Self Expression- Peculiar and Unexpected Ways

As a child I place a pencil on the paper and make a mark. No judgment, no preconceived idea, no plan. Is it simple play or something more primordial?

Joseph Campbell said that the folk are led by artists. The people consequently respond to what the artists makes but the artists lead. The mark leads.  As an artist you come to the realization that you either lead with your mark or you are just following the person in front of you. That realization can be either inspirational or painful. Maybe both at times.  What is self expression?  Does the power of art reside in self expression or in the expression of the material itself, regardless of who the self  is?  

We are not  born with material knowledge . We explore that freely as children.  The desire to make something  be ‘special’, the scholar Ellen Dissanayake says, is the reason the world makes art. We intuitively know it is special until we are sadly taught otherwise.  When and how did the statement ‘Art is a talent you are born with’  become an excuse for believing you don’t have talent? 

One does not  have to master  materials before you can create something beautiful. In this sense art has always been about what happens in the process of making. What you have to try to master is the ability to see what is beautifully happening during  the process. This may be what children have and adults lose as they mature. We are taught not to trust ourselves. We judge and are critical of what should be natural.  As a elementary school child I was taught to draw a Thanksgiving turkey by tracing my hand on the paper, the teacher showing me how it was best done.  No wonder I’m such a mess.

Instead of using materials to express our self  we should think in terms of  our self expressing the materials. The difference is subtle and changes the way I think about art. Art is not art therapy.  Art in itself  is therapeutic but not in the sense of a treatment.  In T.S.Eliot’s essay  ‘Tradition and Individual Talent’ published in 1920,  he contends that the best art is art made when the self gets out of  its own way.  “The process of an artists is continual self sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality”.   This seems to be quite a different explanation of the creative process than what I was taught.  Eliot writes, “The more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the man who creates; the more perfectly the mind will digest and transmute the passions which are his material.”   Hans Hoffman said that the artists technical problem is “how to transform the material…back into the sphere of the spirit.”  The self transmutes but the material transforms.

Stories abound of painters, writers, and dancers who after  years of practice and struggle break through to something new and exciting.  Their relationship with their medium has gone through the transformation that Hoffman speaks of.  This, as Eliot explains,  has more to do with the expression of the artists use of materials than the expression of the self.  “The poet(artist) has, not a  ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium, which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impression and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in the poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play quite a negligible part in the man, the personality.”   Unfortunately having a great personality does not guarantee that you will make great art.

Eliot’s  “experiences” combined in “peculiar and unexpected ways”   helps me explain in simple terms the act of  painting.  Painters explore new combinations, treatments of paint, brush work and compositions in “peculiar and unexpected ways” that they may not always understand. You are led to something new and exciting by not knowing where you are going. We enter the unknown, where things get both frightening and exciting.  This is counterintuitive to what I was taught as a child.  I was shown it was important to plan, organize, test, reassess, and have a back up plan.  I do some of that also when I make a painting but I  want to be willing… no I want to be brave enough, to chuck all of it and fly blind.  It is only in this type of  foggy consciousness which hovers just above what is subconscious that poetry is formed.  Its our primordial soup.  Its the swampy bog of  possibilities which we crawl out of  to join those who have come before us.  Eliot believed that the poet is formed by the “peculiar and unexpected ways”  of  the generations that have come before. And when the modern poet or artist puts their mark down they effect  all of the history that came before them as they, in turn, were effected by all who proceeded them. It’s like adding your building block to a continuum of changing and growing consciousness. You are formed by what has come before you and you will form those who come after.  Its a big beautiful cosmic art plan. A big, world changing  plan that your -self and my -self can participate in.  And you get to make a turkey picture  anyway you want to.

 

 

 

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Aesthetics

 

“Aesthetics is what connects one to matters of fact. It is anti-ideal, it is materialistic. It implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.’

Fairfield Porter 

 

I have always, it seems, done battle with personal taste in art. Either I’m trying to figure out just what I think about art or I am trying to understand someone else’s ideas. What has helped calm my mind is understanding the difference between one’s taste or opinions about art and one’s aesthetics about art. My opinions are simply that- opinions. My aesthetics are how I go about thinking and looking at art.

My first big battle with taste was in undergraduate school  during the early 80’s when I was a ceramic major. The department was split into two factions. There were those who made functional pots and those who made ‘art’. As a student there was this underlying  pressure to pick a camp and commit to its ideology.  If you were a ‘clay artists’ making pots was too old school and lacked the room for creative self expression. The potters, on the other hand, saw themselves as part of a valuable tradition and thought it sacrilegious to make something out of clay that wasn’t part of that tradition. Taste it seemed was both a personal judgment and a sociological concept. We were young, impressionable and frankly did not know our heads from holes in the ground. Neither did our instructors who were guilty of fueling the whole stupid debate. We were being taught taste.

Off to graduate school I went where I was exposed to more new things in the world than I could imagine but where I had to start making limiting choices. I had to choose the classes I wished to focus on, the teachers I wished to work with, the material I thought was interesting with the ultimate choice of writing a dissertation and orally defending the choices I made. We bolstered our own opinions about art by rejecting other people’s ideas. We were there to develop our own ideas. The problem was we were still all young and impressionable but were beginning to think we knew it all. We were developing our own taste.

Then it was off into the real world after graduating where I had my first exhibition at Northwestern Michigan Collage of a series of drawings I was doing at the time .  I thought I was radical in my desire to hang these drawings  unframed in the exhibition area, which was basically the hallway in the art building. The response from some of the art students was  to draw on my drawings and write on them how much the thought they were crap. I was even chastised by the administration for leaving myself open to such a reaction by not ‘properly framing” my work. They were expressing there personal taste.

Taste is ones opinion. There can be good opinions or bad opinions. The opinions about art I learned as a young student seem subordinate to the ‘aesthetics’ that Porter talks about. Porter’s idea of aesthetics implies a philosophy, a tool by which you sense things. A procedure by which you look. How you look and how you think about what your seeing is going to control what kind of taste you end up having.

It was the philosopher David Hume who believed that aesthetic judgment had to have both the ability to detect things with your sight and a emotional sensitivity to what you detect. You have to look first and be able to feel something about what your looking at. And it was Immanuel Kant who believed that  to aesthetically judge something depended on ones ability to be reflective on what you are seeing. All three of those qualities; sensations, emotions and intellect vary between people and are decisive factors how people decide what they like and don’t like in art. If you accept the notion that beauty is in the mind of the beholder then you also have to be willing to agree that not all of those minds may be firing on the same number of cylinders. The ability to see things varies from person to person. 

Fortunately there is a quality of being that isn’t solely dependent on how much you know. That quality is openness. Remaining open to the possibilities of art is what I believe Porter is referring to when he says that aesthetics “ implies no approval, but respect for things as they are.” You don’t have to like it. You don’t have to be interested in anything you don’t care to be interested in but you don’t get to automatically judge it as bad either. Aesthetics allows you to look, to inquire, to investigate. If you are going to be aesthetic about something it requires you to be respectful. If you  are going to make  judgments right away based on what you say your taste in art is you arr going to miss the whole experience. Here is a little test to use next time you are looking at something you may not understand – If It is easier to simply say you don’t like it than it is to explain why you don’t like it, you are probably not being aesthetic.

There is immense pleasure in going to a museum or an art gallery and simply looking.  Looking with the idea of beauty in your mind. There is a great sense of freedom to look and not be required to make a judgment. No one is going to give you a test. You don’t need to leave an opinion before you go out the door. You can form that later if you want. But the aesthetic experience can only begin if you are open enough to look.  And the joy of the aesthetic experience continues when you can later contemplate and think about what you have looked at and compare and contrast that with all the other things seen in the past.  Soon you have a history of looking and thinking about what you have seen. Possibly you will want to read about the artists and what they were thinking. You’ll want to read art history, buy art books, travel to cities just to see a exhibition. Its addictive. Its pleasurable. And if  you do so aesthetically you won’t have to fight with yourself so much anymore.