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 believe that no work of art can be understood before some preparatory work has been done in the person doing the understanding.
Even as I say it I think to myself “That seems little extreme.” But before I thin the credo let me explain that…
In order to find a theory of art that encompasses more than one field you need to find out what similarities exist between the different art fields. The fields are diverse so there are a lot of possible answers. The only satisfactory connection I have found is communication. Every work of art that I could think of was an attempt by its creator to communicate—or possibly mis-communicate—something.
I believe that humans are linguistic by nature. We are not defined by the words we use but we find or create word to define our world. Further words are tools with which we build ideas.
The Judeo-Christian concept of man asserts that he was created in Gods image. God created everything by speaking it into existence—He created with words. No surprise then that man, in God’s image, cannot create or conceive of creation without words.
Communication is part of necessary adaptation. Adaptation occurs by one of two forces.
Force one is natural selection by which the defective or inadequate options are removed from the pool of possible options. In language this happens when we choose not to use some words or phrases that might get in the way of the message we want to communicate. We choose not to behave in certain ways because we see that those behaviors will not help us to achieve what we want. Natural selection alone is not adequate to solve the worlds riddle. If you have to tell your neighbor something you might eliminate a lot of unhelpful words but narrowing the pool of word doesn’t necessarily mean that you will find the word you need. Natural selection is a negative approach (it relies on restriction) and can only be relied upon when the pool of options contains all the necessary solutions. (Natural selection is the provable part of the evolutionary theory. Evolutionary theory deals with this fundamental flaw by claiming that random mutations can add new solutions to the pool of genetic options. I’m an agnostic where this claim is concerned.)
Force two is creation. Creation is the process of generating new solutions. New solutions might be a combination of old ones but more often they reshape basic materials in a way that multiplies (as opposed to adding) their effectiveness.
Art attempts creative communication. The goal of the artist is to mold a new solution from basic concepts. This new solution is then encapsulated in the work of art and tossed into society.
Each work is like a bottled message bobbing on the ocean of society. When the bottle containing the message (in most cases the artwork contains the message in a cognitive bundle but the art work is not itself the message) plunks onto a strand of sand where you sit you won’t immediately get the message. Just looking at the container doesn’t convey the message.
You might open the bottle and look at the message in it and if you understand the language in which it is written you will be able to read the message. Here is where the seed concept comes in. The seed is the message encoded in the art. Language is the cultural soil that the seed must have in order to grow in your mind. Language prepares you to receive the message in the work of art. Without this soil construct you won’t get the message. You might look at the art but it won’t make sense to you.
The seed of art grows in proportion to this soil. Knowing how to speak a language means that when you listen to people speak in another language you can probably pick up on some emotional clues based on pitch and volume. The better you understand the language being spoken the more your get from the speech. Increased preparation before hand means increased comprehension.
Preparation comes in a lot of forms but it all enables comprehension. Without this preparation there is no comprehension. Solomon said that the simple person reading the proverbs would get some basic information, the wise man who reads it would be able to cultivate wisdom, but to the person whose heart had not been prepared with a fear of God the book would be puzzling or empty. Looking at art without the necessary preparation is trying to understand a blank sheet of paper.