Moksha

making art: not quite the same as writing it

One of the best things I ever did was take an art class. Now that the art school brochures are crowding the mailbox once again, I am reminded of this fact.

Now it may seem strange that a person struggling to become an art historian for the past 7 (8?) years had NEVER taken an art class prior to about a year ago - but there it is, not even in high school.

And yet I was foolishly confident when I stepped up for a San Francisco Art Institute course in collage. Confident that since I spent such an inordinate about of time writing, thinking and dreaming about art, that surely that would manifest itself into something sublime that actually was art. Oh naive one.

It is not surprising that I spent the first two weeks of the course literally writing words on canvas. I tried to do this in some ambiguous interesting way of course - through newspapers, crosswords, etc....the results were horrific, to say the least.

I had spent so much time forcing the visual qualities of art into words on paper that I could not conceive of an artwork without words. And as anyone who has ever read a review, then seen the exhibition and wondered if the reviewer was on crack - words and art are very often at polar opposites. Maybe some of the best work, for me anyway, is where meanings are so slippery and sly that framing them with words on a page is inevitably unsatisfying.

So I had to break free. Kill the historian and unleash the artistic being that I was pretty sure (although by this time, not 100% sure) was inside me. Coming up with ideas was the easy part - executing them was far more painful than writing them, naturally. By the time my tremendously subversive idea had worked itself out on canvas, it appeared trite, forced, silly and just really really bad. I was great at the "critique" part of the course - I could cut up or admire everyone else's work as well as my own - yet I was embarrassed to hang up my crapola work. Most of it immediately went into the garbage.

The upside to all of this was that I now teach art history a little differently - particularly to a class of studio students for whom I have unending admiration! We talk more about process, about technique, and more about artist interpretation than before I tried to be an artist.

I am more inclined to admit that the historian of art offers a limited perspective, and even that it is perhaps not the RIGHT one for thinking about and understanding the artistic process. Horror or horrors - but that's not my revelation, its Donald Preziosi's (see Brain of the Earth's Body)...it's one that makes you think though.

Ok - I know I've gone too far on the blog when I start to cite. Blogging, in a very real way, parallels the experience of letting loose that was so crucial to even begin to "make" art. Thank goodness it still allows me to use words though, or else I'd really be depressed.

The not-so-great fruits of my artistic labor are above and below (and I do mean LABOR):

posted by Moksha @ 7:36 PM