A (grossly generalized) history of my attitude towards contemporary art
Looking at contemporary art in middle school (and before) filled me with boredom. Look at contemporary art in high school filled me with awe. Looking at contemporary art in freshman year of college filled me with confusion but happiness. Looking at art in sophomore filled me with confusion but happiness and an inkling of light. Looking at contemporary art in junior year filled me with boundless wonder. Looking at art in senior year filled me with wonderful uneasiness. Looking at contemporary art now, a lot of it anyways, makes me feel like I am searching for something I might well never find. Even when it is explained to me – by a curator, a professor, a friend, the artist him/herself – I sometimes get it, but there is almost always a big hole, a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction. Both as a consumer of art and as a hopeful artmaker.

Overcome with platitudes, or lack of understanding? There are things that artists, famous artists, extraordinary history-will-remember-them artists, will often say of their own work:

• “I am fascinated by the small things that people overlook – the cracks in the wall, the beautiful accidents.”
• “They ask me, ‘Why do you make art,’ and I say, ‘Because I love it. It should be fun.”
• “The space between inside and out, the private and the public, is exquisitely complex, and that draws me in.”
• “I sketch day to day in a diary-like ritual; it is the lens through which I see the world.”

No, those aren’t exact quotes; I made them up. I’ve watched enough artist interviews and documentaries, sat in enough critiques, and gone to enough gallery talks that this seems to be the common language of artists nowadays. Not all, but a fair share of them. This is what they are saying about themselves – about their work. Generalized and couched in academic-sound terminology, with words like “problematize” sprinkled throughout. I don’t doubt that these artists are speaking from their souls, being as honest and true as those words could ever mean. But I am young and I am impatient.

A platitude is “a remark or statement, often with moral content, that has been used too often to be interesting or meaningful.”

What is meaning? I have no idea! I haven’t read enough (any) serious books on the matter outside of being forced to do so in a school setting (which of course means I forgot it all). But I know at least this much: it exists, and I familiar in my day-to-day functioning with certain forms of meaning: information, knowledge, data. It is also logic, excuses, justifications, means-to-ends. I cannot know what it is for sure (or maybe I just haven’t read enough) but it definitely is some strange amorphous quantum force that nevertheless, with pinpoint precision, helps the human race carry on its clockwork drama. I also know we cannot live without it. Meaning is conveyed by language, as well as by dreams and images, the stuff that art is made of. Art is containers/vehicles for meaning, as is language. Thus, it would seem, the two are on equal footing, and therefore:

We do not need language to understand art. False (at least I think so). Two things: One, if we have no need of language to explain art, then why interview artists at all? We clearly love to do it. We do it compulsorily, even if they sometimes have nothing but famous platitudes or romantic, self-indulgent mutterings to offer (I say this in the nicest but most honest manner possible). Clearly we think that, by hearing there words, we are learning more; we are extracting precise meaning out of an otherwise tangled, vague, frightening, and non-usable collection of visual suggestions. This, too, is why we need art critics – to refine the meaning, to distill it into something more tangible. But even critics tend to start at the source – the artist’s personal intentions, his/her words. And then the critic uses words himself.

Secondly, language and art are not on equal footing. Language is a special container for meaning because it is given over to precision. The tendency to dispose of linguistic interpretation of art is a tendency to annihilate precision. Precision can be seen as oppressive, judgmental, limiting…

But without it, where would we be? Precision brings people together. Without it, how are we brought to smiles or tears? How are we brought closer to the brink of peace or understanding? How are we taken inside people’s homes, into their minds, into their hearts? How are we going to appreciate how delicate life and nature are? How are we going to despise (or embrace) death and torture? How are we going to be connected with? How will we know we are unified under the umbrella of compassionate human beings and that we are not simply amoebic forms munching on one another in a petri dish?

And this brings me the ultimate thing that I disagree with whenever I see/hear most things art-related these days:

Artists don’t have to be able to explain their own work. Why not? Even if they can’t, even if their minds don’t work that way… they have to be held responsible for the images that they create. They have to be held responsible for the generation of meaning… and meaning begins with language…

Oi, I need some sleep.