Words by Edgar Wang
An artist walks by the square with a balloon in tow. The balloon looms large, belly full of helium. White cloth draped over it moves with and against the wind, alternately pulled by and pulling the artist. Metal wires, like a prosthetic claw, or perhaps a pendant, hang midair from the sphere. A man sneers, walks up to the artist, and asks: “what is this supposed to mean?”
There is an accessible absurdity when such-and-such piece goes on sale for millions of dollars. Common targets of this facile ridicule include Damien Hirsch, Mark Rothko, Jeff Koons, Jackson Pollock, with certain provisions set aside for French Impressionism. The first reaction is incomprehension at the sum. The second is an assured laughter in the work’s reproducibility by their five-year old. In fact, didn’t little Johnny do something just like this at kindergarten last week? It decorates the fridge door. Bet I could sell that for a million if I handed it to a dealer.
One could perhaps excuse (we won’t, but this will come later) this behavior if the same people who claim some moral high ground when confronted with art that looks easy to make, that isn’t realistic, retained consistency and were in fact ardent defenders of realism. And yet, this same crowd most commonly accuses the art hanging in our museums of being old and boring, that they are filled with too many clichés, look stiff, or, for the more sophisticated, appeal to naive sentimentalism.
What is easy art, anyway? Is it art that is easy to make? Assuming that they’re comparatively “easy” to make, abstract expressionism and surrealism tend to be the hardest art to interpret of the bunch, completely lacking in any of the narrative and iconographic signposts orienting the viewer. And if it’s art that is easy to interpret, it feels wrong to brand Gericault or Delacroix’s art as easy.
Tom Wolfe, in The Painted Word, traces one narrative of the life of modern art in America in the twentieth century. Wishing to abandon the novelistic, literary, constraints of realist and classical painting, the abstract expressionists, surrealists, and minimalists decided to do art for art’s sake, working with absolute flatness, reducing artwork to its critical components: symbols, line, color, canvas. The Beckettian absurdity of Wolfe’s narrative is, of course, that so little was left that a corresponding Theory became crucial to any artistic movement, and every artwork needed an accompanying essay, which turned the whole enterprise even more literary and logocentric, until no art was left to be seen.
If that was hard to follow, it’s probably why little Johnny’s dad doesn’t think too much about art except to scoff at headlines of hedge fund managers and Walton heirs swapping these canvases like so many other pieces of securitized paper. For the slightly more cynical and worldly: it’s for tax purposes, that’s what it is! And we turn on the TV to the evening news.
The artist with the balloon retorts: “What do you think it means?” Later, to an audience of peers: “I want to embody networks, connections, all sorts of immaterial things. I flew on planes a lot as a child, my parents moved around a lot, I wanted to see the world their way. I want my audience to think about how they might see the invisible.”
What is the reality of an image? A painting is an object. We often forget that pictures are objects, we who are inured to symbols, bombarded with hundreds of thousands of signs and signals through all manner of flat screens. Our lives are as abstract as any art: every button we press has a meaning abstracted into an icon, which we need to decode to act. Has abstraction become function? Real paintings have volume. It is precisely the topography of a Van Gogh painting that gives it life: the difference in elevation of ridges between individual bristles are etched into the oil paint and become leaves and wheat and midnight winds. Renoir paintings peel off the cheap canvases he bought in bulk when painting outdoors for hours.
Everything that exists in the world was designed by somebody. Some unconscious vote was passed to materialize an artist’s intentionality. Conspiracy theories about Bauhaus and minimalists abound, mixed with regret over the lost future of Art Deco and Art Nouveau. Nothing sinister or malicious, in fact, but perhaps the constraints of mass production and the limits of capital: flat surfaces are easier to shop than petal-shaped knobs.
Stand in front of a Rothko, a Pollock, an Agnes Martin. Try to imagine making this. Without creativity: simply reproduce. Layer the paint, the shades, the melting reds and violets, jam and spiral and twist your brush, print impossibly precise lines. Perhaps little Johnny does imagine. Two decades ago, Alex Matter found a bunch of Pollocks in his attic, with a note saying “Purchase+Gift.” His parents were allegedly friends with the artist. Later, it was determined that the paints used weren’t commercially available until years after Pollock’s death, and a laser showed that J.P. was added much later. Many do imagine they can do better than little Johnny.
“What does it mean?” As if the existence of a mapping from iconography to semiology justified the entire exercise. As if that’s what gave it value, what explained everything, what explained why people would fork over millions for it. “What does it mean?” Because if it’s worth that much money, the work has to produce something, and damn it if it’s meaning, I want something, anything, so what if it’s just meaning! If you want meaning, I say, read Applied Mathematics in Integrated Navigation Systems, Third Edition.
Are images lies? They are reproductions, untrue in the naive sense that they aren’t the represented object, only an idea of it, or a code. Critics often say: “Portraits capture the essence of the likeness, without needing to be fully accurate.” Are essences more or less true? Does it matter?
Invariably, it becomes a question of politics that doesn’t really affect real people. A certain type of conservative worships ideals of physical beauty, tall white arches and columns, and dislike any distortion of the “Truth.” They blame everyone who ventured outside of a rigid conformity to the good-enough. Anyone who sauntered to bend limits, to ironically or reflexively question, must have been part of a demoralization campaign. Why think! Why question? Wasn’t it good enough to leave it alone? Look at what you’ve done! Now everyone’s thinking! They cannot handle it! Or: they aren’t thinking, they did not do the hard work of thinking, they swallowed wholesale your results compressed in a pill, without doing any of the work. Their immune systems aren’t used to the progress.
Stand in front of Rothko’s Orange and Yellow and imagine, and soon you will see a setting sun through a window, and you realize that no one except maybe Monet, Rothko of course, and you, ever really looked at the sky.
A mathematician measured the fractal dimension — a quantitative assessment of self-similarity — of 18 known Pollocks and compared them to Alex Matter’s stash. The attic Pollocks did not exhibit the self-similar spirals shown by sunflowers, shorelines, and snowflakes, while the real ones did. Imagine him standing atop his ladder making big circles with his arms, and then smaller ones with his wrist. Imagine whoever painted the Matter stash dragging a paintbrush left and right, up and down, rectilinearly. Imagine moving pixels by mouse and command line.
Susan Sontag writes: stop interpreting! Feel, let the mystery and eroticism of the picture affect you directly. Don’t think. Forget your Benjamin and Greenberg and Schiller and Schelling. Imagine painting buffaloes with your palm on cave walls. Don’t speak, don’t let the artwork speak, don’t defend it, don’t feel the need to defend it, just feel.
The artist deflates the balloon and carries it strapped over her shoulder back to her studio.
This is what art means to me: instantaneity. A novel happens word by word, a song happens note by note, whereas the entire painting or sculpture is there all at once. It presents itself to me without interruption. I can choose, perhaps, to look at this or that in some sequential order, but everything reminds me that I am facing something complete. I bear witness to an event, or an idea. I remember all my childhood seaside vacations in fishing towns and every cabin I’ve lived in by a Canadian lake when I see Sisley’s quiet ports. Weep at figures of Christ on the cross and of Mary suffering. Sigh at fashionable women who no longer exist and the heroes who lost those legendary battles. See the world, for a short second, with a cataract. Shift your body through the gallery hall and let parallax fool you into thinking there’s depth underneath those ice-like shards. Feel it, not because it’s art, but because it’s real. It doesn’t have to mean anything at all.