Can one exist without the other? And whose needs are paramount?
It seems to me, as an artist, that the core of the creative experience is solitary communion with …the muse/source/deity/goddess. The child sits engrossed in sandbox play; the youth paints visions all night in an empty studio; the commuter frantically scribbles lines of poetry on the back of the gas bill; the elder belts out old hymns or Billie Holiday tunes while scrubbing dishes. The impulse is only a little less urgent than breathing, and requires an effort of will in order to refrain.
But of course art also communicates. I’m a member of the audience as well; as an observer, I’m often deeply annoyed by inexplicable or distasteful works. When jazz left melody behind, it left me behind too; handheld camera work triggers motion sickness, and heartbreaking works of staggering genius bore me halfway through the first chapter.
Have these artists “failed” in some important way because I cannot respond positively to their work?
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22 comments:
All right, hang on Wilcox. Why not pester the others as well?? I was thinking about this as it is a very large topic and this is a relatively small comment box. No wonder no one wants to leave me comments!
I don't think I would say the work "failed" if you did not respond positively to it, perhaps that is your fault as a viewer? I wonder about this a lot with my more abstract images, how far can I go before they are so difficult people give up. On the other hand one has to consider who it is, when a person like Clarke gives up then you know you have gone wayyyyy toooo far.
I love the writing of your first part, it talks about the impulse of making outside of a maker dialogue. I do not think of the audience when I make work, as it never turns out the way it ought I think of myself as part of the audience too, slightly less objective however. I make what I want to make, I seek to answer my own questions and concerns, and this is what drives my concepts. What I hope engages me I assume, most of the time wrongly so, that it will engage others.
Again you seem to be begging the question of lines, what do we call bad art? Jill could tell you all about that, and while she has a great eye for picking out bad art, someone could argue the other way.
Join or lead the discussion?
I invited everybody I could think of to this discussion.
No lines. Let's just try to work without them, shall we?
but then you can't say that the artist has "failed" because then you are implying a judgment of success.
Well, I put quote marks around the word "failed" because I imagine other people might think in those terms, not because I do.
But you're right, we bring such a freight of value judgements to the arts, it may not be possible to avoid lines.
Does the artist have a responsibility to communicate effectively with audience? if so, what does that mean?
I'm not really an artist: I don't even really fancy myself a writer--or want to produce written product for the market, as it were--though I do on occasion write. So take this with a grain of salt.
It seems to me that any talk of separating the artist from her audience is horribly wrong headed. The one cannot exist without the other: if an artist makes work without having an audience in mind, there is no point in making it beyond the act.
I also would differ with you on the status of creation: I don't think it is solitary, or not completely. While the artist generally acts as an individual, the significant material (the signifying material perhaps) that makes creation more than a solitary act (and hence 'art') is of necessity tied into a larger cultural framework: one that includes the audience if it is going to mean anything. A solitary individual does not write sonnets, if you get my drift.
One could probably show that the impulse to create is as much an impulse to share as it is to act alone--probably more so. The cult of authorship may have tied art-making to the ego in the West (but that's speculation); though I would tend to look at wealth production.
I think that it would be presumptuous to think that a particular individual's tastes or response could dictate the 'success' or 'failure' of a work. But:
Given that every artist has an audience in mind, we might say that his or her work 'fails' or 'succeeds' based on whether or not it achieves his (conscious) intent. But I spent the greater part of my undergraduate education arguing that such expectations really reflected an undesirable urge: to ascribe authorial intent to a text, which in many ways hinders its signification (exploration of which hinges less on aesthetic success/failure than on exploring the structures embodied in its meaning-making).
If one is going to make a judgment about success, he has to have a criterion: choosing which to follow of course has its own implications.
Does the artist have a responsibility to communicate effectively with audience? if so, what does that mean?
Responsibility is a weird word to choose! Civic duty of the republic of letters!
Effective communication requires a shared language. Concept-art from the WGAS communicates far more effectively with artists than my stepfather, for instance. Given that there is more or less general art-language (which of course is recreated each time it is employed) the artist should employ it skillfully: otherwise art becomes again not art but a solitary act. And if art is art is not a solitary act.
In my observation, artists very often begin a work with no audience in mind whatsoever. A poetic phrase comes to mind, or an intriguing fragment of melody. A dream or a photo suggests expression in an image, a story, a video, a sonata.
The creative process, then, consists of working with, and through, that originating impulse. At some point in the process, the artist does very often—though not always—begin to consider a possible audience:
"Is anybody going to get this? Will it cause a riot? I just know somebody is going to call it girly / amateur / derivative / sensationalistic. Nobody in their right mind would pay good money and hang this on their wall / load it on their iPod / read it over summer vacation. Well, Mom will like it... even if she doesn't get it."
The artist then wrestles to balance the need to explore his or her original vision with the demands of conveying the vision to others—and to resolve the question of whether or not it is important to do so.
Some folks create only what they know will appeal to a wide, well-paying audience. No original vision required.
Then there is the wonderful draftsman who produces sketch after sketch for himself alone; we only see his work when he is forced to hang it for critique in class. Do we instantly convey "meaning" to his work by viewing it? If a tree falls in the forest…?
See, I think I differ with you in that I don't think that even the first impulse can be said to be individual: the person works with/through a system of meaning-making that he or she is not alone in. A single person may make a piece of art, but it doesn't attain significance individually. And if I, for instance, have a particularly striking line of verse come into my head, I wouldn't really claim it to have been inspired by my own person: rather it would be what my own person has been able to make out of all the things I filter through me: Shakespeare, Stevens, Eliot, commie propoganda, etc. Now, assuming I write the verse down and then decide to do something with it, I have to start thinking of an audience. Whatever form a piece takes is a tacit assumption of a future audience, I would argue.
Is there necessarily a tension in exploring these creative impulses and conveying it to others?
If a tree falls in the forest, it creates the potential for a perceived sound ;p
Good topic. I recently discovered through some talk therapy that I create my art as a self-soothing mechanism. It helps keep me sane. I don't NEED an audience for that. That process is complete unto itself.
And yet...I post my stuff on the web, for sale, hoping someone will check it out, maybe even buy it (for a ridiculously low amount of $$$).
So, an audience would be appreciated. I also plan on copyrighting everything so it will exist in the Library of Congress in the hope that perhaps some researcher in the next century will discover it and declare my stuff some of the great unknown folk art of the late 20th/early 21st centuries.
Hah! That's some serious ego shit going on there...
I keep remembering Van Gogh sold exactly one painting during his lifetime. If you MUST create, an audience is optional.
Well, yes, John, now that you mention it: What if your audience isn't there yet? Van Gogh, James Joyce, Stravinsky, William Blake—none of these artists spoke to the majority of their contemporaries.
"Inspired by my own person?" Very likely not. Who can say definitively what the source of an inspiration is? And why would it be desirable to do so?
True, jcd, few of us live in a vacuum, creative or otherwise. The materials, tools, language available to any artist are supplied by the milieu in which he or she lives. Nor does the creative act occur in perfect isolation; any number of co-creators may in this sense participate in an individual's process— but invisibly, for the most part.
You may with perfect legitimacy insist that the personal creative space is densely crowded with predecessors and contemporaries and old girlfriends and bums off the street, and that art is by definition a social act which has meaning only in a broader social context.
Nonetheless, that is not the common subjective experience of the person engaged in creating.
that is not the common subjective experience of the person engaged in creating.
There is no common subjectivity ;p
At any rate it is impossible to point at subjectivity as such. We don't get access to others' and can only metaphorically represent our own.
Okay, time to be serious about defining what is at issue. While the impetus for my work begins from within, or may come from my muse, I absolutely agree with jcd. (Perhaps we have a different take on it because we are writers. One does not sit down in front of a blank page without some concept of who will read the word we scrawl on the page. )
I will take a harsher tack: Now, solipsistic activity with art materials may be a “creative process”, but it doesn’t create “Art”. If the solipsistic creator doesn’t care for her audience, then we in the audience don’t care for her right back. Don’t be asking us for that slack artists whine about : “ohh please gimme understanding, because Ima artiste, I’m sensitive! Gimme some money, gimme a patron, gimme respect, think of my solipsistic creations as sublime when I sell them to you!” If indeed the creator cares nothing for the audience, the she should keep the creations in a closet in her garret.
Without the fundamental component of communication – even if it’s just writing to ‘Dear Diary’-- creativity is not “art” per se, it’s just a form of masturbation. Fun, maybe even therapeutic, but not “art”.
Hmm. Well, that's rather a special case definition of art, isn't it?
When I do graphic design work, the audience is fundamental, primary, and constantly pursued.
When I write, I do generally have an audience in mind, and my impulse is chiefly to communicate to someone else, although sometimes that's an afterthought.
When I draw or paint or create a plate, contemplation of the audience usually enters into the process at some point but, sorry, it's not primary.
When I sing or dance, thought of any kind is rarely involved, but no one in their right mind would imagine much of an audience.
It seems just as wrongheaded to insist that art must, by definition, be communicative, as to demand that it be defined solely as an individual act (which—let's read carefully, please—no one here has done).
Why would you conclude that anyone here dismisses the audience completely? Or expects any special consideration for their creative pursuits?
Oh, sure. My comment is over the top for sure, but to a point. The point being that the communication component is fundamental. No, no one here dismisses the audience completly, nor is doing a solitary act. Special consideration? Well I first encountered this discussion when y'all were talking about "the Academy" and whether weaving, etc. was art or craft. There was recognition of a divide there, along a fault line of some art being entitled to special considertion. I suggest that along with an x axis, there is a y axis as well ....
I stand by my special case definition of art, btw. No communication, not art.
But any piece of "art" can communicate something however little the creator thought about their "audience" and often even when the artist is thinking and thinking about how to communicate to their audience it happens that the viewers get something completely different out of the work. I would say intent becomes more important than communication.
Just want to add that I agree with everything Tom said (there, Lisa, I didn't say 'What Tom said!'). No communication, no art.
However (and you knew it was there, didn't ya, Tom?), I've written poems for myself alone that were later 'discovered' by my ex-wife. I'm pretty sure she wasn't just humoring me when she said she loved them and that they really spoke to her. Thing is, deep down, we're all so much alike with so many of the same joys, needs, and longings that what we write for ourselves 'speaks' to that same level in others and -viola!- communicates!
My book was written with a specific audience in mind. It wound up finding an audience I didn't expect (but am ne vertheless quite grateful for).
Well, you hang on to that definition, then, guys. Like Alissa, I'd be hard put to think of art which doesn't communicate, and then you do indeed get into the whole question of whether it communicates what the artist intended, to his or her imagined audience, or to somebody else entirely.
Now hear this: Communication is good! Thinking about your audience, good! Also listening to your audience, yes, good! OK?
ALL I'm saying is that for most folks engaged in the creative process, the inward-turned exploration is a common, recognizable and near-universal experience. I don't know that absolutely everybody invests solitary energy every time they create, but virtually everyone I know does so, observably, and they talk about it in those terms.
This aspect of the creative process is consistently present, whether or not you are concerned with an audience at any given point in the process. It's there when you are learning to draw, it's there when you're preparing work for your first solo show. I'm pretty sure it's there when you're cast away on a desert island.
the inward-turned exploration is a common, recognizable and near-universal experience. I don't know that absolutely everybody invests solitary energy every time they create, but virtually everyone I know does so, observably, and they talk about it in those terms.
Those terms are wrong ;p
Or rather, I don't think they capture the complete process, for the reasons I put above: the constitutive stuff of expression (& hence art) is not solitary (even solipsism: which would then seem to be more or less schizophrenic discourse directed at itself as the outward). The inward is the outward as it were.
I don't think that we've come any closer to answering your questions.
Well, I received quite a number of responses to my questions. I do wish I had received more from visual artists and musicians but, as we know, they are a feckless and egocentric lot...
Hmmmm..... very interesting conversation, here. Hope y'all don't mind me jumping in, since I WAS invited.
Now, what I mostly love about these kinds of conversations - especially coming into it already worked out a bit - is that I get to see the similarities of everyone's 'point.' I think most of you are saying some of the very same things, but are attached to your way of saying them.
I'm personally having a hard time with all the 'arguments.' I really disagree that this can be discussed in any black or white terms.
Clearly, when I am doing certain types of 'art' (painting, singing, dancing around the house, clay, etc), I never think about an audience and really don't care either way. I sing because I enjoy the ACT of it, not the end result. However, when I am writing certain things, or writing a song, perhaps, I definitely have a feel for the type of audience I picture benefiting from or enjoying my art, but I still am expressing from within ME, not a desire to get something across TO THEM.
And as far as perceptions of 'failure', my only thought is this: no one piece of art will be found gorgeous by everyone. Therefore, perhaps it is not a failure of art, but just one of finding the 'right' audience with which to resonate.
So, where does that leave me in this conversation? Somewhere floating around with the rest of you. I feel like I create to see a part of me that I knew was inside, but needed to be reminded that it was there by seeing it physically. Most of the time, once I create, I am baffled it even came from me, and couldn't go back to that moment even if I tried. And, even if I get pleasure from 'good' responses to whatever it is, I still 'do art' for me, from me, and as that messenger of the divine, with no attachment whatsoever to how it is accepted in the world. It goes through me and out into the universe. What is done with it then is up to everyone else.
STarr
I probably share most of your feelings about the creative process. And I'm going to guess that the importance of audience varies from creative to creative, and from discipline to discipline.
What I think we've seen in this discussion is 1) people speaking about their own subjective experience, and 2) people positing ethical and philosophical requirements and definitions. To the latter group, I recommend one-on-one with a large lump of clay; to the former, well, maybe try to sell something...
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