Posted on Monday, September 13, 2004 10:28 PM
Ok, so my photo instructor assigned us to read Art & Fear by David Bayles & Ted Orland. A very interesting read, and all artists or aspiring artists, or wanna-be artists should read this one. I'm going to type out a couple paragraphs (from towards the end of the book) that really struck home with me.
Provocative art challenges not only the viewer, but also its maker. Art that falls short often does so not because the artist failed to meet the challenge, but because there was never a challenge there in the first place. Think of it like Olympic diving: you don't win high points for making even the perfect swan dive off the low board. There's little reward in an easy perfection reached by many.
But while mastering technique is difficult and time-consuming, it's still inherently easier to reach an already defined goal -- a “right answer” -- than to give form to a new idea. It's easier to paint in the angel's feet to another's master work than to discover where the angels live within yourself. If technique were the core issue in art, our nominee for the Famous Artists Wax Museum would be the lifer at San QUentin who spent twenty ears constructing a perfect replica of the Eifel Tower from toothpicks. (And well, yes, in its own way it was pretty impressive!) But that's not the way it works. Simply put, art that deals with ideas is more interesting than art that deals with technique.
In routine artistic growth, new ork doesn't make the old work false -- it makes it more artificial, more an act of artifice. Older work is ofttimes an embarrassment to the artist because it feels like it was made by a younger, more naive person -- one who was ignorant of the pretension and striving in the work. Earlier work often feels, curiously, both too labored and too simple. This is normal. New work is supposed to replace old work. If it does so by making the old work inadequate, insufficient and incomplete -- well, that's life. (Frank Lloyd Wright advised young architects to plant ivy all around their early buildings, suggesting that in time it would grow to cover their “youthful indiscretions.“) Old work tells you what you were paying attention to then; new work comments on the old by pointing out what you were not previously paying attention to. Now this would all be smooth and lovely except that new work can turn to old work in an instant -- sometimes, indeed, in the instant immediately following the work's completion. Savoring finished work may last only an eye-blink. This is certainly unpleasant -- but its a good sign.
Making art depends upon notising things -- things about yourself, your methods, your subject matter. Sooner or later, for instance, every visual artist notices the relationship of the line to the picture's edge. Before that moment, the relationship does not exist; afterwards it's impossible to imagine it not existing. And from that moment on every new line talks back and forth with the picture's edge. People who have not yet made this small leap do not see the same picture as those who have -- in fact, conceptually speaking, they do not even live in the same world.
In the end it all comes down to this: you have a choice (or more accurately a rolling tangle of choices) between giving your work your best shot and risking that it will not make you happy, or not giving it your best shot -- and thereby guaranteeing that it will not make you happy. It becomes a choice between certainty and uncertainty. And curiously, uncertainty is the comforting choice.
Just some of the few examples from within the book. Like I said, if you are an artist, you should read this book!