in my teaching work, when the opportunity arises to interview prospective students, i often ask their opinions about any exhibitions or galleries they have recently visited to gauge their interest in art. one candidate had been on an organised trip to an established public gallery in the region and had “liked the old paintings with the big skies” but “didn’t see the point of looking at the other pictures [a temporary exhibition] as they were just these big squares with stripes, and they didn’t explain them or tell us why we were supposed to look at them, just that we should look at them”.
i immediately knew the exhibition that they had referred to (though they couldn’t remember who or what it was) as i had been to the artist’s talk. these paintings were magnificent in scale, grand poetic gestures in traditional gesso, pigment and wax, perfectly preserving the subtle anomalies of the medium, with references to architecture, geometry and the golden section in their construction, supremely well crafted, historically evocative surfaces, arrestingly beautiful in a restrained way.. but i did walk away thinking what am i supposed to make of or take from this visual experience? the problem was that they almost crossed that line that all artists should fear… that they were too decorative, art created by the beautiful outcomes of very calculated processes.
i can include my own work in this artistic dilemma, wondering if the exploration of surface, colour and texture is sustainable as an artistic concept.
XIII 2008 and LXI 2009 (click here to view more)
colour as symbolic, surface and texture as calligraphic mark and gesture, yes.. but surface as a signifier, a metaphor for something else? the success of this approach depends on the prior experience of the viewer, and their ability to suspend belief (it is a painted surface) to allow the multitude of subjective references to permeate their senses. as artists we depend on a similar engagement from others that we have ourselves when making art; absorbed, intense, committed to its reason for existence. this acceptance justifies our work. Bataille, in the essay The Cruel Practice of Art, said that:
the painter is condemned to please. By no means can he make a painting an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds, to keep them away from the field where it stands, but even the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors.
consider the fascination we also have with the ugly, the damaged, the deformed, the repulsive. we rely on the ugliness of things to help us measure and possibly re-evaluate what is beautiful. in the wabi sabi aesthetic, things exude a kind of understated beauty through their very fragile hold of it, beauty faded, beauty decayed, and then from the emotional associations and socio-historical references.. a wabi sabi approach to experience also relies on a degree of humility and modesty, or solitude, which is often at odds with the motives of the successful artist: the need for an audience, looking for opportunities, in control of events.. in wabi sabi, the underlying principle is not to commodify, objectify or judge things, but to acknowledge, contemplate and reflect: objects, scenes, events, the landscape of the moment.. and then move quietly on..
p.s. it would be interesting to find other artists who are also pursuing a ‘wabi sabi’ aesthetic in their work, but the current nature of the internet (the proliferation of social networking sites) is at odds with such a gentle philosophy..
