Art Apology... Or Not.

Our group took a semi-grand tour of London on Saturday. We visited St. Paul’s Cathedral, Covent Garden Market, Buckingham Palace, and Green Park before heading back home, but in the middle of our trip we stopped at Trafalgar Square and took a gander at the (free to enter! but no photos...) National Gallery. Me being a visual person, I absorbed every old painting I saw… and…

I was both amazed and disappointed. Amazed, in that each painting paid great attention to details in the backgrounds, the faces, and the light sources, and in that I marveled at the talent and dedication needed to paint each picture. Disappointed, however, in that some of those weren’t good technically. The light source made half the face lie in shadow, or the whole painting was too dark, or insignificant parts shined with brilliant light while the focus didn’t have enough exposure.

I caught myself saying, “This guy (or that guy, or such-and-such woman) could have bumped up the exposure a bit. That would have struck my eye better.”

Artists and art critics aren’t supposed to talk like that. They’re supposed to focus on composition, brushstrokes, and color. I, on the other hand, had focused on the lighting and, even worse, had spoken in the language of photography. I told myself that with a few turns of the aperture dial and a press of the shutter button, I could have made a better copy of these otherwise impressive paintings in less than a second.

Once I came to that conclusion, my shoulders sank with what I had come to realize. So, in the spirit of atonement that has taken some hold in the politics on both sides of the pond, I, as a photographer, apologize on behalf of my profession for killing the painted arts.

Because frankly, modern art sucks. It’s too much out of left field, it relies too much on the artist’s individual perception & ignores universal means of interpretation, and on the whole it doesn’t have any direction. With painted portraits and landscapes and such, there is at least the aim of re-creating the visual world using materials that don’t seem visual at all. (Honestly, whodathunk that liquid from flowers and colored near-paste could create something like The Last Supper? Simply the possibility is mind-boggling!) But now that anyone could do that with any medium-quality camera, visual art (or at least painted art) has nothing to strive for.

* * *

That’s what I was gonna write. I wrote down the idea for it on Saturday, drafted the beginning on Sunday, and had it all mapped out yesterday morning (Monday).

Then yesterday afternoon I visited Tate Modern, the (free to enter! but no photos...) modern art gallery on the south bank of the Thames. I now wish to take back my apology. Photography did wonders for artists, because it made them think outside the boxes that their media (canvas, paper, etc.) had corralled them into.

Now, I’m not saying that still cameras saved art. Given the cultural feeling at the beginning of the modern art movement and the technological progress humankind had made by then, something was going to change art. The world’s culture needed to be re-invented to adapt to all the changes, and not even the absence of photography would have prevented artistic change. I’d even go so far as to say that photography played a bit part, although an important bit part, in providing the cultural changes that prompted the modern art movement.

I’m saying that the still camera freed artists from the need to strive for the perfection in painting that I alluded to earlier. Since images perceived through human sight could be reproduced almost exactly through a camera (not exactly, of course, given the artificial frame every photo requires), artists didn’t need to work toward visual faithfulness. They could focus instead on different dimensions of human perception besides strict vision.

***

Take the Tate’s Red Flocked Wall by Keith Sonnier. The artist pasted thick layers of plaster six feet high and three feet wide on a wall, covered it with red painted sawdust, and pulled the plaster sheet partially off the wall. The end result is a near-vertical shag carpet of sorts, with the top edge still clinging to the wall while the bottom is tied to the floor a foot away from the origin.

My first thought was, “Lame. This says nothing to me.” I had seen much of the same thing at the Art Institute of Chicago, when I came across a red wooden two-by-four leaning against a wall. Seriously. That was all.

Really, REALLY hoping that there was more to this than just a feigned artifact of the 70s, I read the placard next to it. The placard for the red board in Chicago hadn’t helped me at all (it didn’t say anything!), but this one enlightened me to no end. Apparently, Sonnier has to remake the piece everywhere it goes. When it moved to the Tate, he layered the wall in plaster, covered it in red sawdust, and peeled the bottom part of it off the wall. Before the Tate, when it was somewhere else, he layered that wall in plaster, covered it in red sawdust, and peeled part of it off the wall, but not in the same way. Maybe it bulged in the middle, or maybe the top was pulled off and rolled down a little bit, or maybe Sonnier only pulled off one corner. Such varied repetition meant to stress the impermanence of a work of art and such work’s relation to its environment.

***

Now, you may say that a piece of art should be able to astound the viewer by itself. It shouldn’t need a card. Previously, I would have agreed with you. But no. Just as you can’t grasp an entire cataclysmic event by reading one newspaper report, and just as you can’t conclude that they should put iodine in the water after one scientific study extolling its benefits, so you can’t describe an entire experience or concept just in a piece of art. Artists through the years have tried to say everything on one canvas and have failed because they didn’t realize the limitations of staying in one medium or two dimensions.

Modern artists know this (or at least Keith Sonnier knows), and when they try to convey something like impermanence, time, or mobility, they know they have to rely on more than just their work. They have to use all of their resources (including, if necessary, multiple walls in multiple buildings) to convey their ambitious message, and as long as the viewer can grasp the message… eventually, I’m okay with the unorthodoxy.

I take back everything negative I’ve said about modern art. Specifically, I take back the quip I shared with Chris Kaiser in Chicago, that modern art pieces are nothing more than conversation starters. Red Flocked Wall and other pieces at Tate Modern changed (and started) my mind. My bad.