Today was date day for Charissa and me, the gloriously rare day when we leave our kids somewhere and spend the day running around doing things. Not having gotten many chances to go since the boys were born, we decided on a trip to the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, one of our favorite and most frequented places before the boys came.
The museum has re-arranged since we were there last as it has some new collections, and seeing some of the new items, along with my criticism of some of the old has led me to some of the open theoretical questions concerning art, what it is, and who gets to make it.
These are famous modern questions of which art students and critical consumers of art will already be familiar. Indeed, as I suggested in my recent post regarding Duchamp, much of the work of modern artists has been to ask these questions as a way of critiquing their own artistic traditions. This has been a modern and post-modern concern in all the arts. Theatre has Grotowski, Brecht, and Artaud who played with theatre conventions by disentegrating the fourth wall, deconstructing the spoken word, and aboloshing elaborate sets in favor wharehouses and street corners. Literature has Pynchon who broke the conventions of space-time, Vonnegut who destroyed any illusion of the death of the author, and Saporta who destroyed the convention of linearity altogether. And visual art had of course Duchamp, Pollock, and so on. So the questions that I ask here are not new, but I am asking them anyway, in response to my own confrontation with these questions in my little hometown museum.
The centerpiece of the OKC-MOA is it's large Dale Chihuly exhibit. Chihuly began his career in stained glass and accidentally discovered the ancient art of glass blowing while fooling around with some of his glass. Henceforth, he has become world renowned for his work in blown glass. The reason Chihuly fits into my questions here is that many years ago, just as his work was getting larger and more complex, he was involved in an accident which rendered him blind in one eye. Having lost his depth perception, he gave up entirely doing the hands-on work involved in creating his own work. Instead, his sculptures are actually formed by a large number of apprentices, based on rather abstract paintings that Chihuly paints. The paintings are not schematic at all, and therefore do not serve as any type of blueprint for the actual glass sculptures, Instead, they seem to act more as inspiration for the apprentices who will make the sculptures as Chihuly stands behind them pleasantly shouting orders.
For years I've thought of this as an interesting extension of the work of other 20th century artists. Modern artists have asked the question of "who is the artist" in interesting ways. Duchamp critiqued the notion of an inspired genius when he began arranging things found in everyday life and calling them found art sculptures. Others have done similar things in their art. But in each of these cases, artists put their hands on objects not typically considered artistic and asked, "does it make it art that I, an artist, touched it." Chihuly extends this questioning even further because he doesn't touch anything. Instead, in his work, he is not the artist because he crafted the actual piece, but because it came from his mind. The actual building of the sculptures is performed by apprentices who are, we pressume, craftsmen and not artists.
Of course, as I've grown more sympathetic to the Marxist complaint, this definition of the artist has come to bother me. Chihuly hires an extraordinary number of young artists, they create magnificent sculptures, and he gets to put his name on the work. And so, with little physical input of his own, he has grown to world renown on the backs of people we've never heard of. In this system, the artist is the one who gets credit as the "idea man," while his workers, the artistic proletariat if you will, languish in obscurity and in the heat of the glass kiln.
I continue this question of who gets to be called artist as I move on to the work of Alfonso Ossorio. His bizarre collage sculpture INXIT is the centerpiece of a new collection of his work at the OKC-MOA. The piece is a door and door frame with an extraordinary Hodge-podge of strange stuff glued to it including animal bones, plastic birds, and a human skull, all of it creepily encrusted with glass eyeballs. The interesting thing about it is that it looks like every road-side oddity created by any local crazy man who ever donned greasy overalls. Upon seeing this piece, I turned to Charissa and asked, "do you suppose that artists sometimes trick us by saying 'I'm going to throw some bull-crap together and you have to take it seriously because I have an MFA.'"
This theme continued when we watched a film introducing the MOA's temporary exhibit of the constructivist sculptures of Jill Downen. In the film, she discusses how she became obsessed with texture while being placed in time-out by her mother. She notice a crack on the wall and became so excited by it that her mother no longer used time out as a punishment, making her wash dishes instead. The film then goes on to show her walking around an empty New York apartment with a small video camera gushing over the textures of the interesting apartment. The film shows a clip of one of these videos, which she uses as inspiration. The shot is zoomed in unnaturally closely and the video is shaky, and the whole thing is dubbed over by Downen as she said odd, artsy things. It's strangely reminiscent of "the Blair Witch Project."
It occurred to me that, in both the cases of Downen and Ossorio, this art is being produced by people who, if they were anything but artists, would be taken as mentally ill. I told Charissa at this point that the only difference between an artist and a lunatic is which side of the river the person went to school. If she is studying at MIT, she is a maniac. If he is at Harvard, he is an artist.
This is, of course, a joke, but it makes a serious point. That is, the label of "artist" is perhaps a great deal more arbitrary than we have often assumed. The difference between Ossorio and the goofball in Memphis who painted his house pink and glued bizarre stuff to it is a Harvard degree. The difference between Downen and a troubled kid with a penchant for taking strange videos is a Danforth Scholarship at Washington. In the case of Duchamp's "Fountaine," the difference between a urinal and a sculpture is where in the art gallery is stands.
This is not to say that these are not talented artists. They are, without a doubt. This is to say that who gets to become an artist and who goes unnoticed forever has as much to do with the relatively arbitrary forces of access and educational opportunity as it does with artistic "genius." It bears repeating here that this idea is not new to me. Many artists themselves feel this tension and play with these concerns in their own work. But, having been confronted with these truths, I had to make something of them.
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