CLARITY VERSUS POETRY
My task as an artist is twofold. First, I want to make something that’s pretty - beautiful even. Second, I want to tell a story, put forth a point of view, comment, cajole, illuminate - all the things that storytellers do to get someone’s attention and keep it.
Now pretty is still fairly under-rated these days in the art world, and has been for quite some time. And even though pretty’s fortunes seem to be rising, I think the general feeling is still something like this: pretty art, with its soothing, harmonious colors, balanced compositions and attention to craftsmanship isn’t to be taken as seriously as art that forgoes these populist aesthetics. Yet if a piece of art is pretty, people look at it longer. If it’s pretty, people want to know more about it. It’s human nature.
Besides, and this is the most important part, I like pretty -- paintings by Thomas Hart Benton or Philip Taaffe or Howard Hodgkin, sculptures by Alexander Calder or Isamu Noguchi or Andy Goldsworthy. Like the majority of people, pretty is what I want to look at and live with and think about.
So you see, for me anyway, that end of things is fairly straightforward. It’s the storytelling end of my job just keeps getting more and more interesting. That end consists mainly of making metaphors and is a wildly interesting pursuit.
It’s basically the same pursuit that poets and playwrights and many other artists are engaged in: the pursuit of poetry. A pursuit which for me is always just a little like chasing a butterfly through a field with a holey net, beautiful and exhilarating and you never know for sure what you’re going to catch, if anything at all. It’s the kind of pursuit that makes one believe in the concept of the muse. When I catch a good metaphor, a beautiful metaphor, I feel just as lucky as I do proud.
But metaphor creation is not always butterflies and roses and good luck, it’s also hard work: finding, polishing, and placing them. But mainly it’s hard work because of the nearly-always-attendant trade-off between the intentional vagueness of poetry and the necessary obviousness of accessibility. A trade off of poetry versus clarity. Of course there are those exemplary artworks that have both, but by and large, clarity does not peacefully coexist with poetry. Here’s what I mean:
Years ago I saw a beautiful painting of Niagara Falls. Out of the mist of the falls floated chemical diagrams, little pentagonal shaped constructs of oxygen and nitrogen and other elements. The viewer looked at this painting and got it, just like that. Niagara Falls, beautiful but polluted. This piece had clarity, but perhaps not so much poetry.
On the other hand are the myriad pieces of contemporary art that look important and are presented as important and poetic, yet rebuff all attempts at interpretation and therefore offer no clarity. Art like this makes people feel ignorant and makes them feel that contemporary art is neither approachable nor understandable. This should never be a by-product of the creation of art.
When I first started out, I founded an art movement that would, by its definition, eliminate this insidious by-product. The movement is called funism, and here’s its manifesto:
•Art should be as much fun to look at
as it is to think about.
•Art should be intellectually engaging
without being intellectually elitist.
Simple: combine beauty and meaning, while maintaining accessibility. It’s simple in theory but difficult in practice due to the eternal tension between clarity and poetry. To err on the side of poetry is to err on the side of intellectual elitism: if I create a metaphor and nobody but me can decipher it, am I not engaging in elitism? By definition. And if I create a metaphor that’s bang you over the head obvious, then I’ve clumsily, lazily ignored the great aspiration toward poetry. And that won’t do at all. Both masters must be served.
Making matters worse in this debate is the current state of our collective cultural relationship to metaphor. The ascendance of abstract art in our time has brought with it the popular understanding that it’s hopelessly bourgeois to ask of art, “what’s it about?” The ascendance of abstract art in our consciousness has replaced meaning with the emperor’s new meaning.
And while Modernism has succeeded in freeing us from the tyranny of church and state proscribed iconographies, it has also thrust us into the gorgeous melee, a free for all of personal iconographies, each artist creating their own symbolism, often times indecipherable by even the most thoughtful viewer. And thus it has also taken from us the mindset that looks for and expects accessible subtext. Where once we looked for subtext in our art and found it, now we look for nothing and find it. Or worse, we don’t look at all. Lacking the habit of looking for subtext causes us to take everything at face value, and that’s a great loss.
This change in the way we relate to art really took off with the ascendance of Hollywood to the high throne of culture. Hollywood, the recording industry, Bob Ross. To be sure, they are the creators of many beautiful pieces of art: movies, music, happy little clouds. But subtext is more exception than rule. The majority of the cultural products that this country produces are skin deep and no more. And though I am a willing consumer of much mass market culture, I’d be happier if more of these products had more to them than meets the eye.
But what of our art that is about something? Wall “paintings” by Sol LeWitt that even some curators can’t understand; enormous, intrusive sculptures by Richard Serra that are dropped in our path for us to stumble around, figuratively and literally. Sliced sheep in vitrines of formaldehyde. These types of scratch your head works may be important within the tiny art world itself, but for most people, they’re just confusing and belittling. Supposed subtext with nothing to draw us in. It’s a crazy catch-22 in a way, too, because if more people were coming from a place of symbolism savvy, their approach to modern, non-symbolic works of art would definitely be a little more open.
The art-viewing populace needs something between totally inaccessible meaning and no meaning. And only then, after they have been repeatedly rewarded for asking “what’s it about” can they be expected to move on to “how does this make me feel” or other, more difficult questions that so much contemporary art begs. It's a natural progression and our current art culture has extracted a crucial step.
The popular approach to art has always been, and will always be, to assess its superficial beauty first, to wonder about its subject matter and meaning second, and third, for the advanced viewer, to ask “how does this massive tilted arc of steel make me feel and how does that relate to meaning?” In this way, beauty is the friend of meaning, and thoughtfulness is the friend of feeling, one laying the way for the other, tangible showing the path to intangible.
Looking at and understanding advanced concepts in modern art is a great exercise for our minds, and stretching our notion of “what is art” is a great exercise for our soul, but these are the advanced exercises, and a whole generation of art viewers haven’t ever had an opportunity to work out on the prerequisite exercises of metaphor interpretation first. It’s not that people have become lazy viewers, it’s that the contemporary art world no longer gives them all the exercises they need.
This is how to progress: More art needs to be as much fun to look at as it is to think about, and more art needs to be intellectually engaging without being intellectually elitist. Only then will more art viewers become better art viewers.
It’s not that all art has to be guided by this rule of accessibility; sometimes, for example, painting just for the sake of painting is enough, and, of course, not everybody can be expected to understand everything. That would be unnecessary, undesirable, and boring. It’s just that more art needs to be guided by the rule of accessible subtext. We need more art to welcome, not rebuff; then people can be truly rewarded for their time spent with art, not just told that they’ve been rewarded.
Which brings us back to my great debate of clarity versus poetry:
As a consumer of culture and a creator of art, I have settled the debate with what I think is a reasonable and forgiving addition to the funist manifesto: Art should invite interpretation. Simple. Invite interpretation. I can see it now on the bumpers of the masses where the “eschew obfuscation” sticker has worn off after repeated washes. It doesn’t ask much, and it gives a lot.
And maybe, just maybe, it can help get our culture back on the track of metaphorical literacy, one thoughtful viewer at a time. And who knows where that could take us.
