Bryan showed me a sketch of what he had in mind for the car: a complete decorative repaint with an aqua (turquoise) base color and big panels of faux woodgrain, an imitation of the vinyl woodgrain of the 1970s and 1980s that mimicked the real wood commercial station wagons of the 1920s and 1930s. He worked at transforming the car one summer and it was clear that whatever Bryan was doing, it was art. Person after person stopped to chat and observe the changes.

Today, with the aqua paint, the woodgrain panels, the fake rust, a collection of decals, and a couple of plastic hula dancers, the car turns heads just sitting there. By Warhol's definition, the car is art. Its cash value has increased. And it fits the old Indo-European and Middle English definitions of art: Bryan's skill and his mastery of the painter's craft are obvious.

But does it fit contemporary academic definitions of art?

I would argue that it does. Just run your eyes across the car's layers of semiotic meaning that displace its sequential history in a cascade of failing perceptual viewpoints, the rhizomatic contextual connections between the collection of stickers, the mark making of industrial capitalism directly upon the neurological substrate of the viewer, and the self-referential dialectic that speaks to the numinous but semi-infinite and resonating set of perceptions that surround the vehicle yet are located nowhere. Art for sure, in both the "modern", post-modern, "post-modern" and primitive futurist senses of the concept.

But the vehicle risks being too popular, too comprehensible, too easily viewable. It's a 1600 kilogram joke that adults get immediately and kids just stare at. It doesn't need the pretentious art-school jargon required by shoes covered in beeswax or by human forms represented in chicken wire and compost or by bananas duct-taped to gallery walls.

Bryan's decorated Taurus wagon reminds us of the obvious: almost anyone can appreciate art and learn to create art that they find interesting or enjoyable. No philosophy required. Art is a consequence of the evolutionary pressures on humans to be more perceptive, more manually skillful, better at learning, more cooperative, and more deeply aware of social context.

In many of us, those precursor abilities to our growth as artists are not obvious, but they are waiting for you when you need them. Joan says that when she used to work on community art projects person after person would come up to her and say, "If it wasn't for my art, I wouldn't have survived my time in prison."

So when when I hear or read the endless nonsense about "fine" art or some elite social role for artists, I get angry, although I should laugh. And you should laugh, too, and move on to devote more time and thought to your own art. Don't wait until you find yourself in prison.

If nothing else,  when you find handmade art on the Free Table, or mass-produced art hanging in a dollar store, or the art of our universe appearing magically as a pattern of leaves on a wet sidewalk,  take a moment to reflect on the person who created it and what they wanted to share with you.

***

 

 ** If you look carefully, you can see the portrait of the woman with dark hair through the rear glass. **