Making Art is Irrational
Sunday, 29. January 2012 23:57
Last week I quoted both Picasso’s comment about a painting speaking its own language and Hazel Dooney’s about her newfound interest in feeling over ideas in art. In the intervening week, I have thought about this a lot and have run across two other artists who work in completely different media voicing similar opinions.
Asked if he works out ideas by writing songs, Leonard Cohen told Dorian Lynskey in an interview for The Guardian:
I think you work out something. I wouldn’t call them ideas. I think ideas are what you want to get rid of. I don’t really like songs with ideas. They tend to become slogans…. but I like to work on a song until those slogans, as wonderful as they are and as wholesome as the ideas they promote are, dissolve into deeper convictions of the heart. I never set out to write a didactic song. It’s just my experience. All I’ve got to put in a song is my own experience.
In a different Guardian interview, playwright Yasmina Reza told Elizabeth Day, “Writing…. [is] not at all intellectual. Well, for me, at least.”
If such a variety of artists are so adamant about the non-intellectuality of art, why do so many people feel the need to explain art in intellectual terms? There are, I think, at least two reasons for this.
First, for every artist who thinks that art is not about ideas, there is another artist who thinks that that’s all art is about. Probably the best known contemporary artist who falls into this category is Banksy. Almost all of his work is commentary, much of it political. And no matter what you think of his art, it is easy to talk about—because it is primarily intellectual.
And that is the second reason: it’s easier to talk about the art of ideas than it is the art of emotion or the art of vision or any of those other irrational things that don’t really communicate in words. This is not only true of visual art, but of all other art as well. Sir Ken Robinson says in Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative, “The meaning of an artwork is only available in the particular form in which it is expressed.” So, if the work is bound by form and medium, it automatically becomes difficult to talk about in any kind of way that is logical.
The ease in communicating rational ideas and the difficulty in communicating everything else poses a special danger to those who teach in the arts. It is really easy discuss the ideas presented in a work of art, and fairly easy to talk about the form, but verbalizing how the marriage of the two communicates the emotions and vision and meaning on multiple levels at the same time is very difficult. Again, Sir Ken Robinson comments, “We don’t only respond to a poem, or a play, or to music, line by line or note by note. The complete work is more than the sum of its parts.” And that “more” is the part that’s difficult to touch in logical discourse. Unfortunately, many arts instructors take the easy way out and insist that rational verbal meaning and explanation to be attached to each work created by students, which, in turn, leads students to think of all art as merely the communication of ideas.
There is no doubt that analysis of a work of art is a valid academic exercise and is very useful in the editing phase of making art. But analysis, like creation itself, must not concentrate solely on what an artwork means, but on how it means, and on how the combination of the two generates a multiplicity of meanings and references and reflections and insights which is the real reason we treasure art.
Category:Communication, Creativity, Education | Comments (2) | Author: Jay Burton