is Art…Culture?

March 21, 2021

I have been engaged with this question for several months now. No doubt, because I have been engaged with the process of object-making and the entangled histories every object carries on an object is produced. Can I present art without the context of its attached history? Can I objectively make a work in a platonic sense-no string attached? Impossible. This is when I wish I knew less about art, history, and culture, and carried a humble nativity into my practice instead. Thus, the act of making and intent is different from how the object or concept is received or engage with. This is the precarious dance between art and audience is what I have been surveying within my own work at the moment.

Below are notes from other art talks/research I have been surveying to aid in my own understanding of this puzzle.

Notes on Art 21 episode: Structures

Fred Wilson:

  • Has been exploring art with a capital “A”

  • when you start doing what you really really believe intuit when you do your best work

  • your identity is tied to your experiences and the time period you are in

  • what and who I am and what the rest of the world considers what and who I am

  • Art has the potential to be reduced to likeness to a ridiculous degree. It’s interesting, funny, ultimately really sad.

  • all these representations that we grow up with telling us who we are whether we are that or not.

  • so by pulling all these signifiers out and having them talk to each other is a way of taking control of who you are….within or outside of—a culture.

  • this helps you to understand who/ what you are, and who/what the rest of the world says you are.

  • he uses the museum as a palette/backdrop for his practice

  • he uses already made objects and has them talk to each other

  • he manipulates objects, lights, color, spatial relationships, and critiquing as well.

  • Explains that what happens in museums is that objects are arranged by historians who are really interested in the history of the object, the object itself, and not really so focused on the environment they were placed in, the juxtaposition of objects, and what’s the visual of the space the object is in, is doing to the object and your experience. He tries to defuse those spaces

  • it’s not only the visual aspects of these objects, it’s how the objects affect you physically, and emotionally and the power of that. 

  • he is interested in the juxtaposition of objects and how the new placing and combinations can bring a new thought.

  • there is no manipulation of the objects other than their positioning, and that changes the meaning, or the relationship, or how we think about it and interact with it

  • he solicits memories from these objects

  • modernism is a part of the destruction of native cultures

  • brings up the question from a person of native heritage, “if your modern art is our traditional art, does that make our contemporary art your cliche?

Richard Tuttle: 

  • Art is life, and it in fact has to be, all of life

  • The awareness the beauty, the ability to give to a viewer something which makes their life more what it is, more what it could be

  • It’s like the missing clue to everything. It’s a remarkable thing to be able to connect the mind freedom the is available to us in this particular landscape

  • Art is about harmonizing..about living in the beauty or non-beauty of it

  • Not so much just looking. It’s about how it gets into us and finally feeds the spirit.

  • I’m interested in impermanence in the arts….whats more permanent than the invisible?

  • Any art form, there has to be an accounting for its opposite condition. You gonna be a visual artist, then there has to be something that accounts for the invisible, the opposite visual experience

  • A painting or sculpture really exists somewhere between what it is and what it is not

  • He is constantly refining himself— looking in-between —that is the rich vein that we don’t know much about

Alfredo Jaar:

  • There are two thinkers, Italian thinkers, that he admires greatly: Antonio Gramsci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. In the world of culture today, I miss Gramsci, and I miss Pasolini. I miss Gramsci because he was one of the first thinkers who really believed in the power of culture to affect life, to affect social life, to affect political life.

  • And Pasolini was an artist like no other. He was a thinker, a filmmaker, a poet, a writer, a critic. He was writing and working in all directions.

  • And I miss today Gramsci and Pasolini. What brought me to this piece, in particular, was in one of Pasolini’s writings, he says that culture is a prison, and we intellectuals have to get out of that prison.

  • Enough of me speaking to you and you speaking to me, me applauding you and you applauding me — let’s get out, let’s reach a larger audience.

  • And I realized that this could have been my motto, for many, many years. For the last 25 years, I’ve been always looking for different ways of communication.