I want to share a quotation I found particularly interesting in the book I am reading, The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture. The book is a collection of essays, most of them regarding “outsider artists”. However, one essayist (and artist), Richard Nonas, analyzes how society created the label “art” and the function of said “art” in a society obsessed with categorical language. One of his propositions in the essay “The Snake in the Garden” is that:
Art is everywhere differentiated from the rest of human communication, separated exactly by the disjunction and ambiguity of its own essential breaking of the rules of language… Ambiguity is the strength which underlies and propels whatever specific meaning art may be made to carry.
As a curator reliant on the generosity and understanding of a diverse (though mostly suburban) audience, I see first hand that ambiguity can be a tough sale. Most visual art is purchased to serve as wall furnishings or space fillers, and pretty things will bring the money in. However, work that is more challenging, either it isn’t “pretty” or representational, can be even more satisfying once a viewer has immersed themselves in the work and determined their own understanding of the artist’s “intention”.
I love that this came up on a Google Image search for "Difficult Art"
According to my mother, you gotta eat your broccoli before you can really appreciate the ice cream. (At least she let me smother my broccoli in cheese…) As a painter, if I come across a painting or sculpture or performance piece that I can’t quite wrap my head around, I try to focus my eyes on the very specific ways in which the piece was created. How was the paint applied? Why was it layered in that way? What type of material did the sculptor choose? How is the body moving? Is the piece forcing me to move my body to interact with it? Once I have a grasp on the tangible object in front of me, it can be easier to start to hypothesize about why the work was created in the first place.
I’d love to hear your thoughts about the pros and cons of “ambiguous” work and “pretty” work. And what type of cheese do you use when you are trying to get down a really difficult piece of art? (My favorite was always melted cheddar.)
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I think you’re right that our society is “obsessed with categorical language,” and that tends to destroy ambiguity. Even art with nebulous subjects or purposes tends to get categorized; look at the famous pieces by Rothko or Pollock. But we don’t have any other way of dealing with the world. Everything is analogous. It’s always, “X is just like Y,” even in moments of sublime beauty. I personally don’t know how to be — to JUST be, to split the infinitive — without trying to categorize and label and arrange everything into a hierarchy.