March 7, 2013
Response Paper 1 for Semester 2 of Thesis Preparation Writing Project, GRFA 623 / Fall 2
University of the Arts, Studio Art MFA Program
Writing Mentor: Carol Moore
The Essential Question: What Is Art For?
Ellen
Dissanayake sums up my mission this semester in the title of her book, What is Art For? By the definition of
art in our present-day Western culture, art is functionless, an idea expressed
by the phrase "art for art's sake." As I write this, I am at a point
in my life, as a young mother, when my time is more in demand and more precious
than it has ever been. Why then, I have to ask myself, should I spend it making
art objects, which are functionless? Why do we as a society make art? Why have
other civilizations across the globe and throughout time made art?
In
reading Jacquelynn Baas's Fluxus and the
Essential Questions of Life, I have found that these are the same questions
asked by Fluxus "anartist" George Maciunas. Baas writes of Maciunas, "He devoted his
life to the analysis of what art has been throughout the history of humankind
and what it might be good for now," (49). Baas also might as well be
describing Dissanayake's research and
writing.
Whereas
Maciunas and I address the question "What is art for?" with the
immediacy of being artists , or anartists[1],
Dissanayake looks at this question from an anthropological and biobehavioral
point of view. Observing that all societies in all times and places have made
art of one kind or another,[2]
she concludes that the making and appreciation of the arts is a universal human
behavior. Assuming that human beings are animals who have evolved over time by
the same laws of natural selection as other animals, she concludes that art
making and appreciating behaviors have somehow been beneficial to us as a
species. In other words, art behavior has been "valuable" enough in
the game of survival to have been preserved and passed down.
Looked at from this point of view, one could
say that the propensity to make and appreciate art is a genetically determined
part of human nature. The question is, why were these behaviors advantageous to
early humans? What was art for? By
digging into our past as a species, Dissanayake strives to illuminate our
present.
Before
I continue with Dissanayake's line of reasoning, let me take a look at some of
my own half-baked answers to this question, prior to reading What is Art For? Since I am an artist,
my concern with the question starts on a personal level: What does art do for
me? Then I ask, what does it do for other artists or people who make art (children,
hobbyists, students, mental patients, etc.)? Only as an afterthought do I tend
to ponder the other side of the question, what does art do for those who view
or appreciate it? Up to this semester, my instincts and prior research have
lead me to suspect answers embedded in the following areas of interest: play,
learning, therapy, and spirituality.
Last semester (Fall 2012) I concentrated my
research on play, since it had become an important element in my artwork. My
research lead me to two main areas of contact between play and art - learning
and therapy. First, I will recap the association between play and learning.
Play often involves exploration, and thus discovery. In play, children often
set up self-imposed challenges to overcome, thereby practicing their
problem-solving. Problem solving and social skills are also practiced during
group play, in which conflicts between peers arise and must be resolved. As a
natural avenue for learning, play has been appropriated by various education
reformers as a curriculum tool. Sometimes it is used in a didactic method to
impart set curricular goals in an appealing manner. Other curricula incorporate
play's potential as a more open-ended avenue for discovery. Similarly, play has
begun to be appreciated and cultivated by adult professionals for its role in
creative problem-solving, design, and artistic expression.
As an artist, art-educator, and mother (i.e.
the teacher of my own young children), I find the association between art,
learning, and play to be useful both in my teaching and my practice of making. I
seek to reach a spirit of play in my art making, which can open up roads of
discovery. When discoveries are made through play it makes learning joyful and
more deeply experienced, play more satisfying, and art-making more original.
This statement applies equally to my own artistic process as it does to educational
art-activities I plan for children. Increasingly, I find less desire to
distinguish between the playful, artistic, and educational activities I engage
in as an artist, teacher, and mother.
The
other main branch where my research on play lead me is therapy - various forms
of play and art therapy for children and adults. Play therapy can help a child
resolve their emotions, and can also provide a therapist with a
"window" into the child's experiences and inner world. It seems that
play therapy, first developed for use with children, more recently has branched
out into therapeutic work with adults. Play therapy, often in artistic forms (such
as art therapy, music therapy, and role-playing) helps adults who find it
difficult to speak about their experiences or feelings in a traditional
talk-therapy format. These methods essentially work by allowing an alternative
road into difficult issues, a road that bypasses the roadblocks of the
conscious, logical mind, providing insights, and allowing the individual to
"work through" their issues. Aside from the insights various forms of
art therapy provide, the very process of making art, playing music, or engaging
in role-play can be healing.
As
I researched the therapeutic value of play and art, my mind automatically
leaped to a similar value in spirituality. I had already been interested in the
spiritual components of contemporary art, and how art can provide a spiritual
release for its maker. I had touched on the topic in my research on artist
Tracey Emin during the summer of 2012. I also encountered the idea of
contemporary art as modern form of spirituality in the novel I Capture the Castle, which I quoted in
my final paper for the summer. This connection stood out to me because it
resonated with my personal experience and views. Furthermore, therapy and
spirituality both concern themselves
with the inner life of the individual and healing. Whereas therapy takes the
scientific, modern road of psychology, spirituality and religion take an older,
less well-defined, but potentially broader path. While the two areas are
related, I feel that both can be explored productively, and simultaneously, by
the modern individual.
Now
we return to Dissanayake's exploration of our question, "What is art
for?". After laying out her biobehavioral premise, she goes on to explore
the central question by asking two subsequent ones - "What is art?"
and "What does art do for people?". Asking these questions and trying
to answer them from an anthropological point of view reveals the messiness
inherent in our present concept of art. In our culture, we display artifacts
from "primitive" societies alongside modern abstract paintings,
appreciate them all for their "aesthetic" qualities and call them all
art. But in their original contexts artifacts from primitive societies served a
very different purpose (facilitating ritual ceremony or decorating utilitarian
items) than the abstract painting, which represents the modern Western concept
of "art for art's sake". Ultimately Dissanayake reveals that while
"art" objects from other cultures have aesthetic value as we define
it, their original meaning does not fit with our own definition of art. Our
present view of art, which divorces aesthetics from other concerns or meanings,
is unique, and has only developed since the 18th century (Dissanayake 41).
Dissanayake
attempts to consider the concept of art from every possible angle; she looks at
every variation of "the arts," from the highest and most elite fine
arts, to the lowest and most popular representations of decoration and
entertainment. She attempts to parse out every possible purpose any and all of
these might serve in our lives. Her examples range from the ancient to the
contemporary, from modern to primitive. She touches on potential answers to her
question which I had previously considered, and many I had not. Gratifyingly, ritual and play emerge, by
Chapter 4, "Making Special"
Toward a Behavior of Art, as top contenders for study, related behaviors
which also have antecedents in the animal world.
In
addition to Dissanayake and Baas, I selected Joseph Campbell's Myths to Live By, as a source for
cross-cultural comparison, concerned with religion, magic, and storytelling. Myths to Live By is a collection of
lectures, selected from ones Campbell gave at Cooper Union from 1958 to 1971.
As such, it provides an accessible, manageable overview of his philosophy, and
an easy inroad to the mind of this influential thinker. I concentrated on the
first three chapters, or lectures, which I found to be most immediately
relevant to my reading of Dissanayake: I
The Impact of Science on Myth, II The Emergence of Mankind, and III The Importance of Rites. While I
found Campbell's analysis and interpretation of specific myths, and their
comparison to counterparts in other cultures, insightful, I was disappointed
with his larger reflections on society. These come across as surprisingly
socially conservative, at the same time that his universalist view of religions
and acceptance of science would seem to advocate a progressive point of view. Still,
I look to his cross-cultural comparisons and understanding of universal themes
in storytelling to inform my own studio forays into writing and story this
semester.
Now
turning to Fluxus and the Essential
Questions of Life; I was struck by the parallels between Dissanayake and
Fluxus. It became evident to me that Dissanayake's thinking had been influenced
and provoked by the Fluxus movement and its artistic descendants. Toward the
conclusion of her book, Dissanayake observes, "Although art is no longer
part of life as in the past, when it was the handmaiden of significant and
vital activities, much avant-garde art today is concerned with giving art back
to life, rather than relegating it, as in the past few centuries,~ to the
remote and special worlds of the museum or concert hall, where it is intended
to be experienced by an elite sporadically and self-consciously as 'works of art,'"
(191). In the paragraphs that follow this statement, she explicitly names
artists and movements tied to Fluxus, such as John Cage and Happenings.
Dissanayake's
answer to the question "What was art
for?" in evolutionary terms, is that it supported ritual ceremonies which
served the selectively valued purpose of uniting social groups. Similarly, Jacquelynn
Baas writes in Fluxus, "Maciunas
regarded art at its best to be part of the social process, as it had been from
prehistoric times to the Renaissance," (49). The answer that Dissanayake
finds to the question, "What is
art for?" in our own culture, is that it echoes its earlier function in
relation to a secular society; it is a way for individuals to construct and
find meaning in their lives in a modern society which has become more isolating
and increasingly devoid of such comforting "illusions" as
religion. In the conclusion of her
thesis Dissanayake writes, "To those
who value it, capital-A art is a way of possessing sacredness and spirituality
in a profane world; art in everything or everything-potentially-art is a way of
imposing coherence (shape, integration) on selves and experiences that have
fragmented," (192). Here she is describing and explaining my
own stated goal of integrating art and life.
Maciunas's goal is closely related to mine: the
"end of art... its absorption into the practice of being human"
(Baas, 2). However, while reading Fluxus,
I noticed that two main problems arose from this goal. One was the problem of
professionalism; the total elimination of art as separate practice also
eliminates the profession of being an artist. This was no problem to Maciunas
who was the quintessential radical in every way, but it lead to a schism
between himself and other Fluxus artists who were not willing to go so far as
to eliminate themselves and their own profession (Baas, 30). The other problem
that I found as I read Baas's book, is that while the goal of the Fluxus
artists was to democratize art, by taking it out of the hands of elite makers,
buyers, museums, etc. - when they reached the most radical stages of this plan
they had so distorted the recognizable shape of what most people call
"art" that they essentially had rendered it elitist again. Baas
writes, "The ideal Fluxus composition, in Maciunas's view, would function
as a kind of readymade, occurring automatically, without any 'special'
performance. All one need do is notice it," (28). The problem is, who would notice it? In this scenario, only
the most knowledgeable insiders would be capable of recognizing a work of art
at all. Perhaps this is why the less extreme artists associated with Fluxus,
such as Alan Kaprow, are the ones whose names have become most familiar to us
today. Though they pushed the boundaries of art, their work remained
recognizable as art, rather than
becoming indistinguishable from life.
Ellen
Dissanayake does such a remarkable job at dissecting, defining, and rationally
stating my own views and goals as an artist, that one might ask, "What remains
for me to do in my research and writing?". Luckily, Dissanayake's writing
is rich, complex, and sensitive enough to leave plenty of room for further,
personally relevant exploration. Two topics I am interested in investigating
more deeply are: 1) the importance of rules for escaping oppressive freedom and
creating meaning, both in art and life and 2) storytelling in spirituality and
art.
Examples of Studio Work...
 |
| Last Semester's Work: The Zoo Installation, Fall 2012, Photograph of Closing, Amy Brand |
 |
My Cave, Installed at Uarts for Winter Critique, December 2012, Photographs of exterior view and various details. Amy Brand
This semester's work, so far...
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Sneak Preview of Spring 2013: Little god 1, Mouse Girl, Work in Progress, Amy Brand
|
Bibliography
Baas, Jacquelynn. Fluxus and the
Essential Questions of Life. Chicago: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, in Association with the University
of Chicago, 2011. Print.
Campbell, Joseph. Myths to Live
By. New York: Viking, 1972. Print.
Dissanayake, Ellen. What Is Art
For? Seattle: University of Washington, 1988. Print.
[1] A
term coined by Marcel Duchamp. Baas quotes Duchamp speaking to Richard Hamilton
in a 1959 radio interview, "I'm against the word 'anti'... because it's
very like 'atheist' as compared to 'believe.' An atheist is just as ...
religious... as the believer is, and an 'anti-artist' is just as much of an
artist as the other artist. 'Anartist' would be much better... meaning, 'no
artist at all.' That would be my conception," (2).
[2]Dissanayake
defines art for the purpose of her book as all forms of visual, linguistic, and
temporal arts, of both high and low status within their respective cultures.
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