Why is it? I love poems that employ concrete imagery in more than a descriptive way? Hamlet’s rank un-weeded garden or a star sending out sometimes red and sometimes blue rays.
I don’t claim to understand music but when I hear some concrete audio reference I feel like my brain can get a handle on the work I’m listening too. Even if the reference is suggested by a third party who may or may not know any more than I do about the piece. If the music is in a film and connected to a character or a set of images it stays locked in my mind as a unity of audio-visual experience.
Why is it? I love poems that employ concrete imagery in more than a descriptive way? Hamlet’s rank un-weeded garden or a star sending out sometimes red and sometimes blue rays.
I don’t claim to understand music but when I hear some concrete audio reference I feel like my brain can get a handle on the work I’m listening too. Even if the reference is suggested by a third party who may or may not know any more than I do about the piece. If the music is in a film and connected to a character or a set of images it stays locked in my mind as a unity of audio-visual experience.
My goal in painting is to use images in this same concrete connectable way. I know that people attach meaning and force to images. “That’s the beauty of Collage and found object painting” I tell myself.
So why is it so easy to slip back into trotting out the same old clichéd, seemingly universal images? Advertising slogans and torn away bits of print media? Why is it that it’s so easy to make art about art instead of art about people and places and things?
The beauty of concrete imagery is the difference between “a” and “the.” It’s hard though not to overlook values in “the” and use the image only for it’s “a” qualities. The bowler hat becomes “a” reference to Magritte but the personal history of “the” hat—that particular bowler hat—is forgotten in the euphoric rush that comes with symbolic representation.
Collage has been developed to such an extent that there is a common visual vocabulary to it similar to the visual vocabulary of cubism. Earlier cubist came up with a vocabulary for themselves but followers replicated the beautiful vocabulary that they didn’t own. Schwitters started using ad-art in his collages in 1919 (link) and collage artists are still doing it today.
There’s nothing wrong with building on another artists ideas or taking inspiration from them. The challenge for every semi-ambitious artist is to develop their own set of visual words without loosing their audience. Not new for the sake of new but new because there’s little value in calling something new work if the ideas are all borrowed from art-historical sources.
This is the reason that artists have to develop their perceptive abilities. New images and visual vocabulary are all around us but we have to see and filter it.
The artist has to have something to say. If I’m too focused on stylistic concerns I’ll slip into the easy flow of meaningless visual babbling and eye candy—sweet and low for the soul. One way to make sure that I’m saying something is to evaluate my visual vocabulary to see if it is personal and concrete. Do I have a good reason for choosing the images I’m using or are they just an expected greeting to my viewers.
Artist: how are you?
Viewer: Fine. And you?
Artist: Fine.
Concrete images keep things exciting and fresh. Even older collages still impact us because the images relate to the work and not to all the historical examples of collage. They make the works interesting to regular folks not just other artists and art historians who know all the visual references. Visual allusions should bring a deeper layer of meaning to the work but if they are too much on the surface the work will be shallow, hollow men.
I've no explanation of the unique contribution of found objects to a work, although I have begun to use them more frequently in the "constructions" I am currently making. Often the found elements seem to attain a new identity in the mix of making, unrelated to their original function, but even in an alien context, retain the power to restore the connection to a "lost" place in time.
Posted by: henry mitchell at August 2, 2004 06:29 PMHow does this apply to non-objective art? Would the visual vocabulary include concrete colors or patterns in place of concrete images? I'm trying to avoid the "expected greeting" to my paintings. Currently, I moved to an objective painting format (stylized landscapes with heavy thematic colors) to create what I had been doing with composition and color non-objectively. So, I'm interested in how your concept would apply to non-objective art.
Posted by: Matt Mulder at September 12, 2004 12:58 AMYou nailed it. Colors themselves are concrete on a certain level. People have all experienced red and specific reds can be concrete images of something. Pattern too could be concrete. The difficulty though with color or pattern is that they may not be concrete enough to spark an immediate response.
I have moved away from completely non-objective art in the past couple of years because I didn’t feel like people could really connect with the colors and shapes I had been using. They instead connected with the abstract as abstract art and so never bothered to think any deeper than that level. I love the abstract and my compositions are still abstract but I feel like if an artist wants to connect with their audience in a non decorative way they have to find some connection with the concrete world that their audience lives in.
Keep going on your non-objectivity though. These thoughts are not a recipe for good art just my thoughts about it.