contemporary monkey

Art, if you haven’t noticed, doesn’t pretend to know boundaries. I’m pretty sure it couldn’t find them if it had night-vision goggles, taped up with sonar-enhanced earplugs, connected to Scoville Chili Pepper Heat Index tongue extensions.  The common law of physics that applies to everything else we know, anything within the upper limit of the planet’s atmosphere, is just a bothersome, trifling annoyance for art.  Art doesn’t adhere to science, doesn’t care about it, doesn’t bother listening to it.  Or does it?

The other world, Science Inc., seems to play the game nicely.  The unambiguous world of science throws off a division of itself called Theoretical Physics.  Scientists who are Theoretical Physicists are the comedians of their dull, pragmatic, un-humorous industry.  Forget what you hear about popular stage comedians, these wacky revolutionaries are truly our comic geniuses.  They think of bizarre realities, and try to interpret what life would be like inside this unconventional city.  What’s the distance of the British coastline?  Infinite, say theoretical scientist, because the more you magnify the rough edges, the more undiscovered gaps will appear.  How about days with 25 hours instead of the earthbound, rotationally stuck, 24 hours we usually complain about not having enough of.  We could simply ignore the bothersome planetary rotation thing and make up our own arbitrary rules and abide by a new, albeit flaky, order.  We’d get to see fireworks in the middle of the day.

the art of science

Sean Carroll is one such Theoretical Physicist at California Institute of Technology.  What he thinks about, he admits, isn’t science, and some of it isn’t even theory.  It’s just a different direction in which to take the messy business of reality.  His new book, “From Eternity to Here” wonders why it is that we can remember the past, but can’t remember the future.  In space, we can go up or down, left or right, forward and backward, but time is a dimension with a one way street.  The arrow of time, despite what Hollywood tells us, goes only forward.  It never moves toward yesterday.  Even heavies like Newton and Galileo wondered this, and suggested that we could remember the future, if we only knew everything there was to know.  In theory, the events in our half-baked, unhinged blue marble of a planet could be determined because we’d know fully why things happen in the order that they do.  Say you lose your wallet every twelve years.  You’d plan on carrying no money and credit cards in your wallet on the day you were due for a shocker.  On the other hand, it wouldn’t be a shocker because you would have been prepared for it.  Oh this damned warping of space-time is so confusing!  Someone get Michael J. Fox on the phone.

But you see what I mean about the art of science.  Science at least gives the sinister “other” a go.  A close example from the Art Camp is Anne Truitt, who creates minimalist sculpture.  To sum up her work in a brutish and not very kind phrase, think of very colourful, tall-as-a-woman, square-ish, wooden posts.  Art Forum claims that photographs don’t do the pieces justice, but as I try not to listen to the pretension of Art Forum, I’ve included one of her pieces here.  Art Forum also warns of danger when categorizing Truitt’s style as Minimalist, because, well, categories are for doormats like the scientists, and not for the gallant artist. They don’t like leaving their safe houses, these artists.  Struggling onward into the wooly world of science, however, is Anne Truitt’s concept of life as a sculpture.  Not a life as a sculptor, but that which sculpting begets - the mysterious 3D spawn of artistic invention.

pillars of the community

One morning, while standing in the front room of her house, probably wondering, as all artists do, just what the hell she was thinking graduating with an art degree, Truitt was focused on passing shadows as the sun continued its formidable and inevitable slipping into sunrise.  To paraphrase Truitt’s quote from Art Forum, it is we people, as sculptures, who stand firm, while the sun continues forward.  In that sense, we disarm time; and while we’re not subject to it, we are illuminated by it.

OK, a neat trick, you’re thinking, and we should applaud the metaphysical breakthrough for art in escaping its earthly white cube, and into the chilling cosmos of scientific law.  Scientifically speaking, of course, what she said is not true, but it lends itself to thoughtful poetry, and certainly useful to Truitt as a devisor of art.  You can imagine that a stationary person waiting patiently for a bus, might notice more of life, and therefore time passing, than someone running for that same bus, falling down, spilling a double latte on themselves, with the stationary person not helping at all by laughing loudly.  By the way, this didn’t really happen to me anytime, ever.

As an artist - as a hungry, wanting, miserable-existing, low-rent-living, desperately seeking appreciation artist - wouldn’t you want to have maximum exposure so that any one of us buyers and lovers of art might catch on that you, well, exist?  More philosophically, if you have a showing of your work, and it lasts only one day, do you, or the art itself, really exist?

In the November issue of Art Forum (the leading industry publication, but really the advertising brochure for the art gallery world), we find ourselves an artist committed to producing multiple pieces, only to show them for one, single, here today, gone tomorrow, 24 hour period.  This mysterious exhibit, called Dia de Frutas y Nubes Negras (Day of Fruits and Black Clouds) showed (past tense) a series of empty wooden crates devised by Gabriel Sierra, hanging about the whole of the otherwise empty art space.  His inspiration for the empty crates are taken from a broader idea, the success of which is not worth debating, mostly because nobody saw them.  It is, however, worth pointing out, and reflecting upon, and possibly even to remedy the situation for, the myriad and colourful ways contemporary artists seem to find for lodging bullet firmly in foot.

Gabriel Sierra: Artist for a Day

What’s more, for our intrepid artist above, the one day opening wasn’t enough of a operational hurdle.  The show was held in an area between the centre of Bogata, Columbia and a nearby slum.  For all of us clairvoyant enough to be there on this day of magic, the signage on the outside of the artist-run studio was nearly non-existent (hmmm,  “artist run” you say, perhaps a hint for what went wrong).  Above the art space doorway was one of the artist’s pieces signaling to all passers-by for what lay inside; like a flag for the secret tribe of the world’s least ambitious carpenters.  This was art determined to be ignored.

But let us not cast stones in the house of glass.  Perhaps our artist friend could do with aid from my favourite subject,  “Mathematics for Artists”.  For this second chapter, I thought to help the poor lad out with a bit of logical instruction, in the hopes that other artists might learn from a brethren’s mistake.

KEY TO GRAPH

P = Population. Think of this number as people, animals, even plants that might want to see your show.  You want this number to be a large one.

T = Time. This is a number working against you.  Against all of us actually. This number will always increase, and rarely, if ever,  go backwards (even in the artist world).

The horizontal line has two important points: “o” for open, and “c” for close.  The distance between the two is the duration of your show.  If measured in days, you want this to be a big number; certainly bigger than one, as exemplified by our dauntless friend above.

The vertical axis has two points as well.  The lower one, “n” = nobody. This “n” happens to everyone, even a Jeff Koons or a Damien Hirst.  There has to be a nobody before the show opens; otherwise, it wouldn’t need opening.  The second point, “m” correlates with your new goal, and represents the multitude, or mob, if you like.  As time moves forward, your goal is to get more people to see your work.  That’s why you do, what you do.  This unpleasant, but indispensable “strategy” will greatly benefit your future, and help us out as well.

The third point on the horizontal axis, “r” represents the point in time that critical reviews are published in art magazines.  Reviews have nothing to do with adding more people to your visitor list.  In fact, nearly all reviews surface in the public pool of influence after shows have been closed.  Nobody knows why this is, but keep in mind that it doesn’t matter.  Critical reviews are to the artist, what a spatula is to an athlete: completely useless.

Commit this graphical image to memory and your success is nearly guaranteed.  All you have to do is produce original, thought-provoking art (a mathematical lesson for a later time).

In order to further assist artists with their efforts in gaining a following and thus increasing their importance to the brotherhood of man, I thought to create a mathematical model that explicitly describes a winning formula.  “Simian’s Theorem of Grasp” is a useful device for eliminating those individuals, who, in the end, don’t matter enough to the lonely artist, while optimizing the number of people in the world who do.  We can all do with a little closet cleaning, and to no-one is this activity more important than to the starving artist.

Simian’s Theorem of Grasp states that

x = y - (a + b + c + d);

where the constants and variables are explained to the forlorn artist as follows:

a = you, and, with the possible exception of Grayson Perry, is always constant at 1.  Realistically, if you hope to have a chance with your art, your influence should attempt to reach beyond this lonely number.

b = your friends (variable in number, decreasing with time, and usually insignificant in this filthy business of art.). This group will never tell you that your art is rubbish, and will therefore most likely lie to you when asked by you, “This art, do you get it?”  Your friends are one thing, your friends in art are quite another.  In fact, your true friends will probably thank you for literally leaving them out of the equation.

c = art patrons.  These individuals are usually quite wealthy in cash, but poor in judgement in matters of art.  People in this group can include British bankers, Russian oligarchs, American hedge fund managers, Mexican drug runners, and Charles Saatchi.  When we speak of those with “more money than sense”, it’s this group of whom we speak.

d = sycophantic art culture hangers-on (similar to “b” above, but even less significant in the art scheme of things).  Those in this group act differently than variable “b” in that the number may actually increase with time if you’re represented by powerful, yet delusional, agents.  Please remember however that knowing more of the wrong people doesn’t help you with your goal of making a real difference in the world.

y = everybody on planet earth; including those hard to count tribes in Indonesian jungles.

x = this is perhaps the most important of the variables: this the magical number of willing individuals who seek to derive meaning, or feel emotion, or exhibit love toward your art.  This group can include those that, unprompted, unpaid, and unrehearsed, say they like your work.  The higher this number, the more influential you will be to mankind.  This variable is the antithesis of a,b,c and d combined.  Think of x as the Jedi knights, while a,b,c and d are, well, you know who…

Success in art is really this simple.  It’s been proven to be true by those that have high “x” factors, such as Anish Kapoor, and perversely proven true by those, such as Damien Hirst,  with high “c” and “d” factors.  Please be advised that, because of its greater potential, “x” can be an extremely large number.  The wise artist will use this to his or her advantage, and will soon find that the c’s and d’s of the formula soon become useless and trivial.