art in your head
Contemporary art, it seems to me, requires contemporary creativity. I don’t mean from the contemporary artists’ point of view, I’m assuming they have an abundance. I mean from us folk: the contemporary viewers struggling to understand contemporary art in this oh so contemporary world. You can never know what the artist means through their peculiar visual language, no matter how long you burn a hole into it by staring at it. Your best bet is to make it up in your head, and, as Charlie Kaufman would say, it means what you think it means.
I was thinking about this as I read through a new publication (for me), called Art Papers. Ready to take apart an art magazine I knew very little about, I was fed the usual art-speak, with a distinctive American accent (read: serious bullshit). I usually prepare myself for these attacks by reading the masthead of the magazine first; the part that says who and why the thing is published. If your name is on this page, it’s the most important page in the book. In the case of Art Papers, the masthead reveals that the publication was published in Atlanta. Not exactly your source for contemporary art appreciation, the U.S. state of Georgia, but you never know where inspiration might escape from in these post-Dick Cheney days. Ignoring the author’s style, and its propensity to make up something that isn’t there, it occurred to me that appreciating contemporary art really doesn’t require you to know the underlying motive for producing a piece of art. It’s probably more advantageous to both you and the artist if you don’t. I reckon if you can get that far with a piece of contemporary art, (in my case, that’s about 5% of all art I see) it’s probably worth more of your time.
This kind of thing usually happens with me when I shuffle through the canvases at my favourite gallery in west London, an unassuming business for locals without big checkbooks. I can usually drag someone from the gallery downstairs to pull out a few pieces from the cupboards, and then have a chat. Usually I start off with my take on a particular piece, and the gallery person will give me their own, different viewpoint. Invariably we’ve hit upon two completely different ideas, and neither seem improbable. We’re nearly always talking about an abstract piece, so the whole process is kind of psychoanalytical, as if we’re simultaneously taking a Rorschach test in full view of each other. But in the end, I commend both of us for being artistic in our heads, and the artist never has to know. How Freudian, yet dangerous, of us.
So that’s how I’m going to approach art magazines in the future. I’m going to look at the pictures first, and then, if I have time, read someone else’s thinking on the topic. But I’m definitely avoiding the art-speak!