I’m writing this in a field in Yorkshire as I am away for a couple of weeks, so this will be uploaded to the blog when I get home and will all be slightly out of synch.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what medium I should select to research for AE&EA and about the research process itself – what it should include what it shouldn’t, what is worth being included. The value of the project itself has been a major issue for me.
Firstly the research. We were told to go away and research each area in as much depth as possible and document it – ‘to find out everything there is to know’. It was still a very vague brief though, and given the impossibility of researching the infinite – and indeed documenting it online – I’m not seeing this as a valuable use of my time. So I’m not going to go out and research every fact and figure as any kind of list or encyclopaedia.
Instead what I will do is think, read, look, observe, interact, perform – and see what my thoughts are on the concepts of what I am looking at or producing – of medium, of institution, gallery, artist and publication. I could research the specific in detail but it is such a small part of the whole – and art being such a wide arena I don’t think it is necessarily a good thing to have detail on specifics. At least not yet. So whilst I will choose a specific medium, artist or whatever, I’m far more interested in it as part of a whole system, or as a general concept.
Which leads me to the first area I’m supposedly documenting my research on – a medium. After thinking endlessly about choosing a medium and looking at what it is, what it isn’t, what it is used for, why it used, who has used it ad infinitum and being no more inspired I have decided my medium is thought. Thinking, ideas. Communicating through ideas. My first interest at college is philosophy – or to be more precise understanding and ideas – and using art as a tool within this to gain understanding; and to communicate. Ideas are a medium for me, as well as an end result.
Last year I was told that art is about communication. There is always communication of some form intended in an artwork. This doesn’t seem to be the general view at my current college, but I don’t know if that’s through a lack of clarity or understanding or what. Regardless of my experiences last year, surely art has to be about the transfer or evocation of some kind of understanding, thought, idea or emotion in the viewer? Even without any original intent, there is communication as soon as the viewer sets eyes (or ears, or whatever else) on it.
If the viewer is not getting the message intended by the artwork then the artist wasn’t successful in their objective, it was ‘bad art’ – it could have been done better. But despite this – even if an artwork evokes the wrong message, or wasn’t supposed to have any message, it has to evoke a feeling or an idea of some sort in the mind of the viewer. Whether it is the appreciation of the beauty of a landscape, a message of power, beauty or status in a portrait, or political comment in contemporary art or anything else – it has to evoke some kind of mental activity in the viewer. Emotion, understanding, thought, idea – Descartes would label them all ‘thinking’.
However surely art today has gone beyond the evocation of idea or thinking, to using ideas as a medium. As Beuys said it has gone ‘beyond the visual’. Conceptual art. Relational art. Yoko’s Grapefruit. The philosophy of art. Philosophy as art…
This is beginning to sound confusing. Let me try to organise this a little more…
