Chapter 5: The Analyses of Art
In this chapter, the goal is to put the knowledge gathered in the previous four chapters to use in a series of brief analyses of actual instances that historically and culturally have been labelled and treated as art and juxtapose them with the definition of art given in this thesis, discussing their status of art and determining it if possible, offering practical insight into the definition.
Michael Rakowitz – paraSITE (1997) // Link
paraSITE is essentially a project – in the sense that it is a collection of several, individual entities – more so than strictly a “piece”, although it focuses on two singular entities that are directly connected: First of all, an actual inflatable shelter that attaches to an exterior vent of a building, which thereby inflates and heats the shelter up. Second of all, the idea symbolized by the shelter and its use. What makes it a project, however, is the fact that over thirty shelters have been made, given to homeless people and put to actual use in four different cities, thereby going far beyond the singularity of the first prototype and the initial idea.
This interrupts a clear determination of the art status of paraSITE. It seems clear that political commentary on the situation of homeless people was an integral part of the project from the start. With just the one shelter and its symbolic value, it is fairly easy to determine the status – the problem arises with the mass-production and distribution of the shelters. The concept inherent in the prototype is representational of the initial idea, and it seems probable that Rakowitz executed this idea for the very sake of doing so; he had figured out a way to practically make a functional device, which also – by its very existence – highlights a general issue in society.
Once the idea was executed, what could be called Rakowitz’ “art practice” can be said to be replaced by an agenda that seems more politically motivated than anything else: The shelters are mass-produced and distributed, which does not expand the original idea in any way, but it does spread that same idea out, ensuring that more people will see it and take notice of it – potentially becoming more aware of the conditions homeless people have to live under and perhaps even being inspired to assist in doing something about the situation.
Where does that leave paraSITE, the project, in the context of the definition of art? It resides very much in one of the previously mentioned grey areas, but the best understanding – which, of course, is the ultimate goal – is believed to be achieved through a separation of the two aspects of the project: The idea inherent in both the first prototype and the subsequent shelters is considered art here, whereas the mass-production and distribution of the shelters are not, since they are understood to be motivated, above all, politically – the initial idea is merely used and reproduced, not expanded upon. This is the similar situation with reproduced art – be it music albums, posters of or movies: The actual, physical thing is not what is art – it is merely a carrier of the actual work; a necessary physicality, as it was labelled in the previous chapter.
Kristian Hornsleth – The Hornsleth Village Project Uganda (2006) // Link
Like paraSITE, this is also – as the title in no way tries to conceal – a project; an “art project” even. The core part of the project consists of 100 Ugandans changing their last name to Hornsleth in return for a farm animal. Each person was photographed with his or her new passport. These photos were “defined as an original art work” by Hornsleth, exhibited in galleries and published in a book, which describes the project. The process was documented by Danish television.
Hornsleth is obviously aware that his project also resides in a grey area, evident in his use of the word “art” in defining both the project and the portraits. That both are art is agreed upon here – the question is, rather, to determine what aspects of the project are indeed art. For instance, the television documentary is not considered art, and nor is all the legal work involved with changing the names of 100 people, nor the logistical work of distributing the animals, nor the actual people and their lived lives, and so forth. What is considered art – as with paraSITE – is the idea, the concept thought up by Kristian Hornsleth, and its execution. The portraits – again, like the paraSITE shelters – are representative of the idea, and what is judged when they are viewed is not the technical, photographical performance, but instead the idea they represent.
Although not every aspect of the project is considered art, it will not be argued here that “art project” is an unfitting classification, seeing as how the aspects that are art are the central ones; the sine qua non for the rest of the project.
Lars Johanssson, Cecilie Gravesen and Kristine Agergaard – Contemplation Room (2002) // Link
A third and final project to be discussed here is Contemplation Room, which consists of a selection of individual instances of art – including visual art, rooms and performances – that all deal with the concept of contemplation in some way or another. What ties them all together is their public placement around Copenhagen over the course of a month in the early summer of 2002.
The individual elements (which have not been analysed one by one) are assumed here to be quite conventional and thus not controversial in terms of their status as art. This is not to say that there might not be pieces that challenge the conventions of art, but rather to keep focus on what the three organisers consider “the artwork”: The process; the interaction; the continued dialogue between the individual pieces and the viewers, as well as the dialogue among the viewers themselves.
This, quite uncontroversially, will be accepted here. There is a creative idea that was executed, thereby creating art. It should be noted, however, that it seems as if there is quite a high risk that people would not have taken any notice of this overall concept, since it essentially is one that exists whenever art is publicly exhibited, and one that is not typically pointed to as being art itself – the interaction (between art and recipient, and between the recipients themselves) is something that always has the potential to happen in such a situation. This is not to pass of any judgment on Contemplation Room – it is merely highlighting an important aspect of it. One might react negatively when introduced to the concept, because it is not particularly original; one might react positively, exactly because of the extra emphasis on the aspect of interaction: The judgment has the potential to go both ways. Also, the political aspect of Contemplation Room obviously plays a big part, and if one were to determine that it is an overshadowing one, then that would remove the status of art from the overall concept of the project – while, of course, still having the individual instances it consists of be art.
Joseph Beuys – How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare (1965) // Link
Taken as a representative for performance art in general, whether it takes places in an organized setting like this one or, say, on the street, is Beuys’ How To Explain Pictures To A Dead Hare. Performance art has been hard to classify in the past due to its fickle and immaterial nature; where does it start and when does it stop? How long does it go on for? Which, in a series of performances, is the “real one”? Such questions are of less importance here, as there is no need to determine the exact specifics of a performance – rather, what is of interest is, which should come as no surprise, the idea behind it.
Through glass, spectators could see Beuys with a dead hare in his arms, explaining surrounding pictures to it for three hours, with his head covered in honey and gold leaves. A performance that seems rich with ideas and possible interpretations, much like when the composer La Monte Young gave the instruction “Draw a straight line and follow it” in 1960 (link), or when John Cage presented his 4’33 in 1952 (link). While all three can be hard to classify according to different perspectives on art, the emphasis on the idea – the product of human creativity – that the definition given here has makes it fairly easy to deal with such kinds of art: The materiality and the temporality can be seen as tools, so to speak, to get the idea across.
This does not make them unimportant on the whole – clearly they are the tools that were believed most fit – of the ones available – to get that idea across by whoever came up with the idea, and that justifies that they are taken into consideration. If the focus on the tools overshadow the product they are trying to shape, however, then that is not considered an approach to the best possible understanding of the given piece: The selection of tools is obviously much more limited than the endless array of possible ideas, and focusing on the tools limits the perspective on the ideas.
Tom Friedman – 1,000 Hours of Staring (1997) // Link
The view on concept art is more or less identical as that on performance art, so it will be dealt with particularly briefly here. One example is this piece by Tom Friedman, which consists of a piece of blank paper that Friedman stared at for a thousand hours, though not consecutively: A physical testimony to the importance that is put on things that in and of themselves have a limited value but become significant to someone, when they learn of the context of the object; where it was found, what had happened to it, who it was owned by, and so forth. A blank piece of paper is something that is both cheap and easy to come by and thereby almost valueless, which helps illustrate that what gives this piece of concept art value (to someone) is not the unchanged physicality of the paper but the immaterial context it has become part of.
Eric Stewart – Pet portraits // Link
A clear example of something that is called art without being so is a painting of a pet commissioned by its owner. The motive is quite simple: Monetary gain. Having figured out that one has the ability to paint in a way that can be a source of income is obviously a business opportunity, but the outcome is not art. It is simply putting one’s creative abilities to use, much in the same way as in the development of any other commodity that is (also) judged on its visual appeal, be it a car, an advertisement, a portable music player, a piece of clothing or furniture, or something else. In the way that something does not have to look like traditional art to be art (e.g. a urinal does not look like a traditional sculpture and such), having an appearance of traditional art does not make something art.
Rembrandt – Portraits of Nicolaes Ruts (1631) and Maria Trip (1639) // Link // Link
With no intention of making any general statement about Rembrandt’s status in the history of art, it should be pointed out that not all his paintings are art – for the exact same reason that the pet portraits are not either; the primary motive is monetary gain, understood in the sense that Rembrandt would not have made these exact portraits (and others), had he not been commissioned to do so for money. This is not to be understood as an attack specifically on Rembrandt – what holds true for his commissioned portraits obviously holds true for any commissioned portrait – by any person, before or after 1750.
Dale Chihuly – Chihuly at the de Young (Exhibition in San Francisco, 2008) // Link
The exhibition consisted of a wide selection of pieces by Chihuly; predominantly made out of colourful glass and ranging in size from a regular flower vase to entire rooms. Though a great amount of thought has been put into the concepts behind several of the pieces, it is not possible to exclude the possibility that some pieces have not been made simply as by-products – understood in the sense that they could be easy, almost factory-like things to produce, the motivation for doing so could be monetary gain. A way of reasoning could be that because the large pieces – which are considered art here – are as popular as they are, Chihuly might as well produce some smaller pieces that people can buy and take home. Somewhat of an accusation, and there is no saying here that Chihuly has such a motive, but at least the fact that the de Young gift shop were selling actual Chihuly pieces to its visitors supports this suspicion.
Some controversy was caused by a review written by Kenneth Baker in the San Francisco Chronicle115. Baker stated that Chihuly had no place in the history of art, criticising the “ensembles of works in blown glass, so theatrically lighted that they make a visitor feel like a walk-on performer in some costly, unnamed spectacle”, stating that the visitor “gets the queasy sense that here the gift shop inevitably barnacled to such exhibitions has finally engulfed its host”, before finally claiming that “educated viewers cannot look for long at Chihuly’s work without wishing there were something to think about”. In a follow-up piece116, Baker discusses Duchamp and the “struggle” of combining “thought and thing”, before stating that “Chihuly does not participate in the struggle I have just described. If he is aware of it, he appears not to care, and so he excuses admirers of his work from knowing or caring.” This is understood in the sense that because Chihuly appears happy with producing “beautiful things”, instead of participating in the struggle of modern art, his pieces are not even art. It is agreed here that Chihuly’s work generally appeals more to an immediate sense of aesthetic wonderment than one of intellectual ponderment, but that does not remove its status as art. Not wanting to challenge the concept of art – which is, ironically, exactly what Chihuly does according to Baker – is an entirely legitimate approach. Baker’s point about the gift shop is accepted, however – to an extent at least – as a pointer to why the exhibition might not present art all the way through, for the reasons already discussed.
Andy Warhol – Sticky Fingers (The Rolling Stones album sleeve, 1971) // Link
Album sleeves are not considered art, since they are, by definition, commercial commodities whose ultimate purpose is to make the album they represent attractive to consumers. That said, they can feature art, with Coldplay’s Viva La Vida Or Death And All His Friends as an example; the 2008 album features Liberty Leading The People by Eugene Delacroix. They can also be exhibited at an art museum – without thereby becoming art, though – as the de Young museum showed with its 2009 exhibition, Warhol Live, which focuses on Andy Warhol and his work with the music business and its affiliates. The exhibition features this Rolling Stones album sleeve in its original version with the crotch shot featuring an actual zipper on the jeans.
Placed in the context of pieces that are indeed art – such as Warhol’s portraits of musicians such as Elvis Presley, Deborah Harry and the Rolling Stones themselves – the album sleeve could be said to have its “useful significance” removed (seeing as how it no longer directly serves its purpose as packaging for a commercial commodity) and thereby be seen under a “new point of view”, so that the placement “creates a new thought for that object”, to once again paraphrase Duchamp’s words about Fountain. There is agreement to this: It is indeed a new context, and every change of context obviously forces at least a slightly new perspective on a given thing. This change, however, does not make the sleeve art.
The difference between Fountain and the album sleeve – besides the obvious – is that Fountain is presented in the institutional context as something else; the urinal has been turned 90 degrees and has had a signature added and is not understood as a urinal, but as a piece of art. There is a semantic shift. This shift does not take place with the album sleeve; it is being presented as itself, and not as something else. It can only be understood as an album sleeve – or at least it cannot escape its status as being one such. More attention is potentially being given to the album sleeve in the museum than when a consumer is flipping through albums in a record store; but it is the same thing that attention is being given to. If someone made an exhibition of a collection of urinals, presenting them simply as that – in the way that the album sleeve is presented at the museum – then there would not be any shift there either, and they would of course not be art; they would simply be urinals.
Henry Darger – “The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion” (Year of completion unknown) // Link
Darger (1892–1973) was a social recluse living in Chicago, who produced this illustrated story without anyone – aside from possibly a single friend – knowing about it. The story is spread out over 15,000 pages and three volumes of several hundred watercolour illustrations. It portrays a war between a Christian nation, Abbieannia, and a child slavery regime, Glandelinians, and it takes place on a planet around which the Earth is orbiting as a moon. Religion, war and child slavery are thus dominant themes in the mythological story, which correspond with information about Darger’s personal life: He was a Catholic, who went to church every day; like his father, he was interested in the American Civil War; he had spent time in a boy’s home because his parents died early; and he was evidently strongly moved and inspired by a story of an 5-year-old girl, who was kidnapped and strangled to death in 1911.
The work of Henry Darger became known when his landlords, Nathan and Kiyoko Lerner, entered his apartment shortly before his death, and they became managers of the estate after Darger died, showing off the work to the world and ensuring posthumous fame to Darger, who also wrote another fictional story, Crazy House, which consists of over 10,000 pages, as well as an autobiography of over 5,000 pages.
Are the fictional stories and watercolour illustrations that Darger made art? Yes, in all probable probability. And not only that; Darger’s work is a massive testimony to the introduced purity of art: With no connection to the institution of art whatsoever and seemingly no interest to show off his work to anyone else, it is concluded here that it is the urge of Darger to create his work that is directly – and solely – responsible for its existence.
A particularly interesting thing about Darger’s work is that it is a counter-example to Dickie’s theory: With no connection to the institution and no plausible way of arguing that Darger was somehow wishing in his head that his work would be institutionalised, it simply would not be art, according to Dickie. Unless, of course, the landlords are labelled artists and the work is reduced to being “found art”, but that seems an entirely unnecessary shift and far from the best possible understanding of Darger’s work, which, as ever, is the goal here.
Paul Strand – Driftwood, Maine (1928) // Link
The final example that will be discussed is a gelatin silver print of Strand’s photo, which, quite simply, depicts a piece of driftwood from Maine – up close, so that the monochrome details fill the frame. The inclusion here is of course a reference to the topic of whether a piece of driftwood can be art, discussed by Dickie and Davies and concluded upon in chapter 4: Yes, it can, since everything can be art – but in and of its own, a random piece of driftwood might not be of interest to very many people, thus leading to the institution of art automatically regulating itself; ensuring that only things of a certain amount of interest become part of the institution.
Evidently, this photo passed that test and got its place on the walls of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Examining the photo up close, it is of quite high technical quality: It is sharp, crisp and in focus, and a high range of tones have been captured. What one might suspect is that the photo is given its spot mainly because of its historical value – the fact that the photo is from 1928 – rather than how it appears outside of that context, seeing as how even relatively cheap photography gear could replicate the image quite easily (technically speaking – a similarly intriguing piece of driftwood would of course be required, too).
That, however, is a discussion of the institution and what it values as worthy to put on its walls. When it comes to its art status, the photo was, in all probability, art from the start, and a current-day replica with modern photography gear would also be art – given, of course, that the motivation for taking these photos were the creative act of doing so.