Paint and Pixel Notions

Thoughts about art cavort in my mind with all the other stuff that gets crammed into my cranium each day. Two days ago, those paint-and-pixel notions got more articulated than is often the case, as evidenced in the journal entry I wrote. Essentially, this is what I came up with:

People want to categorize art in one way—okay, maybe two or a half dozen—but it’s not that straightforward. A portrait artist gazing at a model and trying to capture her likeness for the patron who commissioned the work does not engage in the process like a man who looks at a bicycle seat and rusty handlebars, sees a bull’s head, and then creates a sculpture that looks both like bicycle parts and the head of an animal. In the same manner, an artist who scribbles lines on a canvas, then brushes or splashes paint in, on, and around those lines to discover where her actions will lead is working from a place that is not terribly close to where those first two artists are hanging out.

Yet, we want to put the three of them into a box, tape it shut, grab a fat marker and write, “ARTISTS.” Even worse, some of us are willing to accord only one of those creative persons the ARTIST label; the other two just get shown the door.

A provocative and insightful line from Luigi Giussani in At the Origin of the Christian Claim seems appropriate here. In pointing out the difference between Nicodemus, who said to Jesus, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him” (John 3:2), and the Pharisees who refused to believe that Jesus was God made man, Giussani observes:

Because of their factiousness, his adversaries did not accept the position Nicodemus adopted, and thus they hindered themselves from seeing the facts in a simple way. For factiousness exists when a notion becomes a stance rather than an obedience to reality. (emphasis mine)

Everywhere I look, even (especially?) in the world of art, I see stances rather than obedience to reality, which is rather ironic, because I’ve never contended that art should reflect reality.

I guess it comes down to this: I want the art, and I am mostly willing to listen to opinions on the subject. Just don’t expect me to wave a flag for some ideological stance on art, unless your banner says something like this: Spend some time with it