Fluidity. Turbidity. Evolution.
Stagnancy. Immobility. Death.
Which do you associate with art?
Good Art is the vanguard of cultural (r)evolution, moving around and over conservative bulwarks in a way that is fluid, rapid, dizzying. As time marches on, culture shifts — it bends — through time like a river of collective taste, fashion, aesthetics, cutting down and through the bedrock of staid everyday living. Sometimes art can be an installation of a memory, serving to put its shoulder against the river’s flow and resist that change, to make its own stand against the effluent. But installing conservative art that is backwards looking in nostalgic romanticism does NOT create classical masterpieces — you don’t create award-winning material by trying to recreate other winning pieces. “Classics” are created across the zeitgeist of many moments, and reach classic status only later as the impact of that work emerges in the world, rising slow-motion like a supermodel with slicked back hair out of a pristine summer pool, and it is the passage of time that bleeds details from our recollection of that raging cultural river until it becomes a hazy yet perfect [Pool with Two Figures] that could even permit perfectly coiffed hair on its strident mermaids. Genius emerges — there is no “instant Classic” — but it emerges from the turbidity of the constant innovation of the art world.
Art is about exploration, discovery, awe — the endorphin rush of surprise. Real art is risk. It is vision. It is an understanding of Reality that establishes new sightlines and guideposts into a new Space. And it is memorable, like a trauma, because that is when our new view of the World supplants the old one that we can never return to, making us an orphan to that old Reality, but a proud and bold explorer in the New.
Art as Precursor to Memory and Dialectics
But let’s turn to “memory” for a second. John O’Keefe won the Nobel Prize in 2014 in medicine for establishing that the hippocampus in the brain is the situs of BOTH (a) our understanding of space — of place — AND (b) memories. Our relation to our space helps us form memories. When you combine place with genius art — with discovery, surprise, delight — that experience creates the best kind of memories. Indelible on the space as physical graffiti, and indelible on the audience’s perception of Reality as psychological evolution.
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Often, Art is just on broadcast — a one way message from the artist to the audience. You know what else is a broadcast? Billboards. In our modern environment, we see and experience installation art that is on broadcast like we see billboards: momentarily, as we flow on by and don’t return. Physically or intellectually, these pieces are left behind as little more than signposts. To stand out as a monumental signpost, that diatribe artist better be effing Artistic Jesus.
New art — art that reflects the flow of culture — demands a dialogue with the audience. This is why we’ve seen an explosion of experiential art: installations you can play with, on, inside, around; Burning Man art; art you can manipulate. But this is not the audience demanding discussion or exchange with the artist — no, this is the artist demanding more of their audience. In this world, art exists in three phases:
- Phase 1 is creating and installing the art relics (i.e. the physical installation). These pieces are just the artist’s initial script, setting the stage, prepping the lights, readying the curtain.
- Phase 2 is the audience tête-à-tête. The manner in which artists structure the art experience to create interaction with the audience. How the audience participates. What is generated from that interaction. The audience is a brush working on the canvas.
- Phase 3 is that the audience is now the canvas — each member of the audience becomes the art; and the beauty of this personified art lies in the manipulated changes expressed into each person of the audience. Had they not participated in the art, they would not be this new entity. You can never step in the same river twice, but step you must.
In this near future art world, the Phase 1 artifacts become fungible, non-unique because they’re easily reproduced. Even Classical Masterpieces can now be reproduced by laser or printout with little more than a push of a button, so scarcity of possessing the “thing” is no longer a barrier. It might be a signifier of taste, of wanting to be closer to the creator, the artist, and to the experience laid out through the 3 Phases. But possession is no longer a divider between the haves and the have-nots.
The interactions in Phase 2 require that the artifacts become more complicated, more mobile, more plastic and maleable. No longer can art simply be a static snapshot of a one-sided discussion. It needs life, tools, or mechanisms to assist the audience to provide their input. And the psychological transitions driven in Phase 3 require that the art have some way to connect to the person. Some way for the audience member to memorialize their interaction, their contribution. Some way to embody themselves as the art and the artist. In this new art landscape, because the 3 Phase art is a dialog between two parties, the audience too is caught up in this Artist identity, finding themselves now simultaneously the Artist and the canvas, all in one.
No longer are the art pieces the only desired artifacts, the only collectible from the installation. Instead, lifestyles, experiences, knowledge and grace are held dear, and the artist her or himself is the new masterpiece, taking years to complete. As a result of stepping into the artist’s river, each audience member becomes an orphan of the Old Reality and explorers of a new perspective. Minds have been changed. Hearts have been opened. And the Memory of that kind of art lingers.
Source: https://arvrjourney.com/on-art-reality-i-2a5bd0309897?source=rss—-d01820283d6d—4
