I went into this one thinking it was going to hurt. It did. But not as much as I imagined.
I feel this one wasn’t as philosophical as the pre-reading promised it would be. We were given questions like
– Is there, or should there be, any overlap between ethics and aesthetics?
– Bishop quotes a description of Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument as ‘social pornography’. What does this mean? Can you think of any other artworks that could be described this way?
-If an artwork has a function can its value as art be judged by its ability to fulfill its function?
To which I will give my answers here.
1: No. The artist should be free to draw what they want
2: I’d guess ‘social pornography’ would be showing off or glorifying aspects of a different or alien society to a gratuitous degree that it becomes disgusting or condescending.I think some western media’s portrayal of African, Indian, First Nation, and Buddhist cultures often fall into this trap. Showing these cultures as spiritual utopias where sin and suffering just don’t exist.
3: It can but it’s a very crude and basic way of assessing things. ‘A Serbian Film’ sets out to shock and disgust. It does so very well. But that’s not an engaging or worthwhile experience. Transformers 2 was only made to make money, which it did. To call either good just because they did what they meant to do is setting the bar very low.
If I may just respond to the concept here. I don’t think artists have responsibilities beyond don’t intentionally try to incite acts of violence.
The same people who call for a code of intersectional feminism to be supported and preached by all of art are the ones who would scream and rant the loudest about conservatives asking for media to do the same thing but with religious morals. Saying there’s a moral code all art must follow presupposed you know what is best for everyone. If you think that, you are wrong.
And on top of the aforementioned hypocrisy and vanity there the fact I feel art should have the right to be apolitical. Look at the art of Kandinsky and Klee, the music of Bach, or the games of Sega and Nintendo. They were not made to make a point, but they are beautiful. Yes I know they were inspired by the political world they were shaped in, and can have meaning ascribed to them via context. But that’s not why they exist or why people love them. These and millions of other pieces were not made as activism. They were made to be, and are, transcendent of any political, moral or activist statement that a picky critic can place upon them.
But sadly the questions we we’re given were nowhere near as interesting as the ones I imagined we’d get.
The first piece of reading we were given was a journal called ‘The Social Turn’ by Claire Bishop. And we’re already off to a bad start.
We open with a quote from someone called Dan Graham that goes “All artists are alike. They all dream of doing something that’s more social, more collaborative, and more real than art”. To which I say, speak for yourself dude. I would love nothing more than to make art that is less social than collaborative. I would pay to be able to make art that is less social and collaborative.
I’d like to point out we already have works of art that rely on mass collaboration. Movies, games, animation and even comics. The snobbery of Fine/conceptual/postmodern art knows no bounds. If the “real” art world didn’t make it it doesn’t count. And anything can be art but we won’t acknowledge anything we don’t like.
Bishop herself seems unsure of what she is preaching beyond “More social and collaborative” She isn’t even sure what to name her ideas for collaborative art
I think dialogic or participatory art are the best terms Bishop suggests for what she is trying to describe. Her ideas involve art that instead of being made by one person art made by a group or community working to express mutually. The terms “Dialogic, or Participatory” show that if all aren’t pulling their weight or letting one take the lead the idea isn’t working.
For a new idea Bishop has a bit too much faith in her concept. She claims “There can be no failed unsuccessful unresolved, or boring works of collaborative art because all are equally essential to the task of strengthening the social bond”. To which I say
1: You’ve never seen group a people fail miserably to get along have you?
2: Logically if the art fails to strengthen the social bond then by this metric it is a pure failure.
3: If the social bond and not what the art looks like is what matters then it is being held to the same standard as school play basically. If this art has the same value as a local women’s karaoke group why should I care? Single artists have done way better work.
Here’s a jaw droppin My Little Pony fan animation made by one person
And here’s a man who got his 1980’s printer to play Take on Me
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Modern art is nepotism. What Bishop is proposing is trash. But because it’s part of the art scene it will be important trash.
The arrogance doesn’t end there. While praising a trio of collaborative postmodern artists from Turkey she states that Turkey NEEDs Non-object based art [My words, not hers] because Turkey still being largely based in painting and sculpture is an inherently bad thing. I love how postmodernists claim to hate colonialistion so much, but when they see culture doing things differently or in a way they see as outdated they say it has to change. No consistency.
Bishop seems to wax and wane on the importance of non-artists getting involved in these works is. Her Turkish tro are just leading other people by the hand and doing all the thinking work. But she really does seem to think the point of these works is to help out real people. Even though she also seems to believe the old lie that everyone is/will one day be an artist,
Something about the urge to find “Real people” to collaborate with shows just how fake this idea is. They fetishize the idea that everyone is an artist. But don’t feel this collaborative art is real unless it uses non-artistic people as a sort of diversity hiring scheme. “We’re not phoney. Look at all the non art people we’ve hired!”
Surely if you’re just using members of a community you don’t belong to to make your art it’s not much different to a circus master claiming he and his animals and freaks are just one big happy family.
And art and life will never be blurred. Most people are not and do not want to be artists. This is the truth of the world. We need to respect that.This dream of a Téchntopia (Word society of artists. Don’t look it up, I just coined the term) is nothing but vanity from artists who can’t engage with the real world. People have been preaching the coming of the Téchntopia for about a hundred years now. If it was going to happen then it would have happened by now.
Can I just point out that modern art doesn’t matter? Like at all. No-one who isn’t already a superfan of postmodern art knows or cares about your “dematerialised, antimarket, politically engaged projects”. Australian Christian death metal bands have more impact on the world than this stuff does. So why am I being asked to treat this with such awe and respect.
I hate using irrelevance as an insult because it’s small minded. It suggests something only has value if it’s popular. But considering Bishop later describes painting and sculpture as irrelevant I feel justified here.
This, and indeed most modern art is totally irrelevant to the world at large. But it is always setting itself up as a messiah. That would be bad enough on it’s own. But the vanity and nepotism make it all the worse.
Why should I respect these people?
I’m going to be honest. I’m reacting to the bits I actually got. I understand very little of what I was reading here.
So I didn’t like the required reading much? Was the rest of it any good?
Well the session on Friday was a drag. Most of what we were shown wasn’t real art. It had no artistic vision or merit. It was just “cute”. And I mean that in the worst way possible.
Some of it was just activism called art to make it trendier and to excuse a strong or effective message. The ultimate exercise in middle class slacktivism. Make yourself feel good about a cause and puff yourself up for being an artist without having to go through the brutal grind and heartache of real activism.
A lot of this, Like the police on horses one by Tania Bruguera or the sand dune one by Francis Alys, don’t have anything to do with the question of responsibilities at all. It’s just rich people doing things just because. Apart from having no artistic value it makes no real point. “Hey. If a lot of people shifted the sand on a sand dune the dune would be different shape. Hey. Wouldn’t it be cool if we had mounted police officers doing crowd-control in an art gallery and no-one knows it’s meant to be art”. These aren’t art pieces. They’re anecdotes. Silly stories to tell over dinner when you can’t think of anything meaningful to talk about. They’re neither moral or aesthetically pleasing. It’s just “A rich person did this and called it great art”.
The bit about Atur Zmijewski’s experiment with the choir of deaf children actually was fun and interesting to read about and could be good talking points on issues of perspective and disability. Repeated a few times we might even learn something scientific about music, deafness and singing. But I wouldn’t call it art. Just a neat experiment. Even most of the bits that feel like art, as opposed to non-art using activism and post-modernism as excuses, have no artistic value. It’s all “cute” at best. Appraised as art they are unremarkable and passe.
Peter Gabirel and many of the other rock stars of the 1980s were able to give us songs that were both strong works of activism and great works of music. Whether you think they were sincere or not they did both effect change and make great art. But because they are not “real” artists they deserve less respect than the people shown here. Apprently…..
We were asked if this “Collaborative art” was practical or symbolic. It strikes me this stuff is never practical and always symbolic.
We were asked how should a work of art be evaluated? Almost always as art first and moral value second. A work would have to do an extraordinary amount of good or evil in the real world before it’s moral value should be considered more important than its artistic value. “All good intentions shouldn’t render art immune to critical analysis”.
I also feel the lecture itself had some intellectual dishonesty. The definition of responsibility given in the slideshow are surprisingly narrow and based on a certain point of view. Rightly or wrongly, not everyone sees improving social conditions and helping the environment as something people have.
Assuming art has to vitalise people to action instead of numbing them can be a dangerous idea. You can turn people away with your art. Like how Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s more liberal bent caused a large chunk of the fanbase to claim they were being preached at and form a boycott of the new Star Wars films. Or how the Family Guy episode ‘Screams in Silence’ has been heavily criticized for spreading misinformation about domestic abuse that could make things harder for people experiencing domestic abuse.
Just having a good cause in no-way guarantees a good product. You can end up hurting your own cause.
Also. It’s not proven that just because a work is numbing that it is bad. I’ve heard the defence that we need a degree of numbing to get by.
Art can be both therapeutic or/and confrontational. There is room for both.
All this posturing does is instead of making the world better is make art worse. It lets people make bad art, or bad non-art, and feel good about it because they’re “Helping”
I’m Bored.
John's Learning Journal 