Art. What?

I think about art a lot - what is it, who gets to define it, who gets to judge it, and other imponderables that are purely subjective.  That old saw "I don't know anything about art but I know what I like" is actually true.

The Joseph Beuys exhibit at PAM is a case in point.  Beuys was a German fluxus - one who mixes or blends different media and art forms.  PAM exhibited his Lightening With Stag In Its Glare which consists of a huge piece of iron dangling from the ceiling (the lightening), and scattered on the floor below the various and sundry other bits of metal, a steel cart, blocks of stone, and a tripod table.
A friend and I were on the balcony above the piece, looking down at the twisted shapes littering the floor.  It came to me.  "Those look to me like coprolites."  She said, "I was thinking exactly the same thing.

We simply could not understand the sculpture.  We later talked to one of the room attendants, who pointed out what each piece represented (I think the steel cart was the stag - I don't recall), which helped.

It reminded me of an art show I attended in Eugene years ago.  The painter was there, along with patrons and guests drinking wine and talking about art.  The artist had been collared by a middle-aged woman with money and attitude.  She had her arm hooked through his, gesturing with her wine glass at a painting they were standing in front of.  "What were you trying to achieve with that slash of mauve across the lower right?  Is that a statement of lost hope, or perhaps even despair?"  The artist, without missing a beat said, "I just liked the color."

Art is like that.  You get it or you don't.  But it can depend on how you're exposed to it.  For years I thought that Mark Rothko's stuff was nonsense.  Certainly I could paint something like this.  How hard could a light red O on a dark red background be?  Until the Rothko retrospective at PAM, I had only seen his paintings in magazines.

Seeing them in person changed my perspective entirely, partly due to their size (most of them are enormous canvases), but mostly because in person I could begin to see the subtle way he had done them.  They started to make sense to me in a way they hadn't before.  He hadn't just slopped some paint onto a canvas and called it art, he had worked on them.  They meant something to him. Seeing them in person and to scale changed my perception of what he was doing.

I still don't know if I like them, but I appreciate them as art just the same.

One definition of art, I suppose, is the transformation of emotion into a physical entity. Rothko was feeling something when he painted his abstracts.  He was trying to explain something that was going on inside him; some vague or perhaps even crystal clear feeling that he could only express by laying paint on canvas.  I've been listening to a lot of 50's and 60's jazz lately, and that same thing comes through when "Fatha" Hines lays his hands on a keyboard.  He's expressing something from inside that only comes out through his fingers.

I know, I know, this is all very trite, and I'm only covering ground that has been well-trod.  But abstract art always makes me wonder about what art is.  Is this art...

A banged up old wooden dining room table, painted over and over again, nicks and scratches everywhere, sits sort of off to the side of a large museum gallery, alone, with nothing nearby.  Around the table apron are painted eyes.  When an innocent bystander happens to walk near the table, the table begins to make a noise.  As the bystander gets closer, the table begins to shake violently, and doesn't stop until the person backs off.

Is that art?  Well, maybe.  Let's say my intention was to portray the feelings of someone suffering from anthropophobia.  Heck, we all get tired of people once in a while.  For us introverts, we do better without a bunch of people around anyway.  Perhaps I built the table to reflect how I feel when perfect strangers approach me.  In that case, in my opinion it is art.  I might build that table just to see what it's like to express an emotion through a physical entity.  In this case, the table would be an expression of an emotion, and I think that's what art is.

But, I might be all wet.

PAM is having a great show on California Impressionism, which is one of my favorite styles of landscape painting - abstract enough to be interesting, but you can still see the trees.  You should go.  They have AC.