BRINGING UP THE ARTISTIC COMPETENCE OF AUDIENCES Art and artistic processes
By Manel Montañés www.manel-montanes.co.uk
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There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists. (E.H. Gombrich)
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The Art’s human dimension We usually look at artists with such a strange feeling. It is something related to the admiration, the respect and the envy. This may be due to the fact that we have praised their ability to abstract some aspects from the reality or the spiritual life since the beginning of times and the way they dress it up with forms, colours, materials, words, sounds, tastes or smells turning it into something new full of significance or symbolic values. From love to hate, from the absolute identification to the total misunderstanding, the Art History is a compendium of attitudes in front of the artistic work, a sequence of time periods from the antiquity to the contemporary where the relationship between the artist and the beholder has suffered all kind of ups and downs. We have called Art what they do and our incapacity to do the same by ourselves bring us to consider them blessed by the Gods. They have been loved, hated, praised or persecuted just because of that reason. But as E.H. Gombrich said: There really is no such thing as art. There are only artists. So let’s give Art our welcome to the human sphere.
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What we expect as beholders According to Arnold Hauser1, we read in different ways the artistic works that don’t have a direct relation with our present, our sense of life or our vital purposes. In Hauser’s words, what the art beholder is looking for are the answers to the questions about how could we live and how must we live our reality. In our words, what Hauser suggests is that the best way to understand an artistic work is to place ourselves as beholders in the strictly field of his contemporariness. No matter when an artistic work has been produced, we always have to contemplate it from its contemporariness. This is the first key to bring up the artistic competence of audiences. This has nothing to do with the creative freedom that of course we love, or something related to the different conceptions, theories or notions about styles or the art’s aesthetic. Simply, first we want to understand artists and then agree or disagree with them or with their works. The artist’s look Like us, an artist is a beholder living in the cultural context we live in. This context is a huge field full of strong social conventions, implicit significances and rules that are most of the time invisibles and that clearly appear out of the blue when something unexpected occurs. The difference between artists and ordinary people is that an artist is also a beholder who actively participates in the culture by making visible what is invisible, revealing attitudes or actions made to turn reality into something 1
Hauser, Arnold (1962) The Social History of Art
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different and in turn affecting, modifying or transforming the cultural context. A well known anecdote will help us to illustrate what we are trying to say. In January 1969 The Beatles decided to give a concert on the roof of their studio at Savile Row in central London. They placed their instruments and gears and started to play surrounded by their staff people, cameras, photographers and journalists. Below in the street, hundreds of people stopped to see what was going on. The traffic jammed and finally the police came to stop the performance. Was that an illegal or a dangerous action? No, it was simply an unexpected event that broke some cultural or social conventions at that time. Nowadays we are absolutely used to this kind of performances.
From the reality point of view, the artist’s look or attitude refers to anything that could be different, conceivable or possible. As Granés Maya2 points out, the image of the artist isolated or wrapped up in himself is not real. He needs to get in touch with the reality because it is inside the cultural context where artists find the raw material for their work. We will only reach them if we understand how an artistic process works. The artistic processes We usually talk about the creative or artistic processes easily but how can we define it in a way that could be useful for every kind of art work in any history period? First of all, once we find ourselves in the artist’s contemporariness level we will be able to define it as an uncertain process of active exploration of the cultural context with the purpose of turning it over, with the aim to build a
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Granés Maya, Carlos (2004) Aproximación antropológica a procesos de creación artística en contextos inestables. Universidad Complutense. ISBN 84-669-2640-2
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fiction or an imagined reality made of the artist’s expectations or desires. Let’s have a look at the implicit elements contained in our definition; Uncertainty The artistic process is not a scientific one. There is no evidence, neither thesis nor intuition of the final result. Only the constant doubt or the critical revision of the reality and its significances drives the thought of the artist. Experimentation The experimentation is the artist’s tool. Once again driven by the doubt the artist will try changing shapes, textures, colours or words until he finds something that satisfies him. The context The context is always their and our contemporariness, the battle field. Intentionality A work of art is always an intentional product and just because of that it always carries ideas, objects or emotions full of significances. Imagination Imagination is the most powerful tool of the creative people. They use it to build their own universe of inventions and every artist does it in a different and particular way. The works of art, the creations are the result of the dialogue and the interaction between those elements and as well as full of significances they have the ability to operate on the tricky grid of rules and conventions that shapes any contemporariness.
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Although we have defined the elements operating in the artistic processes, it does not mean that an artistic process should be lineal, organised or sequenced in time. It is not. The artist goes back and forth. He is in or out in any moment according to his own experience. In this sense, related to Picasso, Gombrich3 said he never intended that Cubism procedures would replace other ways of representing the visible world. On the contrary, Picasso always loved to change his procedures returning to the traditional art forms despite the boldest experiments. We have written these lines with the aim to point some ideas about some general aspects we need to consider whether as artists, producers, managers or art’s organisations, we want to bring up the artistic competence of our audiences in order to get from them a high level of engagement with the culture and the arts. In the next chapters we will revise some interesting concepts and initiatives focused in these perspectives.
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Gombrich, E.H (1950). The Story of Art
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