what is art? — Please Be Quiet
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The Essence in Art - Please Be Quiet (Part I)
‘Art is skilful production’ defines the Oxford English Dictionary. The essence in art is then the skill to produce remembrance, representation, provocation, evocation, interpretation and perpetuation of objects, people, events and emotions. The essence of art is everything that it has been developed to be capable of. The skill falls into the category of the universal.
However, in order to apply the skill masterfully, the artist would have to work with their heart and soul. Human interventions at the level of the non-material, often understood as the innate creation of the spiritual are also universal, for the work of masters can withstand the test of time, and their expression of personality is capable of moving other souls. Therefore, artistry, the application of the skill masterfully, is a universal quality. The essence in art is timeless. It is clear then that in the modernistic thinking, it is the identity and culture surrounding an individual that dictates the totality of an experience of art, not art itself.
The timelessness of art suggests the nature of art is serious. Art is also educational for its purifying effect. A museum is a temple of art. The combinative effect of art in a museum is intimidating, quietness becomes the best and most respectful atmosphere for an experience of art.
The Presence of Art - Please Be Quiet (Part II)
The way we appreciate art is a custom. Art has been considered to have the effect of purifying the soul. Throughout history art is an educational tool, to tell biblical stories in the Middle Ages, to portray and comment on the contemporary social attitude as the Realists did in the nineteenth century. The presence of art is relative to the viewer.
The profession of art owes its early allegiance with religion and politics. Art created under such circumstance had settings before they were completed, especially ceiling and wall frescoes. The Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo was no longer just a fresco when it was completed, it was to be the ceiling. Indeed the heightened architectural aesthetic of the chapel springs from the fresco’s integration with the architecture, especially with the illusionary depth of field created by his painted architecture. The presence of art is merged with that of architecture, the viewer is prepared to be convinced that those three hundreds and forty three figures reside in the ceiling and they could leap out anytime.
Brian O’Doherty in his book “Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of Gallery Space” suggests that the focus of art has changed from the ’subject within declared limits’ of the nineteenth century to ‘edges’ of the twentieth century. What used to declared limits are challenged and extended. Increasingly representational paintings were appreciated for their aesthetic and technical qualities, while the subject matter receded in importance. And when the representational goes abstract, the viewer is told be look beyond the ‘material’ to perceive the stimulation.
The modern movement’s contribution in the evolution of the art museums began in the 1930s. The momentum of modernism propelled a divergence from the classical museum design. One common emphasis made by modernist architects was on flexibility. Moveable walls replaced individual galleries to allow the curators to rearrange the spaces as required. This strategy is evident in both New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the late 1930s, and Mies’s un-built project, A Museum for a Small City, which was a prelude to the Berlin National Gallery (1962-68). This emphasis on ’space’ was at its clearest and its effect profound in Mies’s German Pavilion at the Barcelona Exhibition of 1929, one project that was distinctly composed of ’spaces’ rather than ‘rooms’. The interior was entirely open. The colours of the interior were intrinsic to the materials, walls of glass and dark green marble, screen walls of onyx, shiny steel shafts of cross section and a white flat roof. Nikolaus Pevsner in “An Outline of European Architecture” commented that monumentality was achieved with ’splendid materials and a noble spatial rhythm’.
All this bareness for flexibility and poetics of the walls became a modern pre-requisite for the justifiable presence of art. The white cube is a ‘hot-housed the serial jettisoning of content’, writes Brian O’Doherty. ‘Art itself is being produced in homes that have been made to look like the white cube. The art will be sold to another home that probably also has an area made to look like a gallery. Today it is hard for an artist to be taken seriously if his or her studio does not mimic gallery conditions: ‘white walls free of homey elements, and halogen lights please’ observes Mira Schor. Both are critics of art, critiquing a condition surrounding art.
The step towards abstraction was generally considered to be a dramatic leap. However, while at the same time the new found artistic freedom was being explored, new conditions regarding this freedom was unconsciously imposed. Although boundary gives limitations, it can also be frightening to work without one. In a cynical sense, there has to be rules, before one can say ‘rules are made to be broken’. In the case of modern art, eventually a new set of conditions under the disguise of artistic freedom replaced some of the old ones, while some were inherited. Nevertheless there is something about art that hasn’t changed because of that. Art is still powerful and evocative, it is the mind of the spectator that has changed.
Just to name a few of the ‘conditions’: art is given a pedestal, it is looked up to, it always mean so much more than fathomable; art needs to be given enough space to breath, to assert itself, its emotive power; and do be quiet when confronted with art, one needs enormous concentration to understand the overwhelming non-figurative composition. These conditions nest in the spectator’s perception of what art is. Inevitably the creation of art becomes affected by these conditions. O’Doherty further suggests that ‘art used to be made for illusion; now it is made from illusions’, as ‘most of the people who look at art now are not looking at art; they are looking at the idea of “art” they carry in their minds.’
Next — what is art? — Please Do Not Touch
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