Need Dream Desire Hope

On Visceral Engagement with Art

By Maggie Taft

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Zurich, Switzerland. Sometime in the 1920s. Tristan Tzara! Hugo Ball! Hans Arp! A company of players.

Everyone Is An Artist.

Maybe not. But most cohesive artistic movements of the past century have tried to encourage that philosophy. The surrealists demonstrated how people might forge their own experiment with automatism. Allan Kaprow and other performers of the 1960s allowed spectators a physical hand in creating the performance. In the 1980s Keith Haring and Jean Basquiat pulled art's spotlight onto America's peripheral sects, publicizing and popularizing formerly ignored values and expressions by transforming 'street art' into high art. All of these artists directed their efforts towards the formulation of a new society based upon an unending interaction and confusion of the artist/audience relationship. Though always boldly asserted, their positions allowed room for questioning and appropriation, demanding and dependent upon active engagement and an immediate and open-ended emotional response on the part of both artist and viewer.

Now what?

Once Upon A Time, When Pictures Were Pretty

Long before I came to college my family and I used to attempt family dinners. We'd gather around the glass dining room table my father had once fallen through while trying to replace the bulb that lit the fixture above. Never one for silences, my dad would ask about my day. I'd usually say it was fine and, when asked for specifics, say I didn't know. Eventually we'd turn on the TV and watch Jeopardy! Often the questions, or answers, provoked conversation. When they didn't, Alex Trebek's voice or the gurgles and burps of the Budweiser frogs filled our silent gaps and lulls.

Every once and again, we'd stumble upon the subject of art. In the years preceding, my tastes had mirrored my father's. Family outings to the MoMA used to consist of us vehemently admonishing the validity or relevance of boldly colored numbers on canvas à la Jasper Johns. My mother would maintain at least six feet of distance from us, severely embarrassed by our base criticism, which we always indulged in at high volumes.

Then I took a freshman year art history elective and wrote a paper on Kasimir Malevich's Flying Airplane. Suddenly my idea of art expanded beyond my father's canonical sphere of Renaissance and Dutch masters. Warhol came to be about something more than enticing colors and appealing visual aesthetics. Even Vermeer, who I'd previously understood as little more than a master of technique and accurate lighting, took on a newfound social relevancy. During our "art talks," my father never ceased to probe me for what exactly that something was. The first time he asked, I, lacking any explanation of my own, simply cited their placement in a museum. I said I needed more time to think about the matter.

It was weeks—months more likely—before the subject was again broached. We were at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, looking at Van Dyck's Samson and Delilah of 1628. My father said he loved it. When I told him I did too, he asked why. I said it was because I could feel it. When I looked at Samson looking at Delilah, my response was physical. I saw how Delilah's betrayal far outweighed his imminent torture at the hands of the Philistines. When I looked at Samson, all I wanted to do was look away, but that was the very last thing I seemed able to do. And so I asserted that art was about visceral response and emotion. That which constituted art was purely subjective and the existence of the canon was the result of a scientific approach to the field. The majority of scholars responded to the work of Cezanne, so he was given a spot. Same for Turner and Pollock and Raphael and on and on.

I'm An Artist! (Save The World)

Earlier this year the RISD museum exhibited Manifest Destiny, Alexis Rockman's large-scale (8 by 24 feet) vision of New York City three thousand years in the future. A hot canvas, boiling reds and oranges flood the city's ruins. The nearly unrecognizable Brooklyn Bridge, along with other markers of the city, are submerged under global-warming induced waters inhabited by cockroaches, ugly and exotic fish, pterodactyl-looking birds and other such creatures. Human life is but a barely preserved memory made evident to the viewer by the deteriorating relics of buildings. After spending nearly five years researching environmental sciences on a broad scale, Rockman claims the piece to be a feasible depiction of the future face of the world. Working closely with a local New York architect, Diane Lewis, the two conceived the devastated landscape, a process dependent on intuitive imagination and precise mechanics. Dating the apocalypse certainly invites a forceful response. For the women standing next to me in the gallery, such a response consisted of one asking the other, "What should I do?" The second, head cocked, eyes down, lips pursed, looking entirely forlorn, shook her head in desolation and then mentioned something about maybe, possibly trading in her SUV. If her husband would allow it, that is. For me, their response was more devastating than the work itself.

Looking upon the enveloping canvas I saw a visually sound composition. The strokes were hard and firm and maintained their resonance at distances both near and far. A giant jellyfish extending horizontally across the central right two thirds of the canvas pulled together the kinetic arrangement of forms. As I looked at Rockman's achievement, impressive in terms of both scale and dynamism, I saw a painting. What I didn't see, however, was art.

Rockman's vision seemed little more than an aesthetically sound illustration from a science textbook or a religious pamphlet warning of an oncoming apocalypse. He arrived at his canvas after years of researching urbanism, evolution, and environmental science, all of which were recorded in sketches and architectural plans, displayed in conjunction with the painting. Though intended to evoke an extreme response, the piece seemed to lack any trace of immediate action or epiphany in its creation. Alexis Rockman declared himself an artist and then took it upon himself to save the world by telling us, his viewers, that we should be the ones to actually take action. As an artist, he had done his part, revealing a future truth. Now it was our responsibility. And so here was his petition: canvas, paints, colors, and forms, exactly as he predicted the world would look three thousand years in the future. He claimed accuracy and, thus, scientific integrity. The byproduct was a complete subordination of painted aesthetics to his science.

Down With Reality! Up With Mysticism!

Early on in his career, Bruce Nauman, inspired by an old light-up beer sign, hung neon-piping in his grocery-front studio window reading, "The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths." When asked about it later he said it was more an experiment in the process of making a statement than an absolute declaration; he wasn't really sure he bought it. I'm not certain either. On the one hand, Nauman recognizes the 20th century artist's attempt to forge the world a band-aid, à la Joseph Beuys. Yet the neon light and gaudy colors introduce a playful pop aesthetic that recognizes the implausibility of the statement. Of course, it's salted with some tongue-in-cheek irony, but it also proposes a definition of art that is more refined than my puberty-induced (angry, moody, emotional, etc.) proposition that it's all about emotion. Not to say that the two statements are entirely unrelated. Certainly mysticism sees at least a few of its roots in feeling and emotion. But it also aims at something more. While imparting the weight of religion, spirituality, and mysticism on art may imbue it and its creators with more power and effect than is due, it may nevertheless be entirely appropriate. Particularly in the last century, art has formed its very own cult complete with sect-specific (movement oriented) values, goals, methods. Some people may not subscribe to it. I do.

And so for me to call Manifest Destiny art is equivalent, in my mind, to declaring Darwinism a proper religion. While religion, and (to continue the comparison), art, are rooted in a faith in something greater, Darwinism depends on facts and data to write a secure science, as scary or inspiring as that may be. Of course I can't deny the validity of either, since Darwinism and Manifest Destiny are both profoundly important global hypotheses. Yet, for Rockman to champion his canvas as an art masterpiece seems no different than calling Thomas Kinkaid's mass-produced pictures the equal of a Picasso or a de Chirico. The work of the latter induces a metaphysical reflection, provoking thought, response, reaction, and transforming the act of looking into an independent intellectual and emotional experience. Kinkaid's works and Alexis Rockman's Manifest Destiny encourage a passive viewer, willing to accept the images on the canvas exactly as they exist. Because really, art should be like Jeopardy!. My artist is Alex Trebek, revealing the answers, forcing me to ask the questions.

Maggie Taft B'07 is actually watching Legends of the Hidden Temple.

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