But is it Art?

"So, I think people have to remember that their life is a giant empty piece of fabric to paint on, you know? And that you can either have it done for you by what the society tells you - you have to paint over this box that way or you can go in and say, "oh, you know what. For the next sixty years I just want to wear the color purple because that really makes me happy." Paint the canvas purple or whatever. So anyway, I've created this singing person from scratch and put him in this real world and a lot of my blueprints in how I've been told what I need to be continually trip me up because I'm so programmed that I have to have a 9-5 job , I have to make a good income, I have to be married by this age, I have to, you know, do this and do that. I have to dissemble all of that blueprinting and social sort of brainwashing and just, you know, be the person in the painting and paint from the painting out instead of being from out there in. "Ellis Paul

 

A September day in SoHo may indeed be a work of art all by itself. Reds and yellows, a canvas of movement and light - water spraying against the bright window glass on Prince Street, the arc of light illuminating the drops for an instant before they return to their work of scraping gum off the sidewalk. Form and function, light and color, what is intended and what we perceive. Welcome, to a day on art.

Heather and Leigh were right on time. Having made their plans to meet on the train coming into Manhattan from their colleges in central New Jersey, I was relieved to see them at the appointed corner. Color and light and chaos and a dose of caffeine from Dean and Deluca. Jon and Erel arrive and after Brett's wake up call, he, too comes to join us on our sunny corner. We're expecting Damian to drive in from New Jersey with a small entourage but as time stretches on we start to wonder if they'll join us.

"Let's leave them a note."

"On a street corner in New York?"

"Ok, who has something to write with?"Out come the crayons and markers. I love this group if only for what they carry in their knapsacks.

They create a very artistic sign and then find ways, (mostly by stealing tape off of other people's signs) and attach our piece of artwork to a lampposts. "They'll find it. We have faith in them." they tell me. Knowing this particular group, very little ever surprises me.

To prepare for the day I had spent a long time thinking about what is art and how we go about thinking about art. I had read two books - No More Secondhand Art, by Peter London, which talked about art as a process instead of product and another called Trust the Process which seemed to pick up where London left off. Still, I had felt like we needed a definition of art from which to begin, so I had gone on a collecting mission.

I made a small flyer with some words about what other people had said about art. It was the kind of thing meant to be shoved in a back pocket and read here and there, while waiting for someone to buy another pack of cigarettes or while waiting on line for falafel later. I don't think it answered any questions but I think it gave us some places from which to jump off.

 

 

Art: {Gr. ar, to join} creative work generally, or its principles; the making or doing of things that have form and beauty. (from Webster's dictionary)

 

Heading into the Guggenheim's Soho loft space with the hopes that Damian and Co. would still be able to find us, we talked about what is art. Jon got out a notebook and began a list of ideas as we brought them up. "Creative expression - something to look at - an expression of an idea that you don't have the words to say - I don't know."

We walked into the open space of the exhibit. "Art is found in places with white walls and shiny wood floors. The people who work at those places yell at you if you get anywhere near the art." ( I have forever been chastised for getting close enough to look at brush strokes. I was once told not to breathe on Monet as if he were in the room with me and I was giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation). The Guggenheim was hosting an exhibit of Andy Warhol's Last Supper. It was a two-room exhibit filled with enormous canvases all relating in one way or another to his visions of the Last Supper. On the wall in the back corner was an explication of the exhibit painted onto the white wall, written by one of the curators of the Museum which spoke to Warhol's intent.

"Is it art?" I asked, as I looked at the scrunched up noses taking in the canvases.

"If you think so-"

" Do you think so?"

" I don't know. I wouldn't want to live with it."

" I appreciate what he was trying to say."

" What is he trying to say?"

" I don't know."

"Something about repetition and images and the familiar and the media."

"But is it art?"

"What is art?"

"Here we go again."

Jon reads from the list. Thus far we know that art can be found in places where someone has determined it to be art. It seems that there are rules for behavior for viewing art which do not allow any form of interaction between the viewer and the work. Chances are you will be viewed as suspect if you are a young person looking at the art and a few talk of that same feeling of being treated like they might steal something at any moment, or of being underdressed to be in an art gallery. To view art do we need to behave in a certain manner? Why the separations?

We discuss the pieces themselves, how we feel about them and how they make us feel. "Let's get out of here before we get yelled at again." We are the only people in the gallery and even speaking quietly, our voices echo across the walls."

We walk downstairs and back out onto the street. We are all struggling with our ideas of what art can be versus how art is used. This is not a simple issue and I knew that this particular group would wrestle with art in all of its slippery questions. Among us were visual artists and writers and photographers and filmmakers - the sort of people who slide easily between media finding the right form to express their ideas. Who else come armed for a day in the city with a bag full of crayons and know their crayons all by their poetic names?

We head down the block to the Newmuseum. Unlike the Guggenheim, there is a loud and busy exhibit going on - a retrospective of the works of Martha Rosler. It chronicled her work from collages up into the present with a very loud installation exhibit with computer terminals and sound and a bombardment of images.

In the silence of the Warhol exhibit we talk a lot. In the noise of the Rosler exhibit we drift off on our own - some reading the post cards that hang from the ceiling in long Lucite cases, some taking in the clips of commercials from the 1970s. I enjoy watching the physical reactions of the group. Erel and Heather look overwhelmed by the noise, Brett seems energized by it. It feels like yet another example of the way in which art speaks to each person differently.

"Nothing in the world requires more courage than to applaud the destruction of values we still cherish. If a work of art or a new style disturbs you, then it is probably good work. If you hate it, it is probably great." Leo Steinberg

"When I am finishing a picture I hold some God-made object up to it - a rock, a flower, the branch of a tree or my hand - as a kind of final test. If the painting stands up beside a thing a man cannot make, the painting is authentic. If there's a clash between the two, it is bad art." Marc Chagall

"What do you think?"

"Can we go? It's too loud in here-"

"She's trying too hard-"

"Why is this art?"

"Because someone said so? If I saw these posters somewhere else they'd just be posters. It's because they're in a gallery that someone says they're art."

"There are paintings upstairs that I've seen as album covers - Leonard Cohen - "

"Is that art?"

"I guess."

"What is art?"

"Making a statement about something."

"Is this?"

"I guess."

"How does it make you feel."

"Overwhelmed."

Back on the streets. A few months before I had been involved in a one-day course on Post Modernism. The course had two visual artists in the group and I remember feeling very frustrated when I talked about what post modern art does. Later, Jon sent me a paper he had written for a course with the title," We want Beauty." It made me think again and again about the multifaceted purpose that art has in society. It is evocative, it is a mirror, it is a vision of where things could be, it is an image of where things are, it is deeply personal, it is completely public, it resonates.

"Art is dangerous because it doesn't have a definable function. I think that is what people are afraid of- " Terry Tempest Williams

"I know a great place for lunch - "

Brett and Erel lead us towards Greenwich Village. We stop along the way at a housing complex where a Picasso sculpture stands in the middle. On the edge of the street we see a man painting the skyline of Houston Street.

"Someone go ask him why he's doing what he's doing-"

No takers. It is good to see someone creating since we have spent our morning looking at the after effects but not the process.

"Art is for climbing on-" is added to Jon's list as suddenly our group is at the foot of the Picasso statue trying to see if they can do handstands onto its faces. Here is the intersection between art and humanity - the child like sense of wonder and play which comes from our interaction with the powers of creativity. It seems apropos to be using Picasso as our urban jungle gym since it was he who said," I used to draw like Raphael , but it has taken me a whole lifetime to learn to draw like a child." And his friend Henry Miller had added, "The thing is to become a master and in your old age to acquire the courage to do what children did when they knew nothing." We could do that...climbing on a Picasso sculpture and washing away the sense that art cannot be viewed except in whitewashed galleries was a worthy amendment to our morning's list.

Rolls of foil with lettuce and tomatoes rolling out - chicken kebabs and a line out the door but some form of order in the chaos. We walk across to Washington Square Park to eat and draw

. It is a gorgeous fall day and the park is alive. Sitting at the edge of the fountain we see some of the colorful local homeless folk out wandering around. One has created a hat and outfit out of clear plastic garbage bags he has stolen from the NYU dorms. Erel and Jon recognize some of the familiar figures of the square. There are performance artists and people eating ice cream, guys offering drugs while riding by on bicycles and "the cute guy from Felicity." The park is the carnival and we are part of its colors.

Speaking of colors, I hand out paper and leave out some art supplies. "Thought after seeing so much this morning you might want to create a little." I hand out a scrap of paper to each which can serve as a prompt if they'd like it. It has an idea which I had found in Peter London, and also a quote from the film American Beauty which had been a topic of discussion for months among the people in the group:

"What quality about you is the irreducible element without which you would cease to be the person you take yourself to be? Try to express it..."

and from American Beauty (thanks to Damian)

"But it is hard to stay mad when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst...Then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life. Most of you have no idea what I'm talking about."

And we go silent.

I am amazed by how quickly Brett dives into his paper. He is sitting across from me on the steps of the fountain, and while I am tentative, afraid of drawing something "wrong" I watch his confidence. It is not so much what he creates, but it is his manner. I look back and see Leigh as tentative as me - Heather comfortable with her crayons, Erel making long smooth strokes with hers and Jon deep in concentration.

I start having flashbacks to elementary school. I notice how intimidated I am by the white space. I don't even know what I want to say but I know that while I am very comfortable with words, the idea of creating something visually makes me hit all sorts of ego walls. Worse yet, when I think that I might have to show the rest of the group what I've made, I feel even worse. It is the feeling of wanting to say something, but not knowing if language will even come out of your mouth. In the safety of our group I like being able to laugh at my own collection of issues which seem to arise around artistic creation.

It's too nice a day for this kind of angst and I'm not being graded. I don't know why creating in that medium does that to me, but I have heard my students talk about feeling the same sense of anxiety and preprescribed failure when it comes to writing, too.

I just pick colors and begin to feel the space of the paper. What was I so concerned about? Art is in the process, not so much in the results. One of my favorite images of art is one that I read on the wall of an exhibit at the Museum of the Native Americans. It is a line by Jim Schoppert, an artist from the Pacific Northwest and I have carried I with me in notebooks and journals. He says:

"Art is process oriented. The final art object is just the husk of the experience. The experience - the feel of the wood and the smell of the work - benefits me one hundred percent; the viewer is left with the residue."

Getting into my drawing, I agree. I just like the feel of the colors and the flow of the crayons. I don't think I'm trying to express something as much as I am trying to find my way to a quieter place in the middle of the city. At least I've stopped feeling frustrated.

One by one we finish our pieces and mercifully it does not become an episode of show and tell. Instead, we talk about process. Brett is surprised when I mention what I perceive as boldness when it is just his way of being. Erel notices that she and I have chosen very similar shapes and colors. Leigh talks about her comfort with words over images and we drift into a conversation about our comfortable spaces.

I mention that I am very comfortable at nonfiction but never write fiction. Heather and Brett both give me surprised responses. Brett suggests that I write in third person describing myself from another point of view. I say I don't like fiction because it is in fiction that you are most exposed - it is as if everyone can see what lives on the underbelly of your imagination. There is teasing and a dare to try writing fiction. (In the weeks that followed I wrote a novel - I credit all of them with planting the seed and daring me to write it.)

Leaving the park we passed by a familiar site to the park denizens. Erel says, "You have to see the matchstick man."

On the corner of the park, seated on the stone wall was a lovely older man making boxes and picture frames from burnt match sticks. Each one glued in place. He said he had no plan, he just felt his way through the process. The work that he did was beautiful and created in the way I believed art is conceived - in the feel of it, not in the concern over whether or not it will sell or if it will have a curator's interpretation written on the wall. Natural work made from every day material turned through love and attention into art. That meant something to me.

Brett suggested that we go up to the School for Visual Arts to see the exhibit in their gallery. It was getting late in the afternoon and I think our heads were full. We walked through one of those wonderful street fairs where the same items are always for sale and yet I find I can't help looking, as if some hidden mystery will be buried beneath all of those plastic sunglasses and zeppolis. We passed the Union Square market where Leigh ran into friends and there was much laughter in the familiar and the unfamiliar coming together.

As we walked, Brett told me about the powers of color in advertising. Reds and yellows together make us do things faster - that's why the fast food companies use those colors. Greens and blues are cooling and soothing, hence why psychiatric hospitals and schools often use those colors on the cinderblocks of their walls. "It's really sick when you think about it-" Brett comments," Using what we know about the way colors make us feel so they can sell us things." How much is art about commodity? How much of art gets used that way?

We arrive at 23rd street and the huge painting on the side of the building announces the school of visual arts. Is it an image of DaVinci's? Is that what art is, or is it the graffiti and posters that we studied on the street in Soho which felt like art because it was original, not a reproduced image that had been exploited for new purposes. Wait - wasn't that what Warhol was saying, too?

We wandered around Brett's building, looking at projects done by students and films created by some of SVA's more famous (or infamous) drop outs. There was talk of the frustrations of being a student in an art school - about conforming to the rules, about breaking them, about being an artist and having to find creative ways to get around the system.

Standing outside of Brett's apartment I ask again

. "So what is art?"

"Isn't art a verb?" Jon asks.

"Like thou art a villan?"

"It basically means is."

"Art art."

"Excuse me?" (it sounded like he was barking, but he was also climbing on scaffolding at that point so it could have been the sound of a city bird.)

"Art art-"

We all began to smile. Art is.

Somehow that is a satisfying answer to a question which is in many ways impossible to answer. Art is process and we interact with its results, or some aspect of them. Art does things to us, makes us have a relationship with the artist, each other, the place where we find it. Art speaks and shapes the way we see the world. The world in turn shapes the way we experience art. Art challenges our believes and gives us cause to believe again. In the end, Lewis Hyde in his book The Gift, comes closest to my vision of art:

 

 

" The greatest art offers us images by which to imagine our lives. And once the imagination has been awakened, it is procreative: through it we can give more that we were given, say more than we had to say...A work of art breeds in the ground of the imagination."

 

And I have come to believe the great depth of our understanding lies precisely in its simplicity -

art art.