Thoughts brought to the surface by Anthony Boswell’s latest post. Like the paintings, these thoughts are a stuttering work in progress. I am aware of some contradictions and confused issues below but not at present of how to resolve them. In so far as art concerns itself with its contemporary world, Moore, Newman et al are no longer possible. What is possible is to live in a state of unrecognised nostalgia. Recognising the problem at least permits clinging on!! I don’t know if Andrew has similar feelings, but I have a tendency to feel that what I do is somehow trivial (chances are that it is trivial, but I refer to the feeling) by comparison with much contemporary work and its preoccupations. I feel embarrassed. It is something that I fight. I do what I do with some hope that I shall leave it behind.But there is the possibility that I can put my embarrassment to one side and just get on with being a kind of anachronistic creature, making my stuff and learning from it. I once heard it said that a good judge can enjoy bad art.
Art of the last century as typified by Newman, Pollock etc. might conceivably have evolved into ritual, surviving now in individual and group practices away from the mainstream. As ritual, its creativity defers to the demands of ideal form, open to nuance but bound by formal rules, work that may be judged in relation to that ideal. The making of art becomes social activity (ritual) like a tea ceremony (or vegetable show.) But this comes at the price of an ossified, conservative cultural order with all the coercive techniques necessary to sustain it. (However elegant or profound the ritual might seem)
If there are no longer qualitative criteria in art the implication is that all or nothing survives over time. Conversely those works which reveal themselves to have something to say in the future might have a presence analogous to excellence, for which the concept of drawing could serve as a metaphor.
Interesting that Rich White raises similar issues in his letter in a-n. in asking for some kind of labeling system for creativity. Coincidentally I crossed a connected path to do with the artistic community in my previous blog. He refers implicitly to the artists in your post. Maybe the historical notion of creativity as such now sits uncomfortably with the redundancy of criteria. To design a label to distinguish between creative and other things is to miss the point of creativity that it is ubiquitous. There is the further observation that the creative experience occurs in the subject; the creative object is at conception a subjective event.
Whether or not work needs explanation, we must talk about it.The error is to expect, or even wish for, the kind of explanation that explains. As I wrote this I thought that I understood some of it. It doesn’t affect the taste of chocolate.
