Context of art

Ron hated art at school. Not that he was unable, he was very able. He painted and drew beautifully, with an excellent technique. He just could never settle into the way that art was taught. There were plenty of kids who had little technical ability, and they were no-hopers, for most purposes. They were never going to be able to achieve the kind of form and beauty that Ron was capable of. But he always found himself struggling to deal with the teacher, who wanted to know at every point whose style he was emulating. He used to struggle to tell the teacher that he was following no one’s style but his own. I found it intriguing that he could not articulate this at the time. Apparently he just mumbled or went quiet or something. So he never really had this one out and therefore never resolved it. His favourite medium was acrylic paint and he liked to produce elegant pictures with hidden objects that were equally elegant in their form, but difficult to discern at first. Once you knew they were there, you could never fail to spot them.

I was thinking about this the other day, while cutting the grass. The sun was high in the sky and the heat was pleasant. The noisy roar of the petrol mower drowns all other sounds and the brain compensates for this by thinking more loudly. I recall feeling a great deal of sympathy for Ron’s quandary. He did not want to argue with the teacher, as the teacher probably knew best, and direct confrontation usually doesn’t help much. I think that I thought the same as Ron, and that my discomfort with art was caused by the same disquiet at always having to be derivative. When Ron asked why couldn’t something just be in its own, original style, I though that this was a good point. But this morning I realized why this was wrong. It was the music buzzing around in my head that made it clear.

All art forms communicate something to us. They use a language of their own. This language has its own internal consistency and grammar. I never could see this in paintings as a young man, but I can definitely hear it in music, read it in stories and see it in films. Listening to certain pieces of music, I can hear influences of Bach or the Beatles. Sometimes those particular influences are not there, but something else is there in its place. What makes new music original and exciting is usually not a totally new language, form and method of composition, but a radical departure of just one of those elements, placing the other elements into stark relief and revealing them in some previously unknown manner. Similarly, with the form of the novel or the short story, there are conventions and whether one likes it or not, these conventions are so deeply ingrained in the culture of story-telling that we follow them. Indeed, the structure of the language is sufficient to cause delight in its own right, but this is due to the observance of, or deliberate departure from form. It is not because the story-teller has suddenly departed from every previous assumption about how to do it. Beckett was great at taking his art-form to a unique and highly original place, but this uniqueness was in the context of everything else, not in a vacuum.

Thus, art has a context. Now I can see that the struggles of the impressionists were institutional struggles. Artistic expression has to develop a relationship with the institutions and historical context of art. It is not simply a question of self-expression, although that is a very real and important part of the process. It is a question of using the language. Where Ron’s teacher failed was in not having this debate with him, and leaving the issue unresolved, so he has developed this feeling that art is a construct to which his work does not belong. His work may have no merit in it at all, but the real problem is that he cannot connect it in his own mind to what has gone before. What I realized while cutting the grass was that Ron is therefore only a decorator of canvasses. He can produce attractive looking images to ornament a wall, but I guess this is not art.

Now I begin to understand why people study art. I used to wonder why they did not just produce it. Then I learned that techniques have to be acquired from masters. I have long had an uncomfortable feeling about the culture of art institutions, the galleries, exhibitions, agents and critics, all buzzing around busy as you like, none of them producing anything. But I see that this whole industry is concerned with weaving a vast web of interconnectivity and developing the meaning and language of very complex things. No wonder it is so difficult to get in.

Finally, I see that even the production of primitive and simple images that seem totally unconnected to anything in the modern art world can be explained by reference to entoptic art or to cave art. In other words, even this obscure form of expression does not exist in isolation from cultural roots of some form. It is quite clear that all art connects to the human condition in some way or another, and that it is rare to invent a whole new language. And if one did invent a whole new language, well no one else would understand it! Thus, Ron’s inability to explain who he was emulating when he produced something at school was not a s sign that the teacher was limiting them to mere replication of what has gone before, but a sign that the teacher was failing to get Ron to understand the context and language of his own work.